LOAVES AND FISHES

Acknowledgments are made to the editors of “The Pall Mall Magazine,” “The Illustrated London News,” “The World,” “Black and White,” “The London Magazine,” “The English Illustrated Magazine,” and “The Bystander,” to the hospitality of whose pages a number of the stories here reprinted were first invited.

LOAVES AND FISHES

A GALLOWS-BIRD

In February of the year 1809, when the French were sat down before Saragossa—then enduring its second and more terrific siege within a period of six months—it came to the knowledge of the Duc d’Abrantes, at that time the General commanding, that his army, though undoubtedly the salt of the earth, was yet so little sufficient to itself in the matter of seasoning, that it was reduced to the necessity of flavouring its soup with the saltpetre out of its own cartridges. In this emergency, d’Abrantes sent for a certain Ducos, captain on the staff of General Berthier, but at present attached to a siege train before the doomed town, and asked him if he knew whence, if anywhere in the vicinity, it might be possible to make good the deficiency.

Now this Eugène Ducos was a very progressive evolution of the times, hatched by the rising sun, emerged stinging and splendid from the exotic quagmires of the past. A facile linguist, by temperament and early training an artist, he had flown naturally to the field of battle as to that field most fertile of daring new effects, whose surprises called for record rather than analysis. It was for him to collect the impressions which, later, duller wits should classify. And, in the meantime, here he was at twenty a captain of renown, and always a creature of the most unflagging resourcefulness.

“You were with Lefebvre-Desnouettes in Aragon last year?” demanded Junot.

“I was, General; both before the siege and during it.”

“You heard mention of salt mines in this neighbourhood?”

“There were rumours of them, sir—amongst the hills of Ulebo; but it was never our need to verify the rumours.”

“Take a company, now, and run them to earth. I will give you a week.”

“Pardon me, General; I need no company but my own, which is ever the safest colleague.”

Junot glared demoniacally. He was already verging on the madness which was presently to destroy him.

“The devil!” he shouted. “You shall answer for that assurance! Go alone, sir, since you are so obliging, and find salt; and at your peril be killed before reporting the result to me. Bones of God! is every skipjack with a shoulder-knot to better my commands?”

Ducos saluted, and wheeled impassive. He knew that in a few days Marshal Lannes was to supplant this maniac.

* * * * *

Up and away amongst the intricate ridges of the mountains, where the half-unravelled knots of the Pyrenees flow down in threads, or clustered threads, which are combed by and by into the plains south of Saragossa, a dusky young goatherd loitered among the chestnut trees on a hot afternoon. This boy’s beauty was of a supernal order. His elastic young cheeks glowed with colour; his eyebrows were resolute bows; his lips, like a pretty phrase of love, were set between dimples like inverted commas. And, as he stood, he coquetted like Dinorah to his own shadow, chasséd to it, spoke to it, upbraiding or caressing, as it answered to his movements on the ground before him—

“Ah, pretty one! ah, shameless! Art thou the shadow of the girl that Eugenio loved? Fie, fie! thou wouldst betray this poor Anita—mock the round limbs and little feet that will not look their part. Yet, betray her to her love returning, and Anita will fall and kiss thee on her knees—kiss the very shadow of Eugenio’s love. Ah, little shadow! take wings and fly to him, who promised quickly to return. Say I am good but sad, awaiting him; say that Anita suffers, but is patient. He will remember then, and come. No shadow of disguise shall blind him to his love. Go, go, before I repent and hold thee, jealous that mine own shadow should run before to find his lips.”

She stooped, and, with a fantastic gesture, threw her soul upon the winds; then rose, and leaned against a tree, and began to sing, and sigh and murmur softly:

“ ‘At the gate of heaven are sold brogues

For the little bare-footed angel rogues’—

Ah, little dear mother! it is the seventh month, and the sign is still delayed. No baby, no lover. Alack! why should he return to me, who am a barren olive! The husbandman asks a guerdon for his care. Give me my little doll, Santissima, or I will be naughty and drink holy-water: give me the shrill wee voice, which pierces to the father’s heart, when even passion loiters. Ah, come to me, Eugenio, my Eugenio!”

She raised her head quickly on the word, and her heart leaped. It was to hear the sound of a footstep, on the stones far below, coming up the mountain side. She looked to her shirt and jacket. Ragged as they were, undeveloped as was the figure within them, she had been so jealous a housewife that there was not in all so much as an eyelet hole to attract a peeping Tom. Now, leaving her goats amongst the scattered boulders of the open, she backed into the groves, precautionally, but a little reluctant, because in her heart she was curious.

The footsteps came on toilfully, and presently the man who was responsible for them hove into sight. He wore the dress of an English officer, save for the shepherd’s felt hat on his head; but his scarlet jacket was knotted loosely by the sleeves about his throat, in order to the disposition of a sling which held his left arm crookt in a bloody swathe. He levered himself up with a broken spear-shaft; but he was otherwise weaponless. A pistol, in Ducos’s creed, was the argument of a fool. He carried his ammunition in his brains.

Having reached a little plateau, irregular with rocks shed from the cliffs above, he sat down within the shadow of a grove of chestnut and carob trees, and sighed, and wiped his brow, and nodded to all around and below him.

“Yes, and yes, and of a truth,” thought he: “here is the country of my knowledge. And yonder, deep and far amongst its myrtles and mulberries, crawls the Ebro; and to my right, a browner clod amongst the furrows of the valleys, heaves up the ruined monastery of San Ildefonso, which Daguenet sacked, the radical; whilst I occupied (ah, the week of sweet malvoisie and sweeter passion!) the little inn at the junction of the Pampeluna and Saragossa roads. And what has become of Anita of the inn? Alack! if my little fille de joie were but here to serve me now!”

The goatherd slipped round the shoulder of a rock and stood before him, breathing hard. Her black curls were, for all the world, bandaged, as it might be, with a yellow napkin (though they were more in the way to give than take wounds), and crowned rakishly with a dusky sombrero. She wore a kind of gaskins on her legs, loose, so as to reveal the bare knees and a little over; and across her shoulders was slung a sun-burnt shawl, which depended in a bib against her chest.

Now the one stood looking down and the other up, their visions magnetically meeting and blending, till the eyes of the goatherd were delivered of very stars of rapture.

Was this a spirit, thought Ducos, summoned of his hot and necessitous desire? But the other had no such misgiving. All in a moment she had fallen on her brown knees before him, and was pitifully kissing his bandaged arm, while she strove to moan and murmur out the while her ecstasy of gratitude.

“Nariguita!” he murmured, rallying as if from a dream; “Nariguita!”

She laughed and sobbed.

“Ah, the dear little happy name from thy lips! A thousand times will I repeat it to myself, but never as thou wouldst say it. And now! Yes, Nariguita, Eugenio—thine own ‘little nose’—thy child, thy baby, who never doubted that this day would come—O darling of my soul, that it would come!”—(she clung to him, and hid her face)—“Eugenio! though the blossom of our love delays its fruitage!”

He smiled, recovered from his first astonishment. Ministers of coincidence! In all the fantastic convolutions of war, the merry, the danse-macabre, should not love’s reunions have a place? It was nothing out of that context that here was he chanced again, and timely, upon that same sweet instrument which he had once played on, and done with, and thrown aside, careless of its direction. Now he had but to stoop and reclaim it, and the discarded strings, it seemed, were ready as heretofore to answer to his touch with any melody he listed.

He caressed her with real delight. She was something more than lovable. He made himself a very Judas to her lips.

“Anita, my little Anita!” he began glowingly; but she took him up with a fevered eagerness, answering the question of his eyes.

“So long ago, ah Dios! And thou wert gone; and the birds were silent; and under the heavy sky my father called me to him. He held a last letter of thine, which had missed my hands for his. Love, sick at our parting, had betrayed us. O, the letter! how I swooned to be denied it! He was for killing me, a traitor. Well, I could not help but be. But Tia Joachina had pity on me, and dressed me as you see, and smuggled me to the hills, that I might at least have a chance to live without suffering wrong. And, behold! the heavens smiled upon me, knowing my love; and Señor Cangrejo took me to herd his goats. For seven months—for seven long, faithful months; until the sweetest of my heart’s flock should return to pasture in my bosom. And now he has come, my lamb, my prince, even as he promised. He has come, drawing me to him over the hills, following the lark’s song of his love as it dropped to earth far forward of his steps. Eugenio! O, ecstasy! Thou hast dared this for my sake?”

“Child,” answered the admirable Ducos, “I should have dared only in breaking my word. Un honnête homme n’a que sa parole. That is the single motto for a poor captain, Nariguita. And who is this Señor Cangrejo?”

Some terror, offspring of his question, set her clinging to him once more.

“What dost thou here?” she cried, with immediate inconsistency—“a lamb among the wolves! Eugenio!”

“Eh!”—he took her up, with an air of bewilderment. “I am Sir Zhones, the English capitaine, though it loose me your favour, mamsellee. Wat! Damn eet, I say!”

She fell away, staring at him; then in a moment gathered, and leapt to him again between tears and laughter.

“But this?” she asked, her eyes glistening; and she touched the bandage.

“Ah! that,” he answered. “Why, I was wounded, and taken prisoner by the French, you understand? Also, I escaped from my captors. It comes, blood and splint and all, from the smashed arm of a sabreur, who, indeed, had no longer need of it.”

“For the love of Christ!” she cried in a panic. “Come away into the trees, where none will observe us!”

“Bah! I have no fear, I,” said Ducos. But he rose, nevertheless, with a smile, and, catching up the goatherd, bore her into the shadows. There, sitting by her side, he assured her, the rogue, of the impatience with which he had anticipated, of the eagerness with which he had run to realize this longed-for moment. The escapade had only been rendered possible, he said truthfully, by the opportune demand for salt. Doubtless she would help him, for love’s sake, to justify the venture to his General?

But, at that, she stared at him, troubled, and her lip began to quiver.

“Ah, God!” she cried; “then it was not I in the first place! Go thy ways, love; but for pity’s heart-sake let me weep a little. Yes, yes, there is salt in the mountains, that I know, and where the caves lie. But there are also Cangrejo—whom you French ruined and made a madman—and a hundred like him, wild-cats hidden amongst the leaves. And there, too, are the homeless friars of St. Ildefonso; and, dear body of Christ! the tribunal of terror, the junta of women, who are the worst of all—lynx-eyed demons.”

He smiled indulgently. Her terror amused him.

“Well, well,” he said; “well, well. And what, then, is this junta?”

“It is a scourge,” she whispered, shivering, “for traitors and for spies. It gathers nightly, at sunset, in the dip yonder, and there waters with blood its cross of death. This very evening, Cangrejo tells me——”

She broke off, cuddled closer to her companion, and clasping her hands and shrugging up her shoulders to him, went on awfully—

“Eugenio, there was a wagon-load of piastres coming secretly for Saragossa by the Tolosa road. It was badly convoyed. One of your generals got scent of it. The guard had time to hide their treasure and disperse, but him whom they thought had betrayed them the tribunal of women claimed, and to-night——”

“Well, he will receive his wages. And where is the treasure concealed?”

“Ah! that I do not know.”

Ducos got to his feet, and stretched and yawned.

“I have a fancy to see this meeting-place of the tribunal. Wilt thou lead me to it, Nariguita?”

“Mother of God, thou art mad!”

“Then I must go alone, like a madman.”

“Eugenio, it is cursing and accurst. None will so much as look into it by day; and, at dusk, only when franked by the holy church.”

“So greatly the better. Adios, Nariguita!”

It took them half an hour, descending cautiously, and availing themselves of every possible shelter of bush and rock, to reach a strangely formed amphitheatre set stark and shallow amongst the higher swales of the valley, but so overhung with scrub of myrtle and wild pomegranate as to be only distinguishable, and that scarcely, from above. A ragged track, mounting from the lower levels into this hollow, tailed off, and was attenuated into a point where it took a curve of the rocks at a distance below.

As Ducos, approaching the rim, pressed through the thicket, a toss of black crows went up from the mouth ahead of him, like cinders of paper spouted from a chimney. He looked over. The brushwood ceased at the edge of a considerable pit, roughly circular in shape, whose sides, of bare sloping sand, met and flattened at the bottom into an extended platform. Thence arose a triangular gibbet, a very rack in a devil’s larder, all about which a hoard of little pitchy bird scullions were busy with the joints. Holy mother, how they squabbled, and flapped at one another with their sleeves, it seemed! The two carcasses which hung there appeared, for all their heavy pendulosity, to reel and rock with laughter, nudging one another in eyeless merriment.

Ducos mentally calculated the distance to the gallows below from any available coign of concealment.

“One could not hide close enough to hear anything,” he murmured, shaking his head in aggravation; “and this junta of ladies—it will probably talk. What if it were to discuss that very question of the piastres? Nariguita, will you go and be my little reporter at the ceremony?”

Anita, crouching in the brush behind him, whispered terrified: “It is impossible. They admit none but priests and women.”

“And are not you a woman, most beautiful?”

“God forbid!” she said. “I am the little goatherd Ambrosio.”

He stood some moments, frowning. A scheme, daring and characteristic, was beginning to take shape in his brain.

“What is that clump of rags by the gallows?” he asked, without looking round.

“It is not rags; it is rope, Eugenio.”

He thought again.

“And when do they come to hang this rascal?” he said.

“It is always at dusk. O, dear mother!” she whimpered, for the young man had suddenly slipped between the branches, and was going swiftly and softly down the pit-side.

Already the basin of sand was filled with the shadows from the hills. Ducos approached the gibbet. The last of the birds remaining arose and dispersed, quarrelling with nothing so much as the sunlight which they encountered above.

“It is an abominable task,” said the aide-de-camp, looking up at the dangling bodies; “but—for the Emperor—always for the Emperor! That fellow, now, in the domino—it would make us appear of one build. And as for complexion, why, he at least would have no eyes for the travesty. Mon Dieu! I believe it is a Providence.”

There was a ladder leaned against the third and empty beam. He put it into position for the cloaked figure, and ran up it. The rope was hitched to a hook in the cross-piece. He must clasp and lever up his burden by main strength before he could slacken and detach the cord. Then, with an exclamation of relief, he let the body drop upon the sand beneath. He descended the ladder in excitement.

“Anita!” he called.

She had followed, and was at hand. She trembled, and was as pale as death.

“Help me,” he panted—“with this—into the bush.”

He had lifted his end by the shoulders.

“What devil possesses you? I cannot,” she sobbed; “I shall die.”

“Ah, Nariguita! for my sake! There is no danger if thou art brave and expeditious.”

Between them they tugged and trailed their load into the dense undergrowth skirting the open track, and there let it plunge and sink. Ducos removed the domino from the body, rolling and hauling at that irreverently. Then he saw how the wretch had been pinioned, wrists and ankles, beneath.

Carrying the cloak, he hastened back to the gallows. There he cautiously selected from the surplus stock of cord a length of some twelve feet, at either end of which he formed a loop. So, mounting the ladder, over the hook he hitched this cord by one end, and then, swinging himself clear, slid down the rope until he could pass both his feet into the lower hank.

“Voilà!” said he. “Come up and tie me to the other with some little pieces round the waist and knees and neck.”

She obeyed, weeping. Her love and her duty were to this wonder of manhood, however dreadful his counsel. Presently, trussed to his liking, he bade her fetch the brigand’s cloak and button it over all.

“Now,” said he, “one last sacramental kiss; and, so descending and placing the ladder and all as before, thou shalt take standing-room in the pit for this veritable dance of death.”

A moment—and he was hanging there, to all appearance a corpse. The short rope at his neck had been so disposed and knotted—the collar of the domino serving—as to make him look, indeed, as if he strained at the tether’s end. He had dragged his long hair over his eyes; his head lolled to one side; his tongue protruded. For the rest, the cloak hid all, even to his feet.

The goatherd snivelled.

“Ah, holy saints, he is dead!”

The head came erect, grinning.

“Eugenio!” she cried; “O, my God! Thou wilt be discovered—thou wilt slip and strangle! Ah, the crows—body of my body, the crows!”

“Imbecile! have I not my hands? See, I kiss one to thee. Now the sun sinks, and my ghostly vigil will be short. Pray heaven only they alight not on that in the bush. Nariguita, little heroine, this is my last word. Go hide thyself in the bushes above, and watch what a Frenchman, the most sensitive of mortals, will suffer to serve his Emperor.”

It was an era, indeed, of sublime lusts and barbaric virtues, when men must mount upon stepping-stones, not of their dead selves, but of their slaughtered enemies, to higher things. Anita, like Ducos, was a child of her generation. To her mind the heroic purpose of this deed overpowered its pungency. She kissed her lover’s feet; secured the safe disposition of the cloak about them; then turned and fled into hiding.

* * * * *

At dusk, with the sound of footsteps coming up the pass, the crows dispersed. Eugène, for all his self-sufficiency, had sweated over their persistence. A single more gluttonous swoop might at any moment, in blinding him, have laid him open to a general attack before help could reach him from the eyrie whence unwearying love watched his every movement. Now, common instance of the providence which waits on daring, the sudden lift and scatter of the swarm left his hearing sensible to the tinkling of a bridle, which came rhythmical from the track below. Immediately he fell, with all his soul, into the pose of death.

The cadence of the steely warning so little altered, the footsteps stole in so muffled and so deadly, that, peering presently through slit eyelids for the advent of the troop, it twitched his strung nerves to see a sinister congress already drawn soundless about the gibbet on which he hung. Perhaps for the first time in this stagnant atmosphere he realized the peril he had invited. But still the gambler’s providence befriended him.

They were all women but two—the victim, a sullen, whiskered Yanguesian, strapped cuttingly to a mule, and a paunchy shovel-hatted Carmelite, who hugged a crucifix between his roomy sleeves.

Ducos had heard of these banded vengeresses. Now, he was Frenchman enough to appreciate in full the significance of their attitude, as they clustered beneath him in the dusk, a veiled and voiceless huddle of phantoms. “How,” he thought, peeping through the dropped curtain of his hair, “will the adorables do it?” He had an hysterical inclination to laugh, and at that moment the monk, with a sudden decision to action, brushed against him and set him slowly twirling until his face was averted from the show.

Immediately thereon—as he interpreted sounds—the mule was led under the gallows. He heard the ladder placed in position, heard a strenuous shuffling as of concentrated movement. What he failed to hear (at present) was any cry or protest from the victim. The beam above creaked, a bridle tinkled, a lighter drop of hoofs receded. A pregnant pause ensued, broken only by a slight noise, like rustling or vibrating—and then, in an instant, by a voice, chuckling, hateful—the voice of the priest.

“What! to hang there without a word, Carlos? Wouldst thou go, and never ask what is become of that very treasure thou soldst thy soul to betray? The devil has rounded on thee, Carlos; for after all it is thou that art lost, and not the treasure. That is all put away—shout it in the ears of thy neighbours up there—it is all put away, Carlos, safe in the salt mines of the Little Hump. Cry it to the whole world now. Thou mayst if thou canst. In the salt mines of the Little Hump. Dost hear? Ah, then, we must make thee answer.”

With his words, the pit was all at once in shrill hubbub, noise indescribable and dreadful, the shrieking of harpies bidden to their prey. It rose demoniac—a very Walpurgis.

“No, no,” thought Ducos, gulping under his collar. He was almost unnerved for the moment. “It is unlawful—they have no right to!”

He was twisting again, for all his mad will to prevent it. He would not look, and yet he looked. The monk, possessed, was thrashing the torn and twitching rubbish with his crucifix. The others, their fingers busy with the bodkins they had plucked from their mantillas, had retreated for the moment to a little distance.

Suddenly the Carmelite, as if in an uncontrollable frenzy, dropped his weapon, and scuttling to the mule, where it stood near at hand, tore a great horse pistol from its holster among the trappings, and pointed it at the insensible body.

“Scum of all devils!” he bellowed. “In fire descend to fire that lasts eternal!”

He pulled the trigger. There was a flash and shattering explosion. A blazing hornet stung Ducos in the leg. He may have started and shrieked. Any cry or motion of his must have passed unnoticed in the screaming panic evoked of the crash. He clung on with his hands and dared to raise his head. The mouth of the pass was dusk with flying skirts. Upon the sands beneath him, the body of the priest, a shapeless bulk, was slowly subsiding and settling, one fat fist of it yet gripping the stock of a pistol which, overgorged, had burst as it was discharged.

* * * * *

The reek of the little tragedy had hardly dissipated before Ducos found himself. The sentiment of revolt, deriving from his helpless position, had been indeed but momentary. To feel his own accessibility to torture, painted torture to him as an inhuman lust. With the means to resist, or escape, at will, he might have sat long in ambush watching it; even condoning it as an extravagant posture of art.

With a heart full of such exultation over the success of his trick that for the moment he forgot the pain of his wound, he hurriedly unpicked the knots of the shorter cords about him, and, jumping to the ground, waited until the shadow of a little depressed figure came slinking across the sand towards him.

“Eugenio!” it whispered; “what has happened? O! art thou hurt?”

She ran into his arms, sobbing.

