Land at Last: A Novel

Transcriber's Note:
1. Page scan source: Google Books
https://books.google.com/books?id=NzZWAAAAcAAJ

LAND AT LAST.

A Novel.

BY

EDMUND YATES,

AUTHOR OF "FORLORN HOPE," "BLACK SHEEP,"
"RUNNING THE GAUNTLET," ETC., ETC.

"Post tenebras lux."

THIRD EDITION.

LONDON:
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.
1868.

LAND AT LAST.

[Book the First.]

[CHAPTER I.]

IN THE STREETS

It was between nine and ten oclock on a January night, and the London streets were in a state of slush. During the previous night snow had fallen heavily, and the respectable portion of the community, which, according to regular custom, had retired to bed at eleven oclock, had been astonished, on peering out from behind a corner of the window-curtain when they arose, to find the roads and the neighbouring housetops covered with a thick white incrustation. The pavements were already showing dank dabs of footmarks, which even the snow then falling failed to fill up; and the roadway speedily lost its winter-garment and became sticky with congealed mud. Then the snow ceased, and a sickly straggling bit of winter-sunlight, a mere parody on the real thing, half light and half warmth, came lurking out between the dun clouds; and under its influence the black-specked covering of the roofs melted, and the water-pipes ran with cold black liquid filth. The pavement had given it up long ago, and resumed its normal winter state of sticky slippery grease--grease which clung to the boots and roused the wildest rage of foot-passengers by causing them to slip backward when they wanted to make progress, and which accumulated in the direst manner on the landing-places and street corners,--the first bits of refuge after the perils of the crossing,--where it heaped itself in aggravating lumps and shiny rings under the heels of foot passengers just arrived, having been shaken and stamped off the soles of passengers who had just preceded them. So it had continued all day; but towards the afternoon the air had grown colder, and a whisper had run round that it froze again. Cutlers who had been gazing with a melancholy air on the placards "Skates" in their window, and had determined on removing them, as a bad joke against themselves, decided on letting them remain. Boys who had been delighted in the morning at the sight of the snow, and proportionately chopfallen towards middle-day at the sight of the thaw, had plucked up again and seen visions of snowballing matches, slides on the gutters, and, most delicious of all, omnibus-horses both down at once on the slippery road. Homeward-bound City-clerks, their day's work over, shivered in the omnibuses, and told each other how they were afraid it had come at last, and reminded each other of what the newspapers had said about the flocks of wild-geese and other signs of a hard winter, and moaned lugubriously about the advanced price of coals and the difficulties of locomotion certain to be consequent on the frost.

But when the cruel black night had set regularly in, a dim sleek soft drizzle began to fall, and all hopes or fears of frost were at an end. Slowly and gently it came down, wrapping the streets as with a damp pall; stealing quietly in under umbrellas; eating its way through the thickest broadcloth, matting the hair and hanging in dank, unwholesome beads on the beards of all unlucky enough to be exposed to it. It meant mischief, this drizzle, and it carried out its intention. Omnibus-drivers and cabmen knew it at once from long experience, donned their heavy tarpaulin-capes, and made up their minds for the worst. The professional beggars knew it too. The pavement-chalking tramp, who had selected a tolerably dry spot under the lee of a wall, no sooner felt its first damp breath than he blew out his paper-lantern, put the candle into his pocket, stamped out as much of the mackerel and the ship at sea as he had already stencilled, and made off. The man in the exemplary shirt-collar and apron, who had planted himself before the chemist's window to procure an extra death-tinge from the light reflected from the blue bottle, packed up his linen and decamped, fearing lest his stock-in-trade--his virtue and his lucifers--might be injured by damp. The brass bands which had been playing outside the public-houses shouldered their instruments and went inside; the vendors of secondhand books covered their openly-displayed stock with strips of baize and dismissed their watchful boys, conscious that no petty thief would risk the weather for so small a prey. The hot-potato men blew fiercer jets of steam out of their tin kitchens, as though calling on the public to defy dull care and comfort themselves with an antidote to the general wretchedness; and the policemen stamped solemnly and slowly round their beats, as men impressed with the full knowledge that, as there was not the remotest chance of their being relieved from their miserable fate until the morning, they might as well bear themselves with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances.

It was bad everywhere; but in no place at the West-end of London was it so bad as at the Regent Circus. There the great tide of humanity had been ebbing and flowing all day; there hapless females in shoals had struggled across the roaring sea of Oxford Street, some conveyed by the crossing-sweeper, some drifting helplessly under the poles of omnibuses and the wheels of hansom cabs. There the umbrellas of the expectant omnibus-seekers jostled each other with extra virulence; and there the edges of the pavements were thick with dark alluvial deposits kicked hither and thither by the feet of thousands. All day there had been a bustle and a roar round this spot; and at ten o'clock at night it had but little diminished. Omnibus-conductors, like kites and vultures, clawed and wrangled over the bodies of their victims, who in a miserable little flock huddled together in a corner, and dashed out helplessly and without purpose as each lumbering vehicle drew up. Intermingled with these were several vagabond boys, whose animal spirits no amount of wet or misery could quell, and who constituted themselves a kind of vedette or outpost-guard, giving warning of the approach of the different omnibuses in much pleasantly familiar speech, "Now, guv'nor, for Bayswater! Hatlas comin' up! Ready now for Nottin' 'Ill!"

At the back of the little crowd, sheltering herself under the lee of the houses, stood a slight female figure, a mere slight slip of a girl, dressed only in a clinging gown and a miserable tightly-drawn shawl. Her worn bonnet was pulled over her face, her arms were clasped before her, and she stood in a doorway almost motionless. The policeman tramping leisurely by had at first imagined her to be an omnibus-passenger waiting for a vehicle; but some twenty minutes after he had first noticed her, finding her still in the same position, he took advantage of a pretended trial of the security of various street-doors to scrutinise her appearance. To the man versed in such matters the miserable garb told its own tale--its wearer was a pauper; and a beggar the man in office surmised, although the girl had made no plaint, had uttered no word, had remained immovable and statue-like, gazing blankly before her. The policeman had been long enough in the force to know that the girl's presence in the doorway was an offence in the eyes of the law; but he was a kindly-hearted Somersetshire man, and he performed his duty in as pleasant a way as he could, by gently pulling a corner of the drabbled shawl, and saying, "You musn't stand here, lass; you must move on, please." The shawl-wearer never looked up or spoke but shivering slightly, stepped out into the dank mist, and floated, phantom-like, across the road.

Gliding up the upper part of Regent Street, keeping close to the houses, and walking with her head bent down and her arms always folded tightly across her breast, she struck off into a bystreet to the right, and, crossing Oxford Market, seemed hesitating which way to turn. For an instant she stopped before the window of an eating-house, where thick columns of steam were yet playing round the attenuated remains of joints, or casting a greasy halo round slabs of pudding. As the girl gazed at these wretched remnants of a wretched feast, she raised her head, her eyes glistened, her pinched nostrils dilated, and for an instant her breath came thick and fast; then, drawing her shawl more tightly round her, and bending her head to avoid as much as possible the rain, which came thickly scudding on the rising wind, she hurried on, and only stopped for shelter under the outstretched blind of a little chandler's shop--a wretched shelter, for the blind was soaked through, and the rain dripped from it in little pools, and the wind shook it in its frame, and eddied underneath it with a wet and gusty whirl; but there was something of comfort to the girl in the warm look of the gaslit shop, in the smug rotund appearance of the chandler, in the distant glimmer of the fire on the glazed door of the parlour at the back. Staring vacantly before him while mechanically patting a conical lump of lard, not unlike the bald cranium of an elderly gentleman, the chandler became aware of the girl's face at the window; and seeing Want legibly inscribed by Nature's never-erring hand on every feature of that face, and being a humane man, he was groping in the till for some small coin to bestow in charity, when from the back room came a sharp shrill voice, "Jim, time to shut up!" and at the sound of the voice the chandler hastily retreated, and, a small boy suddenly appearing, pulled up the overhanging blind, and having lost its shelter, the girl set forth again.

But her course was nearly at an end. To avoid a troop of boys who, arm-in-arm, came breasting up the street singing the burden of a negro-song, she turned off again into the main thoroughfare, and had barely gained the broad shadow of the sharp-steepled church in Langham Place, when she felt her legs sinking under her, her brain reeling, her heart throbbing in her breast like a ball of fire. She tottered and clung to the church-railing for support. In the next instant she was surrounded by a little crowd, in which she had a vision of painted faces and glistening silks, a dream of faint words of commiseration overborne by mocking laughter and ribald oaths, oaths made more fearful still by being uttered in foreign accents, of bitter jests and broad hints of drunkenness and shame; finally, of the strident voice of the policeman telling her again to "move on!" The dead faintness, consequent on cold and wet and weariness and starvation, passed away for the time, and she obeyed the mandate. Passively she crept away a few steps up a deserted bystreet until her tormentors had left her quite alone; then she sunk down, shivering, on a doorstep, and burying her face in her tattered shawl, felt that her end was come.

There she remained, the dead damp cold striking through her lower limbs and chilling them to stone, while her head was one blazing fire. Gradually her limbs became numbed and lost to all sensation, a sickening empty pain was round her heart, a dead apathy settling down over her mind and brain. The tramping of feet was close upon her, the noise of loud voices, the ringing shouts of loud laughter, were in her ears; but she never raised her head from the tattered shawl, nor by speech or motion did she give the smallest sign of life. Men passed her constantly, all making for one goal, the portico next to that in which she had sunk down helpless--men with kindly hearts attuned to charity, who, had they known the state of the wretched wayfarer, would have exerted themselves bravely in her succour, but whom a London life had so inured to spectacles of casual misery and vice, that a few only cast a passing glance on the stricken woman and passed on. They came singly and in twos and threes; but none spoke to her, none noticed her save by a glance and a shoulder shrug.

Then, as the icy hands of Cold and Want gradually stealing over her seemed to settle round the region of her heart, the girl gave one low faint cry, "God help me! it's come at last--God help me!" and fell back in a dead swoon.

[CHAPTER II.]

THE BRETHREN OF THE BRUSH.

The house to which all the jovial fellows who passed the girl on the doorstep with such carelessness were wending their way was almost unique in the metropolis. The rumour ran that it had originally been designed for stables, and indeed there was a certain mews-ish appearance about its architectural elevation; it had the squat, squabby, square look of those buildings from whose upper-floors clothes-lines stretch diagonally across stable-yards; and you were at first surprised at finding an imposing portico with an imposing bell in a position where you looked for the folding-doors of a coach-house. Whether there had been any truth in the report or not, it is certain that the owner of the property speedily saw his way to more money than he could have gained by the ignoble pursuit of stabling horses, and made alterations in his building, which converted it into several sets of spacious, roomy, and comfortable, if not elegant chambers. The upper rooms were duly let, and speedily became famous--thus-wise. When Parmegiano Wilkins made his first great success with his picture of "Boadicea at Breakfast,"--connoisseurs and art-critics will recollect the marvellous manner in which the chip in the porridge of the Queen of the Iceni was rendered,--Mr. Caniche, the great picture-dealer, to whom Wilkins had mortgaged himself body and soul for three years, felt it necessary that his next works should be submitted to the private inspection of the newspaper-writers and the cognoscenti previous to their going into the Academy Exhibition. On receiving a letter to this effect from Caniche, Wilkins was at his wits' end. He was living, for privacy's sake, in a little cottage on the outskirts of Epping Forest, and having made a success, had naturally alienated all his friends whose rooms in town would otherwise have been available for the display of his pictures; he thought--and there the astute picture-dealer agreed with him--that it would be unwise to send them to Caniche's shop (it was before such places were called "galleries"), as tending to make public the connection between them; and Wilkins did not know what to do. Then Caniche came to his rescue. Little Jimmy Dabb, who had been Gold-Medallist and Travelling-Student at the Academy three years beforehand, and who, for sheer sake of bread-winning, had settled down as one of Caniche's Labourers, had a big studio in the stable-like edifice near Langham Church. In it he painted those bits of domestic life,--dying children on beds, weeping mothers, small table with cut-orange, Bible and physic by bedside, and pitying angel dimly hovering between mantelpiece and ceiling,--which, originally in oil, and subsequently in engravings, had such a vast sale, and brought so much ready money to Caniche's exchequer. The situation was central; why not utilise it? No sooner thought of than done: a red cotton-velvet coverlet was spread over Jimmy Dabb's bed in the corner; a Dutch carpet, red with black flecks, was, at Caniche's expense, spread over the floor, paint-smeared and burnt with tobacco-ash; two gorgeous easels, on which were displayed Wilkins's two pictures, "The Bird in the Hand"--every feather in the bird and the dirt in the nails of the ploughboy's hand marvellously delineated--and "Crumbs of Comfort," each crumb separate, and the loaf in the background so real, that the Dowager-Countess of Rundall, a celebrated household manager, declared it at once to be a "slack-baked quartern." Invitation-cards, wonderfully illuminated in Old-English characters, and utterly illegible, were sent forth to rank, fashion, and talent, who duly attended. Crowds of gay carriages choked up the little street: Dabb in his Sunday-clothes did the honours; Caniche, bland, smiling, and polyglot, flitted here and there, his clerk took down orders for proof copies, and the fortune of the chambers was made. They were so original, so artistic, so convenient, they were just the place for a painter. Smudge, R.A., who painted portraits of the aristocracy, who wore a velvet-coat, and whose name was seen in the tail-end of the list of fashionables at evening-parties, took a vacant set at once; and Clement Walkinshaw of the Foreign Office, who passed such spare time as his country could afford him in illuminating missals, in preparing designs for stained glass, and in hanging about art-circles generally, secured the remainder of the upper-floor, and converted it into a Wardour-Street Paradise, with hanging velvet portières, old oak cabinets, Venetian-glass, marqueterie tables, Sèvres china, escutcheons of armour, and Viennese porcelain pipes.

Meanwhile, utterly uncaring for and utterly independent of what went on upstairs, the denizens of the lower story kept quietly on. Who were the denizens of the lower story? who but the well-known Titian Sketching-Club! How many men who, after struggling through Suffolk Street and the Portland Gallery, have won their way to fame and fortune, have made their coup d'essai on the walls of the chambers rented by the Titian Sketching-Club! Outsiders, who professed great love for art, but who only knew the two or three exhibitions of the season and only recognised the score of names in each vouchsafed for by the newspaper-critics, would have been astonished to learn the amount of canvas covered, pains taken, and skill brought to bear upon the work of the Members of the Titian. There are guilds, and companies of Freemasons, and brotherhoods by the score in London; but I know of none where the grand spirit of Camaraderie is so carried out as in this. It is the nearest thing to the Vie de Bohème of Paris of Henri Murger that we can show; there is more liberty of speech and thought and action, less reticence, more friendship,--when friendship is understood by purse-sharing, by sick-bedside-watching, by absence of envy, jealousy, hatred, and all uncharitableness,--more singleness of purpose, more contempt for shams and impostures and the dismal fetters of conventionality, than in any other circle of English Society with which I am acquainted.

