THE CLOVEN FOOT

THE CLOVEN FOOT
A Novel
BY THE AUTHOR OF
‘LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,’ ‘AURORA FLOYD,’
ETC.
Stereotyped Edition.
LONDON
JOHN AND ROBERT MAXWELL
MILTON HOUSE, SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET
[All rights reserved]

CONTENTS.

THE CLOVEN FOOT.

CHAPTER I.

THE HEIR PRESUMPTIVE.

The air was thick with falling snow, and the country side looked a formless mass of chilly whiteness, as the south-western mail train carried John Treverton on a lonely midnight journey. There were not many people in the train on that bleak night, and Mr. Treverton had a second-class compartment to himself.

He had tried to sleep, but had failed ignominiously in the endeavour, waking with a start, after five minutes’ doze, and remaining broad awake for an hour at a time pondering upon the perplexities of his life, and hating himself for the follies that had made it what it was. It had been a very hard life of late, for the world had gone ill with John Treverton. He had begun his career with a small fortune and a commission in a crack regiment, and, after wasting his patrimony and selling his commission, he was now a gentleman at large, living as best he might, no one but himself knew how.

He was going to a quiet village in Devonshire, a far-away nook under the shadow of Dartmoor, in obedience to a telegram that told him a rich kinsman was dying, and summoned him to the death-bed. The day had been when he hoped to inherit this kinsman’s property; not because the old man had ever cared for him, but because he, John, was the only relative Jasper Treverton had in the world; but that hope had vanished when the lonely old bachelor adopted an orphan girl to whom he was reported to have attached himself strongly. The ci-devant Captain had never seen this young person, and it is not to be supposed that he cherished very kindly feelings towards her. He had made up his mind that she was a deep and designing creature, who would, of course, play her cards in such a manner as to induce old Jasper Treverton to leave her everything.

‘He never bore me or mine much goodwill,’ John Treverton said to himself, ‘but he might have left his money to me for want of anyone else to leave it to, if it hadn’t been for this girl.’

During almost the whole of that dreary night journey he was meditating on this subject, half inclined to be angry with himself for having taken such useless trouble for the sake of a man who was not likely to leave him sixpence.

He was not an utterly bad fellow, this John Treverton, though his better and purer feelings had been a good deal blunted by rough contact with the world. He had a frank, winning manner, and a handsome face, a face which had won him the love of more than one woman, with little profit to himself. He was a man of no strong principle, and with a self-indulgent nature that had led him into wrong-doing very often during the last ten years of his life. He had an easy temper, a habit of looking at the pleasanter side of things so long as there was any pleasantness in them, and a chronic avoidance of all serious thought—qualities which do not serve to make up a strong character. But the charm of his manner was none the less because of this latent weakness of character, and he was better liked than many better men.

The train stopped at a little rustic station, forty miles westward of Exeter, about an hour after midnight—a dreary building with an open platform, across which the wind blew and the snow drifted as John Treverton alighted, the one solitary passenger to be deposited at this out-of-the-way place. He knew that the house to which he had to go was some miles from the station, and he applied himself at once to the sleepy station-master to ascertain if there were any possibility of procuring a conveyance at that time of night.

‘There’s a gig waiting for a gentleman from London,’ the man answered, stifling a yawn. ‘I suppose you are the party, sir.’

‘A gig from Treverton Manor?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Thanks, yes; I am the person that is expected. Civil, at any rate,’ John Treverton added to himself, as he walked off to the gig, wrapped to the eyes in his great coat, and with a railway rug across his shoulder.

He found a gig, with a rough-looking individual of the gardener species waiting for him in the snow.

‘Here I am, my man,’ he cried cheerily. ‘Have you been waiting long?’

‘No, sir. Miss Malcolm said as how you’d come by this train.’

‘Miss Malcolm sent you for me, then?

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And how is Mr. Treverton to-night?’

‘Mortal bad, sir. The doctors say as th’ old gentleman hasn’t many hours to live. And Miss Malcolm, she says to me, “Jacob, you’re to drive home as fast as th’ horse can go, for papa is very anxious to see Mr. John before he dies.” She allus calls the old gentleman papa, you see, sir, he having adopted of her ten years ago, and brought her up as his own daughter like ever since.’