“I am hurt,” said Ducos. “Quick, child! unstrap this from my arm and bind it about my calf. Didst hear? But it was magnificent! Two birds with a single stone. The piastres in pickle for us. Didst see, moreover? Holy Emperor! it was laughable. I would sacrifice a decoration to be witness of the meeting of those two overhead. It should be the Yanguesian for my money, for he has at least his teeth left. Look how he shows them, bursting with rage! Quick, quick, quick! we must be up and away, before any of those others think of returning.”

“And if one should,” she said, “and mark the empty beam?”

“What does it matter, nevertheless! I must be off to-night, after thou hast answered me one single question.”

“Off? Eugenio! O! not without me?”

“God, little girl! In this race I must not be hampered by so much as a thought. But I will return for thee—never fear.”

He still sat in his domino. She knelt at his feet, stanching the flow from the wound the pistol had made in his leg. At his words she looked up breathlessly into his face; then away, to hide her swimming eyes. In the act she slunk down, making herself small in the sand.

“Eugenio! My God! we are watched!”

He turned about quickly.

“Whence?”

“From the mouth of the pass,” she whispered.

“I can see nothing,” he said. “Hurry, nevertheless! What a time thou art! There, it is enough of thy bungling fingers. Help me to my feet and out of this place. Come!” he ended, angrily.

He had an ado to climb the easy slope. By the time they were entered amongst the rocks and bushes above, it was black dusk.

“Whither wouldst thou, dearest?” whispered the goatherd.

He had known well enough a moment ago—to some point, in fact, whence she could indicate to him the direction of the Little Hump, where the treasure lay; afterwards, to the very hill-top where some hours earlier they had forgathered. But he would not or could not explain this. Some monstrous blight of gloom had seized his brain at a swoop. He thought it must be one of the crows, and he stumbled along, raving in his heart. If she offered to help him now, he would tear his arm furiously from her touch. She wondered, poor stricken thing, haunting him with tragic eyes. Then at last her misery and desolation found voice—

“What have I done? I will not ask again to go with thee, if that is it. It was only one little foolish cry of terror, most dear—that they should suspect, and seize, and torture me. But, indeed, should they do it, thou canst trust me to be silent.”

He stopped, swaying, and regarded her demoniacally. His face was a livid and malignant blot in the thickening dusk. To torture her? What torture could equal his at this moment? She sought merely to move him by an affectation of self-renunciation. That, of course, called at once for extreme punishment. He must bite and strangle her to death.

He moved noiselessly upon her. She stood spellbound before him. All at once something seemed to strike him on the head, and, without uttering a sound, he fell forward into the bush.

* * * * *

Ducos opened his eyes to the vision of so preternaturally melancholy a face, that he was shaken with weak laughter over the whimsicality of his own imagination. But, in a very little, unwont to dreaming as he was, the realization that he was looking upon no apparition, but a grotesque of fact, silenced and absorbed him.

Presently he was moved to examine his circumstances. He was lying on a heap of grass mats in a tiny house built of boards. Above him was a square of leaf-embroidered sky cut out of a cane roof; to his left, his eyes, focussing with a queer stiffness, looked through an open doorway down precipices of swimming cloud. That was because he lay in an eyrie on the hillside. And then at once, into his white field of vision, floated the dismal long face, surmounted by an ancient cocked-hat, slouched and buttonless, and issuing like an august Aunt Sally’s from the neck of a cloak as black and dropping as a pall.

The figure crossed the opening outside, and wheeled, with the wind in its wings. In the act, its eyes, staring and protuberant, fixed themselves on those of the Frenchman. Immediately, with a little stately gesture expressive of relief and welcome, it entered the hut.

“By the mercy of God!” exclaimed the stranger in his own tongue. Then he added in English: “The Inglese recovers to himself?”

Ducos smiled, nodding his head; then answered confidently, feeling his way: “A little, sir, I tank you. Thees along night. Ah! it appear all one pain.”

The other nodded solemnly in his turn—

“A long night indeed, in which the sunksink tree very time.”

“Comment!” broke out the aide-de-camp hoarsely, and instantly realized his mistake.

“Ah! devil take the French!” said he explanatorily. “I been in their camp so long that to catch their lingo. But I spik l’Espagnol, señor. It shall be good to us to converse there.”

The other bowed impenetrably. His habit of a profound and melancholy aloofness might have served for mask to any temper of mind but that which, in real fact, it environed—a reason, that is to say, more lost than bedevilled under the long tyranny of oppression.

“I have been ill, I am to understand?” said Ducos, on his guard.

“For three days and nights, señor. My goatherd came to tell me how a wounded English officer was lying on the hills. Between us we conveyed you hither.”

“Ah, Dios! I remember. I had endeavoured to carry muskets into Saragossa by the river. I was hit in the leg; I was captured; I escaped. For two days I wandered, señor, famished and desperate. At last in these mountains I fell as by a stroke from heaven.”

“It was the foul blood clot, señor. It balked your circulation. There was the brazen splinter in the wound, which I removed, and God restored you. What fangs are theirs, these reptiles! In a few days you will be well.”

“Thanks to what ministering angel?”

“I am known as Don Manoel di Cangrejo, señor, the most shattered, as he was once the most prosperous of men. May God curse the French! May God” (his wild, mournful face twitched with strong emotion) “reward and bless these brave allies of a people more wronged than any the world has yet known!”

“Noble Englishman,” said he by and by, “thou hast nothing at present but to lie here and accept the grateful devotion of a heart to which none but the inhuman denies humanity.”

Ducos looked his thanks.

“If I might rest here a little,” he said; “if I might be spared——”

The other bowed, with a grave understanding.

“None save ourselves, and the winds and trees, señor. I will nurse thee as if thou wert mine own child.”

He was as good as his word. Ducos, pluming himself on his perspicacity, accepting the inevitable with philosophy, lent himself during the interval, while feigning a prolonged weakness, to recovery. That was his, to all practical purposes, within a couple of days, during which time he never set eyes on Anita, but only on Anita’s master. Don Manoel would often come and sit by his bed of mats; would even sometimes retail to him, as to a trusted ally, scraps of local information. Thus was he posted, to his immense gratification, in the topical after-history of his own exploit at the gallows.

“It is said,” whispered Cangrejo awfully, “that one of the dead, resenting so vile a neighbour, impressed a goatherd into his service, and, being assisted from the beam, walked away. Truly it is an age of portents.”

On the third morning, coming early with his bowl of goat’s milk and his offering of fruits, he must apologize, with a sweet and lofty courtesy, for the necessity he was under of absenting himself all day.

“There is trouble,” he said—“as when is there not? I am called to secret council, señor. But the boy Ambrosio has my orders to be ever at hand shouldst thou need him.”

Ducos’s heart leapt. But he was careful to deprecate this generous attention, and to cry Adios! with the most perfect assumption of composure.

He was lying on his elbow by and by, eagerly listening, when the doorway was blocked by a shadow. The next instant Anita had sprung to and was kneeling beside him.

“Heart of my heart, have I done well? Thou art sound and whole? O, speak to me, speak to me, that I may hear thy voice and gather its forgiveness!”

For what? She was sobbing and fondling him in a very lust of entreaty.

“Thou hast done well,” he said. “So, we were seen indeed, Anita?”

“Yes,” she wept, holding his face to her bosom. “And, O! I agonize for thee to be up and away, Eugenio, for I fear.”

“Hush! I am strong. Help me to my legs, child. So! Now, come with me outside, and point out, if thou canst, where lies the Little Hump.”

She was his devoted crutch at once. They stood in the sunlight, looking down upon the hills which fell from beneath their feet—a world of tossed and petrified rapids. At their backs, on a shallow plateau under eaves of rock, Cangrejo’s eyrie clung to the mountain-side.

“There,” said the goatherd, indicating with her finger, “that mound above the valley—that little hill, fat-necked like a great mushroom, which sprouts from its basin among the trees?”

“Wait! mine eyes are dazzled.”

“Ah, poor sick eyes! Look, then! Dost thou not see the white worm of the Pampeluna road—below yonder, looping through the bushes?”

“I see it—yes, yes.”

“Now, follow upwards from the big coil, where the pine tree leans to the south, seeming a ladder between road and mound.”

“Stay—I have it.”

“Behold the Little Hump, the salt mine of St. Ildefonso, and once, they say, an island in the midst of a lake, which burst its banks and poured forth and was gone. And now thou knowest, Eugenio?”

He did not answer. He was intently fixing in his memory the position of the hill. She waited on his mood, not daring to risk his anger a second time, with a pathetic anxiety. Presently he heaved out a sigh, and turned on her, smiling.

“It is well,” he said. “Now conduct me to the spot where we met three days ago.”

It was surprisingly near at hand. A labyrinthine descent—by way of aloe-horned rocks, with sandy bents and tufts of harsh juniper between—of a hundred yards or so, and they were on the stony plateau which he remembered. There, to one side, was the coppice of chestnuts and locust trees. To the other, the road by which he had climbed went down with a run—such as he himself was on thorns to emulate—into the valleys trending to Saragossa. His eyes gleamed. He seated himself down on a boulder, controlling his impatience only by a violent effort.

“Anita,” he said, drilling out his speech with slow emphasis, “thou must leave me here alone awhile. I would think—I would think and plan, my heart. Go, wait on thy goats above, and I will return to thee presently.”

She sighed, and crept away obedient. O, forlorn, most forlorn soul of love, which, counting mistrust treason, knows itself a traitor! Yet Anita obeyed, and with no thought to eavesdrop, because she was in love with loyalty.

The moment he was well convinced of her retreat, Ducos got to his legs with an immense sigh of relief. Love, he thought, could be presuming, could be obtuse, could be positively a bore. It all turned upon the context of the moment; and the present was quick with desires other than for endearments. For it must be related that the young captain, having manœuvred matters to this accommodating pass, was designing nothing less than an instant return, on the wings of transport, to the blockading camp, whence he proposed returning, with a suitable force and all possible dispatch, to seize and empty of its varied treasures the salt mine of St. Ildefonso.

“Pouf!” he muttered to himself in a sort of ecstatic aggravation; “this accursed delay! But the piastres are there still—I have Cangrejo’s word for it.”

He turned once, before addressing himself to flight, to refocus in his memory the position of the mound, which still from here was plainly visible. In the act he pricked his ears, for there was a sound of footsteps rising up the mountain path. He dodged behind a boulder. The footsteps came on—approached him—paused—so long that he was induced at last to peep for the reason. At once his eyes encountered other eyes awaiting him. He laughed, and left his refuge. The new-comer was a typical Spanish Romany—slouching, filthy, with a bandage over one eye.

“God be with thee, Caballero!” said the Frenchman defiantly.

To his astonishment, the other broke into a little scream of laughter, and flung himself towards him.

“Judge thou, now,” said he, “which is the more wide-awake adventurer and the better actor!”

“My God!” cried Ducos; “it is de la Platière!”

“Hush!” whispered the mendicant. “Are we private? Ah, bah! Junot should have sent me in the first instance.”

“I have been hurt, thou rogue. Our duel of wits is yet postponed. In good time hast thou arrived. This simplifies matters. Thou shalt return, and I remain. Hist! come away, and I will tell thee all.”

Half an hour later, de la Platière—having already, for his part, mentally absorbed the details of a certain position—swung rapidly, with a topical song on his lips, down the path he had ascended earlier. The sound of his footfalls receded and died out. The hill regathered itself to silence. Ducos, on terms with destiny and at peace with all the world, sat for hours in the shadow of the trees.

Perhaps he was not yet Judas enough to return to Anita, awaiting him in Cangrejo’s eyrie. But at length, towards evening, fearing his long absence might arouse suspicion or uneasiness, he arose and climbed the hill. When he reached the cabin, he found it empty and silent. He loitered about, wondering and watchful. Not a soul came near him. He dozed; he awoke; he ate a few olives and some bread; he dozed again. When he opened his eyes for the second time, the shadows of the peaks were slanting to the east. He got to his feet, shivering a little. This utter silence and desertion discomforted him. Where was the girl? God! was it possible after all that she had betrayed him? He might have questioned his own heart as to that; only, as luck would have it, it was such a tiresomely deaf organ. So, let him think. De la Platière, with his men (as calculated), would be posted in the Pampeluna road, round the spur of the hill below, an hour after sunset—that was to say, at fifteen minutes to six. No doubt by then the alarm would have gone abroad. But no great resistance to a strong force was to be apprehended. In the meantime—well, in the meantime, until the moment came for him to descend under cover of dark and assume the leadership, he must possess his soul in patience.

The sun went down. Night flowing into the valleys seemed to expel a moan of wind; then all dropped quiet again. Darkness fell swift and sudden like a curtain, but no Anita appeared, putting it aside, and Ducos was perplexed. He did not like this bodiless, shadowless subscription to his scheming. It troubled him to have no one to talk to—and deceive. He was depressed.

By and by he pulled off, turned inside-out and resumed his scarlet jacket, which he had taken the provisional precaution to have lined with a sombre material. As he slipped in his arms, he started and looked eagerly into the lower vortices of dusk. In the very direction to which his thoughts were engaged, a little glow-worm light was burning steadily from the thickets. What did it signify—Spaniards or French, ambush or investment? Allowing—as between himself on the height and de la Platière on the road below—for the apparent discrepancy in the time of sunset, it was yet appreciably before the appointed hour. Nevertheless, this that he saw made the risk of an immediate descent necessary.

Bringing all his wits, his resolution, his local knowledge to one instant focus, he started, going down at once swiftly and with caution. The hills rose above him like smoke as he dropped; the black ravines were lifted to his feet. Sometimes for scores of paces he would lose sight altogether of the eye of light; then, as he turned some shoulder of rock, it would strike him in the face with its nearer radiance, so that he had to pause and readjust his vision to the new perspective. Still, over crabbed ridges and by dip of thorny gulches he descended steadily, until the mound of the Little Hump, like a gigantic thatched kraal, loomed oddly upon him through the dark.

And, lo! the beacon that had led him down unerring was a great lantern hung under the sagging branch of a chestnut tree at the foot of the mound—a lantern, the lurid nucleus of a little coil of tragedy.

A cluster of rocks neighboured the clearing about the tree. To these Ducos padded his last paces with a cat-like stealth—crouching, hardly breathing; and now from that coign of peril he stared down.

A throng of armed guerrillas, one a little forward of the rest, was gathered about a couple more of their kidney, who, right under the lantern, held the goatherd Anita on her knees in a nailing grip. To one side, very phantoms of desolation, stood Cangrejo and another. The faces of all, densely shadowed in part by the rims of their sombreros, looked as if masked; their mouths, corpse-like, showed a splint of teeth; their ink-black whiskers hummocked on their shoulders.

So, in the moment of Ducos’s alighting on it, was the group postured—silent, motionless, as if poised on the turn of some full tide of passion. And then, in an instant, a voice boomed up to him.

“Confess!” it cried, vibrating: “him thou wert seen with at the gallows; him whom thou foisted, O! unspeakable, thou devil’s doxy! on the unsuspecting Cangrejo; him, thy Frankish gallant and spy” (the voice guttered, and then, rising, leapt to flame)—“what hast thou done with him? where hidden? Speak quickly and with truth, if, traitor though thou be, thou wouldst be spared the traitor’s estrapade.”

“Alguazil, I cannot say. Have mercy on me!”

Ducos could hardly recognize the child in those agonized tones.

The inquisitor, with an oath, half wheeled.

“Pignatelli, father of this accursed—if by her duty thou canst prevail?”

A figure—agitated, cadaverous, as sublimely dehumanized as Brutus—stepped from Cangrejo’s side and tossed one gnarled arm aloft.

“No child of mine, alguazil!” it proclaimed in a shrill, strung cry. “Let her reap as she hath sown, alguazil!”

Cangrejo leapt, and flung himself upon his knees by the girl.

“Tell Don Manoel, chiquita. God! little boy, that being a girl (ah, naughty!) is half absolved. Tell him, tell him—ah, there—now, now, now! He, thy lover, was in the cabin. I left him prostrate, scarce able to move. When the council comes to seek him, he is gone. Away, sayst thou? Ah, child, but I must know better! It could not be far. Say where—give him up—let him show himself only, chiquita, and the good alguazil will spare thee. Such a traitor, ah, Dios! And yet I have loved, too.”

He sobbed, and clawed her uncouthly. Ducos, in his eyrie, laughed to himself, and applauded softly, making little cymbals of his thumb-nails.

“But he will not move her,” he thought—and, on the thought, started; for from his high perch his eye had suddenly caught, he was sure of it, the sleeking of a French bayonet in the road below.

“Master!” cried Anita, in a heart-breaking voice; “he is gone—they cannot take him. O, don’t let them hurt me!”

The alguazil made a sign. Cangrejo, gobbling and resisting, was dragged away. There was a little ugly, silent scuffle about the girl; and, in a moment, the group fell apart to watch her being hauled up to the branch by her thumbs.

Ducos looked on greedily.

“How long before she sets to screaming?” he thought, “so that I may escape under cover of it.”

So long, that he grew intolerably restless—wild, furious. He could have cursed her for her endurance.

But presently it came, moaning up all the scale of suffering. And, at that, slinking like a rat through its run, he went down swiftly towards the road—to meet de la Platière and his men already silently breaking cover from it.

And, on the same instant, the Spaniards saw them.

* * * * *

“Peste!” whispered de la Platière “We could have them all at one volley but for that!”

Between the French force, ensconced behind the rocks whither Ducos had led them, and the Spaniards who, completely taken by surprise, had clustered foolishly in a body under the lantern, hung the body of Anita, its torture suspended for the moment because its poor wits were out.

“How, my friend!” exclaimed Ducos. “But for what?”

“The girl, that is all.”

“She will feel nothing. No doubt she is half dead already. A moment, and it will be too late.”

“Nevertheless, I will not,” said de la Platière.

Ducos stamped ragingly.

“Give the word to me. She must stand her chance. For the Emperor!” he choked—then shrieked out, “Fire!”

The explosion crashed among the hills, and echoed off.

A dark mass, which writhed and settled beyond the lantern shine, seemed to excite a little convulsion of merriment in the swinging body. That twitched and shook a moment; then relaxed, and hung motionless.

THE RAVELLED SLEAVE

Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care.

I should like to preface my subject with a Caractère, in the style of La Bruyère, as thus:—

Pamphilus is what the liberal call a reserved man, and the intolerant a secretive. He certainly has an aggravating way of appearing to make Asian mysteries of the commonplaces of life. He traffics in silence as others do in gossip. The “Ha!”, with which he accepts your statement of fact or conjecture, seems to imply on his part both a shrewder than ordinary knowledge of your subject, and a curiosity to study in you the popular view. One feels oddly superficial in his company, and, resentful of the imposition, blunders into self-assertive vulgarities which one knows to be misrepresentations of oneself. Do still waters always run deep? Pamphilus, it would appear, has founded his conduct on the fallacy, as if he had never observed the placid waters of the Rhine slipping over their shallow levels. One finds oneself speculating if, could one but once lay bare, suddenly, the jealous secrets of Pamphilus’s bosom, one would be impressed with anything but their unimportance. Yet, strangely, scepticism and irritation despite, one likes him, and takes pleasure in his company.

Possibly the fact that he cultivates so few friends makes of his lonely preferences a flattery. Then, too, loquacity is not invariably a brimming intellect’s overflow. It is better, on the whole, if one has very little to say, to keep that little in reserve for a rainy day. Too many of us, having the conceit of our inheritance, think that we, also, can feed a multitude on five loaves and a couple of fishes. But we must adulterate largely to do it.

Pamphilus, again, has the winning, persuasive “presence.” He is thirty-three, but still in his physical and mental attributes a big-eyed wondering boy. You can mention to him nothing so ordinary, but his eager “Yes? Yes?” startles you into trying to improve upon your subject with a touch of humour, a flower of observation, for his rare delectation. Is he worth the effort? You don’t know. You don’t know whether or not he wants you to think so, or is really instinctively greedy for the psychologic bonne bouche. He is tall, and spare, and interesting in appearance. In short, he lacks no charm but candour; and I am not sure but that the lack is not a fifth grace. He is, finally, “Valentine,” and the subject of this “Morality.”

It may have been a year ago that, coming silently into my rooms one night, Valentine “jumped” me, to my dignified annoyance. I hate being so taken off my guard. Generally, I hold it that a man’s consideration for his fellow-creatures’ nerves is the measure of his mental endowment. Valentine, however, does not, to do him justice, make these noiseless entrances to surprise one, so much as to entertain himself with one’s preoccupations. Mine, as it happened, was the evening paper.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, breathing the monosyllable suddenly over my shoulder, like an enlightened ghost. The characteristic note was, I supposed, in allusion to the paragraph which engaged my attention at the moment. It was headed “The Brompton Sleeping Girl.”

I started, of course; and, in the instant reaction of nerve, flew to an extreme of rudeness.

“Yes,” I drawled; “an interesting case, isn’t it? Supposing it had been a private letter, how long would you have stood before shouting your presence into my ear like that?”

He laughed as he moved away (he had not shouted at all, by the by); then, as he sat down opposite me in the shadow, appeared for the first time to realize my meaning.

“Just long enough to recognize the fact,” he said quietly. “What do you mean by the question?”

Thus rebounding, my own rudeness struck me ashamed. I had no real justification for the insult, anyhow that I could call into evidence.

“O, nothing!” I mumbled awkwardly; “except that you made me almost jump out of my skin.”