It was a grand night with the Titians; no model was carefully posed on the "throne" that evening; no intelligent class was grouped round on the rising benches, copying from the "draped" or the "nude;" none of the wardrobe or properties of the club (and it is rich in both),--none of the coats of mail or suits of armour, hauberks and broadswords, buff boots, dinted breastplates, carved ebony crucifixes, ivory-hafted daggers, Louis-Onze caps, friars' gowns and rosaries, nor other portions of the stock-in-trade, were on view. The "sending-in" day for the approaching Exhibition of the British Institution was at hand; and the discoloured smoky old walls of the Titians, the rickety easels piled round the room, all available ledges and nooks, were covered with the works of the members of the club, which they fully intended to submit for exhibition. A very Babel, in a thick fog of tobacco-smoke, through which loomed the red face of Flexor the famous model, like the sun in November, greeted you on your entrance. Flexor pretended to take the hats, but the visitors seemed to know him too well, and contented themselves with nodding at him in a friendly manner, and retaining their property. Then you passed into the rooms, where you found yourself wedged up amongst a crowd of perhaps the most extraordinary-looking beings you ever encountered. Little men with big heads and long beards, big men with bald heads and shaved cheeks, and enormous moustaches and glowering spectacles; tall thin straggling men, who seemed all profile, and whose full face you could never catch; dirty shaggy little men, with heads of hair like red mops, and no apparent faces underneath, whose eyes flashed through their elf-locks, and who were explaining their pictures with singular pantomimic power of their sinewy hands, and notably of their ever-flashing thumbs; moon-faced solemn didactic men prosing away on their views of art to dreary discontented listeners; and foppish, smart little fellows, standing a-tiptoe to get particular lights, shading their eyes with their hands, and backing against the company generally. Moving here and there among the guests was the Titians' president, honest old Tom Wrigley, who had been "at it," as he used to say, for thirty years; without making any great mark in his profession, but who was cordially beloved for his kind-heartedness and bonhomie, and who had a word and a joke for all. As he elbowed his way through the room he spoke right and left.

"Hallo, Tom Rogers!--hallo, Tom! That's an improvement, Tom, my boy! Got rid of the heavy browns, eh? weren't good, those heavy browns; specially for a Venetian atmosphere, eh, Tom? Much better, this.--How are you, Jukes? Old story, Jukes?--hen and chickens, ducks in the pond, horse looking over the gate? Quite right, Jukes; stick to that, if it pays. Much better than the death of J. Caesar on a twenty-foot canvas, which nobody would be fool enough to buy. Stick to the ducks, Jukes, old fellow.--What's the matter, George? Why so savage, my son?"

"Here's Scumble!" said the young man addressed, in an undertone.

"And what of that, George? Mr. Scumble is a Royal Academician, it is true; and consequently a mark for your scorn and hatred, George. But it's not his fault; he never did anything to aspire to such a dignity. It's your British public, George, which is such an insensate jackass as to buy Scumble's pictures, and to tell him he's a genius."

"He was on the Hanging-Committee last year, and--"

"Ah, so he was; and your 'Aristides' was kicked out, and so was my 'Hope Deferred,' which was a deuced sight better than your big picture, Master George; but see how I shall treat him.--How do you do, Mr. Scumble? You're very welcome here, sir."

Mr. Scumble, R.A., who had a head like a tin-loaf, and a face without any earthly expression, bowed his acknowledgments and threw as much warmth into his manner as he possibly could, apparently labouring under a notion that he was marked out for speedy assassination. "This is indeed a char-ming collection! Great talent among the ri-sing men, Mr.--pardon me--President! This now, for instance, a most charming landscape!"

"Yes, old boy; you may say that," said a square-built man smoking a clay-pipe, and leaning with his elbows on the easel on which the picture was placed. "I mean the real thing,--not this; which ain't bad though, is it? Not that I should say so; 'cause for why; which I did it!" and here the square-built man removed one of his elbows from the easel, and dug it into the sacred ribs of Scumble, R.A.

"Bad, sir!" said Scumble, recoiling from the thrust, and still with the notion of a secret dagger hidden behind the square-built man's waistcoat; "it's magnificent, superb, Mr.----!"

"Meaning me? Potts!" said the square-built man "Charley Potts, artist, U.E., or unsuccessful exhibitor at every daub-show in London. That's the Via Mala, that is. I was there last autumn with Geoffrey Ludlow and Tom Bleistift. 'Show me a finer view than that,' I said to those fellows, when it burst upon us. 'If you'd a Scotchman with you,' said Tom, 'he'd say it wasn't so fine as the approach to Edinburgh.' 'Would he?'said I. 'If he said anything of that sort, I'd show him that view, and--and rub his nose in it!'"

Mr. Scumble, R.A., smiled in a sickly manner, bowed feebly, and passed on. Old Tom Wrigley laughed a great boisterous "Ha, ha!" and went on his way. Charley Potts remained before his picture, turning his back on it, and puffing out great volumes of smoke. He seemed to know everybody in the room, and to be known to and greeted by most of them. Some slapped him on the back, some poked him in the ribs, others laid their forefingers alongside their noses and winked; but all called him "Charley," and all had some pleasant word for him; and to all he had something to say in return.

"Hallo, Fred Snitterfield!" he called out to a fat man in a suit of shepherd's-plaid dittoes. "Halloa, Fred! how's your brother Bill? What's he been doing? Not here to-night, of course?"

"No; he wasn't very well," said the man addressed. "He's got--"

"Yes, yes; I know, Fred!" said Charley Potts. "Wife won't let him! That's it, isn't it, old boy? He only dined out once in his life without leave, and then he sent home a telegram to say he was engaged; and when his wife received the telegram she would not believe it, because she said it wasn't his handwriting! Poor old Bill! Did he sell that 'Revenge' to what's-his-name--that Manchester man--Prebble?"

"Lord, no! Haven't you heard? Prebble's smashed up,--all his property gone to the devil!"

"Ah, then Prebble will find it again some day, no doubt. Look out! here's Bowie!"

Mr. Bowie was the art-critic of a great daily journal. In early life he had courted art himself; but lacking executive power, he had mixed up a few theories and quaint conceits which he had learned with a great deal of acrid bile, with which he had been gifted by nature, and wrote the most pungent and malevolent art-notices of the day. A tall, light-haired, vacant-looking man, like a light-house without any light in it, peering uncomfortably over his stiff white cravat, and fumbling nervously at his watch-chain. Clinging close to him, and pointing out to him various pictures as they passed them by, was quite another style of man,--Caniche, the great picture dealer,--an under-sized lively Gascon, black-bearded from his chin, round which it was closely cut, to his beady black eyes, faultlessly dressed, sparkling in speech, affable in manner, at home with all.

"Ah, ah!" said he, stopping before the easel, "the Via Mala! Not bad--not at all bad!" he continued, with scarcely a trace of a foreign accent. "Yours, Charley Potts? yours, mon brave? De-caidedly an improvement, Charley! You go on that way, mai boy, and some day--"

"Some day you'll give me twenty pound, and sell me for a hundred! won't you, Caniche?--generous buffalo!" growled Charley, over his pipe.

The men round laughed, but Caniche was not a bit offended. "Of course," he said, simply, "I will, indeed; that is my trade! And if you could find a man who would give you thirty, you would throw me over in what you call a brace of shakes! N'est-ce pas? Meanwhile, find the man to give you thirty. He is not here; I mean coming now.--How do you do, Herr Stompff?"

Mr. Caniche (popularly known as Cannish among the artists) winced as he said this, for Herr Stompff was his great rival and bitterest enemy.

A short, bald-headed, gray-bearded man was Mr. Stompff,--a Hamburger,--who, on his first arrival in England, had been an importer of piping bullfinches at Hull; then a tobacconist in St Mary Axe; and who finally had taken up picture-selling, and did an enormous business. No one could tell that he was not an Englishman from his talk, and an Englishman with a marvellous fluency in the vernacular. He had every slang saying as soon as it was out, and by this used to triumph over his rival Caniche, who never could follow his phraseology.

"Hallo, Caniche!" he said; "how are you? What's up?--running the rig on the boys here! telling Charley Potts his daubs are first-rate? Pickles!--We know all that game, don't we, Charley? What do you want for it, Charley?--How are you, Mr. Bowie? what's fresh with you, sir? Too proud to come and have a cut of mutton with me and Mrs. S. a-Sunday, I suppose? Some good fellows coming, too; Mugger from the Cracksideum, and Talboys and Sir Paul Potter--leastways I've asked him. Well, Charley, what's the figure for this lot, eh?"

"I'll trouble you not to 'Charley' me, Mr. Stump, or whatever your infernal name is!" said Potts, folding his arms and puffing out his smoke savagely. "I don't want any Havannah cigars, nor silk handkerchiefs, nor painted canaries, nor anything else in your line, sir; and I want your confounded patronage least of all!"

"Good boy, Charley! very good boy!" said Stompff, calmly pulling his whisker through his teeth--"shouldn't lose his temper, though. Come and dine a-Sunday, Charley." Mr. Potts said something, which the historian is not bound to repeat, turned on his heel, and walked away.

Mr. Stompff was not a bit disconcerted at this treatment. He merely stuck his tongue in his cheek, and looking at the men standing round, said, "He's on the high ropes, is Master Charley! Some of you fellows have been lending him half-a-crown, or that fool Caniche has bought one of his pictures for seven-and-six! Now, has anybody anything new to show, eh?" Of course everybody had something new to show to the great Stompff, the enterprising Stompff, the liberal Stompff, whose cheques were as good as notes of the Bank of England. How they watched his progress, and how their hearts beat as he loitered before their works! Jupp, who had a bed-ridden wife, a dear pretty little woman recovering from rheumatic fever at, Adalbert Villa, Elgiva Road, St. John's Wood; Smethurst, who had a 25l. bill coming due in a fortnight, and had three-and-sevenpence wherewith to: Vogelstadt, who had been beguiled into leaving Dusseldorf for London on the rumours of English riches and English patronage, and whose capital studies of birds in the snow, and treibe-jagd's, and boar-hunts, had called forth universal laudation, but had not as yet entrapped a single purchaser, so that Vogelstadt, who had come down not discontentedly to living on bread-and-milk, had notions of mortgaging his ancestral thumb-ring to procure even those trifling necessaries,--how they al glared with expectation as the ex-singing-bird-importer passed their pictures in review! That worthy took matters very easily, strolling along with his hands in his pockets, glancing at the easels and along the walls, occasionally nodding his head in approval, or shrugging his shoulders in depreciation, but never saying a word until he stopped opposite a well-placed figure-subject to which he devoted a two-minutes' close scrutiny, and then uttered this frank though argot-tinged criticism "That'll hit 'em up! that'll open their eyelids, by Jove! Whose is it?"

The picture represented a modern ballroom, in a corner of which a man of middle age, his arms tightly folded across his breast, was intently watching the movements of a young girl, just starting off in a valse with a handsome dashing young partner. The expressions in the two faces were admirably defined: in the man's was a deep earnest devotion not unmingled with passion and with jealousy, his tightly-clenched mouth, his deep-set earnest eyes, settled in rapt adoration on the girl, showed the earnestness of his feeling, SO did the rigidly-fixed arms, and the pose of the figure, which, originally careless, had become hardened and angular through intensity of feeling. The contrast was well marked; in the girl's face which was turned toward the man while her eyes were fixed on him, was a bright saucy triumph, brightening her eyes, inflating her little nostrils, curving the corners of her mouth, while her figure was light and airy, just obedient to the first notes of the valse, balancing itself as it were on the arm of her partner before starting off down the dance. All the accessories were admirable: the dreary wallflowers ranged round the room, the chaperons nidnodding together on the rout-seats, paterfamilias despondingly consulting his watch, the wearied hostess, and the somnolently-inclined musicians,--all were there, portrayed not merely by a facile hand but by a man conversant with society. The title of the picture, "Sic vos non vobis," was written on a bit of paper stuck into the frame, on the other corner of which was a card bearing the words "Mr. Geoffrey Ludlow."

"Ah!" said Stompff, who, after carefully scanning the picture close and then from a distance, had read the card--"at last! Geoffrey Ludlow's going to fulfil the promise which he's been showing this ten years! A late birth, but a fine babby now it's born! That's the real thing and no flies! That's about as near a good thing as I've seen this long time--that; come, you'll say the same! That's a good picture, Mr. Wrigley!"

"Ah!" said old Tom, coming up at the moment, "you've made another lucky hit if you've bought that, Mr. Stompff! Geoff is so confoundedly undecided, so horribly weak in all things, that he's been all this time making up his mind whether he really would paint a good picture or not. But he's decided at last, and he has painted a clipper."

"Ye-es!" said Stompff, whose first enthusiasm had by no means died away--on the contrary, he thought so well of the picture that he had within himself determined to purchase it; but his business caution was coming over him strongly. "Yes! it's a clipper, as you say, Wrigley; but it's a picture which would take all a fellow knew to work it. Throw that into the market--where are you! Pouf! gone I no one thinking of it. Judicious advertisement, judicious squaring of those confounded fellows of the press; a little dinner at the Albion or the Star and Garter to two or three whom we know; and then the wonderful grasp of modern life, the singular manner in which the great natural feelings are rendered, the microscopic observation, and the power of detail--"

"Yes, yes," said Tom Wrigley; "for which, see Catalogue of Stompff's Gallery of Modern Painters, price 6d. Spare yourself, you unselfish encourager of talent, and spare Geoff's blushes; for here he is.--Did you hear what Stompff was saying on, Geoff?"

As he spoke, there came slouching up, shouldering his way through the crowd, a big, heavily-built man of about forty years of age, standing over six feet, and striking in appearance if not prepossessing. Striking in appearance from his height, which was even increased by his great shock head of dark-brown hair standing upright on his forehead, but curling in tight crisp waves round the back and poll of his head; from his great prominent brown eyes, which, firmly set in their large thickly-carved lids, flashed from under an overhanging pair of brows; from his large heavy nose, thick and fleshy, yet with lithe sensitive nostrils; from his short upper and protruding thick under lip; from the length of his chin and the massive heaviness of his jaw, though the heavy beard greatly concealed the formation of the lower portion of his face. A face which at once evoked attention, which no one passed by without noticing, which people at first called "odd," and "singular," and "queer," according to their vocabulary; then, following the same rule, pronounced "ugly," or "hideous," or "grotesque,"--allowing all the time that there "was something very curious in it." But a face which, when seen in animation or excitement, in reflex of the soul within, whose every thought was legibly portrayed in its every expression, in light or shade, with earnest watchful eyes, and knit brows and quivering nostrils and working lips; or, on the other hand, with its mouth full of sound big white teeth gleaming between its ruddy lips, and its eyes sparkling with pure merriment or mischief;--then a face to be preferred to all the dolly inanities of the Household Brigade, or even the matchless toga-draped dummies in Mr. Truefitt's window. This was Geoffrey Ludlow, whom everybody liked, but who was esteemed to be so weak and vacillating, so infirm of purpose, so incapable of succeeding in his art or in his life, as to have been always regarded as an object of pity rather than envy; as a man who was his own worst enemy, and of whom nothing could be said. He had apparently caught some words of the conversation, for when he arrived at the group a smile lit up his homely features, and his teeth glistened again in the gaslight.

"What are you fellows joking about?" he asked, while he roared with laughter, as if with an anticipatory relish of the fun. "Some chaff at my expense, eh? Something about my not having made up my mind to do something or not; the usual nonsense, I suppose?"

"Not at all Geoff," said Tom Wrigley. "The question asked by Mr. Stompff here was--whether you wished to sell this picture, and what you asked for it."

"Ah!" said Geoffrey Ludlow, his lips closing and the fun dying out of his eyes. "Well, you see it's of course a compliment for you, Mr. Stompff, to ask the question; but I've scarcely made up my mind--whether--and indeed as to the price--"

"Stuff, Geoff! What rubbish you talk!" said Charley Potts, who had rejoined the group. "You know well enough that you painted the picture for sale. You know equally well that the price is two hundred guineas. Are you answered, Mr. Stump?"

Ludlow started forward with a look of annoyance, but Stompff merely grinned, and said quietly, "I take it at the price, and as many more as Mr. Ludlow will paint of the same sort; stock, lock, and barrel, I'll have the whole bilin'. Must change the title though, Ludlow, my boy. None of your Sic wos non thingummy; none of your Hebrew classics for the British public. 'The Vow,' or 'the Last Farewell,' or something in that line.--Very neatly done of you, Charley, my boy; very neat bit of dealing, I call it. I ought to deduct four-and-nine from the next fifteen shillin' commission you get; but I'll make it up to you this way,--you've evidently all the qualities of a salesman; come and be my clerk, and I'll stand thirty shillings a-week and a commission on the catalogues."