They had jolted over the uneven stones of a narrow street, the high street of a small settlement which evidently called itself a town, for here, at a point where two narrow lanes branched off from the central thoroughfare, there stood a dilapidated old building of the town-hall species, and a vaulted market-place with iron railings and closely-locked gates shutting in emptiness. John Treverton perceived dimly through the winter darkness an old stone church, and at least three Methodist chapels. Then, all in a moment, the town was gone, and the gig was rattling along a Devonshire lane, between high banks and still higher hedges, above which rose a world of hill and moor, that melted far off into the midnight sky.

‘And your master is very fond of this young lady, Miss Malcolm?’ John Treverton inquired presently, when the horse, after rattling along for a mile and a half at a tremendous pace, was slowly climbing a hill which seemed to lead nowhere in particular, for one could hardly imagine any definite end or aim in a lane that went undulating like a snake amidst a chaos of hills.

‘Oncommon, sir. You see, she’s about the only thing he has ever cared for.’

‘Is she as much liked by other people?’

‘Well, yes, sir, in a general way Miss Malcolm is pretty well liked, but there is some as think her proud—think her a little set up as you may say, by Mr. Treverton’s making so much of her. She’s not one to make friends very easy; the young ladies in the village, Squire Carew’s daughters, and such like, haven’t taken to her as much as they might have done. I’ve heard my wife—as has been parlour-maid at the Manor for the last twenty years—say as much many a time. But Miss Malcolm is a pleasant-spoken young lady, for all that, to those she likes, and my Susan has had no fault to find with her. You see all of us has our peculiarities, sir, and it ain’t to be supposed as Miss Malcolm would be without hers,’ the man concluded in an argumentative tone.

‘Humph!’ muttered John Treverton. ‘A stuck-up young lady, I dare say—and a deep one into the bargain. Did you ever hear who she was—what her position was, and so on—when my cousin Jasper adopted her?’ he asked aloud.

‘No, sir. Mr. Treverton has kept that oncommon close. He’d been away from the Manor a twelvemonth when he brought her home without a word of warning to any one in the house, and told his old housekeeper as how he’d adopted this little girl—who was an orphan—the daughter of an old friend of his, and that’s all he ever said about her from that time to this. Miss Malcolm was about seven or eight year old at that time, as pretty a little girl as you could see—and she has grown up to be a beautiful young woman.’

Beautiful. Oh, this artful young person was beautiful, was she? John Treverton determined that her good looks should have no influence upon his opinions.

The man was quite willing to talk, but his companion asked no more questions. He felt, indeed, that he had already asked more than he was warranted in asking, and felt a little ashamed of himself for having done so. The rest of the drive, therefore, passed for the most part in silence. The journey had seemed long to John Treverton, partly because of his own impatience, partly on account of the numerous ups and downs of that everlasting lane, but it was little more than half-an-hour after leaving the station when they entered a village street where there was not a glimmer of light at this hour, except one solitary lamp shining feebly before the door of the general shop and post-office. This was the village of Hazlehurst, near which Hazlehurst Manor-house was situated. They drove to the end of this quiet street and along a high road bordered by tall elms which looked black against the night sky, till they came to a pair of great iron gates.

The man handed the reins to his companion, and then dismounted and opened these gates. John Treverton drove slowly into a winding carriage drive that led up to the house, a great red-brick mansion with many long, narrow windows, and a massive carved stone shell over the door, which was approached on each side by a flight of broad stone steps.

There was light enough from the stars for John Treverton to see all this as he drove slowly up to the hall door. His coming had evidently been awaited anxiously, as the door was opened before he had alighted from the gig, and an old man-servant peered out into the night. He opened the door wide when he saw John Treverton. The gardener—or groom, whichever he might happen to be—led the gig slowly away to a gate at the side of the house, opening into a stable yard. John Treverton went into the hall, which looked very bright and cheerful after his dreary drive—a great, square hall hung with family portraits and old armour, and with crimson sheep-skins and tawny hides of savage beasts lying about on the black and white marble pavement. There was a roomy old fireplace on one side of this hall, with a great fire burning in it, a fire which was welcome as meat and drink to a traveller this cold night. There were ponderous carved oak chairs with dark-red velvet cushions, looking more comfortable and better adapted for the repose of the human frame than such chairs are wont to be, and at the end of the hall there was a great antique buffet adorned with curious bowls and bottle-shaped jars in Oriental china.

John Treverton had time to see these things as he sat before the fire with his long legs stretched out upon the hearth, while the old servant went to announce his arrival to Miss Malcolm.