It was characteristic of him, and a further puzzle, that in spite of his self-suggested consciousness of superiority he was easily depressed by a snub. We sat for a little in a glowering silence, and perhaps with a mutual sense of injury.

“Yes, an interesting case,” he said at length with an effort. “A trance, isn’t it?”

“Something of the sort,” I replied. “I saw the girl yesterday.”

He looked up interested.

“Yes?”

“She is in a private ward of B—— Hospital. I know the house surgeon. He took me to see her.”

“Well! How does she look?”

“Seen the St. Amaranthe at Tussaud’s—the one whom, as children, we used to call the Sleeping Beauty? Not unlike her: as pretty as wax and as stiff: just breathing, with pale cheeks and her mouth a little open.”

“The fit—I seem to remember—was brought on by some shock, wasn’t it?”

I growled—

“According to report, concealment of birth. I conclude she was put to shame by some rogue, and couldn’t face the music. The child was found, three or four months ago, on a doorstep or somewhere, and traced to her. When the police entered, I suppose she feared the worst, and went off. Odd part is, that the infant itself was intact—as sound as a bell. But all that’s of little interest. It’s the case for me; not the sentiment.”

“Ah?” said Valentine.

He leaned forward, resting his long arms on his knees and gently clicking his fingers together. His eyes were full of an eager light.

“Johnny, I wonder if you could get me a sight of her?”

“Why not?” I answered. I felt that I owed him some atonement. “I’ll ask C—— if you like.”

II

C—— demurred, hummed and hawed, and acquiesced.

“Your friend must keep in the background,” he said. “He’s not a backstair reporter, I suppose?”

“He’s an independent gentleman, and either a poet or an ass—I don’t know which.”

“Same thing,” said this airy Philistine; “but no matter, so long as he don’t talk.”

“He won’t talk.”

“Very well, bring him up. Fact is, we’re trying an experiment this afternoon. Aunt’s brought the baby—sort of natural magnetism to restore the current, cancel the hiatus—see? I’ve not much belief in it myself.”

I fetched Valentine, and we followed C—— up to the ward. There were only present there—one, a list-footed nurse; two, a little shabby-genteel woman, with a false tow-like front over vicious eyes, who carried a flannelled bundle; and three, the patient herself.

She had not so much as stirred, to all appearance, since I last saw her. We, Valentine and I, took up our position apart. Some accidental contact with him made me turn my head. He was quivering like a high-strung racer for the start. This physical excitability was news to me. “H’mph!” I thought. “Is there really that in you which you must keep such a tight rein on?”

The nurse took the infant, and placed it on the sleeping girl’s breast. It mewed and sprawled, but evoked no response whatever.

“She’d never a drop of the milk of kindness in her,” muttered the little verjuicy woman.

“Hold your tongue!” said the doctor sharply.

He and the nurse essayed some coaxing. In the midst, I was petrified by the sight of Valentine going softly up to the bed-head.

“May I whisper a word?” he said. “It may fail or not. But I don’t think you can object to my trying.”

And actually, before his astonished company could move or collect its wits, he had bent and spoken something, inaudible, into the patient’s ear.

Now, I ask you to remember that this girl had been in a cataleptic sleep for not less than three months, under observation, and with no chance, so far as I knew, to cozen her attendants; and believe me then as you can when I tell you that, answering, instantly and normally, to Valentine’s whisper, she sighed, stretched her arms, though at first with an air of some lassitude and weakness, and, opening her eyes, fixed them with a sort of suspended stare upon the face of her exorcist. Gradually, then, a little pucker deepened between her brows, and instantly, some shadow of fright or uneasiness flickering in her dark pupils, she turned her head aside. Obviously she was distressed by the vision of this strange face coming between the light and her normal, as it seemed to her, awaking.

Valentine immediately stood away, and backed to where she could not see him.

C——, obviously putting great command on himself, since circumstances made it appear that some damned “natural magic” had got the better of his natural science, took the situation in hand professionally, and frowned to the aunt, to whom the baby had been restored, to show herself. The woman, rallying from the common stupefaction, gave an acrid sniff and obeyed.

“Well, Nancy!” she said, in a tone between wonder and remonstrance.

The girl looked round again and up, with a little shock. Immediately her dilated pupils accepted with frank astonishment this more familiar apparition.

“Gracious goodness, Aunt Mim!” she whispered; “what have you got there?”

Then she turned her face on the pillow, with a smile of drowsy rapture.

“Anyhow, you’ve found your way to Skene at last,” she murmured, and instantly fell into a natural sleep, from which, it was evident, there must be no awaking her.

C—— wheeled upon my friend.

“I suppose you won’t part with your secret?” he asked drily.

It was a habit with Valentine, not his least aggravating, composedly to put by any unwelcome or difficult question addressed to him as if he did not hear it.

“Skene’s in Kent, isn’t it?” he asked, ostensibly of the aunt, though he looked at me. I could have snapped at him in pure vindictiveness. He wasn’t inscrutable, any more than another. What was his confounded right to pose as a sphinx?

“She fancies she’s there,” he said. “Why?”

I turned dumbly with the question to the little woman creature. I don’t know if she supposed I was in some sort of official authority to cross-examine her. She had powder on her face, and a weak glow mantled through it.

“It was there she met her trouble, sir,” she said, hesitating. “She’d gone down to the hop-picking last September, and I was to follow. But circumstances” (she wriggled her shoulders with an indescribable simper) “was against my joining her.”

“Well,” broke in C——, suddenly and rather sharply, “you must take the consequences, and, for the present anyhow, the burden of them off her shoulders.”

“Begging your pardon, sir?” she questioned shrewdly.

“The child,” said the doctor, “the child. Everything, it appears, relating to it is for the moment obliterated from her mind. She takes up existence, I think you’ll find, last autumn, at this Skene, with expecting you. Well, you have come, and returned to London together. You understand? The time of year is the same. None of all this has for the moment happened.”

There was an acrid incredulity in his hearer’s face as she listened to him.

“Do I understand, or don’t I, sir,” she said, “that her shame is to be my care and consideration? And till when, if you’ll be so good?”

“That I can’t say,” he answered. “Probably the interval, the abyss in her mind, will bridge itself by slow degrees. Her reason likely depends upon your not rudely hastening the process. I warn you, that’s all.”

“And pray,” she said, with ineffable sarcasm, “how is I, as a respectable woman, to account to her for this that I hold?”

“Put it out to nurse.”

“No, sir, if you’ll allow me. The hussy have done her best to bring me to ruin already.”

“Say you’ve adopted it.”

She gave a shrill titter.

“Nanny will have lost her wits, hindeed, to believe that.”

“Well, she has in a measure.”

“And the police?” she said. “Aren’t you a little forgetting them, sir?”

“The police,” said C——, “I will answer for. The case isn’t worth their pursuing, and they will drop it.”

The baby began to wail; and Aunt Mim, with her lips pursed, to play the vicious rocking-horse to it.

III

One evening, a week later, Valentine came quietly into my room. I had not seen him in the interval, and was immediately struck, though it was semi-dusk, by the expression on his face. It was white and smiling, and the eyes more brightly inscrutable than ever.

A storm had just crashed across the town, and left everything dripping in a liquid fog. Looking down, one could see the house-fronts, submerged in the running pavements, become the very “baseless fabrics of a vision.” The hansom-drivers, bent over their glazed roofs, rode each with a shadowy phantom of himself reversed, like an oilskin Jack of Spades. No pedestrian but, like Hamlet, had his “fellow in the cellarage” keeping pace with him. The solid ground seemed melted, and the unsubstantial workings of the world revealed. To souls hemmed in by bricks, there are more commonplace, less depressing sights than a wet London viewed from a third story.

There was a box in my window, with some marguerites in it, the sickly pledges of a rather jocund spring. Valentine, joining me as I leaned out, handled a half-broken stem very tenderly.

“It has been beaten down, like poor Nanny, by the storm,” he said. “We must tie it to a stick.”

I did not answer for a minute. Then very deliberately I drew in my head and sat down. Again like my shadow, in this city of shadows, Valentine did the same. For some five minutes we must have remained opposite one another without speaking. Then sudden and grim I set my lips, and asked the question he seemed to invite.

“Are you the stick?”

He nodded, with a smile, which I could hardly see now, on his face.

“You speak figuratively, of course,” I said, “in talking of tying her to you?”

“No,” he said. “I talk of the real bond.”

“Of matrimony?”

“Certainly.”

With a naughty word, I jumped to my feet, strode the round of the room, sat down flop on the table, put my hands in my pockets, tried to whistle, laughed, and burst out—“I suppose you intend this, in a manner, for a confidence? I suppose you are taking straight up the tale of a week ago? Well, I haven’t lost the impression of that moment, or gone mad in the interval. Do you want me to sympathize with your insanity, or to argue you out of it—which?”

He did not answer. Indeed, the offensiveness of my tone was not winning.

“I am perfectly aware,” I went on, “that the melodramatic unities demand an espousal with the interesting spirit we have called back to life. They have a way, at the same time, of ignoring Aunt Mims. You will, I am sure, forgive me if I say that it is the figure of that good lady which sticks last in my memory.”

Still he did not answer.

“I will put my point,” I continued, growing a little angry—“I will put my point, as you seem to ask it, with all the delicacy I can. You drew an analogy between—between some one and that broken cabbage yonder. The sentiment is unexceptionable; only in France they consider those things weeds.”

“Do they?” he said coolly. “We don’t.”

“No; because we must justify ourselves for exalting ’em out of their proper sphere. They’ll not cease to smell rank, though, however you give ’em the middle place in your greenhouse.”

I struck my knee viciously with my open palm.

“That was in vile bad taste, Val. I beg your pardon for saying it. But, deuce take it, man! you can’t have come to me, a worldling and an older one, for sympathy in this midsummer madness?”

I was off the table again, going to and fro and apostrophizing him at odd turns.

“Let’s drop parables—and answer plainly, if it’s in you. You don’t exhale sentiment as a rule. Did or did not that touch about ‘poor Nanny’ imply a hint of some confidence put in me?”

“I’ve always considered you my closest friend.”

“Flattered, I’m sure; though I didn’t guess it. You put such conundrums—excuse me—beyond the time of a plain man to guess. Well, I say, I’m flattered, and I’ll take the full privilege. It’s natural you should feel an interest in——by the way, I regret to say I only know her as the Brompton Sleeping Girl.”

“She’s Nanny Nolan.”

“In Miss Nolan, then. A propos, I’ve never yet asked, and mustn’t know, I suppose, the secret of your ‘open sesame’?”

“No, I can’t tell you.”

“O, it doesn’t matter! Only, as a question of this confiding friendship——”

“It isn’t my secret alone.”

“Then I’ve no more to say. But I presume she’s the—the flower in question?”

“O, yes! And I’m the stick.”

He said it with a quiet laugh.

“I shouldn’t have supposed it, on my honour,” I assured him. “You can have stuck at very little in a week.”

I took a few turns, and faced him, or his motionless shadow, very solemnly.

“Now,” I demanded, “for the plain speaking. Will you answer me the truth? I brought away an impression, as I said. It might have been, after all, an impertinent one. A man’s a man for a’ that—though I confess I can’t quite apply the moral to a woman. Still, I’ll ask you frankly: How is she socially?”

“Nothing at all. Her father was a colour-sergeant, a red-headed Celt from over the border of dreams. He’s gone to join the Duke of Argyll’s cloud army at Inverary. Her aunt’s an ex-coryphée living on a mysterious pension.”

“Of course; only rather worse than I supposed.”

“Verender, I must tell you the girl is without reproach. Socially, it is true, they are in a very limited way. They eke out existence in a number of small directions, even, as you know, hop-picking.”

“I’ve nothing but respect for Miss Nolan’s virtues. I can even appreciate the appeal of her prettiness to a susceptible nature, which I don’t think mine is. Anyhow, I’m no Pharisee to pelt my poor sister of the gutter because she’s fallen in it. That’s beside the question. But it isn’t, to ask what in the name of tragedy induces you, with your wealth, your refinement, your mental and social amiability, to sink all in this investment of a—of a fancy bespoke—there, I can put it no differently.”

“Call it my amiability, Verender. She’s like the centurion’s daughter. There’s something awfully strange, awfully fascinating, after all, in getting into her confidence—in entering behind that broken seal of death.”

“You’re not an impressionable Johnny—at least, you shouldn’t be. You’ve passed the Rubicon. This child with a child—with Aunt Mim, good Lord! Have you thought of the consequences?”

“Yes; all of them.”

“Of the—pardon me. Do you know who he was?”

“Yes.”

I stared aghast at him—at the deeper blot of gloom from which his voice proceeded.

“And you aren’t afraid—for her; for yourself?”

“You mean, of her relapsing?” he said clearly. “Not when she knows the truth—knows what a poor thing he is.”

“Are you sure you know woman? She is apt to have a curious tenderness for the blackguard who distinguishes her with his most especial brand of villainy. Then she hasn’t learned it—the truth—yet?”

“No. Aunt Mim has been loyal.”

“Well, well she may be, so long as you offer yourself the prize to such a self-denying ordinance. She sees which side her bread’s buttered, no doubt. And how does she account for the little stranger?”

“By adoption. It’s an odd thing, Verender—Verender, it’s a very odd thing, and very pitiful, to see how she—little Nanny—distrusts the child—looks on it sort of askance—almost hates it, I think. I’ve a very difficult part to play.”

I groaned.

“Then why play it? What does it all matter to you? You’ve opened her eyes. Isn’t that enough, without waiting till she’s opened yours?”

“Ah!” he said, obviously not attending to me. “But that isn’t the whole of my difficulty. The truth is, she appears to shrink from me too.”

“You’ll forgive me,” I said grimly. “That’s your first comforting statement.”

“I don’t know how it is,” he continued, in a low voice, self-pondering; “she’s frightened—distressed, before a shadow she can’t define. Sometimes and somehow it seems as if she wants to love me, but can’t—as if she were trying, and vainly, to shape out of a great gloom the obstacle which separates us. And I want to help her; and yet I, too, can’t understand. Shall I ever, I wonder?”

I stared at him. “Isn’t it plain enough? But you have love’s eyes, I suppose.” Then I asked, a little softened, “Does she ever lose herself, trying to piece that broken time?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “She speaks so little. She is like a little shy ghost—half-materialized—fearful between spirit and matter—very sweet and pathetic.”

With the last word he turned abruptly and strode out of the room. I was not so much astonished at his curt conclusion, as at a certain tell-tale cough which accompanied it.

“O, hang the fellow!” I muttered. “If he’s developed tears in his voice, I give him up.”

IV

One afternoon, accident taking me past the Nolans’ house in the Fulham Road, I was disturbed to hear Valentine’s voice hailing me from the parlour window. It was a little cheap tenement, and a curiously shabby frame to his rather distinguished figure as he stood up eagerly to stop me.

“Come in,” he said. “I want you.”

I demurred, in an instant and instinctive panic.

“What for? I’m horribly pressed. Won’t it do another time?”

“It won’t,” he answered. “It’s its way. But go on, if your need is greater than mine.”

“That’s shabby,” I thought; and yielded with the worst grace possible. He retaliated by meeting me all sweetness at the door, and conducting me into the parlour.

It was an impossible room—I may say it at once—quite the typical tawdry boudoir of an ex-coryphée. She was not there, I was relieved to find, in person; but her multiplied presentment simpered and abashed one from a dozen places on walls and mantelpiece. “Claudine” (she might have been a hair-wash, and enjoyed the same sort of popularity) posed, for all the blind purposes of vanity, in the tights and kid boots of a past generation. Looking from queer old daguerreotypes, in skirts like curtailed crinolines; ogling from wreaths, her calves, crossed to display their strength, in disfiguring proportion with the thin bosom above, she seemed to make an outrage of the dear ungainly sanctities which appeal to us, in pegtops and voluminous skirts, from the back parts of our albums. There are certain people who, with the best intention in the world to be held sweet, are unsavoury; and Aunt Mim was one of them. All the more wonder that such fruit could be born of her stock.

For she was certainly attractive, was the girl—pure and pretty and unaffected. I had to own it grudgingly to myself, as I bowed to her, and turned interrogatively to my friend.

He had gone to the back of her chair, where she sat away from the open window. There was some discarded work in her lap, and in her eyes some look of a vague sadness and bewilderment.

“Nanny,” he said softly, “this, Mr. Verender, is my great friend—my counsel out of Court. Will you just do this for me—make him yours, too? Will you try to explain to him, while I go away, what you find it so hard to explain to me—your sense of the something that keeps us apart?”

I made an instant but faint demur. Nanny, as faintly, shook her head.

“O,” he said, “but he will listen to you, I know! Because I am unhappy, and you are unhappy, and I love you so, Nanny, and he is my best friend. Try to explain to him, dear, the difficulty of your case.”

This novel enlargement on our relations, his and mine, vaguely annoyed me.

“Why should there be any?” I put in impatiently. “Our friend can give you great social and other advantages, Miss Nolan. If he is decided on this course—you don’t dislike him, I think—forgive me, I can see no reason for objection on your part.”

She rose, as if scared, to her feet. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Hush!” he said. “Be just to me, and try to tell him.”

He left the room and the house; and I was in two minds about following him. Was ever man put in a more ridiculous position? Yet the look of the girl gave me pause. She seemed to me to be yet only half awake; and indeed, I think, that is something to understate the case.

“Well,” I said stumblingly, as she stood before me. “You heard what he said, Miss Nolan?”

I was not sympathetic. I knew it. Perhaps, having once asserted myself, I might have grown so. But she would not give me the opportunity. In the meantime, I did not feel the less the full force of this mismatch.

She put her hand in a lost way to her forehead.

“I will try,” she said, in a low voice, “because he asked me. There—there was a great trouble—O! it was so far back. I can’t remember it—and then everything went.”

“He is willing, it appears, to take that interval, that trouble, on trust,” I said. “He only asks you, it seems, to repay his confidence. What you are is what he desires. Cannot you consider yourself new-born into his love?” (I positively sneered the word to myself.)

“There is something stands between us,” she only murmured helplessly.

“He doesn’t admit it for himself,” I insisted irritably. “It might be the ruin of his career, of his position, as foreseen by his friends. I suppose he wishes to assure you that that counts for nothing with him, if by any chance the bar between you lies in your dim consciousness of such a sentiment.”

I had been brutal, I admit it. I can only palliate my behaviour by confessing that it was intended to sound the first note of my moral surrender to the appeal of those poor, pain-troubled eyes. Now, at least, I had got my shaft home. She looked up at me with a light of amazed knowledge in her face.

“Thank you,” she said. “I knew there was a right reason; and all the time I have been hunting for a fancied one.”

I suffered an instant reaction to dismay. I had had no right whatever to make this point. Whatever my private opinion of Valentine’s folly, I had allowed myself to be accredited his ambassador.

“Come; it is no reason at all,” I said. “There is no such thing as a misalliance in love” (I threw this atrocious sop to my own panic). “If only the practical bar between you could be as easily disposed of.”

“The practical bar?”

She turned upon me with a piteous pain in her voice. I had opened a door of release to her, I suppose, and before she could escape shut it again in her face. I was stumbling weakly on an explanation, when suddenly from somewhere above the baby began to wail. Instantly her face assumed the strangest expression—a sort of exalted hardness. She put up her hand, listened a moment, then, without another word, glided from the room. I am ashamed to say that I seized the opportunity to put an instant period to my visit.

I expected to meet Valentine loitering without; but to my relief he did not appear. So I went on my way fuming. What right had the man to try to inveigle me into seeming to sanction his idiotcy by claiming me its advocate? He wanted to buy justification, I suppose. There are certain natures which cannot properly relish their own grief or happiness unless a witness be by to report upon them. Such was Valentine’s, I thought; and the thought did not increase my respect for my friend. I fancied I had already plumbed the shallows of that pretentious reserve, and was angry and half contemptuous that he had so soon revealed himself to me. There was certainly something attractive about the girl; but—well, he had not been the first to discover the fact, and, when all was said, his infatuation showed him a fool in my eyes.

That evening, when I was sitting alone writing, she suddenly stood before me. My first shock of amazement was followed by a glow of fury. I felt that I was being persecuted.

“Well, what is it?” I said harshly.

“I only wanted to tell you,” she said low, panting as if she had run; “I wanted you to tell him that—that I know now what it is. I found out the moment I left you; and I came to say—but you were gone.”

“Well?”

“It is the child, sir.”

“Yes, you are quite right—it is the child.”

No sooner had I said it, than I felt the weight of my self-commitment. Had she discovered—remembered all? Did she conceive the impediment as associated with some scandal attaching to the ineffable Aunt Mim? or was the baby, in her clouded soul, but an unattachable changeling, which had come to disrupt the kind order of things and brand their household with a curse?

“Yes, it is the child,” I said, and leaned my forehead into my hand while I frowned over the problem.

She made no answer. When I looked up at the end of a minute, she was gone.

I started to my feet, and went up and down. I made no attempt to follow. “It is better,” I thought angrily, “to let this stuff ferment in its own way. I could have given no other answer.”

At the twentieth turn I saw Valentine before me, and stopped abruptly.

“Well,” he said; “were you able to get it out of her?”

“What?” I asked defiantly.