Charley Potts was too delighted at his friend's success to feel annoyance at these remarks; he merely shook his fist laughingly, and was passing on, with his arm through Ludlow's; but the vivacious dealer, who had rapidly calculated where he could plant his newly-acquired purchase, and what percentage he could make on it, was not to be thus balked.

"Look here!" said he; "a bargain's a bargain, ain't it? People say your word's as good as your bond, and all that. Pickles! You drop down to my office to-morrow, Ludlow, and there'll be an agreement for you to sign--all straight and reg'lar, you know. And come and cut your mutton with me and Mrs. S. at Velasquez Villa, Nottin' 'Ill, on Sunday, at six. No sayin' no, because I won't hear it. We'll wet our connection in a glass of Sham. And bring Charley with you, if his dress-coat ain't up! You know, Charley! Tar, Tar!" And highly delighted with himself, and with the full conviction that he had rendered himself thoroughly delightful to his hearers, the great man waddled off his brougham.

Meanwhile the news of the purchase had spread through the rooms, and men were hurrying up on all sides to congratulate Ludlow on his success. The fortunate man seemed, however, a little dazed with his triumph; he shook all the outstretched hands cordially, and said a few commonplaces of thanks, intermingled with doubts as to whether he had not been too well treated; but on the first convenient opportunity he slipped away, and sliding a shilling into the palm of Flexor the model, who, being by this time very drunk, had arranged his hair in a curl on his forehead, and was sitting on the bench in the hall after his famous rendering of George the Fourth of blessed memory, Geoff seized his hat and coat and let himself out. The fresh night-air revived him wonderfully, and he was about starting off at his usual headstrong pace, when he heard a low dismal moan, and looking round, he saw a female figure cowering in a doorway. The next instant he was kneeling by her side.

[CHAPTER III.]

BLOTTED OUT.

THE strange caprices of Fashion were never more strangely illustrated than by her fixing upon St. Barnabas Square as one of her favourite localities. There are men yet living among us whose mothers had been robbed on their way from Ranelagh in crossing the spot, then a dreary swampy marsh, on which now stands the city of palaces known as Cubittopolis. For years on years it remained in its dismal condition, until an enterprising builder, seeing the army of civilisation advancing with grand strides south-westward, and perceiving at a glance the immediate realisation of an enormous profit on his outlay, bought up the entire estate, had it thoroughly cleansed and drained, and proceeded to erect thereon a series of terraces, places, and squares, each vying with the other in size, perfection of finish, and, let it be said, general ghastliness. The houses in St. Barnabas Square resemble those in Chasuble Crescent, and scarcely differ in any particular from the eligible residences in Reredos Road: they are all very tall, and rather thin; they have all enormous porticoes, over which are little conservatories, railed in with ecclesiastical ironwork; dismal little back-rooms no bigger than warm-baths, but described as "libraries" by the house-agents; gaunt drawing-rooms connected by an arch; vast landings, leading on to other little conservatories, where "blacks," old flower-pots, and a few geranium stumps, are principally conserved; and a series of gaunt towny bedrooms. In front they have Mr. Swiveller's prospect,--a delightful view of over-the-way; across the bit of square enclosure like a green pocket-handkerchief; while at the back they look immediately on to the back-premises of other eligible residences. The enterprising builder has done his best for his neighbourhood, but he has been unable to neutralise the effects of the neighbouring Thames; and the consequence is, that during the winter months a chronic fog drifts up from the pleasant Kentish marshes, and finding ample room and verge enough, settles permanently down in the St. Barnabas district; while in the summer, the new roads which intersect the locality, being mostly composed of a chalky foundation, peel off under every passing wheel, and emit enormous clouds of dust, which are generally drifting on the summer wind into the eyes and mouths of stray passengers, and in at the doors and windows of regular residents. Yet this is one of Fashion's chosen spots here in this stronghold of stucco reside scores of those whose names and doings the courtly journalist delighteth to chronicle; hither do county magnates bring, to furnished houses, their wives and daughters, leaving them to entertain those of the proper set during the three summer months, while they, the county magnates themselves, are sleeping the sleep of the just on the benches of the House of Commons, or nobly discharging their duty to their country by smoking cigars on the terrace; here reside men high up in the great West-end public offices, commissioners and secretaries, anxious to imbue themselves with the scent of the rose, and vivre près d'elle, City magnates, judges of the land, and counsel learned in the law. The situation is near to Westminster for the lawyers and politicians; and the address has quite enough of the true ring about it to make it much sought after by all those who go-in for a fashionable neighbourhood.

A few hours before the events described in the preceding chapters took place, a brougham, perfectly appointed, and drawn by a splendid horse, came dashing through the fog and driving mist, and pulled up before one of the largest houses in St. Barnabas Square. The footman jumped from the box, and was running to the door, when, in obedience to a sharp voice, he stopped, and the occupant of the vehicle, who had descended, crossed the pavement with rapid strides, and opened the door with a pass-key. He strode quickly through the hall, up the staircase, and into the drawing-room, round which he took a rapid glance. The room was empty; the gas was lit, and a fire burned brightly on the hearth; while an open piano, covered with music, on the one side of the fireplace, and a book turned down with open leaves, showed that the occupants had but recently left. The newcomer, finding himself alone, walked to the mantelpiece, and leaning his back against it, passed his hands rapidly across his forehead; then plunging both of them into his pockets, seemed lost in thought. The gaslight showed him to be a man of about sixty years of age, tall, wiry, well-proportioned; his head was bald, with a fringe of grayish hair, his forehead broad, his eyes deep-set, his mouth thin-lipped, and ascetic; he wore two little strips of whisker, but his chin was closely shaved. He was dressed in high stiff shirt-collars, a blue-silk neckerchief with white dots, in which gleamed a carbuncle pin; a gray overcoat, under which was a cutaway riding-coat, high waistcoat with onyx buttons, and tight-fitting cord-trousers. This was George Brakespere, third Earl Beauport, of whom and of whose family it behoves one to speak in detail.

They were novi homines, the Brakesperes, though they always claimed to be sprung from ancient Norman blood. Only seventy years ago old Martin Brakespere was a wool-stapler in Uttoxeter; and though highly respected for the wealth he was reported to have amassed, was very much jeered at privately, and with bated breath, for keeping an apocryphal genealogical tree hanging up in his back-shop, and for invariably boasting, after his second glass of grog at the Greyhound, about his lineage. But when, after old Martin had been some score years quietly resting in Uttoxeter churchyard, his son Sir Richard Brakespere, who had been successively solicitor and attorney general, was raised to the peerage, and took his seat on the woolsack as Baron Beauport, Lord High Chancellor of England, the Herald's College, and all the rest of the genealogical authorities, said that the line was thoroughly made out and received the revival of the ancient title with the greatest laudation. A wiry, fox-headed, thin chip of a lawyer, the first Baron Beauport, as knowing as a ferret, and not unlike one in the face. He administered the laws of his country very well, and he lent some of the money he had inherited from his father to the sovereign of his country and the first gentleman in Europe at a very high rate of interest, it is said. Rumour reports that he did not get all his money back again, taking instead thereof an increase in rank, and dying, at an advanced age, as Earl Beauport, succeeded in his title and estates by his only son, Theodore Brakespere, by courtesy Viscount Caterham.

When his father died, Lord Caterham, the second Earl Beauport, was nearly fifty years old, a prim little gentleman who loved music and wore a wig; a dried-up chip of a little man, who lived in a little house in Hans Place with an old servant, a big violoncello, and a special and peculiar breed of pug-dogs. To walk out with the pug-dogs in the morning, to be carefully dressed and tittivated and buckled and curled by the old servant in the afternoon, and either to play the violoncello in a Beethoven or Mozart selection with some other old amateur fogies, or to be present at a performance of chamber-music, or philharmonics, or oratorio-rehearsals in the evening, constituted the sole pleasure of the second Earl Beauport's life. He never married; and at his death, some fifteen years after his father's, the title and, with the exception of a few legacies to musical charities, the estates passed to his cousin George Brakespere, Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxon, and then of Little Milman Street, Bedford Row, and the Northern Circuit, briefless barrister.

Just in the very nick of time came the peerage and the estates to George Brakespere, for he was surrounded by duns, and over head and ears in love. With all his hard work at Oxford, and he had worked hard, he had the reputation of being the best bowler at Bullingdon, and the hardest rider after hounds; of having the best old port and the finest cigars (it was before the days of claret and short pipes), and the best old oak furniture, library of books, and before-letter proofs in the University. All these could not be paid for out of an undergraduate's income; and the large remainder of unpaid bills hung round him and plagued him heavily long after he had left Oxford and been called to the bar. It was horribly up-hill work getting a connection among the attorneys; he tried writing for reviews, and succeeded, but earned very little money. And then, on circuit, at an assize-ball, he fell in love with Gertrude Carrington, a haughty county beauty, only daughter of Sir Joshua Carrington, Chairman of Quarter Sessions; and that nearly finished him. Gertrude Carrington was very haughty and very wilful; she admired the clever face and the bold bearing of the young barrister; but in all probability she would have thought no more of him, had not the eminent Sir Joshua, who kept his eyes very sharply about him, marked the flirtation, and immediately expressed his total disapproval of it. That was enough for Gertrude, and she at once went in for George Brakespere, heart and soul. She made no objection to a clandestine correspondence, and responded regularly and warmly to George's passionate letters. She gave him two or three secret meetings under an old oak in a secluded part of her father's park,--Homershams was a five-hours' journey from town,--and these assignations always involved George's sleeping at an inn, and put him to large expense; and when she came up to stay with her cousins in town, she let him know all the parties to which they were going, and rendered him a mendicant for invitations. When the change of fortune came, and George succeeded to the title, Sir Joshua succumbed at once, and became anxious for the match. Had George inherited money only, it is probable that from sheer wilfulness Gertrude would have thrown him over; but the notion of being a countess, of taking precedence and pas of all the neighbouring gentry, had its influence, and they were married. Two sons were born to them,--Viscount Caterham and the Hon. Lionel Brakespere,--and a daughter, who only survived her birth a few weeks. As Earl Beauport, George Brakespere retained the energy and activity of mind and body, the love of exercise and field-sports, the clear brain and singleness of purpose, which had distinguished him as a commoner: but there was a skeleton in his house, whose bony fingers touched his heart in his gayest moments, numbed his energies, and warped his usefulness; whose dread presence he could not escape from, whose chilling influence nor wine, nor work, nor medicine, nor gaiety, could palliate. It was ever present in a tangible shape; he knew his weakness and wickedness in permitting it to conquer him,--he strove against it, but vainly; and in the dead watches of the night often he lay broad awake railing against the fate which had mingled so bitter an ingredient in his cup of happiness.

The door swung open and the Countess entered, a woman nearly fifty now, but not looking her age by at least eight years. A tall handsome woman, with the charms of her former beauty mellowed but not impaired; the face was more full, but the firm chiselling of the nose and lips, the brightness of the eyes, the luxurious dark gloss of the hair, were there still. As she entered, her husband advanced to meet her; and as he touched her forehead with his lips, she laid her hand on his, and asked "What news?"

He shook his head sadly, and said, "The worst."

"The worst!" she repeated, faintly; "he's not dead? Beauport, you--you would not say it in that way--he's not dead?"

"I wish to God he were!" said Lord Beauport through his teeth. "I wish it had pleased God to take him years and years ago! No! he's not dead." Then throwing himself into a chair, and staring vacantly at the fire, he repeated, "I wish to God he were!"

"Anything but that!" said the Countess, with a sense of immense relief; "anything but that! whatever he has done may be atoned for, and repented, and--But what has he done? where is he? have you seen Mr. Farquhar?"

"I have--and I know all. Gertrude, Lionel is a scoundrel and a criminal--no, don't interrupt me! I myself have prosecuted and transported men for less crimes than he has committed; years ago he would have been hanged. He is a forger!"

"A forger!"

"He has forged the names of two of his friends--old brother officers; Lord Hinchenbrook is one, and young Latham the other--to bills for five thousand pounds. I've had the bills in my hands, and seen letters from the men denying their signatures to-night, and--"

"But Lionel--where is he? in prison?"

"No; he saw the crash coming, and fled from it. Farquhar showed me a blotted letter from him, written from Liverpool, saying in a few lines that he had disgraced us all, that he was on the point of sailing under a feigned name for Australia, and that we should never see him again."

"Never see him again! my boy, my own darling boy!" and Lady Beauport burst into an agony of tears.

"Gertrude," said her husband, when the first wild storm of grief had subsided, "calm yourself for one instant."

He rang the bell, and to the servant answering it, said:

"Tell Lord Caterham I wish to speak to him, and beg Miss Maurice to be good enough to step here."

Lady Beauport was about to speak, but the Earl said coldly:

"I wish it, if you please;" and reiterated his commands to the servant, who left the room. "I have fully decided, Gertrude, on the step I am about to take. To-morrow those forged bills will be mine. I saw young Latham at Farquhar's, and he said--" Lord Beauport's voice shook here--"said everything that was kind and noble; and Hinchenbrook has said the same to Farquhar. It--it cannot be kept quiet, of course. Every club is probably ringing with it now; but they will let me have the bills. And from this moment, Gertrude, that boy's name must never be uttered, save in our prayers--in our prayers for his forgiveness and--and repentance--by you, his mother; by me his father,--nor by any one in this house. He is dead to us for ever!"

"Beauport, for Heaven's sake--"

"I swear it, Gertrude, I swear it! and most solemnly will keep the oath. I have sent for Caterham, who must know, of course; his good sense will approve what I have done; and for Annie, she is part of our household now, and must be told. Dead to us all henceforth; dead to us all!"

He sank into a chair opposite the fire and buried his face in his hands, but roused himself at advancing footsteps. The door opened, and a servant entered, pushing before him a library-chair fitted on large wheels, in which sat a man of about thirty, of slight spare frame, with long arms and thin womanly hands--a delicately-handsome man, with a small head, soft grey eyes, and an almost feminine mouth; a man whom Nature had intended for an Apollo, whom fortune had marked for her sport, blighting his childhood with some mysterious disease for which the doctors could find neither name nor cure, sapping his marrow and causing his legs to wither into the shrunken and useless members which now hung loosely before him utterly without strength, almost without shape, incapable of bearing his weight, and rendering him maimed, crippled, blasted for life. This was Viscount Caterham, Earl Beauport's eldest son, and heir to his title and estates. His father cast one short, rapid glance at him as he entered, and then turned to the person who immediately followed him.

This was a tall girl of two-and-twenty, of rounded form and winning expression. Her features were by no means regular; her eyes were brown and sleepy; she had a pert inquisitive nose; and when she smiled, in her decidedly large mouth gleamed two rows of strong white teeth. Her dark-brown hair was simply and precisely arranged; for she had but a humble opinion of her own charms, and objected to any appearance of coquetry. She was dressed in a tight-fitting black silk, with linen collar and cuffs, and her hands and feet were small and perfectly shaped. Darling Annie Maurice, orphan daughter of a second cousin of my lord's, transplanted from a suburban curacy to be companion and humble friend of my lady, the one bright bit of sunshine and reality in that palace of ghastly stucco and sham. Even now, as she came in, Lord Beauport seemed to feel the cheering influence of her presence, and his brow relaxed for an instant as he stepped forward and offered his hand; after taking which, she, with a bow to the Countess, glided round and stood by Lord Caterham's chair.

Lord Caterham was the first to speak.

"You sent for us--for Annie and me, sir," he said in a low tremulous voice; "I trust you have no bad news of Lionel."

Lady Beauport hid her face in her hands; but the Earl, who had resumed his position against the mantelpiece, spoke firmly.