“The reason—the impediment, you know?” he answered.

“Sit down, Valentine,” I said. “I will tell you the truth. I hinted that the mésalliance might be her unconscious consideration.”

“She is not so proud,” he said quietly; “though I’m unworthy to buckle her little shoe for her.”

I positively gasped.

“O! if that’s your view! But, anyhow, she was seeming to accept mine, when the infant hailed her, and she left me, and I bolted. You put too much upon me—really you do, Val; and here’s the sequel. Ten minutes ago she appeared in this room and told me that she had discovered the reason—the real one this time.”

“And it was?”

“The baby—no less.”

“What! Does she——?”

“I don’t know from Adam. I was thinking over my answer; and when I looked up, she was gone.”

“And you gave her no reply?”

“O yes! I told her I entirely agreed with her. I had to be honest.”

“Verender! You must come with me!”

“Go with you!”

“You’ve called the tune; you must pay the piper.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I’ll see you—cremated first!”

He stared at me a moment, his teeth showing, his eyes rounding in the dusk, his fists clinching and unclinching; then he, too, was gone. And I went and stood at the window, slinking into the curtains, and feeling myself the most abused cur in all London.

V

For a fortnight this state continued in me, through alternations of depression, self-accusation, and savage bursts of rebellion. On the sixteenth day a brief note, begging me to call at his rooms, reached me from Valentine.

“I won’t go,” I swore through my teeth, feeling an inclination to tear the paper in them; and five minutes later was on my way.

“He shall justify me to myself,” I had thought. “I’ll let my conscience be his footstool no longer.”

The fellow lived en prince in Piccadilly. I found him in the midst of a litter—boxes and packages and strewed floors—evidently on the eve of a journey. He greeted me, twinkling, in high excitement—not a trace of grievance or embarrassment in his manner.

“Leave those things, Phillips,” he said to his staid valet. “We’ll finish by and by.”

The man left the room; and his master took me by the sleeve, while I held myself in reserve—unconsciously, at the same time, softening to his geniality.

“We’re off to Capri—Egypt,” he said, “following our late summer with the swallows.”

“You and—Phillips?” I asked.

“I and my wife,” said he, with a laugh. “Hush! She’s seeing the baby to sleep.”

He could say it without a blush; and they had been married, as I came to learn, just a week! He led me on tiptoe to a distant room, and bade me look through the opened door. Nanny, crowned, proud as any young queen, with conscious maternity, was bent, singing softly, above a little cot. The sight of her—Val’s wife—restored me at once to my self-respect. I had done nothing after all, it seemed, but help to precipitate an event I deplored. My shout had brought down the avalanche. Henceforth my position was to be that of the amused onlooker.

He let me stare; then led me away with all his old affectation of pregnant mystery. We went out together—I don’t know why—into the Green Park. It seemed remote and silent, and the better shadows of night were beginning to troop under its trees. Then he spoke to me, as follows:

“Verender, you have a right to know. You remember what you told me that evening? I wasn’t just to you, perhaps. I foresaw issues to which you must necessarily be blind. The baby stood between us, you said. It did, but not in the way you meant to imply. I am its father.”

I listened perfectly silent, and very grave, as we stepped on together.

“I will say of, not for, myself,” he continued, “that I had known nothing of the fruits of a little moonlight idyll out in that Kent village. I was hop-picking, as she was, but for a worser reason. Our encounter in B—— Hospital was my first intimation of the truth. Till that moment I had never considered, at least had been careless of, a sequel; had never, of course, had a shadow of thought to identify the patient with my victim. Then in a moment—Verender, her helplessness found all that wasn’t bad in me. She didn’t know me—the curtain was too thick. I determined to woo and win, as a stranger, what was already my own. Was I right?”

I nodded. “Yes, you were right.”

“Then came the strange part,” he said—“a sort of subconsciousness of an impediment she could not define. It was her dishonour, Verender—my God! Verender, her dishonour!—that found some subtle expression in the little life introduced into her home. She always feared and distrusted the child; and I tell you I lived in horror that some day her witlessness would arm her gentle hand to do it a hurt. For she wanted to come to me, Verender, she wanted to come, and it was as if she couldn’t, and nobody would tell her why.

“You told her, you old rascal! And with what result, do you think? When I followed her, I found her gone—she had taken the baby from its cot, and hurried out. The old harpy was there, raving and gobbling beyond reason. I had her down on her knees to confess. She admitted that the girl had come in, in a fever to proclaim her knowledge of the bar which separated us. Nanny had rounded upon her, it appeared, and accused her, Aunt Mim, of wantonly causing the scandal which had brought this shadow into her life. And then—perhaps it wasn’t to be wondered at—Auntie exploded, and gave up all.”

“The truth?”

“All of it but what the old hag herself didn’t know—the name of the villain. That, circumstances had kept from her, you see. She let loose, did Auntie—we’ll allow her a grain of justification; to have her forbearance turned upon herself like that, you know!—and screamed to the girl to pack, and dispose of her rubbish somewhere else. And Nanny understood at last, and went.”

“Where?”

“Ah, where? That was the question. I’d only one clue—Skene and the river; but I seized upon it, and my inspiration proved right. She’d gone instinctively to the only place where, it seemed, her trouble could be resolved. You see, she hadn’t yet come to identify me with it. But I followed, and I caught her in time.”

He hung his head, and spoke very low.

“I took the next train possible to Skene. Verender, I’m not going to talk. It was one of those fainting, indescribable experiences, like the voice in the burning bush. Cold dawn it was, with a white bubbling river and the ghost of an old moon. She had intended to commit it to the water—the fog wasn’t yet out of her brain—and then, all in an instant, the mother came upon her, and the memory of me; and she ran to cast herself in instead, and saw me coming.”

There followed a long interval of silence.

“And Aunt Mim?” I asked drily, chiefly to keep up my character.

He laughed.

“O! we’ve added an honourable moiety to a dishonourable pension, and settled her,” he said.

Another silence followed.

“Well, I apologize,” I said grumpily.

THE SOUL OF THE PROFESSOR

John Stannary hungrily paced his laboratory, awaiting an expected advent. A brilliant coronal of candles, concentrated within a shade and pendent from a black beam over the dissecting table, regularly identified him as he came within its radiance, and as regularly, when he had passed without it, returned to its scrutiny of the empty slab beneath, as if it were trying to trace on that blank surface the unwritten hieroglyphics of his development. Yet, if each of its half-score fiery tongues had been as polyglot as the Apostles’ tongues of flame, it could have found among them all no voice to dispute his lifelong consistency with himself. From the hard, ungracious child, who had rejoiced to discomfit the love which sought to hedge him; from the cynic schoolboy, to whom to awaken and analyze pain in the living had been the only absorbing sport; from the unimpassioned student, who had walked the hospitals like a very spectre of moral insensibility; from the calculating libertine, whose experimental phase of animalism had been as brief as it was savage; from the lust of life, soon spent, to the bloodless analysis of its organic motives; from the soulless child to the virile monster of science; from nothingness to a great early reputation, to honours, to a fine house, to his present self and condition, in short, Professor Stannary’s progress had been entirely and unerringly consistent. He was one of those born to account for results, not by any means with a view to clearing the stream of tendency by cleansing its source. On the contrary, he never would have hesitated further to contaminate it, could he by so doing have evolved some novel epidemic. His fight was not to win Nature to God, but to the laboratory; and, if he had a conqueror’s ambition, it was to die gloriously upon a protoplast, at that beginning of things which his fathers had struggled through æons to forget. To have called him a dog nosing back for a scent, would have been to libel the sorriest of mongrels with an inch of tail to wag at a kind word. Yet he had routled so much, nevertheless, that his eyes were inflamed, and his features pimpled, and his nose itself sharpened as with much whetting on carrion. And, still unappeased, he paced his shambles that evening like a caged ravening jackal.

In those early decades of the nineteenth century, anthropophagous science, especially when non-official, was often hard put to it for a meal. The “ringing grooves of change” were sounding; discovery was a new-risen star; ghoulish explorers shouldered one another in their struggle for the scientific pabulum which the grave afforded. But the supply, die as men would, was unequal to the demand. The hospitals kept their own; the others, à contre-cœur, must keep the resurrection-men. They pulled the blinds down on their consciences; they were willing to accept the least plausible of explanations, for the Cause was paramount. But, indeed, we are all casuists when we want to justify our lusts to ourselves. Still the material lacked, only, according to the universal law of necessity, to evolve its more desperate instruments of supply. And then at last, hard-driven, first one, and after him another and another, had the panic courage to pull up those blinds, and let in the light on some very shocking suspicions—with the result that Burke was hanged in Edinburgh, and Bishop and Williams in London.

Professor Stannary was not of these white-livers. He pulled up no blind, for the simple reason that he had let none down. He would have diagnosed conscience as a morbid disease characterized by a diathetic condition, and peculiar to fools of both sexes and all ages. He would have said that to ask any question in this world was to invite a lie, and that in all his thirty years’ experience he had found none but the dead to answer back the unswerving truth. Well, if they did? Did it matter to them, being dead? But it mattered greatly to the cause of science to get at the truth; and he, for one, was certainly not going to question the means so long as the results came to justify them.

While yet, however, the blinds were down and the pitch-plaster but an ugly suspicion, the competition for material had not so ceased of its keenness but that Professor Stannary had found himself checked, one day, under the very near-conquered crest of a physiological peak, for want of the final clue to that crowning achievement—a clue which, like Bluebeard’s key, turned upon nothing so intimately as dead bodies. Step by step he had reasoned his way to this position, only, when within touch of the end, to find himself held up, tantalized, irritated by an inability to proceed farther until a nice necessity should be provided. His material, in fact and in short, had given out at the psychologic moment. His laboratory was already a museum of shredded particles—the pickings from much inevitable waste of dead humanity. There needed only the retraversing of certain nerves, or ducts, or canals to put the finishing touches to a great discovery. And then—the summit, the tribune, as it were, from which he was engaged to announce on the morrow to the Royal Society the triumphant term to his investigations.

Already, pacing to and fro, eager and impatient, in the silent room, he foresaw himself the recipient of the highest honour it was in the power of that body to bestow. He was not above desiring it. He was not himself so superlatively rational but he could covet applause for knocking yet another long nail into the coffin of irrationality; could expect the recognition of the world for his services in helping to reduce it, its passions and its hopes and its pathetic fallacies, to some mathematical formulæ. There is nothing so incomprehensible to the men of science as the reluctance of the unscientific to part with their doting illusions. To be content to rejoice or sorrow in things as they seem, and not to wish to know them as they are—that, they think, is so foolish as to justify their hardest castigation of the folly. At least so thought John Stannary, as, with his lips set sourly, he paused, and consulted his watch, and listened for a sound of expected footsteps shuffling down the hang-dog passage which skirted that wall of the house, and into which his laboratory door conveniently opened.

Not a whisper, however, rewarded him. He put his ear to the panels. Even then, the surf-like murmur of distant traffic—or the thud of his own excited heart, he could not tell which—was the only articulate sound. He glanced up angrily at the shortening candles before resuming his tramp. As he passed to and fro, from dusk to light, and into dusk again, he seemed to be demonstrating to a theatre of spectral monstrosities the hieroglyphics of that same empty slab. For the central core of radiance, concentrating itself with deadly expectancy upon its surface, had, nevertheless, its own ghostly halo—a dim auditorium, tier over tier, peopled with shadows of misbegotten horrors. Sets of surgical steel in the pit, arrayed symmetrically on a table as if for a dinner party of vampires; nameless writhed specimens on cards or in bottles, standing higher behind the dry sleek of glass; over all, murderous busts in the gallery, the dust on their heads and upper features giving them the appearance of standing above some infernal sort of footlights—with such shapes, watchful and gloating in suggestion, was the man hemmed in. They touched his nerves with just such an emotion as the ordinary citizen feels towards his domestic lares; they affected him in just such proportion as he was moved by the thought of the possible manner in which an order he had given to some friends of his that morning might be executed. That is to say, his feeling towards these dead members, as towards the means taken by others to procure him the use of them, was utterly impersonal. He had had at this pass a great truth to demonstrate. “A body, this night, at any cost,” he had simply ordered, and had straightway shut the door on his caterers. He had had no thought of scruple. His responsibility in these matters was to the ages; never to the individual.

A low tap sounded at the door. He was there in three strides, and opening swiftly, let in two men, the one shouldering a sack, the other hovering about his comrade in a sort of anxious moral support.

Professor Stannary, without a word, pointed to the table. The laden one, as mutely, shuffled across, backed, heaved his burden down, and stood to take off his hat and mop his brow. He was a burly, humorous-looking fellow, with a sort of cheerful popularity written across his face—an expression in strong contrast with that of the other, who, tall and stealthy, stood lank behind him, like his shadow at a distance, watching the persuasive effect of his principal on the customer. It was he who had closed the door gently upon them all as soon as they were in, and now stood, his teeth and eyeballs the prominent things in him, softly twirling his hat in his hand.

“Take away the sack,” said the Professor quietly.

The burly man obeyed, sliding it off like a petticoat; and revealed the body of a young woman. Lowering and rubbing his jaw, the Professor stood some moments pondering the vision. Then he turned sharply.

“You are late. I expected you sooner.”

“The notice was short, sir,” answered the man coolly. “These ’ere matters can’t be accommodated in a moment. As it is she’s warm. I bought the body off of——”

The other interrupted him—

“I don’t want to know. You can hold your tongue, and take your price, and go.”

“Short and sweet,” said the man.

He laughed, and his friend laughed in echo, putting his long hand to his mouth as if in apology for such an unpardonable ebullition of nature.

“As to the price,” said the former, “taking into consideration the urgency, and the special providence, so to speak, in purwiding, at a moment’s notice too, this ’ere comely young——”

A certain full chink of money stopped him.

“Thankee,” he said, after a short negotiation. “I’ll own you’ve done the handsome, sir, and we’ve no cause to complain. Not but what I had to give——”

“Good night!” said the Professor.

Not till they were gone, locked out, and the very trail of their filthy footsteps hidden under the black droppings of the night, did he turn, for all his impatience, and regard the body again.

“Nancy,” he murmured to himself; “yes, it’s Nancy.”

Into the vast study of biology it is perfectly certain that a personal knowledge of biogenesis must enter. Here, too, the individual must be sacrificed to the cause. Well, by virtue of that phase in his career before-mentioned, he had already once made of Nancy a holocaust to science. If the fruits of that sacrifice had been to be found in a ruined life, a social degradation, a gradual decline upon infamy, what was it all to him? As german to the general subject as the dead specimens on his walls was the living specimen of his passion. Ex abusu non arguitur ad usum. Still, it was a strange coincidence that she should come thus to consummate his work.

Looking upon her frozen face, he was aware of certain tell-tale, rudely-erased tokens about the mouth. He never had a doubt as to what they signified. It was a rude kiss that of the pitch-plaster, more close and savage than any he himself had once pressed upon those blistered lips. So, the murderous beasts had gone the short way to supply his urgency! Would they have taken it none the less, he wondered, if they could have known in what relation their victim once stood towards their employer? Very likely. Very justly, too, could they believe him consistent with himself.

Nevertheless, though he had no conscience, though he had too often scored that fact on human flesh with a knife to be in any doubt about it, it was notable that, as he moved now, perfectly cold and collected, to make some selection of tools from the table hard by, he was registering to himself a vow, mortal to some folks, that no effort of his should be lacking to help bring certain vile instruments to their judgment—so soon as his disuse of them should find warrant in a fuller supply of the legitimate material.

As he groped for what he wanted, a sparrow twittered somewhere in the dark outside. He started, and dwelt a moment listening. Birds! the little false priests of haunted woods, who sang their lying benedictions over every folly perpetrated in their green shades! Why, he had loathed them, even while he had been making their loves the text for this early experiment of his in rustic nature. They had been singing when——grasping his knife firmly, he returned to the table.

Something had happened there. For one moment the blade shook in his hand. To his practised eye there were signs—the ghostliest, the most remote—but signs still. A movement—a tremor—the faintest, faintest vibration of a soul, unreleased, struggling to return to the surface—that was what he felt rather than saw. He recalled the hasty character of the deed; he thought of the shock, of the suspended trance into which such a deed might cast a sensitive subject. Mastering himself, with the dry firm will of an operator, he walked once more unhurriedly to the instrument table, and made a further selection.

The sparrow twittered again. Birds in the wood—small procuresses to Sentiment! What a trollop she was, that Sentiment! He had known ethereal creatures go from picking the bones of stuffed larks, to moralize sweetly on the song of nightingales under the moon. For himself, barring his natural asceticism, he would have no remorse whatever in devouring nightingales. Such emotions were born of surfeit, and the moral of them all was that a bird in the stomach was worth two, or two hundred, in the bush. The one was the decoy which brought the many into notice. Why, he himself, when flushed with passion——

Harder than steel, hard as flesh can be, he stepped back to the table.

Yes, there was no longer doubt about it. He must decide quickly. Decide! What was there in all his life to warrant in him a moment’s indecision? His pledge to to-morrow was paramount over his pledge to yesterday. It was by very virtue of the past that he owed everything to the future. The Cause was himself, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. As she had made herself one with him, so must she consummate the gift. He chose to believe, even, that she would not hesitate could she know. He grasped his knife.

Her hair! He had said some foolish things about it once. In a sudden fury he seized it, and sliced it off close by her head, and flung it aside. She looked strangely innocent and boyish thus shorn. He had a momentary grotesque thought that he would excuse himself to himself by pretending that she was a boy. It passed on the instant. What excuse was necessary? He remembered how once, to his idle amusement, when she had fancied herself secure of him, she had coveted greatness for his future. Well, it was within his grasp at length, and by her final means.

Damn the sparrow! What was there in all the murky town to tempt his twittering? He had blunted his knife’s edge on the hair. He must fetch another.

As he came back with it, the bird seemed to flutter and cry out against his very door. In a swift access of passion he strode to it, and opened. Whether old, or wounded, or poisoned in the drooping fog, there lay the little thing, gasping, with outspread wings, upon the pavement. One moment the Professor hesitated; then, crushing out the tiny shrieking life under his foot, he relocked the door and returned with a firm step to the table.

* * * * *

His treatise, read the next day before an august body, was said masterly to resolve an intricate and long obscure physiologic problem.

It brought him additional and great honour, and, what he prized above all, that gift of the Society’s gold medal, which is only granted to discoveries of the first importance. But then, it must be remembered, he had given his soul to the Cause. The stain of its sacrifice was yet red on the stones outside his door.

A GHOST-CHILD

In making this confession public, I am aware that I am giving a butterfly to be broken on a wheel. There is so much of delicacy in its subject, that the mere resolve to handle it at all might seem to imply a lack of the sensitiveness necessary to its understanding; and it is certain that the more reverent the touch, the more irresistible will figure its opportunity to the common scepticism which is bondslave to its five senses. Moreover one cannot, in the reason of things, write to publish for Aristarchus alone; but the gauntlet of Grub Street must be run in any bid for truth and sincerity.

On the other hand, to withhold from evidence, in these days of what one may call a zetetic psychology, anything which may appear elucidatory, however exquisitely and rarely, of our spiritual relationships, must be pronounced, I think, a sin against the Holy Ghost.

All in all, therefore, I decide to give, with every passage to personal identification safeguarded, the story of a possession, or visitation, which is signified in the title to my narrative.

Tryphena was the sole orphaned representative of an obscure but gentle family which had lived for generations in the east of England. The spirit of the fens, of the long grey marshes, whose shores are the neutral ground of two elements, slumbered in her eyes. Looking into them, one seemed to see little beds of tiny green mosses luminous under water, or stirred by the movement of microscopic life in their midst. Secrets, one felt, were shadowed in their depths, too frail and sweet for understanding. The pretty love-fancy of babies seen in the eyes of maidens, was in hers to be interpreted into the very cosmic dust of sea-urchins, sparkling like chrysoberyls. Her soul looked out through them, as if they were the windows of a water-nursery.

She was always a child among children, in heart and knowledge most innocent, until Jason came and stood in her field of vision. Then, spirit of the neutral ground as she was, inclining to earth or water with the sway of the tides, she came wondering and dripping, as it were, to land, and took up her abode for final choice among the daughters of the earth. She knew her woman’s estate, in fact, and the irresistible attraction of all completed perfections to the light that burns to destroy them.

Tryphena was not only an orphan, but an heiress. Her considerable estate was administered by her guardian, Jason’s father, a widower, who was possessed of this single adored child. The fruits of parental infatuation had come early to ripen on the seedling. The boy was self-willed and perverse, the more so as he was naturally of a hot-hearted disposition. Violence and remorse would sway him in alternate moods, and be made, each in its turn, a self-indulgence. He took a delight in crossing his father’s wishes, and no less in atoning for his gracelessness with moving demonstrations of affection.

Foremost of the old man’s most cherished projects was, very naturally, a union between the two young people. He planned, manœuvred, spoke for it with all his heart of love and eloquence. And, indeed, it seemed at last as if his hopes were to be crowned. Jason, returning from a lengthy voyage (for his enterprising spirit had early decided for the sea, and he was a naval officer), saw, and was struck amazed before, the transformed vision of his old child-playfellow. She was an opened flower whom he had left a green bud—a thing so rare and flawless that it seemed a sacrilege for earthly passions to converse of her. Familiarity, however, and some sense of reciprocal attraction, quickly dethroned that eucharist. Tryphena could blush, could thrill, could solicit, in the sweet ways of innocent womanhood. She loved him dearly, wholly, it was plain—had found the realization of all her old formless dreams in this wondrous birth of a desire for one, in whose new-impassioned eyes she had known herself reflected hitherto only for the most patronized of small gossips. And, for her part, fearless as nature, she made no secret of her love. She was absorbed in, a captive to, Jason from that moment and for ever.

He responded. What man, however perverse, could have resisted, on first appeal, the attraction of such beauty, the flower of a radiant soul? The two were betrothed; the old man’s cup of happiness was brimmed.

Then came clouds and a cold wind, chilling the garden of Hesperis. Jason was always one of those who, possessing classic noses, will cut them off, on easy provocation, to spite their faces. He was so proudly independent, to himself, that he resented the least assumption of proprietorship in him on the part of other people—even of those who had the best claim to his love and submission. This pride was an obsession. It stultified the real good in him, which was considerable. Apart from it, he was a good, warm-tempered fellow, hasty but affectionate. Under its dominion, he would have broken his own heart on an imaginary grievance.

He found one, it is to be supposed, in the privileges assumed by love; in its exacting claims upon him; perhaps in its little unreasoning jealousies. He distorted these into an implied conceit of authority over him on the part of an heiress who was condescending to his meaner fortunes. The suggestion was quite base and without warrant; but pride has no balance. No doubt, moreover, the rather childish self-depreciations of the old man, his father, in his attitude towards a match he had so fondly desired, helped to aggravate this feeling. The upshot was that, when within a few months of the date which was to make his union with Tryphena eternal, Jason broke away from a restraint which his pride pictured to him as intolerable, and went on a yachting expedition with a friend.

Then, at once, and with characteristic violence, came the reaction. He wrote, impetuously, frenziedly, from a distant port, claiming himself Tryphena’s, and Tryphena his, for ever and ever and ever. They were man and wife before God. He had behaved like an insensate brute, and he was at that moment starting to speed to her side, to beg her forgiveness and the return of her love.

He had no need to play the suitor afresh. She had never doubted or questioned their mutual bondage, and would have died a maid for his sake. Something of sweet exultation only seemed to quicken and leap in her body, that her faith in her dear love was vindicated.

But the joy came near to upset the reason of the old man, already tottering to its dotage; and what followed destroyed it utterly.

The yacht, flying home, was lost at sea, and Jason was drowned.

I once saw Tryphena about this time. She lived with her near mindless charge, lonely, in an old grey house upon the borders of a salt mere, and had little but the unearthly cries of seabirds to answer to the questions of her widowed heart. She worked, sweet in charity, among the marsh folk, a beautiful unearthly presence; and was especially to be found where infants and the troubles of child-bearing women called for her help and sympathy. She was a wife herself, she would say quaintly; and some day perhaps, by grace of the good spirits of the sea, would be a mother. None thought to cross her statement, put with so sweet a sanity; and, indeed, I have often noticed that the neighbourhood of great waters breeds in souls a mysticism which is remote from the very understanding of land-dwellers.

How I saw her was thus:—

I was fishing, on a day of chill calm, in a dinghy off the flat coast. The stillness of the morning had tempted me some distance from the village where I was staying. Presently a sense of bad sport and healthy famine “plumped” in me, so to speak, for luncheon, and I looked about for a spot picturesque enough to add a zest to sandwiches, whisky, and tobacco. Close by, a little creek or estuary ran up into a mere, between which and the sea lay a cluster of low sand-hills; and thither I pulled. The spot, when I reached it, was calm, chill desolation manifest—lifeless water and lifeless sand, with no traffic between them but the dead interchange of salt. Low sedges, at first, and behind them low woods were mirrored in the water at a distance, with an interval between me and them of sheeted glass; and right across this shining pool ran a dim, half-drowned causeway—the sea-path, it appeared, to and from a lonely house which I could just distinguish squatting among trees. It was Tryphena’s home.

Now, paddling dispiritedly, I turned a cold dune, and saw a mermaid before me. At least, that was my instant impression. The creature sat coiled on the strand, combing her hair—that was certain, for I saw the gold-green tresses of it whisked by her action into rainbow threads. It appeared as certain that her upper half was flesh and her lower fish; and it was only on my nearer approach that this latter resolved itself into a pale green skirt, roped, owing to her posture, about her limbs, and the hem fanned out at her feet into a tail fin. Thus also her bosom, which had appeared naked, became a bodice, as near to her flesh in colour and texture as a smock is to a lady’s-smock, which some call a cuckoo-flower.

It was plain enough now; yet the illusion for the moment had quite startled me.

As I came near, she paused in her strange business to canvass me. It was Tryphena herself, as after-inquiry informed me. I have never seen so lovely a creature. Her eyes, as they regarded me passing, were something to haunt a dream: so great in tragedy—not fathomless, but all in motion near their surfaces, it seemed, with green and rooted sorrows. They were the eyes, I thought, of an Undine late-humanized, late awakened to the rapturous and troubled knowledge of the woman’s burden. Her forehead was most fair, and the glistening thatch divided on it like a golden cloud revealing the face of a wondering angel.

I passed, and a sand-heap stole my vision foot by foot. The vision was gone when I returned. I have reason to believe it was vouchsafed me within a few months of the coming of the ghost-child.

On the morning succeeding the night of the day on which Jason and Tryphena were to have been married, the girl came down from her bedroom with an extraordinary expression of still rapture on her face. After breakfast she took the old man into her confidence. She was childish still; her manner quite youthfully thrilling; but now there was a new-born wonder in it that hovered on the pink of shame.

“Father! I have been under the deep waters and found him. He came to me last night in my dreams—so sobbing, so impassioned—to assure me that he had never really ceased to love me, though he had near broken his own heart pretending it. Poor boy! poor ghost! What could I do but take him to my arms? And all night he lay there, blest and forgiven, till in the morning he melted away with a sigh that woke me; and it seemed to me that I came up dripping from the sea.”

“My boy! He has come back!” chuckled the old man. “What have you done with him, Tryphena?”

“I will hold him tighter the next time,” she said.

But the spirit of Jason visited her dreams no more.

That was in March. In the Christmas following, when the mere was locked in stillness, and the wan reflection of snow mingled on the ceiling with the red dance of firelight, one morning the old man came hurrying and panting to Tryphena’s door.

“Tryphena! Come down quickly! My boy, my Jason, has come back! It was a lie that they told us about his being lost at sea!”

Her heart leapt like a candle-flame! What new delusion of the old man’s was this? She hurried over her dressing and descended. A garrulous old voice mingled with a childish treble in the breakfast-room. Hardly breathing, she turned the handle of the door, and saw Jason before her.

But it was Jason, the prattling babe of her first knowledge; Jason, the flaxen-headed, apple-cheeked cherub of the nursery; Jason, the confiding, the merry, the loving, before pride had come to warp his innocence. She fell on her knees to the child, and with a burst of ecstasy caught him to her heart.

She asked no question of the old man as to when or whence this apparition had come, or why he was here. For some reason she dared not. She accepted him as some waif, whom an accidental likeness had made glorious to their hungering hearts. As for the father, he was utterly satisfied and content. He had heard a knock at the door, he said, and had opened it and found this. The child was naked, and his pink, wet body glazed with ice. Yet he seemed insensible to the killing cold. It was Jason—that was enough. There is no date nor time for imbecility. Its phantoms spring from the clash of ancient memories. This was just as actually his child as—more so, in fact, than—the grown young figure which, for all its manhood, had dissolved into the mist of waters. He was more familiar with, more confident of it, after all. It had come back to be unquestioningly dependent on him; and that was likest the real Jason, flesh of his flesh.

“Who are you, darling?” said Tryphena.

“I am Jason,” answered the child.

She wept, and fondled him rapturously.

“And who am I?” she asked. “If you are Jason, you must know what to call me.”

“I know,” he said; “but I mustn’t, unless you ask me.”

“I won’t,” she answered, with a burst of weeping. “It is Christmas Day, dearest, when the miracle of a little child was wrought. I will ask you nothing but to stay and bless our desolate home.”

He nodded, laughing.

“I will stay, until you ask me.”

They found some little old robes of the baby Jason, put away in lavender, and dressed him in them. All day he laughed and prattled; yet it was strange that, talk as he might, he never once referred to matters familiar to the childhood of the lost sailor.

In the early afternoon he asked to be taken out—seawards, that was his wish. Tryphena clothed him warmly, and, taking his little hand, led him away. They left the old man sleeping peacefully. He was never to wake again.

As they crossed the narrow causeway, snow, thick and silent, began to fall. Tryphena was not afraid, for herself or the child. A rapture upheld her; a sense of some compelling happiness, which she knew before long must take shape on her lips.

They reached the seaward dunes—mere ghosts of foothold in that smoke of flakes. The lap of vast waters seemed all around them, hollow and mysterious. The sound flooded Tryphena’s ears, drowning her senses. She cried out, and stopped.

“Before they go,” she screamed—“before they go, tell me what you were to call me!”

The child sprang a little distance, and stood facing her. Already his lower limbs seemed dissolving in the mists.

“I was to call you ‘mother’!” he cried, with a smile and toss of his hand.

Even as he spoke, his pretty features wavered and vanished. The snow broke into him, or he became part with it. Where he had been, a gleam of iridescent dust seemed to show one moment before it sank and was extinguished in the falling cloud. Then there was only the snow, heaping an eternal chaos with nothingness.

Tryphena made this confession, on a Christmas Eve night, to one who was a believer in dreams. The next morning she was seen to cross the causeway, and thereafter was never seen again. But she left the sweetest memory behind her, for human charity, and an elf-like gift of loveliness.

HIS CLIENT’S CASE

The “Personal Reminiscences” of the late Mr. Justice Ganthony, now in process of being edited, are responsible for the following drollery:—

My first “chambers” were on the top, not to say the attic, floor of a house in (the now defunct) Furnival’s Inn. I called it “chambers,” in the plural, on the strength of a coal-cellar, in the window-seat, and a turn-up bedstead which became a cupboard by day. That accounted for two rooms, and “the usual offices,” as the house-agents say, when they refer to a kitchen six feet by eight in the basement. Trousers, after all, are only one garment, although they are called a pair.

There I sat among the cobwebs, like a spider, and waited for my first brief. In the meanwhile, I lived as the spiders do—on hope, flavoured with a little attic salt. It was not a cheering repast; but, such as it was, there was no end to it. By and by I was almost convinced (of what I had been friendlily advised) that it was a forlorn hope—the sort that leads to glory and the grave; probably by starvation. A spider has always, as a last resource, his web to roll up and devour. I ate up my chambers by degrees; that is to say, I dined, figuratively, day in day out, at the sign of the Three Balls. But this was to consume my own hump, like the camel. When that should be all gone, what next? There is a vulgar expression for prog, which is “belly-timber.” I only realized its applicability to my own case when my chairs and tables, and other furniture, had gone the primrose way of digestion. It was the brass fender, a “genuine antique,” that sat heaviest on my chest.

Furnival’s Inn was not a cheerful place to starve in. There was an atmosphere of gloom and decay about it, which derived, no doubt, from its former dealings in Chancery. In the days of its prosperity it had fed the Inns of Court, as Winchester feeds New College; in my time it could not feed itself. The rats were at it, and the bugs, which are the only things I know of that can thrive on crumbling plaster. I had the distinction of providing some of their rare debauches to the latter; but that was before I began to crumble myself. Some of my blood was certainly incorporated in the ancient walls, and was included in their downfall.

My view, from Furnival’s Inn, was dismally introspective. It commanded, in the first place, a quadrangle of emptiness; and included, in the second, an array of lowering and mouldy tenements like my own, at whose stark windows hungry expectant faces would glimmer fitfully, and scan the yard for the clients who never came, and disappear.

There was a decrepit inn, of another and the social type, budded, like a vicious intestinal growth, within Furnival’s. I used to speculate, as I looked down at night on its tottering portico, and solemn old frequenters, and the lights blinking behind its blinds like corpse-candles, if it were not a half-way house of call for the dead. For, by day, all business seemed withdrawn from it, and its upper rooms might have been mortuaries for any life they exhibited. No cheery housemaid ever looked from their windows to chaff the amorous Boots below. There was none to chaff. The dead need no boots.

Furnival’s Inn had one gullet, by which the roar of the world came in from Holborn. Little else came in but tradesmen, and bailiffs, and an occasional policeman in a thoughtful archæological mood. But the gullet was a vent as much of exit as of entrance; and by it one could escape from the madness of ghostly isolation, and mingle with the world, and look in the pastry-cooks’ windows. Whenever I was moved to one of these chameleonic foraging expeditions, I would pin a ticket on my door: “Called away. Please leave message with housekeeper,” and light my pipe with it when I returned. I wonder if any one ever read the fatuous legends? To Hope’s eyes, I am sure, they must have been dinted, like phonographic records, with the echoes of all the footsteps that ever sounded on the stairs during my absences.

Those footsteps! How they marked the measure of my desperation! They were not many, and they were far between; but not one in all the dreary tale ever reached my attic. Why should they, indeed? I am free to acknowledge its moral inaccessibility. Jurisprudence does not, in its convincing phases, inhabit immediately under the roof. The higher one lives, in practice, the lower one’s practice is like to be. The law is not an elevating pursuit.

I recognized this in the end; and the moment I recognized it I got my first client.

One November evening, very depressed at last, I was sitting smoking, and ruminating over my doleful fate, and thinking if I had not better shut myself up for good and all in the bed-cupboard, when I heard steps enter the hall below. My ears pricked, of course, from force of habit, and from force of habit I uttered a scornful stage laugh—for the withering of Fortune, if she happened to be by. But, in spite of my scorn, the steps, ignoring the architects’ offices on the ground floor (Frost and Driffel, contractors for Castles in Spain), ascended and continued to ascend—past the deed-engrosser’s closet on the half-way landing; past the empty chambers immediately below mine (whence, on gusty nights, the tiny creaking of the rope, by which the last tenant had hanged himself from a beam, would speak through the floor under my bed), and higher yet, right up to my door.

Hope, dying on a pallet up three flights of stairs, sprang alert on the instant. It might be a friend, a creditor, the housekeeper: something telepathic, flowing through the panels, assured me that it was none of these things. Tap-tap! so smart on the woodwork that it made me jump. I swept pipes and tobacco into a drawer. “Come in!” I cried. Then, as the visitor entered, “John, throw up the window a little! O, bother the boy! he’s out.”

I don’t know if the new-comer was imposed on. He nodded and sniffed.

“Tobacco!” he exclaimed. “What an age since I’ve tasted it! Mr. Ganthony, I presume?”

I bowed.

“Barrister-at-law?”

I bowed again. My plate was in the hall to inform him.

“Accept my instructions for a brief.”

He stated it so abruptly that it took my breath away. If all this was outside procedure, I was not going to quarrel with my bread and butter. I motioned him to a chair, and, taking up pen and paper tentatively, was in a position to scrutinize my visitor.

His appearance was certainly odd—a marked exaggeration, I should have pronounced it, of the legal type. His face was very red; his enormous side-whiskers very white. Large spectacles obscured his eyes, and he wore his silk hat (of an obsolete pattern) cocked rakishly over one of them. Add to this that his voluminous frock-coat looked like a much larger man’s misfit; that his black cotton gloves were preposterously long in the fingers; that he carried a “gamp” of the pantomime pattern, and it will be obvious that I had some reason for my astonishment. But I kept that in hand. A lawyer, after all, must come to graduate in the eccentricities of clients.

He looked perkily, with an abrupt action of his head, round about him; then came to me again.

“Large practice?” he asked.

“Large enough for my needs,” I answered winningly.

“H’m!” He sniffed. “They don’t appear to be many.”

“That—excuse me—is my affair,” I said with dignity.

“Of course,” he said; “of course. Only I looked you up—accident serving intuition—on the supposition that you were green, you know—one of the briefless ones—called to the Bar, but not chosen, eh?”

I plumped instantly for frankness.

“You are my first retainer,” I said.

His manner changed at once. He pulled his chair a little nearer me, with an eager motion.

“Thats what I wanted,” he said. “That’s it. The sort that are suffering to win their spurs. None of your egregious old-stagers, who require their briefs to be endorsed to the tune of three figures before they’ll move—‘monkey’-in-the-slot men, I call ’em. Thinks I to myself, Here’s the sort that’ll be willing to take up a case on spec’.”

My enthusiasm shot down to zero.

“O!” I said, with a falling face; “on speculation!”

“There’s a fortune in it for a clever advocate,” he answered eagerly. “A fortune! all Pactolus in a nutshell. I’ve had my experiences of the other kind. They squeeze you, and throw you away; take the wages of sin, and hand you over to the deuce. What do you say?”

“If you will give me the particulars,” I answered, without heart, “I shall be able to judge better. Your client——?”

He laughed joyously; frowned; put his hat on the floor; crossed his arms over his umbrella-handle, and glowered ferociously at me, squinting through his glasses.

“Exactly,” he said; “my client, ha-ha! Here, then, young sir, is my client’s case.

“His name is Buggins” (I glanced involuntarily at the wall). “He is, or was, until envy combined with detraction to ruin him, a company-promoter. As such, his trend was always towards insurance. It offered the best opportunities to a great creative genius. Buggins, being all that, recognized the still amazing potentialities in a field of commerce, which, though much worked, remains unexhausted—almost, one might say, inexhaustible. In his younger days he showed a pretty invention in devising and engineering what I may call personal essays in this line. His Insurance against Waterspouts, which he worked principally in the Midlands, brought him some handsome returns with a single generation of farmers. It was based on a cloud-burst at Bethesda, in Wales, which ruined quite a number. Other flights of his immature genius were, respectively, Insurance against Death in Diving-bells; against Death of a Broken Heart; against Official Strangulation; against Non-fatal Disfiguration by Lightning; against Death by Starvation (this last was largely patronized by millionaires). On a somewhat higher plane were his Provident Dipsomaniary, whose policies matured, or ‘burst,’ as Buggins phrased it, at the age of eighty-five, an essential condition being that the holders must put in their claims in person; his Physical Promotion League, which guaranteed to pay to the parents of any child, insured in it during his teens, a sum of ten pounds on the child’s reaching twenty-five years of age and a minimum height of six feet, and a thousand pounds for every additional inch which it grew afterwards; his Anti-Fiction Mutual, whose policies were forfeitable on first conviction of having written a novel (this proved one of the most profitable of all Buggins’s enterprises for a time; but in the end the national malady proved incurable, and subscribers fell off); his Psychical Pocket Research Society, which offered an Insurance against Ghost-seeing, the policy-holder forfeiting his claim on proof of his first supernatural visitation (but this was so violently assailed by the opposition society, which offered to prove that there were not three people in the United Kingdom who were insusceptible to spooks, that the scheme had to be abandoned); finally, in this category, his Bachelors’ Protection Association, which provided that, if a member reached the age of ninety without having married, he should receive an annuity beginning at fifty pounds, and rising, by yearly increments of ten pounds, to ten thousand pounds—figures which, in a centenarian age, were successful in dazzling a great many.

“But, by then, Buggins was beginning to master the deep ethics of his trade, and to realize that its heaviest emoluments were rooted in the grand principle of profitable self-denial. People will be unselfish if they see money in it; you can’t stop ’em.

“One other notable venture marks this period of what I may call his moral transition. That was his inspired scheme for insuring against illness, in the sense that any policy-holder admitting him or herself to be seriously indisposed, lost the right to compensation. It would have proved a godsend in a neurotic age; but the antagonism of the entire medical profession, with the single exception of the officer appointed by the company, killed it.

“We come now to Buggins’s final matured achievements. I beg your pardon?”

I had said nothing; but I suppose there is such a thing as a “speaking” silence. Certainly, if I had looked as I felt, I was a more drivelling maniac by now than Buggins himself. The visitor seemed to shoot out his eyes like an angry crab.

“Young man, young man!” he said warningly, “I begin to be suspicious that, after all, I may be misplacing my confidence.”

He looked banefully into his hat, where it stood rim upwards on the floor; then, suddenly overwrought, kicked it fiercely across the room. The action seemed to restore him to complete urbanity. He smiled.

“So perish all Buggins’s enemies!” he said loftily; “and hail the grand climacteric!”

He pinned me, like a live butterfly, to the wall behind me with a fixed and penetrating gaze.

“What would you say,” he said quietly, “to an Insurance against Brigandage, available to all travelling in Sicily or the Balkans, and realizable” (his watchfulness was intense) “on the receipt, at the head-offices in the Shetland Islands, of a nose, ear, or other organ, attested, under urgency, by the nearest consul, to be the personal property of the applicant desiring a ransom?”

He paused significantly. “I should say,” I responded drivellingly, “that, as a feat of pure inspiration, it—it takes the cake.”

“Ah!” He shouted it, and sprang to his feet joyously. “You are the man for me! You justify my confidence, as the returns justified Buggins’s daring conception. Would you believe it: within the first few months, bushels of noses were received at the head-offices, every one of which Buggins had no difficulty in proving to be false! But, hush! stay!—there was to be a higher flight!”