"I sent for you, Caterham, and for you, Annie, as members of my family, to tell you that Lionel Brakespere's name must never more be mentioned in this house. He has disgraced himself, and us through him; and though we cannot wipe away that disgrace, we must strive as far as possible to blot him out from our memories and our lives. You know, both of you--at least you, Caterham, know well enough,--what he has been to me--the love I had for him--the--yes, my God, the pride I had in him!"

His voice broke here, and he passed his hand across his eyes. In the momentary pause Annie Maurice glanced up at Lord Caterham, and marked his face distorted as with pain, and his head reclining on his chest. Then, gulping down the knot rising in his throat, the Earl continued:

"All that is over now; he has left the country, and the chances are that we shall never see nor even hear from him again." A moan from the Countess shook his voice for a second, but he proceeded: "It was to tell you this that I sent for you. You and I, Caterham, will have to enter upon this subject once more to-morrow, when some business arrangements have to be made. On all other occasions, recollect, it is tabooed. Let his name be blotted out from our memories, and let him be as if he had never lived."

As Earl Beauport ceased speaking he gathered himself together and walked towards the door, never trusting himself to look for an instant towards where his wife sat cowering in grief, lest his firmness should desert him. Down the stairs he went, until entering his library he shut the door behind him, locked it, and throwing himself into his chair, leant his head on the desk, and covering it with his hands gave way to a passion of sobs which shook his strong frame as though he were convulsed. Then rising, he went to the book-case, and taking out a large volume, opened it, and turned to the page immediately succeeding the cover. It was a big old-fashioned Bible, bound in calf, with a hideous ancient woodcut as a frontispiece representing the Adoration of the Wise Men; but the page to which Lord Beauport turned, yellow with age, was inscribed in various-coloured inks, many dim and faded, with the names of the old Brakespere family, and the dates of their births, marriages, and deaths. Old Martin Brakespere's headed the list; then came his son's, with "created Baron Beauport" in the lawyer's own skimpy little hand, in which also was entered the name of the musical-amateur peer, his son; then came George Brakespere's bold entry of his own name and his wife's, and of the names of their two sons. Over the last entry Lord Beauport paused for a few minutes, glaring at it with eyes which did not see it, but which had before them a chubby child, a bright handsome Eton boy, a dashing guardsman, a "swell" loved and petted by all, a fugitive skulking in an assumed name in the cabin of a sea-tossed ship; then he took up a pen and ran it through the entry backwards and forwards until the name was completely blotted out; and then he fell again into his train of thought. The family dinner-hour was long since passed; the table was laid, all was ready, and the French cook and the grave butler were in despair: but Lord Beauport still sat alone in his library with old Martin Brakespere's Bible open before him.

[CHAPTER IV]

ON THE DOORSTEP.

It is cheap philosophy to moralise on the importance of events led up to by the merest trifles; but the subject comes so frequently before us as to furnish innumerable pegs whereon the week-day preacher may hang up his little garland of reflections, his little wreath of homely truisms. If Ned Waldron had not been crossing into the Park at the exact moment when the shortsighted Godalming banker was knocked down by the hansom at the Corner, he would have still been enjoying eighty pounds a-year as a temporary extra-clerk at Whitehall, instead of groaning over the villanous extortion of the malt-tax, as a landed proprietor of some thousands of inherited acres. If Dr. Weston's red-lamp over the surgery-door had been blown out when the servant rushed off for medical advice for Master Percy Buckmaster's ear-ache, the eminent apothecary would never have had the chance of which he so skilfully availed himself--of paying dutiful attention to Mrs. Buckmaster, and finally stepping into the shoes of her late husband, the wealthy Indian indigo-planter.

If Geoffrey Ludlow, dashing impetuously onward in his career, had not heard that long low heart-breaking moan, he might have gone on leading his easy, shiftless, drifting life, with no break greater than the excitement consequent on the sale of a picture or the accomplishment of a resolution. But he did hear it, and, rare thing in him, acting at once on his first impulse, he dropped on his knees just in time to catch the fainting form in his outstretched arms. That same instant he would have shrunk back if he could; but it was too late; that same instant there came across him a horrible feeling of the ludicrousness of his position: there at midnight in a London thoroughfare holding in his arms--what! a drunken tramp, perhaps; a vagrant well known to the Mendicity Society; a gin-sodden streetwalker, who might requite his good Samaritanism with a leer and a laugh, or an oath and a blow. And yet the groan seemed to come from the lowest depths of a wrung and suffering heart; and the appearance--no, there could be no mistake about that. That thin, almost emaciated, figure; those pinched features; drawn, haggard, colourless cheeks; that brow, half hidden by the thick, damp, matted hair, yet in its deep lines and indentations revealing the bitter workings of the mind; the small thin bony hands now hanging flaccid and motionless--all these, if there were anything real in this life, were outward semblances such as mere imposters could not have brought forward in the way of trade.

Not one of them was lost on Geoffrey Ludlow, who, leaning over the prostrate figure, narrowly scanned its every feature, bent his face towards the mouth, placed his hands on the heart, and then, thoroughly alarmed, looked round and called for aid. Perhaps his excitement had something to do with it, but Geoff's voice fell flat and limp on the thick damp air, and there was no response, though he shouted again and again. But presently the door whence he had issued opened widely, and in the midst of a gush of tobacco smoke a man came out, humming a song, twirling a stick, and striding down the street. Again Geoffrey Ludlow shouted, and this time with success, for the newcomer stopped suddenly, took his pipe from his mouth, and turning hist-doo head towards the spot whence the voice proceeded, he called out, simply but earnestly, "Hallo there! what's the row?"

Ludlow recognised the speaker at once. It was Charley Potts, and Geoffrey hailed him by name.

"All right!" said Charley in return. "You've picked up my name fast enough, my pippin; but that don't go far. Better known than trusted is your obedient servant, C. P. Hallo, Geoff, old man, is it you? Why, what the deuce have you got there? an 'omeless poor, that won't move on, or a----- By George, Geoff, this is a bad case!" He had leant over the girl's prostrate body, and had rapidly felt her pulse and listened at her heart. "This woman's dying of inanition and prostration. I know it, for I was in the red-bottle and Plaster-of-Paris-horse line before I went in for Art. She must be looked to at once, or she'll slip off the hooks while we're standing by her. You hold on here, old man, while I run back and fetch the brandy out of Dabb's room; I know where he keeps it. Chafe her hands, will you, Geoff? I shan't be a second."

Charley Potts rushed off, and left Geoffrey still kneeling by the girl's side. In obedience to his friend's instructions, he began mechanically to chafe her thin worn hands; but as he rubbed his own over them to and fro, to and fro, he peered into her face, and wondered dreamily what kind of eyes were hidden behind the drooped lids, and what was the colour of the hair hanging in dank thick masses over the pallid brow. Even now there began to spring in his mind a feeling of wonder not unmixed with alarm, as to what would be thought of him, were he discovered in his then position; whether his motives would be rightly construed; whether he were not acting somewhat indiscreetly in so far committing himself: for Geoffrey Ludlow had been brought up in the strict school of dire respectability, where a lively terror of rendering yourself liable to Mrs. Grundy's remarks is amongst the doctrines most religiously inculcated. But a glance at the form before him gave him fresh assurance; and when Charley Potts returned he found his friend rubbing away with all his energy.

"Here it is," said Charley; "Dabb's particular. I know it's first-rate, for Dabb only keeps it medicinally, taking Sir Felix Booth Bart. as his ordinary tipple. I know this water-of-life-of-cognac of old, sir, and always have internal qualms of conscience when I go to see Dabb, which will not be allayed until I have had what Caniche calls a suspicion. Hold her head for a second, Geoff, while I put the flask to her mouth. There! Once more, Geoff. Ah! I thought so. Her pulse is moving now, old fellow, and she'll rouse in a bit; but it was very nearly a case of Walker."

"Look at her eyes--they're unclosing."

"Not much wonder in that, is there, my boy? though it is odd, perhaps. A glass of brandy has made many people shut their eyes before now; but as to opening them--Hallo! steady there!"

He said this as the girl, her eyes glaring straight before her, attempted to raise herself into an erect position, but after a faint struggle dropped back, exclaiming feebly:

"I cannot, I cannot."

"Of course you can't, my dear," said Charley Potts, not unkindly; "of course you can't. You musn't think of attempting it either. I say, Geoff,"--(this was said in a lower tone)--"look out for the policeman when he comes round, and give him a hail. Our young friend here must be looked after at once, and he'd better take her in a cab to the workhouse."

As he said the last words, Geoffrey Ludlow felt the girl's hand which he held thrill between his, and, bending down, thought he saw her lips move.

"What's the matter?" said Charley Potts.

"It's very strange," replied Geoffrey; "I could swear I heard her say 'Not there!' and yet--"

"Likely enough been there before, and knows the treatment. However, we must get her off at once, or she'll go to grief; so let us--"

"Look here, Charley: I don't like the notion of this woman's going to a workhouse, specially as she seems to--object, eh? Couldn't we--isn't there any one where we could--where she could lodge for a night or two, until--the doctor, you know--one might see? Confound it all, Charley, you know I never can explain exactly; can't you help me, eh?"

"What a stammering old idiot it is!" said Charley Potts, laughing. "Yes, I see what you mean--there's Flexor's wife lives close by, in Little Flotsam Street--keeps a lodging-house. If she's not full, this young party can go in there. She's all right now so far as stepping it is concerned, but she'll want a deal of looking after yet. O, by Jove! I left Rollit in at the Titians, the army-doctor, you know, who sketches so well. Let's get her into Flexor's, and I'll fetch Rollit to look at her. Easy now! Up!"

They raised her to her feet, and half-supported, half-carried her round the church and across the broad road, and down a little bystreet on the other side. There Charley Potts stopped at a door, and knocking at it, was soon confronted by a buxom middle-aged woman, who started with surprise at seeing the group.

"Lor, Mr. Potts! what can have brought you 'ere, sir? Flexor's not come in, sir, yet--at them nasty Titiums, he is, and joy go with him. If you're wanting him, sir, you'd better--"

"No, Mrs. Flexor, we don't want your husband just now. Here's Mr. Ludlow, who--"

"Lord, and so it is! but seeing nothing but the nape of your neck, sir, I did not recognise--"

"All right, Mrs. Flexor," said Geoffrey; "we want to know if your house is full. If not, here is a poor woman for whom we--at least Mr. Potts--and I myself, for the matter of that--"

"Stuttering again, Geoff! What stuff! Here, Mrs. Flexor, we want a room for this young woman to sleep in; and just help us in with her at once into your parlour, will you? and let us put her down there while I run round for the doctor."

It is probable that Mrs. Flexor might have raised objections to this proposition; but Charley Potts was a favourite with her, and Geoffrey Ludlow was a certain source of income to her husband; so she stepped back while the men caught up their burden, who all this time had been resting, half-fainting, on Geoffrey's shoulder, and carried her into the parlour. Here they placed her in a big, frayed, ragged easy-chair, with all its cushion-stuffing gone, and palpable bits of shaggy wool peering through its arms and back; and after dragging this in front of the expiring fire, and bidding Mrs. Flexor at once prepare some hot gruel, Charley Potts rushed away to catch Dr. Rollit.

And now Geoffrey Ludlow, left to himself once more (for the girl was lying back in the chair, still with unclosing eyes, and had apparently relapsed into a state of stupor), began to turn the events of the past hour in his mind, and to wonder very much at the position in which he found himself. Here he was in a room in a house which he had never before entered, shut up with a girl of whose name or condition he was as yet entirely ignorant, of whose very existence he had only just known; he, who had always shirked anything which afforded the smallest chance of adventure, was actually taking part in a romance. And yet--nonsense! here was a starving wanderer, whom he and his friend had rescued from the street; an ordinary every-day case, familiar in a thousand phases to the relieving-officers and the poor-law guardians, who, after her certain allowance of warmth, and food, and physic, would start off to go--no matter where, and do--no matter what. And yet he certainly had not been deceived in thinking of her faint protest when Charley proposed to send her to the workhouse. She had spoken then; and though the words were so few and the tone so low, there was something in the latter which suggested education and refinement. Her hands too, her poor thin hands, were long and well-shaped, with tapering fingers and filbert-nails, and bore no traces of hard work: and her face--ah, he should be better able to see her face now.

He turned, and taking the flaring candle from the table, held it above her head. Her eyes were still closed; but as he moved, they opened wide, and fixed themselves on him. Such large, deep-violet eyes, with long sweeping lashes! such a long, solemn, stedfast gaze, in which his own eyes were caught fast, and remained motionless. Then on to his hand, leaning on the arm of the chair, came the cold clammy pressure of feeble fingers; and in his ear, bent and listening, as he saw a fluttering motion of her lips, murmured very feebly the words, "Bless you!--saved me!" twice repeated. As her breath fanned his cheek, Geoffrey Ludlow's heart beat fast and audibly, his hand shook beneath the light touch of the lithe fingers; but the next instant the eyelids dropped, the touch relaxed, and a tremulousness seized on the ashy lips. Geoffrey glanced at her for an instant, and was rushing in alarm to the door, when it opened, and Charley Potts entered, followed by a tall grave man, in a long black beard, whom Potts introduced as Dr. Rollit.

"You're just in time," said Geoffrey; "I was just going to call for help. She--"

"Pardon me, please," said the doctor, calmly pushing him on one side. "Permit me to--ah!" he continued, after a glance--"I must trouble you to leave the room, Potts, please, and take your friend with you. And just send the woman of the house to me, will you? There is a woman, I suppose?"

"O yes, there is a woman, of course.--Here, Mrs. Flexor, just step up, will you?--Now, Geoff, what are you staring at, man? Do you think the doctor's going to eat the girl? Come on old fellow; we'll sit on the kitchen-stairs, and catch blackbeetles to pass the time. Come on!"

Geoff roused himself at his friend's touch, and went with him, but in a dreamy sullen manner. When they got into the passage, he remained with outstretched ear, listening eagerly; and when Charley spoke, he savagely bade him hold his tongue. Mr. Potts was so utterly astonished at this conduct, that he continued staring and motionless, and merely gave vent to his feelings in one short low whistle. When the door was opened, Geoffrey Ludlow strode down the passage at once, and confronting the doctor, asked him what news. Dr. Rollit looked his questioner steadily in the eyes for a moment; and when he spoke his tone was softer, his manner less abrupt than before. "There is no special danger, Mr. Ludlow," said he; "though the girl has had a narrow escape. She has been fighting with cold and want of proper nourishment for days, so far as I can tell."

"Did she say so?"

"She said nothing; she has not spoken a word." Dr. Rollit did not fail to notice that here Geoffrey Ludlow gave a sigh of relief. "I but judge from her appearance and symptoms. I have told this good person what to do; and I will look round early in the morning. I live close by. Now, goodnight."

"You are sure as to the absence of danger?"

"Certain."

"Goodnight; a thousand thanks!--Mrs. Flexor, mind that your patient has every thing wanted, and that I settle with you.--Now, Charley, come; what are you waiting for?"

"Eh?" said Charley. "Well, I thought that, after this little excitement, perhaps a glass out of that black bottle which I know Mrs. Flexor keeps on the second shelf in the right-hand cupboard--"

"Get along with you, Mr. Potts!" said Mrs. Flexor, grinning.

"You know you do Mrs. F.--a glass of that might cheer and not inebriate.--What do you say, Geoff?"

"I say no! You've had quite enough; and all Mrs. Flexor's attention is required elsewhere.--Goodnight, Mrs. Flexor; and"--by this time they were in the street--"goodnight, Charley."

Mr. Potts, engaged in extracting a short-pipe from the breast-pocket of his pea-jacket, looked up with an abstracted air, and said, "I beg your pardon."

"Goodnight, Charley."

"Oh, certainly, if you wish it. Goodnight, Geoffrey Ludlow, Esquire; and permit me to add, Hey no nonny! Not a very lucid remark, perhaps, but one which exactly illustrates my state of mind." And Charley Potts filled his pipe, lit it, and remained leaning against the wall, and smoking with much deliberation until his friend was out of sight.