He had been pacing riotously up and down. Now he flounced to a stop before me, and held me once more with his glittering eye.

“It took the form,” he whispered, “of a Purgatory Mutual, on the Tontine principle, the last out to take the pool!”

I rose, trembling, to my feet, as he burst into a violent fit of laughter.

“It was that,” he shouted, as he set to racing up and down again, “which let loose the dogs of envy, spite, and slander. They called him mad—him, Buggins, mad, ha-ha! It was the fools themselves were mad. He ignored their clamour; his vast brain was yet busy with immortal conceptions; he matured a scheme against Death from Flying-machines” (here he tore off one whisker and threw it into the fireplace); “he did more—he personally tested the theory of aerostatics” (here he tore off the other whisker, and stamped on it). “Too great, too absorbed, he never noticed that the unstable engine had landed him in the grounds of a private asylum, and, relieved of his weight, had soared away again. The attendants came; they seized and immured him; they would not believe his assurances that he was a perfect stranger. From that day to this, when fortuitous circumstances enabled him to escape, he has appealed to their justice, their humanity, in vain.”

Again he stopped before me, and, flinging his spectacles in my face, rent open the breast of his coat.

“Know me at last for what I am!” he yelled. “I am Buggins, and I appoint you my advocate in the action I am about to bring against the Commissioners of Lunacy!”

The door opened softly, and a masculine face peered round the edge. Its scrutiny appearing satisfactory, it was followed by the whole of an official form, which, in its entering, revealed another, large and passionless, standing behind it.

“Now, Mr. Buggins,” said the first, “we’re a-waitin’ for you to take up your cue.”

The visitor whipped round, started, chuckled, and, to my relief and surprise, responded rather abjectly.

“All right, Johnson,” he said. “I just slipped out between the acts for a whiff of fresh air.”

“Well,” said the man, “you must be quick and come along, or you’ll spile the play.”

He went quite tamely, and the second official outside received him stolidly into custody. Mate number one lingered to touch his cap to me and explain.

“Flyborough Asylum, sir. They give him a part in some private theatricals, and he tuk advantage of his disguise as a family lawyer to hook it between the acts. None of us reco’nized him, or guessed what he’d done, till the time come for him to take up his cue; and then, with the prompter howling for him and him not answering, the truth struck us of a heap.”

I was down in my chair, flabby and gasping.

“But what brought him to me?” I groaned.

“Train, sir,” answered the man; “plenty of ’em, and easy to catch from the suburbs. Why he come on here? Why, his offices in the old days was in Furnival’s; it were that give us the clue. I suppose, now” (he took off his cap, took a red handkerchief from it, thoughtfully mopped his forehead, and returned the bandana to its nest), “I suppose, now, he’s been a-gammoning of you pretty high with his insurances? His fust principle in life was always to play upon fools.”

AN ABSENT VICAR

“Exactly,” said the Reverend Septimus Prior; “the exchange was the most fortuitous, not to say the most fortunate” (he gave a little giggle and bow) “possible. Your uncle saw my advertisement, answered it, and for a brief period he goes to my cure, and I come to his.”

“Well, if you feel certain,” said Miss Robin, regretfully resting in her lap the novel she was reading.

Mr. Prior sipped his tea and nibbled his rusk. In the intervals between, he would occasionally glance at the portrait of a scholarly cleric, with a thin grim mouth and glassy eyes, which bantered him from the wall opposite.

“Your uncle—Mr. Fearful?” he had once ventured to ask; and the niece had answered, “Yes. It is very like him.”

Now he paused, with his cup half-way to his mouth.

“I beg your pardon?” he exclaimed.

Miss Robin put her book to her lips, and looking over it—really rather charmingly,—yawned behind the cover. She was surprisingly dégagée for a country vicar’s niece—self-collected, and admirably pretty; though her openwork stockings, which she did not hesitate to cross her legs to display, filled him with a weak sense of entanglement in some unrighteous mystery.

“You said?” he invited her.

“I said, If you feel certain,” she repeated calmly.

“Ah!” he said. “Yes. You mean?”

“I mean,” she said, without a ruffle, “that Uncle Philip may have settled to swap livings with you pro tem., and may have started off to take yours, and may have got there—if you feel certain that he has.”

“To be sure,” he answered. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“Had he arrived—when you started—for here?”

“No. Certainly he hadn’t arrived. My train was due. I had to leave a message; but——”

She stopped him by dropping her book into her lap; and, clasping one knee in her hands, conned him amiably.

“Did he lead you to expect a niece among the charges he was committing to your care—or cure?” she asked.

“Well, I must confess,” said the young man, blushing, “he—ah! mentioned a housekeeper—Mrs. Gaunt, I think—but——”

“No, of course not,” she interrupted him. “He had forgotten all about me.”

Mr. Prior gasped, and looked down. This was his first holiday exchange of livings—an unsophisticated venture, which he was already half repenting. A suburban cure; a desire for fresh pastures; a daring resolution; an advertisement in the “Church Times”; a prompt answer; as prompt an acceptance (after due reference to the Clergy List); a long railway journey; a tramp, relatively as long, to a remote parsonage on the road to a seaport; an arrival in the dark; an innocence of all expectation of, or preparation for him; an explanation; production of his written voucher, and—here he was, accepted, he could not but think, on sufferance. But there he thought wrong. Miss Robin was not near so upset by his appearance as he was.

“He comes and goes” (she said of Uncle Philip) “without reference to anybody or anything. We never know what he’ll do next, or who’ll introduce himself into the house as his friend. It may be a burglar or a pirate for all we know. All sorts of strange people come up from the port, and are shown into my uncle’s room, and out again by himself at the side door. At least, I suppose so. We never know what becomes of them, or what’s going on, any more than I doubt he does himself. I dare say they fleece him nicely; and—you may laugh—but when he’s in his absent moods, you might undress him without his knowing. Only he’d probably strike you to the ground when he found out—he’s such an awful temper.”

“Dear me!” murmured the young man; “how very curious. One hears of such cases.”

“Does one?” said Miss Robin. “I’d rather hear of, than live with them, anyhow; and in a desert, too. It wouldn’t so much matter if he didn’t always hold others to blame for his mistakes and mislayings. He kept me in bed a week once, because he’d read right through a treatise on explosives in the pulpit, before he discovered that it wasn’t his peace-thanksgiving sermon.”

“Astonishing!” said Mr. Prior; then added, with a faint smile, “Well, I can promise you, at least, that I’m not a pirate.”

“No,” she said, “I can see you’re not. Won’t you have some more tea?”

He was shown to his bedroom by Mrs. Gaunt, who was a stony, silent woman, bleak with mystery. All night the wind howled round the lonely building; and the unhappy man, who, in a phase of worldly revolt, egged on by a dare-devil parishioner, had once read “The House on the Marsh”, thought of Sarah and Mr. Rayner, and of a silent weaving of strings across the stairway in the dark to catch him tripping should he venture upon escape.

He arose, feverish, to a sense of hooting draughts in a grey house, and went to matins in the gaunt dull church, which stood as lonely as a shepherd’s hut on a slope hard by. There was nothing in sight but wind-torn pastures, and, all around, little graves, which seemed trying vainly to tuck themselves and their shivering epitaphs under the grass. There appeared nothing in the world to attract a congregation; but, as a matter of fact, there were a few old frosted spinsters present, of that amphibious order, a sort of landcrabs, which forgathers on the neutral wastes between sea and country.

Mr. Prior went back to his dreary breakfast at the Vicarage. His lady hostess, it appeared, was wont to lie late abed, and did not think it worth her while to alter her habits for him. The meal, however, had been served and left to petrify, pending his return from matins. It was with a consciousness of congealed bacon-fat, insufficiently dissolved by lukewarm tea, sticking to the roof of his mouth, that he rose from it, and pondered his next movement. No one came near him. He looked dismally out on a weedy drive. He rather wished Miss Robin would condescend to his company. He was no pirate, certainly; but he believed he would brave, had braved already, much for his cloth. She had beautiful eyes—clear windows, he was sure, to a virginal soul. But then, the other end! the white feet peeping through that devil’s lattice! He tried to recall any authority in Holy Writ for openwork stockings. Certainly pilgrims went barefoot, and half a loaf was better than no bread.

“This will not do, Septimus,” he said, weakly striking his breast. “I will go and compose my sermon.”

He stepped into the hall. It was papered in cold blue and white marble, with a mahogany umbrella stand, and nothing else, to temper its tomb-like austerity. At the further end was a baize door of a faded strawberry colour.

He was entitled to the run of the house, he concluded. There had been no mention of any Bluebeard chamber. But, then, to be sure, there had been no mention of a niece. The association of ideas tingled him. What if he should turn the handle and alight on Miss Robin?

He flipped his breast again, frowning, and strode to the baize door. Beside it, he now observed, a passage went off to the kitchens. Desperately he pulled the door, found a second, of wood, beyond it, opened that also, and found himself in what was obviously the Vicar’s study.

Obviously, that is to say, to his later conceptions of his correspondent. Otherwise he might have taken it for the laboratory of a scientist. It was lined with bookcases, sparsely volumed; but five out of every six shelves were thronged with jars, instruments, and engines of a terrifying nature. In one place was a curtained recess potential with unholiness. Prints of discomposing organs hung on the walls. Immemorial dust blurred everything. There was a pedestalled desk in the middle, and opposite it, hung with a short curtain, a half-glazed door which the intruder, tiptoeing thither and peeping, with his heart at the gallop, found to lead into a dismal narrow lane which communicated with the road. He returned to the desk, which, frankly open, seemed to invite him to its use, and was pondering the moral practicability of composition in the midst of such surroundings, when a voice at his ear almost made him jump out of his skin.

“Pardon me, sir; but have you the master’s permission to use this room?”

Mrs. Gaunt had come upon him without a sound.

“Dear me, madam!” he said, wiping his forehead. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, sir,” she said, in her stony, colourless way, “that this room is interdict to both great and little, now and always, unless he makes an exception in your favour.”

“There was no specific mention of it, certainly,” said Mr. Prior, “neither for nor against. I concluded that the use of a study was not debarred me.”

“Pardon me,” she repeated monotonously. “I believe you concluded wrong, sir.”

“The door was not locked.”

“There are some prohibitions,” she said, “that need no locks.”

The inference was fearful.

“Miss June” (ecstatic name!) “and I,” she said, “have never dared so much as to put our noses inside, and not a word spoken to forbid it.”

Mr. Prior, to his own astonishment, revolted. Smarting, perhaps, under the memory of some suspected covert innuendo in a certain silvery acquiescence in a statement of his made last night, he revolted. He would prove that he could be a pirate if he chose.

“I shall stop here,” he said, trembling all over. “There was no embargo laid, and I must have somewhere to write my sermon.”

“Of course,” said a voice; and Miss Robin stood in the doorway—the most enchanting morning vision, her eyes bright with curiosity.

“I am delighted you support me,” he said, kindling and advancing.

She still looked beside and around him.

“Do you know,” she said, “it is perfectly true. I have not once dared to venture in here before, though never actually told not to. But that is all one, I think. What an extraordinary litter!”

She had not ventured! and with the inducement of her petrifying surroundings! She was uninquisitive, then—“an excellent thing in woman.”

“Since there is no veto,” he said, incomparably audacious, “supposing we explore together?”

She looked at him admiringly.

“I should like to.” She hesitated.

“June!” cried Mrs. Gaunt.

“And I will,” said the girl.

But the housekeeper, content, it appeared, with her protest, stood, not uninterested in the subsequent investigation.

“Do you not find all this a little remote, a little lifeless sometimes, Miss Robin?” said the clergyman, greatly daring.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Eels get used to skinning. It’s not life, of course. But I have to make the best of it, and there’s no help.”

“Ah, yes, there is!” said her companion, intending to imply the spiritual, but half hoping she would construe it into the material consolation.

“What do you mean?” she asked simply.

“Why,” he said, stammering and blushing furiously, and giving away his case at once, “with your youth, and—and beauty—O, forgive me! I am a little confused.”

“Where do you live?” she said, fixing him with her large eyes.

“At Clapton,” he murmured.

“It sounds most joyous,” she said, clasping her hands.

Hardly knowing what he did, he pulled the curtain away from the recess by which they stood, and instantly staggered back. The housekeeper, who, foreseeing his act, had crept up inquisitively behind, gave a mortal gasp, and Miss Robin a faint shriek—for, stretched lifeless and livid on a couch within, lay the stark body of a man.

For a minute they all stood staring, frozen with horror; then Mrs. Gaunt began to wring her hands.

“It is the same,” she cried, in awful tones. “I remember him—the dark foreigner. He wandered up here from the port a week ago; and I took him in to the master, and he never came out again. I thought he had let him go by the door there into the lane. O, woe on this fearful house! Long have I suspected and long dreaded. The sounds, and the awful, awful smells!”

“Perhaps,” whispered the girl, gulping, and clutching at her breast, “he died unexpectedly, and uncle put him away here, and forgot all about him.”

Mrs. Gaunt shrieked, and seizing the clergyman’s arm, pointed—

“Look! Pickled babies—one, two, three! And bones! And a fish-kettle! It is all plain. He kills them, and boils them down for his experiments, and by an accident he forgot to empty his larder—his larder! hoo-hoo!—before he went!”

She broke into hysteric laughter and gaspings. Miss Robin, whinnying, tottered quite close up to the young man, who stood shivering and speechless.

“What can we do to save him?” she whimpered. “Mr. Prior, say something!”

Thus urged, the unhappy young man strove to press his brain into a focus with his hand, and to rally himself to what, he felt, was the supreme occasion of his life. The appealing eyes and parted lips so close to his would have intoxicated a saint, much more a pirate.

“We must warn him—agony column—from returning,” he ejaculated, reeling. “Cryptic address—has he any distinguishing mark?”

“Yes,” she said, with frantic eagerness; “he has a large mole at the root of his nose.”

“Very well,” he said—“something of this sort: ‘Nose, with large mole at root of. All discovered. Don’t return!’ ”

“But what is the use of an advertisement? O, Mr. Prior! what is the use of an advertisement when we know where he is, or ought to be, and can go——?”

“Do you really think he will be there? It was a blind. O, Miss Robin, it is evident now it was a blind to cover his tracks!”

“But why should he have designed to escape at all, leaving this—O, Mr. Prior!—leaving this horror behind him?”

“We can only conjecture—O, Miss Robin, we can only conjecture! Perhaps because of his conscience overtaking him; perhaps because, killing in haste, he discovered at leisure that it would not go into the kettle; perhaps in a phase of that deadly absence of mind, which, he will have realized by now, the Lord has converted to his confusion.”

“Well, if you are right. And in the meantime we must get rid of this—somehow. O, pray think of a means! Do! Do!”

Mrs. Gaunt steadied her storming breast as she leaned for support, with hanging head, against the door.

“There’s the old well—off the lane,” she panted, without looking up. “He there might have fallen in—as he went out—and none have guessed it to this day.”

It was a fearful inspiration. Mr. Prior, in that moment of supreme sentient exaltation, abandoned himself to the awful rapture of things.

“June!” he whispered, putting shaking hands on the girl’s shoulders; “if I do this thing for your sake, will you—will you—I have a mother—this is no longer a place for you—come to Clapton?”

“Yes,” she answered, offering to nestle to him. “I had supposed that was understood.”

He was a little taken aback.

“We must move this first,” he said, wringing his damp forehead. “Who—who will help me?”

It was really heroic of him. In a shuddering group, they approached together the terrible thing—hesitated—plunged, and dragged it out with a sickening flop on the floor.

A greasy turban, which it wore, rolled away, disclosing a near bald head. Its eyes were closed; its teeth grinned through a fluff of dark hair; a lank frock-coat embraced its body, linen puttees its shanks, and at the end were stiff bare feet.

“Look, and see if the coast is clear,” gasped the clergyman.

Miss Robin turned to obey, and uttered a startled shriek.

“What are you doing with my Senassee?” cried a terrible voice at the door.

Mr. Prior whipped round, echoing his beloved’s squawk. A fierce old man, leaning on a stick, stood glaring in the opening.

“Uncle!” cried the girl.

He advanced, sneering and caustic, pushed them all rudely aside, dropped on his knees beside the corpse, and, thrusting his finger forcibly into its mouth, appeared to hook and roll its tongue forward. Instantly an amazing transformation occurred. A convulsion shook the body; life flowed into its drab cheeks; its eyes opened and rolled; inarticulate sounds came from its jaws.

“Ha!” cried the old man; “I have foreclosed on these busybodies.”

Then he rose to his feet, leaving the patient yawning and stretching on the floor.

“Fearful!” gasped the clergyman.

“Do you address me, sir?” asked the old man, scowling.

“Conjurer!” whispered Mr. Prior.

“If you like,” snarled the other. “It is a common enough trick with these Yogis, but one I had never seen until he came my way and offered to show it me for a consideration. I had forgot he was still lying there when I agreed to exchange livings with you. (You are Mr. Prior, I presume?) It was the merest oversight, which I remembered on my way, and came back by an early train to rectify—none too soon, it seems, for the staying of meddlesome fingers.”

“Forgot he was there!” cried Mr. Prior.

“And what if I did, sir?” snapped the other. “It was a full week he had lain tranced; and let me tell you, sir, I have more things to think of in a week than your mind could accommodate in a century. Why,” he cried, in sudden enlightenment, “I do believe the fools imagined I had murdered the man.”

“Look at the babies in the bottles!” cried Mrs. Gaunt hysterically.

“As to you, you old ass,” shouted the Vicar, flouncing round, “if you can’t distinguish embryo simiadæ from babies, you’d better call yourself Miss, as I believe you are!”

“I give notice on the spot!” cried Mrs. Gaunt.

Miss Robin stepped up bravely to the young clergyman, and linked her arm in his.

“And I,” she said. “I think you have behaved very cruelly to me, to us all, Uncle, and—and Mr. Prior has a mother.”

“I dare say; he seems fool enough for anything,” roared the old gentleman. “Go back to her, sir! Go to——”

June shrieked.

“Clapton!” he shouted, “and take this baggage with you!”

THE BREECHES BISHOP

In that age of gallantry, the reign of Charles the Second, it was customary when a gentleman drank a lady’s health to throw some part of his dress into the flames, in order to do her still greater honour. This was well enough for a lover, but the folly did not stop here, for his companions were obliged to follow him in this proof of his veneration by consuming a similar article, whatever it might be.

About the latter part of the seventeenth century, there was living at Aldersferry, in the Soke of Godsport in Hampshire, a worthy clergyman of the name of Barnabas Winthrop. The little living of St. Ascham’s—a perpetual curacy in the Archdeaconry of Winchester—supplied the moral and material needs of this amiable man; his granddaughter, Miss Joan Seabird, kept house for him; and never were cream and ripe fruit happier in contact than were these two playful and reasonable intellects in their relations of child and sage.

A hysteromaniac, however, is Fortune, who, charmed for a while with the simplicity of these her protégés, soon began to construe their contentment into self-sufficiency, and to devise some means to correct their supposed presumption on her favour, by putting it into the head of the artless divine how silence on questions which one felt called loudly for reform might be comfortable, but was shameful and an evasion of one’s duty. In short, Dr. Winthrop, entertaining original views on sanitation and the prevention of epidemics, was wickedly persuaded by her to expound them, and so to invite into his harmless Eden the snake which was to demoralize it. In one day he became a pamphleteer.

Now the Plague, in that year of 1682, was not so remote a memory but that people lived in a constant terror of its recrudescence. Pandects, treatises, expositions, containing diagnoses, palladiums and schemes of quarantine, all based on the most orthodox superstitions, did not cease to pour from the press, to the eternal confusion of an age which was yet far from realizing the pious schism of the aide-toi. What, then, as might be supposed, was the effect on it, when a clergyman of the Establishment was seen to enter the arena as a declared dissenter from the fata obstant of popular bigotry?

For a time Godsport, startled and scandalized, watched aloof the paper warfare; and it was not until after the appearance of the Doctor’s tract, “De omni re Scibili”—wherein he sought, boldly and definitely, and withal with a characteristic humour, to lay the responsibility for pestilence, not upon the Almighty’s shoulders, but, literally, at the doors of men, at their face-to-face proximity, and at “the Castynge of Noisome filth in their neare neighbourhood”—that it brought down its official hand with a weight and suddenness which shook St. Ascham’s to its roots. In brief, there was flung at the delinquent one morning his formal citation to the Sessions Court, there to answer upon certain charges of having “in divers Tracts, Opuscules and Levrets, sought insidiously to ingrafte the minds of his Majesty’s liege subjects with such impudent heresies as that it is in the power of man to limit the visitations of God—a very pestilent doctrine, and one arrogating to His servants the Almighty’s high and beneficent prerogatives; inasmuch as Plague and Fire and other His scourges, being sacriligeously wrested from His graspe, the world would waxe blown with overlife, till it crawled upon the face of the heavens like a gross putrid cheese.”

Under this bolt from the blue the liberal minds of grandsire and child sank amazed for the moment, only to rally to a consciousness of the necessity for immediate action.

“Up, wench!” cried the Doctor, “and saddle our Pinwire. I will go lay my case instanter before the Bishop.”