Geoffrey Ludlow strode down the street, the pavement ringing under his firm tread, his head erect, his step elastic, his whole bearing sensibly different even to himself. As he swung along he tried to examine himself as to what was the cause of his sudden light-heartedness; and at first he ascribed it to the sale of his picture, and to the warm promises of support he had received at the hands of Mr. Stompff. But these, though a few hours since they had really afforded him the greatest delight, now paled before the transient glance of two deep-violet eyes, and the scarcely-heard murmur of a feeble voice. "'Bless you!--saved me!' that's what she said!" exclaimed Geoff, halting for a second and reflecting. "And then the touch of her hand, and the--ah! Charley was right! Hey no nonny is the only language for such an ass as I'm making of myself." So home through the quiet streets, and into his studio, thinking he would smoke one quiet pipe before turning in. There, restlessness, inability to settle to any thing, mad desire to sketch a certain face with large eyes, a certain fragile helpless figure, now prostrate, now half-reclining on a bit of manly shoulder; a carrying-out of this desire with a bit of crayon on the studio-wall, several attempts, constant failure, and consequent disgust. A feeling that ought to have been pleasure, and yet had a strong tinge of pain at his heart, and a constant ringing of one phrase, "'Bless you!--saved me!" in his ears. So to bed; where he dreamt he saw his name, Geoffrey Ludlow, in big black letters at the bottom of a gold frame, the picture in which was Keat's "Lamia;" and lo! the Lamia had the deep-violet eyes of the wanderer in the streets.

[CHAPTER V.]

THE LETTER.

The houses in St. Barnabas Square have an advantage over most other London residences in the possession of a "third room" on the ground-floor. Most people who, purposing to change their domicile, have gone in for a study of the Times Supplement or the mendacious catalogues of house-agents, have read of the "noble dining-room, snug breakfast-room, and library," and have found the said breakfast-room to be about the size and depth of a warm-bath, and the "library" a soul-depressing hole just beyond the glazed top of the kitchen-stairs, to which are eventually relegated your old boots, the bust of the friend with whom since he presented it you have had a deadly quarrel, some odd numbers of magazines, and the framework of a shower-bath which, in a moment of madness, you bought at a sale and never have been able to fit together.

But the houses in St. Barnabas Square have each, built over what in other neighbourhoods is called "leads,"--a ghastly space where the cats creep stealthily about in the daytime, and whence at night they yowl with preternatural pertinacity,--a fine large room, devoted in most instances to the purposes of billiards, but at Lord Beauport's given up entirely to Lord Caterham. It had been selected originally from its situation on the ground-floor giving the poor crippled lad easy means of exit and entrance, and preventing any necessity for his being carried--for walking was utterly impossible to him--up and down stairs. It was his room; and there, and there alone, he was absolute master; there he was allowed to carry out what his mother spoke of as his "fads," what his father called "poor Caterham's odd ways." His brother, Lionel Brakespere, had been in the habit of dropping in there twice or three times a-week, smoking his cigar, turning over the "rum things" on the table, asking advice which he never took, and lounging round the room, reading the backs of the books which he did not understand, and criticising the pictures which he knew nothing about. It would have been impossible to tell to what manner of man the room belonged from a cursory survey of its contents. Three-fourths of the walls were covered with large bookcases filled with a heterogeneous assemblage of books. Here a row of poets, a big quarto Shakespeare in six volumes, followed by Youatt on the Horse, Philip Van Artevelde, and Stanhope's Christian Martyr. In the next shelf Voltaire, all the Tennysons, Mr. Sponge's Sporting-Tour, a work on Farriery, and Blunt on the Pentateuch. So the mélange ran throughout the bookshelves; and on the fourth wall, where hung the pictures, it was not much better. For in the centre were Landseer's "Midsummer-Night's Dream," where that lovely Titania, unfairy-like if you please, but one of the most glorious specimens of pictured womanhood, pillows her fair face under the shadow of that magnificent ass's head; and Frith's "Coming of Age," and Delaroche's "Execution of Lady Jane Grey," and three or four splendid proof-engravings of untouchable Sir Joshua; and among them, dotted here and there, hunting-sketches by Alken, and coaching bits from Fores. Scattered about on tables were pieces of lava from Vesuvius, photographs from Pompeii, a collection of weeds and grasses from the Arctic regions (all duly labelled in the most precise handwriting), a horse's shoe specially adapted for ice-travelling, specimens of egg-shell china, a box of gleaming carpenter's tools, boxes of Tunbridge ware, furs of Indian manufacture, caricature statuettes by Danton, a case of shells, and another of geological specimens. Here stood an easel bearing a half-finished picture, in one corner was a sheaf of walking-sticks, against the wall a rack of whips. Before the fire was a carved-oak writing-desk, and on it, beside the ordinary blotting and writing materials, wee an aneroid barometer, a small skeleton clock, and a silver handbell. And at it sat Viscount Caterham, his head drooping, his face pale, his hands idly clasped before him.

Not an unusual position this with him, not unusual by any means when he was alone. In such society as he forced himself to keep--for with him it was more than effort to determine occasionally to shake off his love of solitude, to be present amongst his father's guests, and to receive some few special favourites in his own rooms--he was more than pleasant, he was brilliant and amusing. Big, heavy, good-natured guardsmen, who had contributed nothing to the "go" of the evening, and had nearly tugged off their tawny beards in the vain endeavour to extract something to say, would go away, and growl in deep bas voices over their cigars about "that strordinary fler Caterham. Knows a lot, you know, that f'ler, 'bout all sorts things. Can't 'ceive where picks it all up; and as jolly as old boots, by Jove!"

Old friends of Lord Beauport's, now gradually dropping into fogiedom, and clutching year by 672 year more tightly the conventional prejudices instilled into them in early life, listened with elevated eyebrows and dropping jaws to Lord Caterham's outspoken opinions, now clothed in brilliant tropes, now crackling with smart antithesis, but always fresh, earnest, liberal, and vigorous; and when they talked him over in club-windows, these old boys would say that "there was something in that deformed fellow of Beauport's, but that he was all wrong; his mind as warped as his body, by George!" And women,--ah, that was the worst of all,--women would sit and listen to him on such rare occasions as he spoke before them, sit many of them steadfast-eyed and ear-attentive, and would give him smiles and encouraging glances, and then would float away and talk to their next dancing-partner of the strange little man who had such odd ideas, and spoke so--so unlike most people, you know.

He knew it all, this fragile, colourless, delicate cripple, bound for life to his wheelchair, dependent for mere motion on the assistance of others; a something apart and almost without parallel, helpless as a little child, and yet with the brain, the heart, the passions of a man. No keener observer of outward show, no clearer reader of character than he. From out his deep-set melancholy eyes he saw the stare of astonishment, sometimes the look of disgust, which usually marked a first introduction to him; his quick ear caught the would-be compassionate inflection of the voice addressing him on the simplest matters; he knew what the old fogies were thinking of as they shifted uneasily in their chairs as he spoke; and he interpreted clearly enough the straying glances and occasional interjections of the women. He knew it all, and bore it--bore it as the cross is rarely borne.

Only three times in his life had there gone up from his lips a wail to the Father of mercies, a passionate outpouring of his heart, a wild inquiry as to why such affliction had been cast upon him. But three times, and the first of these was when he was a lad of eighteen. Lord Beauport had been educated at Charterhouse, where, as every one knows, Founder's Day is kept with annual rejoicings. To one of these celebrations Lord Beauport had gone, taking Lord Caterham with him. The speeches and recitations were over, and the crowd of spectators were filing out into the quadrangle, when Lord Caterham, whose chair was being wheeled by a servant close by his father's side, heard a cheery voice say, "What, Brakespere! Gad, Lord Beauport, I mean! I forgot. Well, how are you, my dear fellow? I haven't seen you since we sat on the same form in that old place." Lord Caterham looked up and saw his father shaking hands with a jolly-looking middle-aged man, who rattled on--"Well, and you've been in luck and are a great gun! I'm delighted to hear it. You're just the fellow to bear your honours bravely. O yes, I'm wonderfully well, thank God. And I've got my boy here at the old shop, doing just as we used to do, Brakespere--Beauport, I mean. I'll introduce you. Here, Charley!" calling to him a fine handsome lad; "this is Lord Beauport, an old schoolfellow of mine. And you, Beauport,--you've got children, eh?"

"O yes," said Lord Beauport--"two boys."

"Ah! that's right. I wish they'd been here; I should have liked to have seen them." The man rattled on, but Lord Caterham heard no more. He had heard enough. He knew that his father was ashamed to acknowledge his maimed and crippled child--ashamed of a comparison between the stalwart son of his old schoolfellow and his own blighted lad; and that night Lord Caterham's pillow was wet with tears, and he prayed to God that his life might be taken from him.

Twice since then the same feelings had been violently excited; but the sense of his position, the knowledge that he was a perpetual grief and affliction to his parents, was ever present, and pervaded his very being. To tell truth, neither his father nor his mother ever outwardly manifested their disappointment or their sorrow at the hopeless physical state of their firstborn son; but Lord Caterham read his father's trouble in thousands of covert glances thrown towards the occupant of the wheeled chair, which the elder man thought were all unmarked, in short self-suppressed sighs, in sudden shiftings of the conversation when any subject involving a question of physical activity or muscular force happened to be touched upon, in the persistent way in which his father excluded him from those regular solemn festivities of the season, held at certain special times, and at which he by right should certainly have been present.

No man knew better than Lord Beauport the horrible injustice he was committing; he felt that he was mutely rebelling against the decrees of Providence, and adding to the affliction already mysteriously dispensed to his unfortunate son by his treatment. He fought against it, but without avail; he could not bow his head and kiss the rod by which he had been smitten. Had his heir been brainless, dissipated, even bad, he could have forgiven him. He did in his heart forgive his second son when he became all three; but that he, George Brakespere, handsome Brakespere, one of the best athletes of the day, should have to own that poor misshapen man as his son and heir!--it was too much. He tried to persuade himself that he loved his son; but he never looked at him without a shudder, never spoke of him with unflushed cheeks.

As for Lady Beauport, from the time that the child's malady first was proclaimed incurable, she never took the smallest interest in him, but devoted herself, as much as devotion was compatible with perpetual attendance at ball, concert, and theatre, to her second son. As a child, Lord Caterham had, by her express commands, been studiously kept out of her sight; and now that he was a man, she saw very much less of him than of many strangers. A dozen times in the year she would enter his room and remain a few minutes, asking for his taste in a matter of fancy-costume, or something of the kind; and then she would brush his forehead with her lips, and rustle away perfectly satisfied with her manner of discharging the duties of maternity.

And Lord Caterham knew all this; read it as in a book; and suffered, and was strong. Who know most of life, discern character most readily, and read it most deeply? We who what we call "mix in the world," hurry hither and thither, buffeting our way through friends and foes, taking the rough and the smooth, smiling here, frowning there, but ever pushing onward? Or the quiet ones, who lie by in the nooks and lanes, and look on at the strife, and mark the quality and effect of the blows struck; who see not merely how, but why the battle has been undertaken; who can trace the strong and weak points of the attack and defence, see the skirmishers thrown out here, the feigned retreat there, the mine ready prepared in the far distance? How many years had that crippled man looked on at life, standing as it were at the gates and peering in at the antics and dalliances, the bowings and scrapings, the mad moppings and idiotic mowings of the puppets performing? And had he not arrived during this period at a perfect knowledge of how the wires were pulled, and what was the result?

Among them but not of them, in the midst of the whirl of London but as isolated as a hermit, with keen analytical powers, and leisure and opportunity to give them full swing, Lord Caterham passed his life in studying the lives of other people, in taking off the padding and the drapery, the paint and the tinsel, in looking behind the grins, and studying the motives for the sneers. Ah, what a life for a man to pass! situated as Lord Caterham was, he must under such circumstances have become either a Quilp or an angel. The natural tendency is to the former: but Providence had been kind in one instance to Lord Caterham, and he, like Mr. Disraeli, went in for the angel.

His flow of spirits was generally, to say the least of it, equable. When the dark hour was on him he suffered dreadfully; but this morning he was more than usually low, for he had been pondering over his brother's insane downfall, and it was with something like real pleasure that he heard his servant announce "Mr. Barford," and gave orders for that gentleman's admittance.

The Honourable Algernon Barford by prescriptive right, but "Algy Barford" to any one after two days' acquaintance with him, was one of those men whom it is impossible not to call by their Christian names; whom it is impossible not to like as an acquaintance; whom it is difficult to take into intimate friendship; but with whom no one ever quarrelled. A big, broad-chested, broad-faced, light-whiskered man, perfectly dressed, with an easy rolling walk, a pleasant presence, a way of enarming and "old boy-ing" you, without the least appearance of undue familiarity; on the contrary, with a sense of real delight in your society; with a voice which, without being in the least affected, or in the remotest degree resembling the tone of the stage-nobleman, had the real swell ring and roll in it; a kindly, sunny, chirpy, world-citizen, who, with what was supposed to be a very small income, lived in the best society, never borrowed or owed a sovereign, and was nearly always in good temper. Algy Barford was the very man to visit you when you were out of spirits. A glance at him was cheering; it revived one at once to look at his shiny bald forehead fringed with thin golden hair, at his saucy blue eyes, his big grinning mouth furnished with sparkling teeth; and when he spoke, his voice came ringing out with a cheery music of its own.

"Hallo, Caterham!" said he, coming up to the chair and placing one of his big hands on the occupant's small shoulder; "how goes it, my boy? Wanted to see you, and have a chat. How are you, old fellow, eh? Where does one put one's hat, by the way, dear old boy? Can't put it under my seat, you know, or I should think I was in church; and there's no place in this den of yours; and--ah, that'll do, on that lady's head. Who is it? O, Pallas Athené; ah, very well then, non invitâ Minervâ, she'll support my castor for me. Fancy my recollecting Latin, eh? but I think I must have seen it on somebody's crest. Well, and now, old boy, how are you?"

"Well, not very brilliant this morning, Algy. I--"

"Ah, like me, got rats, haven't you?"

"Rats?"

"Yes; whenever I'm out of spirits I think I've got rats--sometimes boiled rats. Oh, it's all very well for you to laugh, Caterham; but you know, though I'm generally pretty jolly, sometimes I have a regular file-gnawing time of it. I think I'll take a peg, dear old boy--a sherry peg--just to keep me up."

"To be sure. Just ring for Stevens, will you? he'll--"

"Not at all; I recollect where the sherry is and where the glasses live. Nourri dans le sérail, j'en connais les detours. Here they are. Have a peg, Caterham?"

"No, thanks, Algy; the doctor forbids me that sort of thing. I take no exercise to carry it off, you know; but I thought some one told me you had turned teetotaller."

"Gad, how extraordinarily things get wind, don't you know! So I did, honour!--kept to it all strictly, give you my word, for--ay, for a fortnight; but then I thought I might as well die a natural death, so I took to it again. This is the second peg I've had to-day--took number one at the Foreign Office, with my cousin Jack Lambert. You know Jack?--little fellow, short and dirty, like a winter's day."

"I know him," said Caterham, smiling; "a sharp fellow."

"O yes, deuced cute little dog--knows every thing. I wanted him to recommend me a new servant--obliged to send my man away--couldn't stand him any longer--always worrying me."

"I thought he was a capital servant?"

"Ye-es; knew too much though, and went to too many evening-parties--never would give me a chance of wearing my own black bags and dress-boots--kept 'em in constant requisition, by Jove! A greedy fellow too. I used to let him get just outside the door with the breakfast-things, and then suddenly call him back; and he never showed up without his mouth full of kidney, or whatever it was. And he always would read my letters--before I'd done with them, I mean. I'm shortsighted, you know, and obliged to get close to the light: he was in such a hurry to find out what they were about, that he used to peep in through the window, and read them over my shoulder. I found this out; and this morning I was ready for him with my fist neatly doubled-up in a thick towel. I saw his shadow come stealing across the paper, and then I turned round and let out at him slap through the glass. It was a gentle hint that I had spotted his game; and so he came in when he had got his face right, and begged me to suit myself in a month, as he had heard of a place which he thought he should like better. Now, can you tell me of any handy fellow, Caterham?"