“Alas, dearest!” answered the weeping girl, “you forget; he is this long while bedridden.”

Her imagination, which had been wont secretly to fondle the idea of her grandfather’s enlightened piety rewarded with a bishopric, pictured it in a moment turned to his confusion, and himself, perhaps, through the misrepresentations of a blockhead Corporation, disgraced and beggared in his old age. But, though she knew the Churchman, she had not calculated the rousing effects of criticism on the author.

“Then,” roared he, “I will seek the fount itself of reason and justice. It was a good treatise, a well-argued treatise; and the King shall decide upon the practical merits of his own English.”

“The King!” she cried, clasping her hands.

“The King,” he answered. “Know you not that he moves daily between Southampton, where he lies, and Winchester, where he builds? We will go to Winchester. Nay, we, child; blubber not; for who knows but that, the shepherd being withdrawn, the wolves might think to practise on the lamb.”

He checked himself, and hung his head.

“The Lord pardon and justify me indignation,” he muttered. “I was a priest before an author.”

It was fine, but a loaded sky, when they set forth upon their journey of twenty or so miles, Joan riding pillion behind her grandfather on the sober red nag. After much cross work over villainous tracks, they were got at last into the Southampton turnpike, when they were joined by a single horseman, riding a handsome barb, who, with a very favourable face for Joan, pulled alongside of them, as they jogged on, and fell into easy talk.

“Dost ride to overtake a bishopric, master clergyman,” says he, “that you carry with you such a sweet bribe for preferment?”

Joan looked up, softly panting. Could he somehow have got wind already of their mission, and have taken them by the way to forestall it? But her eyes fell again before the besieging gaze of the cavalier.

He was a swart man of fifty or so, with a rather sooty expression, and his under-lip stuck out. His eyes, bagging a little in the lower lids, smouldered half-shut, between lust and weariness, under the blackest brows; and, for the rest, he was dressed as black as the devil, with a sparkle of diamonds here and there in his bosom. Joan looked down breathless.

“I seek no preferment, sir, but a reasonable justice,” said the curate; and, in a little, between this and that, had ingenuously, though with a certain twinkling eye for the humour of it all, confessed his whole case to the stranger. But Joan uttered not a word.

The cavalier laughed, then frowned mightily for a while. “We will indict these petty rogues of office on a quo warranto,” he growled. “What! does not ‘cleanness of body proceed from a due reverence of God’? Go on, sir, and I will promise you the King’s consideration.”

Then he forgot his indignation, leering at the girl again.

“And what is your business with Charles, pretty flower?” said he.

But, before she could answer, whish! went Pinwires’s girth out of its buckle, and parson and girl tumbled into the road.

The cavalier laughed out, and, while the Doctor was ruefully readjusting his straps, offered his hand to the girl.

“Come, sweetheart,” said he. “Since we go a common road, shalt mount behind me, and equal the odds between your jade and my greater beast.”

Joan appealed in silence to her grandfather.

“Verily, sir,” he said nodding and smiling, “it would be a gracious and kindly act.”

In a moment she was mounted, with her white arms belted about the stranger’s waist; the next, he had put quick spurs to his horse, and was away with a rush and clatter.

For an instant the Doctor failed to realize the nature of the abduction; and then of a sudden he was dancing and bawling in a sheer frenzy.

“Dog! Ravisher! Halt! Stop him! Detain him!”

He saw the flight disappear round a bend in the road. It was minutes before his shaking hands could negotiate strap and buckle, and enable him to follow in pursuit. But he carried no spurs, and Pinwire, already over-ridden, floundered in his steps. Distraught, dumbfounded, the old man was crying to himself, when he came upon Joan sitting by the roadside. He tumbled off, she jumped up, and they fell upon one another’s neck.

“O, a fine King, forsooth!” she cried, sobbing and fondling him. “O, a fine King!”

“Who? What?” said he.

“Why, it was the King himself!”

“The King!”

“The King.”

“How?” he gasped. “You have never seen him?”

“Trust a woman,” quoth she.

“A woman!” he cried. “You are but half a one yet.”

“It was the King, nevertheless.”

“Joan, let us turn back.”

“He had a wooing voice, grandfather.”

“Retro Satanas! How did you give him the slip?”

“We were stayed by a cow, the dear thing, and like an eel I slid off.”

“Dear Joan!”

“He commanded me to mount again, laughing all the while, and vowing he’d carry me back to you. But I held away, and he said such things of my beauty.”

“That proves him false.”

“Does it? But of course it does, since you say so. And while he was a-wheedling in that voice, I just whipt this from my hair on a thought, and gave his beast a vicious peck with it.”

She showed a silver pin like a skewer.

“Admirable!” exclaimed her grandfather.

“It was putting fire to powder,” she said. “It just gave a bound and was gone. If its rider pulls up this side of Christmas, I’ll give him——”

“What, woman?”

“Lud! I’ve come of age, in a minute. And it’s beginning to pour, grandfather; and where are we?”

He looked about him in the dolefullest way.

“If I knew!” he sighed. “We must e’en seek the shelter of an inn till this storm is by, and then return home. Better any bankruptcy than that of honour, Joan.”

They remounted and jogged on in the rain, which by now was falling heavily. The tired little horse, feeling the weight of his own soaked head, began to hang it and cough. Presently they dismounted at a wayside byre, and, eating the simple luncheon which their providence had provided, dwelt on a little in hopes of the weather clearing. But it grew steadily worse.

“I have lost my bearings,” said the clergyman in a sudden amazement. “We must push on.”

About four o’clock, being seven miles or so short of Winchester, they came down upon a little stream which bubbled across the road. The groaning horse splashed into it and stood still. Dr. Winthrop, wakened by the pause from a brown reverie, whipped his right leg over the beast’s withers, landed, slipped on a stone, and sat down in two feet of water. Uttering a startled ejaculation, he scrambled up, a sop to the very waist of his homespun breeches. Their points—old disused laces, fragrant from Joan’s bodice—clung weeping to his calves. He waded out, cherishing above water-mark the sodden skirts of his coat, his best, of ‘Colchester bayze.’ The horse, sensibly lightened, followed.

“O, O!” cried Joan. “Wasn’t you sopped enough already, but you must fill your pockets with water?”

“Joan!” he cried disconcerted. “I am drowned!”

Luckily, in that pass, looking up the slope of the hill, they espied near the top a toll-booth, and, beyond, the first houses of a village. Making a little glad haste, they were soon at the bar.

The woman who came to take their money looked hard at the tired girl. She was of a sober cast, and her close-fitting coif showed her of the non-conforming order.

“For Winchester, master?” said she.

“Nay,” answered the clergyman; “for the first hostelry. We are beat, dame.”

“The first and the last is ‘The Five Alls,’ ” said she. “But I wouldn’t carry the maiden there, by your leave. There be great and wild company in the house, that recks nothing of anything in its cups. Canst hear ’em, if thou wilt.” And, indeed, with her words, a muffled roar of merriment reached them from the inn a little beyond.

“One riding for Winchester, and the rest from,” she said, “they met here, and here have forgathered roistering this hour. Dare them so you dare. I have spoken.”

“Nunc Deus avertat!” cried the desperate minister. “The Fates fight against us. At all costs we must go by.”

“Nay,” said the good woman; “but, an you will, seek you your own shelter there, and leave this poor lamb with me. I have two already by the fire—decent ladies and proper, and no quarry for licence. I know the company; ’twill be moving soon; and then canst come and claim thine own.”

He accepted gladly, and, leaving Joan in her charge, rode on to the inn, where, dismounting, he betook himself to the stable, which was full of horses, and, after, to the kitchen.

The landlord, cooking a pan of rashers alone over a great fire, turned his head, focussed the new-comer with one red eye, and asked his business.

“A seat by the hearth, a clothes-rack for my breeches, a rug for my loins while they dry, and a mug of ale with a sop in it,” answered the traveller, with a smile for his own waggish epitome. And then he related of his mishap.

The landlord grunted, returned to his task, blew on an ignited rasher, presently took the skillet off the coals, forked the fizzing mess into a dish, and disappeared with it. All the while an ineffable racket thundered on the floor above.

“Peradventure they will respect my cloth,” thought the clergyman. “The Lord fend me! I am among the Philistines.”

The landlord returned in a moment with a horn of ale in one hand, and a rug in the other, which he threw down.

“Dod, man!” he cried; “peel, peel! This is the country of continence! Hast no reason to fear for thy modesty.” And he went out between chuckling and grumbling.

Very decently the curate doffed his small-clothes, hung them over a trestle before the fire, wrapped and knotted the rug about his loins, and sat down vastly content to his sup. In ten minutes—what with weariness, warmth, and stingo—he was asleep.

He woke with a little shriek, and staggered to his feet. Something had pricked him—the point of a rapier. The flushed, grinning face of the man who had wielded it stood away from him. The kitchen was full of rich company, which broke suddenly into a babble of merriment at the sight of his astounded visage. In the midst, a swart gentleman, who had been lolling at a table, advanced, and taking him by the shoulders, swung him gently to and fro till his eyes goggled.

“Well followed, parson!” said he, chuckling, and lurching a little in his speech. “What! is the cuif not to be spoiled of his bishopric because of a saucy baggage?”

He laughed, checked himself suddenly, and, still holding on, assumed a majestic air, with his wig a little on one side, and said with great dignity: “But, before I grant termsir, you shall bring the slut to canvass of herself what termsir. Godsmylife! to hold her King at a bodkin’s point! It merits no pardon, I say, unless the merit of the pardon of the termsir—no, the pardon of the merit of the termsir. Therefore I say, whither hast brought her, I say? Out with it, man!”

The clergyman, recognizing Joan’s abductor, and listening amazed, sprang back at the end with a face of horror, almost upsetting His Majesty, who, barely recovering himself, stood shaking his head with a glassy smile.

“Ifhicakins!” said he: “I woss a’most down!”

“Avaunt, ravisher!” roared the Doctor.

Charles stiffened with a jerk, stared, wheeled cautiously, and tiptoed elaborately from the room. His suite, staggering at the balance, followed with enormous solemnity; and the Doctor, still pointing denunciatory, was left alone.

At the end of a minute, after much whispering outside, a young cavalier re-entered, and approached him with a threatening visage, as if up the slope of a deck.

“His Maj’ty, sir,” said he, “demands to know if you know who the devil you was a-bawling—hic—at?”

“To my sorrow, though late, I do, sir,” answered the Doctor in a grievous voice.

“O!” said the cavalier, and tacked from the room. He returned again in a second, to poke the clergyman with his finger, and suggest to him confidentially, “Betteric la’ than never—hic!” which having uttered, he took himself off, after a vain attempt to open the door from its hinge side. In two minutes he was back again.

“His Maj’ty wan’s know where hast hidden Mrs. Seabird. Nowhere in house, says landlord. Ver’ well—where then?”

“Tell the King, where he shall reach her only over my body.”

The cavalier vanished, and reappeared.

“His Maj’ty doesn’t wan’ tread on your body. On contrary, wan’s raise you up. Wan’s hear story all over again from lady’s lips.”

“I am His Majesty’s truthful minister. There is nothing to add to what I have already reported to him.”

The cavalier withdrew, smacking his thigh profoundly. Sooner than usual he returned.

“His Maj’ty s’prised at you. Says if you won’t tell him where’ve laid her by, he’ll beat up every house within miles-’n’-miles.”

“No!” said the simple clergyman, in a sudden emotion.

“Yes,” said the gentleman, not too drunk to note his advantage. “For miles-’n’-miles. His Maj’ty ver’ s’prised her behaviour to him. Wan’s lil word with her. Tell at once where she is, or worse for you.”

The clergyman looked about him like one at bay. His glance lighted on the trestle before the fire, fixed itself there, and kindled.

“The Lord justify the ways of His servant!” he muttered; and drew himself up.

“Tell His Majesty,” he said in a strong voice, “that, so be he will honour a toast I shall call, the way he seeks shall be made clear to him.”

The other gave a great chuckle, which was loudly echoed from the passage.

“Why, thish is the right humour,” he said, and retired.

Within a few moments the whole company re-entered, tittering and jogging one another, and spilling wine from the beakers they carried.

The King called a silence.

“Sir,” said the clergyman, advancing a little, “I pray your Majesty to convince me, by proof, of a reputed custom with our gallants, which is that, being to drink a lady’s health, the one that calleth shall cast into the flames some article of his attire, there to be consumed to her honour, and so shall demand of his company, by toasters’ law, that they do likewise.”

“Dod!” said the King, chuckling; “woss he speiring at? Drink man! drink and sacrifice, and I give my royal word that all shall follow suit, though it be with the wigs from our heads.”

The Doctor lifted his horn of ale and drained it.

“I toast Joan!” he cried.

“Joan!” they all shouted, laughing and hiccuping, and, having drunk, threw down their beakers helter-skelter.

The clergyman took one swift step forward; snatched up his small-clothes from the trestle; displayed them a moment; thrust them deep into the blazing coals, and, facing about, disrugged himself, and stood in his shirttails.

“I claim your Majesty’s word, and breeches,” said he.

A silence of absolute stupefaction befell; and then in an instant the kitchen broke into one howl of laughter.

In the midst, Charles walked stately to the table, sat down, and thrust out his legs.

“Parson,” said he, “if you had but claimed my hair. The honours lie with you, sir; take ’em.”

He would have none but the Doctor handle him; and, when his ineffable smalls were burning, he rose up in his royal shift, and ruthlessly commandeering every other pair in the room, stood, the speechless captain of as shameful and defenceless a crew of buccaneers as ever lowered its flag to honesty.

Then the Doctor resumed his rug.

“Sir,” said he, trembling, “I now fulfil my bond. My granddaughter is sheltering, with other modest ladies, in the pike-house hard by.”

But the King swore—by divine right—a pretty oath or two, while the chill of his understandings helped to sober him.

“By my cold wit you have won! and there may she remain for me. And now, decent man,” he cried, “I do call my company to witness how you have made yourself to be more honoured in the breach than the observance; and since you go wanting a frock, a bishop’s you shall have.”

And with that he snatched the rug, and, skipping under it, sat on the table, grinning over the quenching of his amazed fire-eaters.

And this, if you will believe deponent, is the true, if unauthorized, version of Dr. Winthrop’s election, and of the confounding of Godsport on a writ of quo warranto.

THE STRENGTH OF THE ROPE

Si finis bonus est, totum bonum erit.

There were notices, of varying dates, posted in prominent places about the cliffs to warn the public not to go near them—unless, indeed, it were to read the notices themselves, which were printed in a very unobtrusive type. Of late, however, this Dogberrian caveat had been supplemented by a statement in the local gazette that the cliffs, owing to the recent rains succeeding prolonged frost, were in so ill a constitution that to approach them at all, even to decipher the warnings not to, was—well, to take your life out of the municipal into your own hands.

Now, had the Regius Professor a bee in his bonnet? Absurd. He knew the risks of foolhardiness as well as any pickpocket could have told him. Yet, neither general nor particular caution availed to abate his determination to examine, as soon as we had lunched, the interior formation of a cave or two, out of those black and innumerable, with which the undercliff was punctured like a warren.

I did not remonstrate, after having once discovered, folded down under his nose on the table, the printed admonition, and heard the little dry, professorial click of tongue on palate which was wont to dismiss, declining discussion of it, any idle or superfluous proposition. I knew my man—or automaton. He inclined to the Providence of the unimaginative; his only fetish was science. He was one of those who, if unfortunately buried alive, would turn what opportunity remained to them to a study of geological deposits. My “nerves,” when we were on a jaunt (fond word!) together, were always a subject of sardonic amusement with him.

Now, utterly unmoved by the prospect before him, he ate an enormous lunch (confiding it, incidentally, to an unerring digestion), rose, brushed some crumbs out of his beard, and said, “Well, shall we be off?”

In twenty minutes we had reached the caves. They lay in a very secluded little bay—just a crescent of sombre sand, littered along all its inner edge with débris from the towering cliffs which contained it.

“Are you coming with me?” said the Regius Professor.

Judged by his anxious eyes, the question might have been an invitation, almost a shamefaced entreaty. But the anxiety, never more than apparent, was delusive product of the preposterous magnifying-glasses which he wore. Did he ever remove those glasses, one was startled to discover, in the seemingly aghast orbs which they misinterpreted, quite mean little attic windows to an unemotional soul.

“Not by any means,” I said. “I will sit here, and think out your epitaph.”

He stared at me a moment with a puzzled expression, grinned slightly, turned, strode off towards the cliffs, and disappeared, without a moment’s hesitation, into the first accessible burrow. I was moved on the instant to observe that it was the most sinister-looking of them all. The tilted stratification, under which it yawned oblique, seemed on the very poise to close down upon it.

Now I set to pacing to and fro, essaying a sort of mechanical preoccupation in default of the philosophy I lacked. I was really in a state of clammy anxiety about the Professor. I poked in stony pools for little crabs, as if his life depended on my success. I made it a point of honour with myself not to leave off until I had found one. I tried, like a very amateur pickpocket, to abstract my mind from the atmosphere which contained it, only to find that I had brought mind and atmosphere away together. I bent down, with my back to the sea, and looking between my legs sought to regard life from a new point of view. Yet, even in that position, my eyes and ears were conscious, only in less degree, of the spectres which were always moving and rustling in the melancholy little bay.

Tekel upharsin. The hand never left off writing upon the rocks, nor the dust of its scoring to fall and whisper. That came away in flakes, or slid down in tiny avalanches—here, there, in so many places at once, that the whole face of the cliffs seemed to crawl like a maggoty cheese. The sound was like a vast conspiracy of voices—busy, ominous—aloft on the seats of an amphitheatre. They were talking of the Regius Professor, and his consideration in making them a Roman holiday.

Here, on no warrant but that of my senses, I knew the gazette’s warning to be something more than justified. It made no difference that my nerves were at the stretch. One could not hear a silence thus sown with grain of horror, and believe it barren of significance. Then, all in a moment, as it seemed to me, the resolution was taken, the voices hushed, and the whole bay poised on tiptoe of a suspense which preluded something terrific.

I stood staring at the black mouth which had engulfed the Regius Professor. I felt that a disaster was imminent; but to rush to warn him would be to embarrass the issues of his Providence—that only. For the instant a fierce resentment of his foolhardiness fired me—and was as immediately gone. I turned sick and half blind. I thought I saw the rock-face shrug and wrinkle; a blot of gall was expelled from it—and the blot was the Professor himself issued forth, and coming composedly towards me.

As he advanced, I turned my back on him. By the time he reached me I had made some small success of a struggle for self-mastery.

“Well,” he said. “I left myself none too much of a margin, did I?”

With an effort I faced about again. The base of the cliff was yet scarred with holes, many and irregular; but now some of those which had stared at me like dilated eyes were, I could have sworn it, over-lidded—the eyes of drowsing reptiles. And the Professor’s particular cave was gone.

I gave quite an absurd little giggle. This man was soulless—a monstrosity.

“Look here,” he said, conning my face with a certain concern, “it’s no good tormenting yourself with what might have happened. Here I am, you know. Supposing we go and sit down yonder, against that drift, till you’re better.”

He led the way, and, dropping upon the sand, lolled easily, talking to himself, by way of me, for some minutes. It was the kindest thing he could have done. His confident voice made scorn of the never-ceasing rustling and falling sounds to our rear. The gulls skated before my eyes, drawing wide arcs and figures of freedom in the air. Presently I topped the crisis, and drew a deep breath.

“Tell me,” I said—“have you ever in all your life known fear?”

The Regius Professor sat to consider.

“Well,” he answered presently, rubbing his chin, “I was certainly once near losing hold of my will, if that’s what you mean. Of course, if I had let go——”

“But you didn’t.”

“No,” he said thoughtfully. “No—luckily.”

“You’re not taking credit for it?”

“Credit!” he exclaimed, surprised. “Why should I take credit for my freedom from a constitutional infirmity? In one way, indeed, I am only regretful that I am debarred that side of self-analysis.”

I could laugh lovelily, for the first time.

“Well,” I said, “will you tell me the story?”

“I never considered it in the light of a story,” answered the Regius Professor. “But, if it will amuse and distract you, I will make it one with pleasure. My memory of it, as an only experience in that direction, is quite vivid, I think I may say—” and he settled his spectacles, and began:

“It was during the period of my first appointment as Science Demonstrator to the Park Lane Polytechnic, a post which my little pamphlet on the Reef-building Serpulæ was instrumental in procuring me. I was a young man at the time, with a wide field of interests, but with few friends to help me in exploring it. My holidays I generally devoted to long, lonely tramps, knapsack on back, about the country.

“It was on one of these occasions that you must picture me entered into a solitary valley among the Shropshire hills. The season was winter; it was bitterly cold, and the prospect was of the dreariest. The interesting conformations of the land—the bone-structure, as I might say—were blunted under a thick pelt of snow, which made walking a labour. One never recognizes under such conditions the extent of one’s efforts, as inequalities of ground are without the contrast of surroundings to emphasize them, and one may be conscious of the strain of a gradient, and not know if it is of one foot in fifty or in five hundred.