"Not I; I'm all unlikely to know of such people. Stay, there was a man that--"

"Yes; and then you stop. Gad, you are like the rest of the world, old fellow: you have an arrière pensée which prevents your telling a fellow a good thing."

"No, not that, Algy. I was going to say that there was a man who was Lionel's servant. I don't know whether he has got another place; but Lionel, you know--" and Lord Caterham stopped with a knot in his throat and burning cheeks.

"I know, dear old boy," said Algy Barford, rising from his seat and again placing his hand on Caterham's shoulder; "of course I know. You're too much a man of the world"--(Heaven help us! Caterham a man of the world! But this was Algy Barford's pleasant way of putting it)--"not to know that the clubs rang with the whole story last night. Don't shrink, old boy. It's a bad business; but I never heard such tremendous sympathy expressed for a--for a buffer--as for Lionel. Every body says he must have been no end cornered before he--before he--well, there's no use talking of it. But what I wanted to say to you is this,--and I'm deuced glad you mentioned Lionel's name, old fellow, for I've been thinking all the time I've been here how I could bring it in. Look here! he and I were no end chums, you know; I was much older than he; but we took to each other like any thing, and--and I got a letter from him from Liverpool with--with an enclosure for you, old boy."

Algy Barford unbuttoned his coat as he said these last words, took a long breath, and seemed immensely relieved, though he still looked anxiously towards his friend.

"An enclosure for me?" said Lord Caterham, turning deadly white; "no further trouble--no further misery for--"

"On my honour, Caterham, I don't know what it is," said Algy Barford; "he doesn't hint it in his letter to me. He simply says, 'Let the enclosed be given to Caterham, and given by your own hand.' He underlines that last sentence; and so I brought it on. I'm a bungling jackass, or I should have found means to explain it myself, by Jove! But as you have helped me, so much the better."

"Have you it with you?"

"O yes; brought it on purpose," said Algy, rising and taking his coat from a chair, and his hat from the head of Pallas Athené; "here it is. I don't suppose anything from poor Lionel can be very brilliant just now; but still, I know nothing. Goodby, Caterham, old fellow; can't help me to a servant-man, eh? See you next week; meantime,--and this earnest, old boy,--if there's anything I can do to help Lionel in any shape, you'll let me know, won't you, old fellow?"

And Algy Barford handed Lord Caterham the letter, kissed his hand, and departed in his usual airy, cheery fashion.

That night Lord Caterham did not appear at the dinner-table; and his servant, on being asked, said that his master "had been more than usual queer-like," and had gone to bed very early.

[CHAPTER VI.]

THE FIRST VISIT.

Geoffrey Ludlow was in his way a recognisant and a grateful man, grateful for such mercies as he knew he enjoyed; but from never having experienced its loss, he was not sufficiently appreciative of one of the greatest of life's blessings, the faculty of sleep at will. He could have slept, had he so willed it, under the tremendous cannonading, the feu-d'enfer, before Sebastopol, or while Mr. Gladstone was speaking his best speech, or Mr. Tennyson was reading aloud his own poetry; whenever and wherever he chose he could sleep the calm peaceful sleep of an infant. Some people tell you they are too tired to sleep--that was never the case with Geoffrey; others that their minds are too full, that they are too excited, that the weather is too hot or too cold, that there is too much noise, or that the very silence is too oppressive. But, excited or comatose, hot or cold, in the rumble of London streets or the dead silence of--well, he had never tried the Desert, but let us say Walton-on-the-Naze, Geoffrey Ludlow no sooner laid his head on the pillow than he went off into a sound, glorious, healthy sleep--steady, calm, and peaceful; not one of your stertorous, heavy, growling slumbers, nor your starting, fly-catching, open-mouthed, moaning states, but a placid, regular sleep, so quiet and undisturbed that he scarcely seemed to breathe; and often as a child had caused his mother to examine with anxiety whether the motionless figure stretched upon the little bed was only sleeping naturally, or whether the last long sleep had not fallen on it.

Dreams he had, no doubt; but they by no means disturbed the refreshing, invigorating character of his repose. On the night of his adventure in the streets, he dreamt the Lamia dream without its in the least affecting his slumber; and when he opened his eyes the next morning, with the recollection of where he was, and what day it was, and what he had to do--those post-waking thoughts which come to all of us--there came upon him an indefinable sensation of something pleasurable and happy, of something bright and sunshiny, of something which made his heart feel light within him, and caused him to open his eyes and grapple with the day at once.

Some one surely must long ere this have remarked how our manner of waking from slumber is affected by our state of mind. The instant that consciousness comes upon us, the dominant object of our thoughts, be it pleasant or horrible, is before us: the absurd quarrel with the man in the black beard last night, about--what was it about? the acceptance which Smith holds, which must be met, and can't be renewed; the proposal in the conservatory to Emily Fairbairn, while she was flushed with the first valse after supper, and we with Mrs. Tresillian's champagne;--or, per contra, as they say in the City, the thrilling pressure of Flora Maitland's hand, and the low whisper in which she gave us rendezvous at the Botanical Fête this afternoon the lawyer's letter informing us of our godfather's handsome legacy;--all these, whether for good or ill, come before us with the first unclosing of our eyelids. If agreeable we rouse ourselves at once, and lie simultaneously chewing the cud of pleasant thoughts and enjoying the calm haven of our bed; if objectionable, we try and shut them out yet for a little while, and turning round court sleep once more.

What was the first thought that flashed across Geoffrey Ludlow's brain immediately on his waking, and filled him with hope and joy? Not the remembrance of the purchase of his picture by Mr. Stompff, though that certainly occurred to him, with Stompff's promises of future employment, and the kind words of his old friends at the Titians, all floating simultaneously across his mind. But with these thoughts came the recollection of a fragile form, and a thin hand with long lithe fingers wound round his own, and a low feeble voice whispering the words "Bless you!--saved me!" in his listening ear.

Beneath the flickering gas-lamps, or in the dim half-light of Mrs. Flexor's room, he had been unable to make out the colour of the eyes, or of the thick hair which hung in heavy masses over her cheeks; it was a spiritual recollection of her at the best; but he would soon change that into a material inspection. So, after settling in his own mind--that mind which coincides so readily with our wishes--that it was benevolence which prompted his every action, and which roused in him the desire to know how the patient of the previous night was getting on, he sprang from his bed, and pulled the string of his shower-bath with an energy which not even the knowledge of the water's probable temperature could mitigate. But he had not proceeded half-way through his toilet, when the old spirit of irresolution began to exercise its dominion over him. Was it not somewhat of a Quixotic adventure in which he was engaging? To succour a starving frozen girl on a wet night was merely charitable and humane; there was no man of anything like decent feeling but would have acted as he had done, and--by George!--here the hair-brushes were suspended in mid-air, just threatening a descent one on either side of his bushy head--wouldn't it have been better to have accepted Charley Pott's suggestion, and let the policeman take her to the workhouse? There she would have had every attention and--bah! every attention! the truckle-bed in a gaunt bare room, surrounded by disease in every shape; the perfunctory visits of the parish-doctor; the--O no! and, moreover, had he not heard, or at all events imagined he heard, the pallid lips mutter "Not there!" No! there was something in her which--which--at all events--well, ruat caelum, it was done, and he must take the consequences; and down came the two hair-brushes like two avalanches, and worried his unresisting scalp like two steam-harrows. The recollection of the fragile frame, and the thin hands, and the broken voice, supported by the benevolent theory, had it all their own way from that time out, until he had finished dressing, and sent him downstairs in a happy mood, pleased with what he had done, more pleased still with the notion of what he was about to do. He entered the room briskly, and striding up to an old lady sitting at the head of the breakfast-table, gave her a sounding kiss.

"Goodmorning, dearest mother.--How do, Til, dear?" turning to a young woman who was engaged in pouring out the tea. "I'm late again, I see."

"Always on sausage mornings, I notice, Geoffrey," said Mrs. Ludlow, with a little asperity. "It does not so much matter with haddock, though it becomes leathery; or eggs, for you like them hard; but sausages should be eaten hot, or not at all; and to-day, when I'd sent specially for these, knowing that nasty herb-stuffing is indigestible--let them deny it if they can--it does seem hard that--well, never mind--"

Mrs. Ludlow was a very good old lady, with one great failing: she was under the notion that she had to bear what she called "a cross," a most uncomfortable typical object, which caused all her friends the greatest annoyance, but in which, though outwardly mournful, she secretly rejoiced, as giving her a peculiar status in her circle. This cross intruded itself into all the social and domestic details of her life, and was lugged out metaphorically on all possible occasions.

"Don't mind me, mother," said Geoff; "the sausages will do splendidly. I overslept myself; I was a little late last night."

"O, at those everlasting Titians.--I declare I forgot," said the young woman who had been addressed as "Til," and who was Geoffrey's only sister. "Ah, poor fellow! studying his art till two this morning, wasn't he?" And Miss Til made a comic sympathetic moue, which made Geoff laugh.

"Two!" said Mrs. Ludlow; "nearer three, Matilda. I ought to know, for I had water running down my back all night, and my feet as cold as stone; and I had a perfect recollection of having left the key of the linen closet in the door, owing to my having been hurried down to luncheon yesterday when I was giving Martha out the clean pillowcases. However, if burglars do break into that linen-closet, it won't be for my not having mentioned it, as I call you to witness, Matilda."

"All right, mother," said Geoffrey; "we'll run the risk of that. I'm very sorry I disturbed the house, but I was late, I confess; but I did some good, though."

"O yes, Geoffrey, we know," said Matilda. "Got some new notions for a subject, or heard some aesthetic criticism; or met some wonderful lion, who's going to astonish the world, and of whom no one ever hears again! You always have done something extraordinary when you're out very late, I find."

"Well, I did something really extraordinary last night. I sold my picture the 'Ballroom,' you know; and for what do you think?--two hundred pounds."

"O, Geoff, you dear, darling old Geoff! I am so glad! Two hundred pounds! O, Geoff, Geoff! You dear, lucky old fellow!" and Miss Till flung her arms round her brother's neck and hugged him with delight. Mrs. Ludlow said never a word; but her cross melted away momentarily, her eyes filled with tears, and her lips quivered. Geoffrey noticed this, and so soon as he had returned his sister's hearty embrace, he went up to his mother, and kneeling by her side, put up his face for her kiss.

"God bless you, my son!" said the old lady reverently, as she gave it; "God bless you! This is brave news, indeed. I knew it would come in time; but--"

"Yes; but tell us all about it, Geoff. How did it come about? and however did you pluck up courage, you dear, bashful, nervous old thing, to ask such a price?"

"I--why, Til, you know that I--and you, dear mother, you know too that--not that I am bashful, as Til says; but still there's something. O, I should never have sold the picture, I believe, if I'd been let alone. It was Charley Potts sold it for me."

"Charles Potts! That ridiculous young man! Well, I should never have thought it," said Mrs. Ludlow.

Miss Matilda said nothing, but a faint flush rose on her neck and cheeks, and died away again as quickly as it came.

"O, he's a capital man of business--for anybody else, that's to say. He don't do much good for himself. He sold the picture for me, and prevented my saying a word in the whole affair. And who do you think has bought it? Mr. Stompff, the great dealer, who tells me he'll take as many more of the same style as I like to paint."

"This is great news, indeed, my boy," said the old lady. "You've only to persevere, and your fortune's made. Only one thing, Geoffrey,--never paint on Sunday, or you'll never become a great man."

"Well but, mother," said Geoff, smiling, "Sir Joshua Reynolds painted always on Sundays until Johnson's death and he was a great man."

"Ah, well, my dear," replied his mother forcibly, if not logically, "that's nothing to do with it."

Then Geoffrey, who had been hurrying through his sausage, and towards the last began to grow nervous and fidgety--accounted for by his mother and sister from his anxiety to go and see Mr. Stompff, and at once fling himself on to fresh canvases--finished his breakfast, and went out to get his hat. Mrs. Ludlow, with her "cross" rapidly coming upon her, sat down to "do the books,"--an inspection of the household brigade of tradesmen's accounts which she carried on weekly with the sternest rigour; and Matilda, who was by no means either a romantic or a strong-minded woman commenced to darn a basketful of Geoffrey's socks. Then the sock-destroyer put his head in at the door, his mouth ornamented with a large cigar, and calling out "Goodbye," departed on his way.

The fragile form, the thin hands, and the soft low voice had it all their own way with Geoffrey Ludlow now. He was going to see their owner; in less than an hour he should know the colour of the eyes and the hair; and figuratively Geoffrey walked upon air; literally, he strode along with bright eyes and flushed cheeks, swinging his stick, and, but for the necessity of clenching his cigar between his teeth, inclined to hum a tune aloud. He scarcely noticed any of the people he met; but such as he did casually glance at he pitied from the bottom of his soul: there were no thin hands or soft voices waiting for them. And it must be owned that the passers-by who noticed him returned his pity. The clerks on the omnibuses, sucking solemnly at their briar-root pipes, or immersed in their newspapers, solemn staid men going in "to business," on their regular daily routine, looked up with wonder on this buoyant figure, with its black wideawake hat and long floating beard, its jerky walk, its swinging stick, and its general air of light-hearted happiness. The cynical clerks, men with large families, whom nothing but an increase of salary could rouse, interchanged shoulder-shrugs of contempt, and the omnibus-conductor, likewise a cynic, after taking a long stare at Geoffrey, called out to his driver, "'Appy cove that! looks as if he'd found a fourpennypiece, don't he?"

Entirely ignorant of the attention he was attracting, Geoff blithely pursued his way. He lived at Brompton, and he was bound for the neighbourhood of Portland Place; so he turned in at the Albert Gate, and crossing the enclosure and the Row, made for Grosvenor Gate. In the Park he was equally the object of remark: the nurse-girls called their charges to come "to heel" out of the way of that "nasty ugly big man;" the valetudinarians taking their constitutional in the Row loathed him for swinging his stick and making their horses shy as he passed; the park-keepers watched him narrowly, as one probably with felonious intent to the plants or the ducks.

Still, utterly unconscious, Geoffrey went swinging along across Grosvenor Square, down Brook Street; and not until he turned into Bond Street did he begin to realise entirely the step he was about to take. Then he wavered, in mind and in gait; he thought he would turn back: he did turn back, irresolute, doubtful. Better have nothing more to do with it; nip it in the bud; send Charley Potts with a couple of sovereigns to Mrs. Flexor's, and tell her to set the girl on her way again, and wish her God-speed. But what if she were still ill, unable to move? people didn't gain sufficient strength in twelve hours; and Charley, though kind-hearted, was rather brusque; and then the low voice, with the "Bless you!--saved me!" came murmuring in his ear; and Geoffrey, like Whittington, turned again, and strode on towards Little Flotsam Street.

When he got near Flexor's door, he faltered again, and very nearly gave in: but looking up, saw Mrs. Flexor standing on the pavement; and perceiving by her manner that his advent had been noticed, proceeded, and was soon alongside that matron.

"Good morning, Mrs. Flexor."

"Good momin', sir; thought you'd be over early, though not lookin' for you now, but for Reg'las, my youngest plague, so called after Mr. Scumble's Wictory of the Carthageniums, who has gone for milk for some posset for our dear; who is much better this momin', the Lord a mussy! Dr. Rollix have been, and says we may sit up a little, if taking nourishment prescribed; and pleased to see you we shall be. A pretty creetur, Mr. Ludlow, though thin as thin and low as low: but what can we expect?"

"She is better, then?"

"A deal better, more herself like; though not knowing what she was before, I can't exactly say. Flexor was fine and buffy when he came home last night, after you was gone, sir. Them nasty Titiums, he always gets upset there. And now he's gone to sit to Mr. Potts for--ah, well, some Roman party whose name I never can remember."

"Is your patient up, Mrs. Flexor?"

"Gettin'. We shall be ready to see you in five minutes, sir. I'll go and see to her at once."

Mrs. Flexor retired, and Geoffrey was left to himself for a quarter of an hour standing in the street, during which time he amused himself as most people would under similar circumstances. That is to say, he stared at the houses opposite and at the people who passed; and then he beat his stick against his leg, and then he whistled a tune, and then, having looked at his watch five times, he looked at it for the sixth. Then he walked up the street, taking care to place his foot on the round iron of every coal-shoot; and then he walked down the street, carrying out a determination to step in the exact centre of every flagstone; and then, after he had pulled his beard a dozen times, and lifted his wideawake hat as many, that the air might blow upon his hot forehead, he saw Mrs. Flexor's head protrude from the doorway, and he felt very much inclined to run away. But he checked himself in time, and entered the house, and, after a ghostly admonition from Mrs. Flexor "not to hagitate her," he opened the parlour-door, which Mrs. Flexor duly shut behind him, and entered the room.

Little light ever groped its way between the closely-packed rows of houses in Little Flotsam Street, even on the brightest summer day; and on a dark and dreary winter's morning Mrs. Flexor's little front parlour was horribly dark. The worthy landlady had some wild notion, whence derived no one knew, that an immense amount of gentility was derived from keeping the light out; and consequently the bottom parts of her windows were fitted with dwarf wire-blinds, and the top parts with long linen-blinds, and across both were drawn curtains made of a kind of white fishing-net; so that even so little daylight as Little Flotsam Street enjoyed was greatly diluted in the Flexorian establishment.

But Geoffrey Ludlow saw stretched out on a miserable black horsehair sofa before him there this fragile form which had been haunting his brain for the last twelve hours. Ah, how thin and fragile it was; how small it looked, even in, its worn draggled black-merino dress! As he advanced noiselessly, he saw that the patient slept; her head was thrown back, her delicate white hands (and almost involuntarily Geoffrey remarked that she wore no wedding-ring) were clasped across her breast, and her hair, put off her dead-white face, fell in thick clusters over her shoulders.

With a professional eye Geoffrey saw at once that whatever trouble she might have taken, she could not have been more artistically posed than in this natural attitude. The expression of her eyes was wanting; and, as he sunk into a chair at her feet, her eyes opened upon him. Then he saw her face in its entirety; saw large deep-violet eyes, with dark lashes and eyebrows; a thin, slightly aquiline nose; small thin close lips, and a little chin; a complexion of the deadest white, without the smallest colour and hair, long thick rich luxuriant hair, of a deep, red-god colour--not the poetic "auburn," not the vulgar "carrots;" a rich metallic red, unmistakable, admitting of no compromise, no darkening by grease or confining by fixature--a great mass of deep-red hair, strange, weird, and oddly beautiful. The deep-violet eyes, opening slowly, fixed their regard on his face without a tremor, and with a somewhat languid gaze; then brightening slowly, while the hands were unclasped, and the voice--how well Geoff remembered its tones, and how they thrilled him again!--murmured faintly, "It is you!"

What is that wonderful something in the human voice which at once proclaims the social status of the speaker? The proletary and the roturier, Nature willing, can have as good features, grow as flowing beards, be as good in stature, grace, and agility, as the noblest patrician, or the man in whose veins flows the purest sangre azul; but they fail generally in hands, always in voice. Geoffrey Ludlow, all his weakness and irresolution notwithstanding, was necessarily by his art a student of life and character; and no sooner did he hear those three little words spoken in that tone, than all his floating ideas of shamming tramp or hypocritical streetwalker, as connected with the recipient of his last night's charity, died away, and he recognised at once the soft modulations of education, if not of birth.

But those three words, spoken in deep low quivering tones, while they set the blood dancing in Geoffrey Ludlow's veins, made him at the same time very uncomfortable. He had a dread of anything romantic; and there flashed through his mind an idea that he could only answer this remark by exclaiming, "Tis I!" or "Ay, indeed!" or something else equally absurd and ridiculous. So he contented himself with bowing his head and putting out his hand--into which the long lithe fingers came fluttering instantly. Then with burning cheeks Geoffrey bent forward, and said, "You are better to-day?"

"Oh, so much--so much better! thanks to you, thanks to you!"

"Your doctor has been?" She bowed her head in reply.

"And you have everything you wish for?" She bowed again, this time glancing up--with, O, such a light in the deep-violet eyes--into Geoffrey's face!

"Then--then I will leave you now," said he, awkwardly enough. The glance fell as he said this; but flashed again full and earnest in an instant; the lithe fingers wound round his wrist, and the voice, even lower and more tremulously than before, whispered, "You'll come to-morrow?"

Geoff flushed again, stammered, "Yes, O, by all means!" made a clumsy bow, and went out.

Now this was a short, and not a particularly satisfactory, interview; but the smallest detail of it remained in Geoffrey Ludlow's mind, and was reproduced throughout the remainder of that day and the first portion of the succeeding night, for him to ponder over. He felt the clasp of her fingers yet on his wrist, and he heard the soft voice, "You'll come to-morrow?" It must be a long distance, he thought, that he would not go to gaze into those eyes, to touch that hand, to hear that voice again!

[CHAPTER VII.]

CHEZ POTTS.

Mr. Potts lived in Berners Street, on the second floor of a rambling big old-fashioned house, which in its palmy days had been inhabited by people of distinction; and in which it was rumoured in the art-world that the great Mr. Fuseli had once lived, and painted those horrors which sprung from the nightmare consequent on heavy suppers of pork-chops. But these were the days of its decadence, and each of its floors had now a separate and distinct tenant. The ground-floor was a kind of half showroom, half shop, held by Mr. Lectern, the great church-upholsterer. Specimens of stained-glass windows, croziers, and brass instruments like exaggerated beadles'-staves, gilt sets of communion-service, and splendidly-worked altar-cloths, occupied the walls; the visitor walked up to the desk at which Mr. Lectern presided between groves of elaborately-carved pulpits and reading-desks, and brazen eagles were extending their wings in every available corner. On the first-floor Mdlle. Stetti gave lessons to the nobility, gentry, and the public in general in the fashionable dances of the day, and in the Magyar sceptre-exercises for opening the chest and improving the figure. Mdlle. Stetti had a very large connection; and as many of her pupils were adults who had never learned to dance while they were supple and tender, and as, under the persevering tuition of their little instructress, they gambolled in a cumbrous and rather elephantine manner, they earned for themselves many hearty anathemas from Mr. Potts, who found it impossible to work with anything like a steady hand while the whole house was rocking under the influence of a stout stockbroker doing the "changes," or while the walls trembled at every bound of the fourteen-stone lady from Islington, who was being initiated into the mysteries of the gavotte. But Charley Potts' pipe was the only confidant of his growled anathemas, and on the whole he got on remarkably well with his neighbours; for Mr. Lectern had lent him bits of oak furniture to paint from; and once, when he was ill, Mdlle. Stetti, who was the dearest, cheeriest, hardest-working, best-tempered little creature in existence, had made him broths and "goodies" with her own hand, and when he was well, had always a kind word and a smile for him--and, indeed, revelled in the practical humour and buffoonery of "ce farceur Pott." For Mr. Potts was nothing if not funny; the staircase leading to his rooms began to be decorated immediately after you had passed Mdlle. Stetti's apartments; an enormous hand, sketched in crayon, with an outstretched finger, directed attention to an inscription--"To the halls of Potts!" Just above the little landing you were confronted by a big beef-eater's head, out of the mouth of which floated a balloon-like legend--"Walk up, walk up, and see the great Potts!" The aperture of the letter-box in the door formed the mouth in a capital caricatured head of Charley himself; and instead of a bell-handle there hung a hare's-foot, beneath which was gummed a paper label with a written inscription "Tug the trotter."

Three days after the gathering at the Titian Sketching-Club, Mr. Potts sat in his studio, smoking a pipe, and glaring vacantly at a picture on an easel in front of him. It was not a comfortable room; its owner's warmest friend could not have asserted that. There was no carpet, and the floor was begrimed with the dirt of ages, and with spilt tobacco and trodden-in cigar-ash. The big window was half stopped-up, and had no curtain. An old oak-cabinet against the wall, surmounted by the inevitable plaster torso, and studies of hands and arms, had lost one of its supporting feet, and looked as though momentarily about to topple forward. A table in the middle of the room was crowded with litter, amongst which a pewter-pot reared itself conspicuously. Over an old sofa were thrown a big rough Inverness-cape, a wideawake hat, and a thick stick; while on a broken, ragged, but theatrically-tawdry arm-chair, by the easel, were a big palette already "set," a colour-box, and a sheaf of brushes. Mr. Potts was dressed in a shepherd's-plaid shooting coat, adorned here and there with dabs of paint, and with semi-burnt brown patches, the result of the incautious dropping of incandescent tobacco and vesuvians. He had on a pair of loose rough trousers, red-morocco slippers without heels, and he wore no neckcloth; but his big turned-down shirt-collar was open at the throat. He wore no beard, but had a large sweeping Austrian moustache, which curled fiercely at the ends; had thin brown hair, light blue eyes, and the freshest and healthiest of complexions. No amount of late hours, of drinking and smoking, could apparently have any effect on this baby-skin; and under the influence of cold water and yellow soap, both of which he used in large quantities, he seemed destined to remain--so far as his complexion was concerned--"beautiful for ever,"--or at least until long after Madame Rachel's clients had seen the worthlessness of pigments. Looking at him as he sat there--his back bent nearly double, his eyes fixed on his picture, his pipe fixed stiffly between his teeth, and his big bony hands clasped in front of him--there was no mistaking him for anything but a gentleman; ill-dressed, slatternly, if you like; but a true gentleman, every inch of him.

The "trotter" outside being tugged with tremendous violence, roused him from his reverie, and he got up and opened the door, saying, as he did so, "Why didn't you ring? I would, if I'd been you. You're in the bell-hanging line, I should think, by the way you jerked my wire. Hollo, Bowker, my boy! is it you? What's the matter? Are you chivied by a dun on the staircase, or fainting for a pull at the pewter, that you come with such a ring as that? Bring your body in, old man; there's a wind here enough to shave you."

Mr. Bowker preceded his friend into the room, looked into the pewter-pot, drained it, wiped his beard with a handkerchief; which he took out of his hat, and said, in a solemn deep voice: "Potts, my pipkin, how goes it?"

"Pretty well, old man, pretty well--considering the weather. And you?"

"Your William se porte bien. Hallo!" glancing at the easel, while he took a pipe from his pocket and filled it from a jar on the table; "hallo! something new! What's the subject? Who is the Spanish party in tights? and what's the venerable buffer in the clerical get-up of the period putting out his hand about?"

"Oh, it's a scene from Gil Blas, where the Archbishop of Grenada discharges him, you know."

"No, I don't, and I don't want to hear; your William, dear boy, has discovered that life is too short to have anything explained to him: if he don't see it at first, he let's it pass. The young party's right leg is out of drawing, my chick; just give your William a bit of chalk. There--not being a patient at the Orthopaedic Hospital--that's where his foot would come to. The crimson of the reverend gent's gown is about as bad as anything Ive seen for a long time, dear boy. Hand over the palette and brushes for two minutes. Your William is a rum old skittle; but if there's one thing he knows about, it is colour." And Charley, who knew that, with all his eccentricity, Mr. Bowker, or "your William," as he always spoke of himself; was a thorough master of his art, handed him what he required, and sat by watching him.

A fat bald-headed man with a grizzled beard, a large paunch and flat splay feet, badly dressed and not too clean, Mr. Bowker did not give one the idea of ever having been an "object of interest" to any one save the waiter at the tavern where he dined, or the tobacconist where he bought his Cavendish. But yet there had been a day when bright eyes grew brighter at his approach, tiny ears latticed with chestnut-hair had eagerly drunk in the music of his voice, gentle hands had thrilled beneath his touch. He had bright blue eyes himself then, and long hair, and a slim figure. He was young Mr. Bowker, whose first pictures exhibited at Somerset House had made such a sensation, and who was so much noticed by Sir David Wilkie, and for whom Mr. Northcote prophesied such a future, and whom Mr. Fuseli called a "coot prave poy!" He was the young Mr. Bowker who was recommended by Sir Thomas Lawrence as drawing-master to the lovely young wife of old Mr. Van Den Bosch, the Dutch banker and financier long resident in London. He was "that scoundrel Bowker, sir," who, being wildly romantic, fell head-over-ears in love with his pupil; and finding that she was cruelly ill-treated by the old ruffian her husband, ran away with her to Spain, and by that rash act smashed-up his career and finally settled himself for ever. Old Van Den Bosch got a divorce, and died, leaving all his money to his nephews; and then William Bowker and the woman he had eloped with returned to England, to find himself universally shunned and condemned. His art was as good, nay a thousand times better than ever; but they would not hear of him at the Royal Academy now; would not receive his pictures; would not allow the mention of his name. Patrons turned their backs on him, debts accumulated, the woman for whom he had sacrificed everything died,--penitent so far as she herself was concerned, but adoring her lover to the last, and calling down blessings on him with her latest breath. And then William Bowker strove no more, but accepted his position and sunk into what he was, a kindly, jolly, graceless vagabond, doing no harm, but very little good. He had a little private money on which he lived; and as time progressed, some of his patrons, who found he painted splendidly and cheaply, came back to him and gave him commissions; but he never again attempted to regain his status; and so long as he had enough to supply his simple daily wants, seemed content. He was a great favourite with some half-dozen young men of Charley Potts's set, who had a real love and regard for him, and was never so happy as when helping them with advice and manual assistance.

Charley watched him at his work, and saw with delight the archbishop's robe gradually growing all a-glow beneath the master's touch; and then, to keep him in good-humour and amused, began to talk, telling him a score of anecdotes, and finally asking him if he'd heard anything of Tommy Smalt.

"Tommy Smalt, sir?" cried Bowker, in his cheery voice; "Tommy Smalt, sir, is in clover! Your William has been able to put Tommy on to a revenue of at least thirty shillings a-week. Tommy is now the right-hand man of Jacobs of Newman Street; and the best judges say that there are no Ostades, Jan Steens, or Gerard Dows like Tommy's."

"What do you mean?--copies?"

"Copies! no, sir: originals."

"Originals!"

"Certainly! original Tenierses, of boors drinking; Wouvermanns, not forgetting the white horse; or Jan Steens, with the never-failing episode;--all carefully painted by Tommy Smalt and his fellow-labourers! Ah, Jacobs is a wonderful man! There never was such a fellow; he sticks at nothing; and when he finds a man who can do his particular work, he keeps him in constant employment."

"Well, but is the imposition never detected? Don't the pictures look new?"

"Oh, most verdant of youths, of course not! The painting is clobbered with liquorice-water; and the varnish is so prepared that it cracks at once; and the signature in the corner is always authentic; and there's a genuine look of cloudy vacancy and hopeless bankruptcy about the whole that stamps it at once to the connoisseur as the real thing. Tommy's doing a 'Youth's Head' by Rembrandt now, which ought to get him higher pay; it ought indeed. It's for a Manchester man. They're very hot about Rembrandts at Manchester."

"Well, you've put me up to a new wrinkle. And Jacobs lives by this?"