“The scene was desolate to a degree; houseless, almost treeless—just white wastes and leaden sky, and the eternal fusing of the two in an indefinite horizon. I was wondering, without feeling actually dispirited, how long it was to last, when, turning the shoulder of a hill which had seemed to hump itself in my path, I came straight upon a tiny hamlet scattered over a widish area. There were some cottages, and a slated school building; and, showing above a lower hump a quarter of a mile beyond, the roofs and tall chimney of a factory.

“It was a stark little oasis, sure enough—the most grudging of moral respites from depression. Only from one place, it seemed, broke a green shoot. Not a moving figure was abroad; not a face looked from a window. Deathlily exclusive, the little stony buildings stood apart from one another, incurious, sullen, and self-contained.

“There was, however, the green shoot; and the stock from which it proceeded was the school building. That in itself was unlovely enough—a bleak little stone box in an arid enclosure. It looked hunched and grey with cold; and the sooty line of thaw at the foot of its wall only underscored its frostiness. But as if that one green shoot were the earnest of life lingering within, there suddenly broke through its walls the voices of young children singing; and, in the sound, the atmosphere of petrifaction lifted somewhat.

“Yes? What is it? Does anything amuse you? I am glad you are so far recovered, at least. Well——

“I like, I must confess, neither children nor music. At the same time, I am free to admit that those young voices, though they dismissed me promptly on my way, dismissed me pleased, and to a certain degree, as it were, reinvigorated. I passed through that little frigid camp of outer silence, and swung down the road towards the factory. As I advanced towards what I should have thought to be the one busy nucleus of an isolated colony, the aspect of desolation intensified, to my surprise, rather than diminished. But I soon saw the reason for this. The great forge in the hills was nothing but a wrecked and abandoned ruin, its fires long quenched, its ribs long laid bare. Seeing which, it only appeared to me a strange thing that any of the human part of its affairs should yet cling to its neighbourhood; and stranger still I thought it when I came to learn, as I did by and by, that its devastation was at that date an ancient story.

“What a squalid carcass it did look, to be sure; gaunt, and unclean, and ravaged by fire from crown to basement. The great flue of it stood up alone, a blackened monument to its black memory.

“Approaching and entering, I saw some writhed and tortured guts of machinery, relics of its old vital organs, fallen, withered, from its ribs. The floor, clammy to the tread, was littered with tumbled masonry; the sheet iron of the roof was shattered in a hundred places under the merciless bombardment of the weather; and, here and there, a scale of this was corroded so thin that it fluttered and buzzed in the draught like a ventilator. Bats of grimy cobweb hung from the beams; and the dead breath of all the dead place was acrid with cold soot.

“It was all ugly and sordid enough, in truth, and I had no reason to be exacting in my inspection of it. Turning, in a vaulting silence, I was about to make my way out, when my attention was drawn to the black opening of what looked like a shed or annex to the main factory. Something, some shaft or plant, revealing itself from the dim obscurity of this place, attracted my curiosity. I walked thither, and, with all due precaution because of the littered ground, entered. I was some moments in adapting my vision to the gloom, and then I discovered that I was in the mill well-house. It was a little dead-locked chamber, its details only partly decipherable in the reflected light which came in by the doorway. The well itself was sunk in the very middle of the floor, and the projecting wall of it rose scarce higher than my knees. The windlass, pivoted in a massive yoke, crossed the twilight at a height a little above my own; and I could easily understand, by the apparent diameter of its barrel, that the well was of a considerable depth.

“Now, as my eyes grew a little accustomed to the obscurity, I could see how a tooth of fire had cut even into this fastness. For the rope, which was fully reeled up upon the windlass, was scorched to one side, as though some exploded fragment of wood or brickwork had alighted there. It was an insignificant fact in itself, but my chance observation of it has its importance in the context; as has also the fact that the bight of the rope (from which the bucket had been removed) hung down a yard or so below the big drum.

“You have always considered me a sapient, or at least a rational creature, have you not? Well, listen to this. Bending over to plumb with my eyes the depth of the pit (an absurdity, to begin with, in that vortex of gloom), I caught with my left hand (wisdom number two) at the hanging end of rope in order to steady myself. On the instant the barrel made one swift revolution, and stuck. The movement, however, had thrown me forward and down, so that my head and shoulders, hanging over, and actually into, the well, pulled me, without possibility of recovery, from my centre of gravity. With a convulsive wrench of my body, I succeeded in bringing my right hand to the support of my left. I was then secure of the rope; but the violence of the act dragged my feet and knees from their last desperate hold, and my legs came whipping helpless over the well-rim. The weight of them in falling near jerked me from my clutch—a bad shock, to begin with. But a worse was in store for me. For I perceived, in the next instant, that the rusty, long-disused windlass was beginning slowly to revolve, and was letting me down into the abyss.

“I broke out in a sweat, I confess—a mere diaphoresis of nature; a sort of lubricant to the jammed mechanism of the nerves. I don’t think we are justified in attributing my first sensations to fear. I was exalted, rather—promoted to the analysis of a very exquisite, scarce mortal, problem. My will, as I hung by a hair over the abysm, was called upon to vindicate itself under an utmost stress of apprehension. I felt, ridiculous as it may appear, as if the surrounding dark were peopled with an invisible auditory, waiting, curious, to test the value of my philosophy.

“Here, then, were the practical problems I had to combat. The windlass, as I have said, revolved slowly, but it revolved persistently. If I would remain with my head above the well-rim—which, I freely admit, I had an unphilosophic desire to do—I must swarm as persistently up the rope. That was an eerie and airy sort of treadmill. To climb, and climb, and always climb, paying out the cord beneath me, that I might remain in one place! It was to repudiate gravitation, which I spurned from beneath my feet into the depths. But when, momentarily exhausted, I ventured to pause, some nightmare revolt against the sense of sinking which seized me, would always send me struggling and wriggling, like a drowning body, up to the surface again. Fortunately, I was slightly built and active; yet I knew that wind and muscle were bound sometime to give out in this swarming competition against death. I measured their chances against the length of the rope. There was a desperate coil yet unwound. Moreover, in proportion as I grew the feebler, grew the need for my greater activity. For there were already signs that the great groaning windlass was casting its rust of ages, and was beginning to turn quicker in its sockets. If it had only stuck, paused one minute in its eternal round, I might have set myself oscillating, gradually and cautiously, until I was able to seize with one hand, then another, upon the brick rim, which was otherwise beyond my reach. But now, did I cease climbing for an instant and attempt a frantic clutch at it, down I sank like a clock weight, my fingers trailed a yard in cold slime, and there I was at my mad swarming once more—the madder that I must now make up for lost ground.

“At last, faint with fatigue, I was driven to face an alternative resource, very disagreeable from the first in prospect. This was no less than to resign temporarily my possession of the upper, and sink to the under world; in other words, to let myself go with the rope, and, when it was all reeled out, to climb it again. To this course there were two objections: one, that I knew nothing of the depth of the water beneath me, or of how soon I should come to it; the other, that I was grown physically incapable of any further great effort in the way of climbing. My reluctance to forgo the useless solace of the upper twilight I dismiss as sentimental. But to drop into that sooty pit, and then, perhaps, to find myself unable to reascend it! to feel a gradual paralysis of heart and muscle committing me to a lingering and quite unspeakable death—that was an unnerving thought indeed!

“Nevertheless, I had actually resolved upon the venture, and was on the point of ceasing all effort, and permitting myself to sink, when—I thought of the burnt place in the rope.

“Do you grasp what that sudden thought meant to me? Death, sir, in any case; death, if, with benumbed and aching hands and blistered knees, I continued to work my air-mill; death, no earlier and no later, no less and no more certainly, if I ceased of the useless struggle and went down into the depths. So soon as the strain of my hanging should tell direct upon that scorched strand, that strand must part.

“Then, I think, I knew fear—fear as demoralizing, perhaps, as it may be, short of the will-surrender. And, indeed, I’m not sure but that the will which survives fear may not be a worse last condition than fear itself, which, when exquisite, becomes oblivion. Consciousness in extremis has never seemed to me the desirable thing which some hold it.

“Still, if I suffered for retaining my will power, there is no doubt that its loss, on the flash of that deadly reflection, would have meant an immediate syncope of nerve and an instant downfall; whereas—well, anyhow, here I am.

“I was fast draining of all capacity for further effort. I climbed painfully, spasmodically; but still I climbed, half hoping I should die of the toil of it before I fell. Ever and again I would glance faintly up at the snarling, slowly-revolving barrel above me, and mark how death, as figured in that scorched strand, was approaching me nearer at every turn. It was only a few coils away, when suddenly I set to doing what, goodness knows, I should have done earlier. I screamed—screamed until the dead marrow must have crawled in the very bones of the place.

“Nothing human answered—not a voice, not the sound of a footfall. Only the echoes laughed and chattered like monkeys up in the broken roof of the factory. For the rest, my too-late outburst had but served to sap what little energy yet remained to me.

“The end was come. Looking up, I saw the burnt strand reeling round, a couple of turns away, to the test; and, with a final gulp of horror, I threw up the sponge, and sank.

“I had not descended a yard or two, when my feet touched something.”

The Regius Professor paused dramatically.

“O, go on!” I snapped.

“That something,” he said, “yielded a little—settled—and there all at once was I, standing as firmly as if I were in a pulpit.

“For the moment, I assure you, I was so benumbed, physically and mentally, that I was conscious of nothing in myself but a small weak impatience at finding the awful ecstasy of my descent checked. Then reason returned, like blood to the veins of a person half drowned; and I had never before realized that reason could make a man ache so.

“With the cessation of my strain upon it, the windlass had ceased to revolve. Now, with a sudden desperation, I was tugging at the rope once more—pulling it down hand over hand. At the fifth haul there came a little quick report, and I staggered and near fell. The rope had snapped; and the upper slack of it came whipping down upon my shoulders.

“I rose, dimly aware of what had happened. I was standing on the piled-up fathoms of rope which I had paid out beneath me. Above, though still beyond my effective winning, glimmered the moon-like disk of light which was the well mouth. I dared not, uncertain of the nature of my tenure, risk a spring for it. But, very cautiously, I found the end of the rope that had come away, made a bend in it well clear of the injured part, and, after many vain attempts, slung it clean over the yoke above, coaxed down the slack, spliced it to the other, and so made myself a fixed ladder to climb by. Up this, after a short interval for rest, I swarmed, set myself swinging, grasped the brick rim, first with one hand, then with both, and in another instant had flung myself upon the ground prostrate, and for the moment quite prostrated. Then presently I got up, struck some matches, and investigated.”

The Regius Professor stopped, laughing a little over the memory.

“Do go on!” I said.

“Why,” he responded, chuckling, “generations of school children had been pitching litter into that well, until it was filled up to within a couple yards of the top—just that. The rope, heaping up under me, did the rest. It was a testimony to the limited resources of the valley. What the little natives of to-day do with their odd time, goodness knows. But it was comical, wasn’t it?”

“O, most!” said I. “And particularly from the point of view of the children’s return to you for your dislike of them.”

“Well, as to that,” said the Regius Professor, rather shamefacedly, “I wasn’t beyond acknowledging a certain indebtedness.”

“Acknowledging? How?”

“Why, I happened to have in my knapsack one of my pamphlets on the Reef-building Serpulæ; so I went back to the school, and gave it to the mistress to include in her curriculum.”

ARCADES AMBO

Miguel and Nicanor were the Damon and Phintias of Lima. Their devotion to one another, in a city of gamblers—who are not, as a rule, very wont to sentimental and disinterested friendships—was a standing pleasantry. The children of rich Peruvian neighbours, they had grown up together, passed their school-days together (at an English Catholic seminary), and were at last, in the dawn of their young manhood, to make the “grand tour” in each other’s company, preparatory to their entering upon the serious business of life, which was to pile wealth on wealth in their respective fathers’ offices.

In the meanwhile, awaiting a prosaic destiny, they continued inseparable—a proverb for clean though passionate affection.

The strange thing was that, in the matters of temperament and physique, they appeared to have nothing in common. Nicanor, the younger by a few months, was a little dark, curly-haired creature, bright-eyed as a mouse. He was, in fact, almost a dwarf, and with all the wit, excitability, and vivaciousness which one is inclined to associate with elfishness. At the same time he was perfectly formed—a man in miniature, a little sheath crammed with a big dagger.

Miguel, on the other hand, was large and placid, a smooth, slumberous faun of a youth, smiling and good-natured. He never said anything fine; he never did anything noteworthy; he was not so much admirable as lovable.

The two started, well-equipped in every way, on their tour. The flocks of buzzards, which are the scavengers of Lima, flapped them good-bye with approval. They were too sweetening an element to be popular with the birds.

Miguel and Nicanor travelled overland to Cayenne, in French Guiana, where they took boat for Marseilles, whence they were to proceed to the capital. The circular tour of the world, for all who would make it comprehensively, dates from Paris and ends there. They sailed in a fine vessel, and made many charming acquaintances on board.

Among these was Mademoiselle Suzanne, called also de la Vénerie, which one might interpret into Suzanne of the chase, or Suzanne of the kennel, according to one’s point of view. She had nothing in common with Diana, at least, unless it were a very seductive personality. She was a fashionable Parisian actress, travelling for her health, or perhaps for the health of Paris—much in the manner of the London gentleman, who was encountered touring alone on the Continent because his wife had been ordered change of air.

Suzanne, as a matter of course, fell in love with Miguel first, for his white teeth and sleepy comeliness; and then with Nicanor, for his impudent bright spirit. That was the beginning and end of the trouble.

One moonlight night, in mid-Atlantic, Miguel and Nicanor came together on deck. The funnel of the steamer belched an enormous smoke, which seemed to reach all the way back to Cayenne.

“I hate it,” said Nicanor; “don’t you? It is like a huge cable paid out and paid out, while we drift further from home. If they would only stop a little, keeping it at the stretch, while we swarmed back by it, and left the ship to go on without us!”

Miguel laughed; then sighed.

“Dear Nicanor,” he said; “I will have nothing more to do with her, if it will make you happy.”

“I was thinking of your happiness, Miguel,” said Nicanor. “If I could only be certain that it would not be affected by what I have to tell you!”

“What have you to tell me, old Nicanor?”

“You must not be mistaken, Miguel. Your having nothing more to do with her would not lay the shadow of our separation, which the prospect of my union with her raises between us—though it would certainly comfort me a little on your behalf.”

“I did not mean that at all, Nicanor. I meant that, for your sake, I would even renounce my right to her hand.”

“That would be an easy renunciation, dear Miguel. I honour your affection; but I confess I expect more from it than a show of yielding, for its particular sake, what, in fact, is not yours to yield.”

Miguel had been leaning over the taffrail, looking at the white wraiths of water which coiled and beckoned from the prow. Now he came upright, and spoke in his soft slow voice, which was always like that of one just stretching awake out of slumber—

“I cannot take quite that view, Nicanor, though I should like to. But I do so hate a misunderstanding, at all times; and when it is with you——!”

His tones grew sweet and full—

“O, Nicanor! let this strange new shadow between us be dispelled, at once and for ever. I love Mademoiselle Suzanne, Nicanor.”

“I love Mademoiselle Suzanne, Miguel.”

“Very well. Then I yield her to you.”

“O, pardon me, Miguel! but that is just the point. I wanted to save you the pain—the sense of self-renunciation; but your blindness confounds me. More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows. Your infatuation for Mademoiselle Suzanne is very plain to very many. What is plain only to yourself is that Mademoiselle Suzanne returns your devotion. You are not, indeed, justified in that belief.”

“Why not?”

“She has confessed her regard, in the first place, for me.”

“But she has also confessed to me that I have won the leading place in her affections.”

“That is absurd, Miguel. She is the soul of ingenuousness.”

“Perhaps, Nicanor—we are only boys, after all—she is a practised coquette.”

“You must not say that, Miguel, if you want me to remain your friend. You, perhaps, attach too much importance to your looks as an irresistible asset in matters of the heart.”

“Now I shall certainly quarrel with you.”

“You are mistaken, I think. Mind, to women of intellect, is the compelling lure.”

“It remains to be proved.”

“You are determined to put it to the test, then? Good-bye, Miguel.”

“This is not a real breach between us? O, Nicanor!”

“We must come to a definite understanding. Until we do, further confidence between us is impossible.”

He strutted away, perking his angry head, and whistling.

But Suzanne had accomplished the amiable débacle for which she had been intriguing. She had, paradoxically, separated the inseparables. It was a little triumph, perhaps; a very easy game to one of her experience—hardly worth the candle, in fact; but it was the best the boat had to offer. It remained only to solace the tedium of what was left of the voyage by playing on the broken strings of that friendship.

It was Nicanor who suffered most under the torture. He had always been rather accustomed to hear himself applauded for his wit—a funny little acrid possession which was touched with a precocious knowledge of the world. Now, to know himself made the butt of a maturer social irony lowered his little cockerel crest most dismally. As for good-natured Miguel, it was his way to join, rather than resent, the laugh against himself; and his persistent moral health under the infliction only added to the other’s mind-corrosion. In a very little the two were at daggers-drawn.

The “affair” made a laughable distraction for many of the listless and mischievous among the passengers. They contributed their little fans to the flame, and exchanged private bets upon the probable consequences. But Suzanne, indifferent to all interests but her own, worked her oracles serenely, and affected a wide-eyed unconsciousness of the amorous imbroglio which her arts had brought about. First one, then the other of the rivals would she beguile with her pensive kindnesses, and, according to her mood or the accident of circumstances, reassure in hope. And the task grew simpler as it advanced, inasmuch as the silence which came to fall between Miguel and Nicanor precluded the wholesome revelations which an interchange of confidences might have inspired.

At last the decisive moment arrived when Suzanne’s more intimate worldlings were to be gratified with her solution of the riddle. It was to end, in fact, in a Palais Royal farce; and they were to be invited to witness the “curtain.”

A few hours before reaching port she drew Miguel to a private interview.

“Ah, my friend!” she said, her slender fingers knotted, her large eyes wistful with tears, “I become distracted in the near necessity for decision. Pity me in so momentous a pass. What am I to do?”

“Mademoiselle,” said poor Miguel, his chest heaving, “it is resolved already. We are to journey together to Paris, where the bliss of my life is to be piously consummated.”

“Yes,” she said; “but the publicity—the scandal! Men are sure to attribute the worst motives to our comradeship, and that I could not endure.”

“Then we will make an appointment to meet privately—somewhere whence we can escape without the knowledge of a soul.”

“It is what had occurred to me. Hush! There is a little accommodating place—the Café de Paris, on the Boulevard des Dames, near the harbour. Do you know it? No—I forgot the world is all to open for you. But it is quite easy to find. Be there at eight o’clock to-morrow morning. I will await you. In the meantime, not a hint, not a whisper of our intention to anyone. Now go, go!”

He left her, rapturous but, once without her radiance, struck his breast and sighed, “Ah, heart, heart! thou traitor to thy brother!”

And at that moment Suzanne was catching sight of the jealous Nicanor, angrily and ostentatiously ignoring her. She called to him piteously, timidly, and he came, after a struggle with himself, stepping like a bantam.

“Is it not my friend that you meant, mademoiselle? I will summon him back. Your heart melts to him at the last moment.”

“Cruel!” she said. “You saw us together? I would not have had a witness to the humiliation of that gentle soul—least of all his brother and happier rival.”

“His——! Ah, mademoiselle, I entreat you, do not torture me!”

“Are you so sensitive? Alas! I have much for which to blame myself! Perhaps I have coquetted too long with my happiness; but how many women realize their feelings for the first time in the shock of imminent loss! We do not know our hearts until they ache, Nicanor.”

“Poor Miguel—poor fellow!”

“You love him best of all, I think. Well, go! I have no more to say.”

“Suzanne!”

“No, do not speak to me. To have so bared my breast to this repulse! O, I am shamed beyond words!”

“But do you not understand my heartfelt pity for his loss, when measured by my own ecstatic gain?”

“Well?”

“Suzanne! I cannot believe it true.”

“I feel so bewildered also. What are we to do?”

“You spoke once of a journey to Paris together.”

“You and I? Think of the jests, the comments on the part of our shipmates! We are not to bear a slurred reputation with us. I should die of shame.”

“What if we were to meet somewhere, unknown to anybody, by appointment, and slip away before the world awoke?”

“Yes, that would do; but where?”

“Can’t you suggest?”

“I know of a little Café de Paris. It is on the Boulevard des Dames, near the harbour. Say we meet there, at eight o’clock to-morrow morning, in time to catch the early mail?”

“O, yes, yes!”

“Hush! We have been long enough together. Do not forget; be silent as the grave.”

“Brains triumph!” thought Nicanor, as he went. “Alas, my poor, sweet, simple-minded comrade!”

De la Vénerie carried betimes quite a select little company with her to the rendezvous. They were all choking with fun and expectation.

“The dear ingénus!” said Captain Robillard. “It will be exquisite to see the fur fly. But precocity must have its lesson.”

They had their rolls and coffee in a closet adjoining the common room. There was a window overlooking the street.

“Hist!” whispered the tiny Comte de Bellenglise. “Here they come!”

Nicanor was the first to arrive. He was very spruce and cock-a-hoop. His big brown eyes were like fever-spots in his little body. He questioned, airily enough, the proprietor, who had been well prompted to answer him.

Loaves and fishes

LOAVES AND FISHES

CONTENTS

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