"Lives by it! ay, and lives like a prince too. Mrs. J. to fetch him every day in an open barouche, and coachman and footman in skyblue livery, and all the little J.'s hanging over the carriage-doors, rendering Newman Street dark with the shadow of their noses. Lives by it! ay, and why not? There will always be fools in the world, thank Heaven!--or how should you and I get on, Charley, my boy?--and so long as people will spend money on what they know nothing about, for the sake of cutting-out their friends, gaining a spurious reputation for taste, or cutting a swell as 'patrons of the fine-arts,'--patrons indeed! that word nearly chokes me!--it's quite right that they should be pillaged and done. No man can love art in the same manner that he can love pancakes. He must know something about it, and have some appreciation of it. Now no man with the smallest knowledge would go to Jacobs; and so I say that the lords and railway-men and cotton-men who go there simply as a piece of duff--to buy pictures as they would carpets--are deuced well served out. There! your William has not talked so much as that in one breath for many a long day. The pewter's empty. Send for some more beer, and let's have a damp; my throat's as dry as a lime-burner's wig."

Charley Potts took up the pewter-measure, and going on to the landing outside the door, threw open the staircase-window, and gave a shrill whistle. This twice repeated had some effect! for a very much-be-ribboned young lady in the bar of the opposite public-house looked up, and nodded with great complaisance; and then Charley, having made a solemn bow, waved the empty quart-pot three times round his head. Two minutes afterwards a bare-headed youth, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his shoulders, crossed the road, carefully bearing a pasteboard hat-box, with which he entered the house, and which he delivered into Mr. Potts' hands.

"Good boy, Richard I never forget the hat-box; come for it this evening, and take back both the empty pewters in it.--It would never do, Bowker, my boy, to have beer--vulgar beer, sir--in its native pewter come into a respectable house like this. The pious parties, who buy their rattletraps and properties of old Lectern down below, would be scandalised; and poor little Mossoo woman Stetti would lose her swell connection. So Caroline and I--that's Caroline in the bar, with the puce-coloured ribbons--arranged this little dodge; and it answers first-rate."

"Ha--a!" said Mr. Bowker, putting down the tankard half-empty, and drawing a long breath; "beer is to your William what what's-his-name is to thingummy; which, being interpreted, means that he can't get on without it. I never take a big pull at a pewter without thinking of our Geoff. How is our Geoff?"

"Our Geoff is--hush! some one coming up stairs. What's to-day? Friday. The day I told the tailor to call. Hush!"

The footsteps came creaking up the stairs until they stopped outside Charley Potts' door, on which three peculiar blows were struck,--one very loud, then two in rapid succession.

"A friend!" said Charley, going to the door and opening it. "Pass, friend, and give the countersign! Hallo, Flexor! is it you? I forgot our appointment for this morning. Come in."

It was, indeed, the great model, who, fresh-shaved, and with his hair neatly poodled under his curly-brimmed hat, entered the room with a swagger, which, when he perceived a stranger, he allowed to subside into an elaborate bow.

"Now then, Flexor, get to work! we won't mind my friend here; he knows all this sort of game of old," said Charley; while Flexor began to arrange himself into the position of the expelled secretary of the archbishop.

"Ay, and I know M. Flexor of old, that's another thing!" said Bowker, with a deep chuckle, expelling a huge puff of smoke.

"Do you, sir?" said Flexor, still rigid in the Gil-Bias position, and never turning his head; "maybe, sir; many gents knows Flexor."

"Yes; but many gents didn't know Flexor five-and-twenty years ago, when he stood for Mercutio discoursing of Queen Mab."

"Lor' a mussy!" cried Flexor, forgetting all about his duty, parting the smoke with his hand and bending down to look into William's face. "It's Mr. Bowker, and I ought to have knowed him by the voice. And how are you, sir? hearty you look, though you'yve got a paucity of nobthatch, and what ''ir you 'ave is that gray, you might be your own grandfather. Why, I haven't seen you since you was gold-medallist at the 'cademy, 'cept once when you come with Mrs.----"

"There, that'll do, Flexor! I'm alive still, you see; and so I see are you. And your wife, is she alive?"

"O yes, sir; but, Lord, how different from what you know'd her! None of your Wenuses, nor Dalilys, nor Nell Gwyns now! she's growed stout and cumbersome, and never sits 'cept some gent wants a Mrs. Primrose in that everlastin' Wicar, or a old woman a-scoldin' a gal because she wants to marry a poor cove, or somethin' in that line; and then I says, 'Well, Jane, you may as well earn a shillin' an hour as any one else,' I says."

"And you've been a model all these years, Flexor?"

"Well, no sir--off and on; but Ive always come back to it. I was a actor for three years; did Grecian stators,--Ajax defyin' the lightnin'; Slave a-listenin' to conspirators; Boy a-sharpenin' his knife, and that game, you know, in a cirkiss. But I didn't like it; they're a low lot, them actors, with no feelin' for art. And then Iwas a gentleman's servant; but that wouldn't do; they do dam' and cuss their servants so, the gentlemen do, as I couldn't stand it; and I was a mute."

"A mute!--what, a funeral mute?"

"Yes, sir; black-job business; and wery good that is,--plenty of pleasant comp'ny and agreeable talk, and nice rides in the summer time on the 'earses to all the pleasant simmetries in the suburbs! But in the winter it's frightful! and my last job I was nearly killed. We had a job at 'Ampstead, in the debth of snow; and it was frightful cold on the top of the 'Eath. It was the party's good lady as was going to be interred, and the party himself were frightful near; in fact, a reg'lar screw. Well, me and my mate had been standin' outside the 'ouse-door with the banners in our 'ands for an hour, until we was so froze we could scarcely hold the banners. So I says, I won't stand no longer, I says; and I gev a soft rap, and told the servant we must have a drop of somethin' short, or we should be killed with cold. The servant goes and tells her master, and what do you think he says? 'Drink!' he says. 'Nonsense!' he says; 'if they're cold, let 'em jump about and warm 'emselves,' he says. Fancy a couple of mutes with their banners in their 'ands a-jumpin' about outside the door just before the party was brought out. So that disgusted me, and I gev it up, and come back to the old game agen."

"Now, Flexor," said Charley, "if you've finished your biography, get back again."

"All right, sir!" and again Flexor became rigid, as the student of Santillane.

"What were we talking of when Flexor arrived? O, I remember; I was asking you about Geoff Ludlow. What of him?"

"Well, sir, Geoff Ludlow has made a thundering coup at last. The other night at the Titians he sold a picture to Stompff for two hundred pounds; more than that, Stompff promised him no end of commissions."

"That's first-rate! Your William pledges him!" and Mr. Bowker finished the stout.

"He'll want all he can make, gentlemen," said Flexor, who, seeing the pewter emptied, became cynical; "he'll want all he can make, if he goes on as he's doin' now."

"What do you mean?" asked Bowker.

"He's in love, Mr. Ludlow is; that's wot I mean. That party--you know, Mr. Potts--as you brought to our place that night--he's been to see her every day, he has; and my missis says, from what she 'ave seen and 'eard--well, that's neither 'ere nor there," said Flexor, checking himself abruptly as he remembered that the keyhole was the place whence Mrs. Flexor's information had been derived.

Charley Potts gave a loud whistle, and said, "The devil!" then turning to Bowker, he was about to tell the story of the wet night's adventure, but William putting up his finger warningly, grunted out "Nachher!" and Charley, who understood German, ceased his chatter and went on with his painting.

When the sitting was over, and Flexor had departed, William Bowker returned to the subject, saying, "Now, Charley, tell your William all about this story of Geoff and his adventure."

Charley Potts narrated it circumstantially, Bowker sitting grimly by and puffing his pipe the while. When he had finished, Bowker never spoke for full five minutes; but his brow was knit, and his teeth clenched round his pipe. At length he said, "This is a bad business, so far as I see; a devilish bad business! If the girl were in Geoff's own station or if he were younger, it wouldn't so much matter; but Geoff must be forty now, and at that age a man's deuced hard to turn from any thing he gets into his head. Well, we must wait and see. I'd rather it were you, Charley, by a mile; one might have some chance then. But you never think of any thing of that sort, eh?"

What made Charley Potts colour as he said, "Welt--not in Geoff's line, at all events?"

William Bowker noticed the flush, and said ruefully, "Ah, I see! Always the way! Now let's go and get some beef or something to eat: I'm hungry."

[CHAPTER VIII.]

THROWING THE FLY.

Mr. Flexor was by nature mendacious; indeed his employers used pleasantly to remark, that when he did not lie, it was simply by accident; but in what he had mentioned to Charley Potts about Geoffrey Ludlow's visits to the nameless female then resident in his, Flexor's, house, he had merely spoken the truth. To be sure there had been an arrière pensée in his remark; the fact being that Flexor objected to matrimony as an institute amongst his patrons. He found that by an artist in a celibate state beer was oftener sent for, donations of cigars were more frequent, cupboards were more constantly unlocked, and irregularities of attendance on his part, consequent on the frivolities of the preceding night, were more easily overlooked, than when there was a lady to share confidence and keys, and to regard all models, both male and female, as "horrid creatures." But although Mr. Flexor had spoken somewhat disparagingly of Geoffrey's frequent visits, and had by his hints roused up a certain amount of suspicion in the breasts of Charley Potts and that grim old cynic William Bowker, he was himself far from knowing what real ground for apprehension existed, or how far matters had progressed, at least with one of the parties concerned.

For Geoffrey Ludlow was hard hit! In vain he attempted to argue with himself that all he had done, was doing, and might do, was but prompted by benevolence. A secret voice within him told him that his attempts at self-deceit were of the feeblest, and that, did he but dare to confess it, he knew that there was in this woman whom he had rescued from starvation an attraction more potent than he had ever yet submitted to. It was, it may be said, his duty to call and see how she was getting on, to learn that she wanted for nothing, to hear from her own lips that his orders for her comfort had been obeyed; but it was not his duty to sit watching jealously every glance of her eye, every turn of her head, every motion of her lithe fingers. It was not his duty to bear away with him recollections of how she sat when she said this or answered that; of the manner in which, following a habit of hers, she would push back the thick masses of her gleaming hair, and tuck them away behind her pretty ears; or, following another habit, she would drum petulantly on the floor with her little foot, when talking of any thing that annoyed her--as, for instance, Mrs. Flexor's prying curiosity.

What was it that caused him to lie awake at night, tossing from side to side on his hot pillow, ever before him the deep-violet eyes, the pallid face set in masses of deep-red hair, the slight frail figure? What was it that made his heart beat loudly, his breath come thickly, his whole being tingle with a strange sensation--now ecstatic delight, now dull blank misery? Not philanthropy, I trow. The superintendents of boys' reformatories and refuges for the houseless poor may, in thinking over what good they have achieved, enjoy a comfortable amount of self-satisfaction and proper pride; but I doubt if the feeling ever rises to this level of excitement. Not much wonder if Geoffrey himself, suffering acutely under the disease, knew not, or refused to avow to himself, any knowledge of the symptoms. Your darling child, peacefully sleeping in his little bed, shall show here and there an angry skin-spot, which you think heat or cold, or any thing else, until the experienced doctor arrives, and with a glance pronounces it scarlet-fever. Let us be thankful, in such a case, that the prostrate patient is young. Geoffrey's was as dire a malady, and one which, coming on at forty years of age, usually places the sufferer in a perilous state. It was called Love; not the ordinary sober inclination of a middle-aged man, not that thin line of fire quivering amongst a heap of ashes which betokens the faded passion of the worn and sated voluptuary; this was boy-love, calf-love, mad-spooniness--any thing by which you can express the silliest, wildest, pleasantest, most miserable phase of human existence. It never comes but once to any one. The caprices of the voluptuary are as like to each other as peas or grains of sand; the platonic attachments or the sentimental liaisons indulged in by foolish persons of both sexes with nothing to do may have some slight shade of distinction, but are equally wanting in backbone and vis. Not to man or woman is it given to be ever twice "in love"--a simple phrase, which means every thing, but needs very little explanation. My readers will comprehend what I want to convey, and will not require my feeble efforts in depicting the state. Suffice it to say, that Geoffrey Ludlow, who had hitherto gone through life scot-free, not because he was case-hardened, not because he was infection-proof, or that he had run no risks, but simply from the merest chance,--now fell a victim to the disease, and dropped powerless before its attack.

He did not even strive to make head against it much. A little of his constitutional wavering and doubtfulness came into play for a short time, suggesting that this passion--for such he must allow it--was decidedly an unworthy one; that at present he knew nothing of the girl's antecedents; and that her actual state did not promise much for all she had to tell of what had gone before. At certain times too, when things present themselves in their least roseate garb, notably on waking in the morning, for instance, he allowed, to himself, that he was making a fool of himself; but the confidence extended no farther. And then, as the day grew, and the sun came out, and he touched up his picture, and thought of the commissions Mr. Stompff had promised him, he became brighter and more hopeful, and he allowed his thoughts to feast on the figure then awaiting him in Little Flotsam Street, and he put by his sheaf of brushes and his palette, and went up and examined himself in the glass over the mantelpiece. He had caught himself doing this very frequently within the last few days, and, half-chuckling inwardly, had acknowledged that it was a bad sign. But though he laughed, he tweaked out the most prominent gray hairs in his beard, and gave his necktie a more knowing twist, and removed the dabs of stray paint from his shooting-coat. Straws thrown up show which way the wind blows, and even such little sacrifices to vanity as these were in Geoffrey Ludlow very strong signs indeed.

He had paid three visits to Little Flotsam Street; and on the fourth morning, after a very poor pretence of work, he was at the looking-glass settling himself preparatory to again setting out. Ever since that midnight adventure after the Titians meeting, Geoffrey had felt it impossible to take his usual daily spell at the easel, had not done five-pounds' worth of real work in the whole time, had sketched-in and taken out, and pottered, and smoked over his canvas, perfectly conscious that he was doing no good, utterly unable to do any better. On this fourth morning he had been even more unsuccessful than usual; he was highly nervous; he could not even set his palette properly, and by no manner of means could he apply his thoughts to his work. He had had a bad night; that is, he had woke with a feeling that this kind of penny-journal romance, wherein a man finds a starving girl in the streets and falls desperately in love with her, could go on no longer in London and in the nineteenth century. She was better now, probably strong enough to get about; he would learn her history, so much of it at least as she liked to tell; and putting her in some way of earning an honest livelihood, take his leave of her, and dismiss her from his thoughts.

He arrived at this determination in his studio; he kept it as he walked through the streets; he wavered horribly when he came within sight of the door; and by the time he knocked he had resolved to let matters take their chance, and to act as occasion might suggest. It was not Mrs. Flexor who opened the door to him, but that worthy woman's youngest plague, Reg'las, who, with a brown eruption produced by liquorice round his lips, nodded his head, and calmly invited the visitor, as he would have done any one else, to "go up 'tairs." Geoffrey entered, patted the boy's head, and stopped at the parlour-door, at which he gave a low rap, and immediately turning the handle, walked in.

She was lying as usual on the sofa, immediately opposite the door; but, what he had never seen before, her hair was freed from the confining comb, and was hanging in full luxuriance over her shoulders. Great heavens, how beautiful she looked! There had been a certain piquancy and chic in her appearance when her hair had been taken saucily off her face and behind her ears; but they were nothing as compared to the profound expression of calm holy resignation in that dead-white face set in that deep dead-gold frame of hair. Geoff started when he saw it; was it a Madonna of Raphael's, or a St. Teresa of Guido's, which flashed across his mind? And as he looked she raised her eyes, and a soft rosy flush spread over her face, and melted as quickly as it came. He seated himself on a chair by her side as usual, and took her hand as usual, the blood tingling in his fingers as he touched hers--as usual. She was the first to speak.

"You are very early this morning. I scarcely expected you so soon--as you may see;" and with a renewed flush she took up the ends of her hair, and was about to twist them up, when Geoffrey stopped her.

"Leave it as it is," said he in a low tone; "it could not be better; leave it as it is."

She looked at him as he spoke; not a full straight glance, but through half-closed lids; a prolonged gaze,--half-dreamy, half-intense; then released her hair, and let it again fall over her shoulders in a rich red cloud.