‘A pleasant old place,’ he said to himself. ‘And to think of my never having seen it before, thanks to my father’s folly in having quarrelled with old Jasper Treverton, and never having taken the trouble to heal the breach, as he might have done, I dare say, with some slight exercise of diplomacy. I wonder whether the old fellow is very rich. Such a place as this might be kept up on a couple of thousand a year, but I have a notion that Jasper Treverton has six times as much as that.’

The old butler came downstairs in about five minutes to say that Miss Malcolm would be pleased to see Mr. Treverton, if he liked. His master had fallen asleep, and was sleeping more peacefully than he had done for some time.

John Treverton followed the man up a broad staircase with massive oak bannisters. Here, as in the hall, there were family portraits on the walls, and armour and old china in every available corner. At the top of this staircase was a gallery, lighted by a lantern in the roof, and with numerous doors opening out of it. The butler opened one of these doors and ushered John Treverton into a bright-looking, lamp-lit sitting-room, with panelled walls. A heavy green damask curtain hung before a door opening into an adjoining room. The mantelpiece was high, and exquisitely carved with flowers and cupids, and was ornamented by a row of eggshell cups and saucers, and the quaintest of Oriental teapots. The room had a comfortable, homelike look, John Treverton thought—a look that struck him all the more perhaps because he had no settled home of his own, nor had ever known one since his boyhood.

A lady was sitting by the fire, dressed in a dark-blue gown, which contrasted wonderfully with the auburn tints of her hair, and the transparent pallor of her complexion. As she rose and turned her face towards John Treverton, he saw that she was indeed a very beautiful young woman, and there was something in her beauty which took him a little by surprise, in spite of what he had heard from his companion in the gig.

‘Thank God you have come in time, Mr. Treverton,’ she said earnestly—an earnestness which John Treverton was inclined to consider hypocritical. What interest could she have in his arrival? What feeling could there be between them but jealousy?

‘I suppose she feels so secure about the old man’s will that she can afford to be civil,’ he thought as he seated himself by the fireside, after two or three polite commonplaces about his journey. ‘There is no hope of my cousin’s recovery, I suppose?’ he hazarded presently.

‘Not the faintest,’ Laura Malcolm answered, very sadly. ‘The London physician was here for the last time to-day. He has been down every week for the last two months. He said to-day that there would be no occasion for him to come any more; he did not think papa—I have always called your cousin by that name—could live through the night. He has been less restless and troubled since then, and he is now sleeping very quietly. He may linger a little longer than the physician seemed to think likely; but beyond that I have no hope whatever.’

This was said with a quiet, restrained manner that was more indicative of sorrow than any demonstrative lamentation could have been. There was something almost like despair in the girl’s look and tone—a dreary hopelessness—as if there were nothing left for her in life when the friend and protector of her girlhood should be taken from her. John Treverton watched her closely as she sat looking at the fire, with her dark eyes shrouded by their long lashes. Yes, she was very beautiful. That was a fact about which there was no possibility of doubt. Those large hazel eyes alone would have given a charm to the plainest face, and in this face there was no fault to be redeemed.

‘You seem to be much attached to my cousin, Miss Malcolm,’ Mr. Treverton said presently.

‘I love him dearly,’ she answered, looking up at him with those deep, dark eyes, which had a melancholy expression to-night. ‘I have had no one else to care for since I was quite a child; and he has been very good to me. I should be something worse than ungrateful if I did not love him as I do.’

‘And yet your life must have been a trying one, as the sole companion of an old man of Jasper Treverton’s eccentric temper. I speak of him as I have heard him described by my father. You must have found existence with him rather troublesome now and then, I should think.’

‘I very soon learnt to understand him, and to bear all the little changes in his humour. I knew that his heart was noble.’

‘Humph!’ thought John Treverton. ‘Women can do these things better than men. I couldn’t stand being shut up with a crusty old fellow for a week.’

And after having made this reflection, he thought that no doubt Miss Malcolm was of the usual type of sycophants and interlopers, able to endure anything in the present for the chance of a stupendous advantage in the future, able to wait for the fruition of her hopes with a dull, grovelling patience.

‘This appearance of grief is all put on, of course,’ he said to himself. ‘I am not going to think any better of her because she has fine eyes.’

They sat for a little time in silence; Laura Malcolm seemed quite absorbed by her own thoughts, and in no way disturbed by the presence of John Treverton. It was a proud face which he looked at every now and then so thoughtfully, not a lovable face by any means, in spite of its beauty. There was a coldness of expression, a self-contained air about Miss Malcolm which her new acquaintance was inclined to dislike. He had come to that house prepared to think unfavourably of her; had come there, indeed, with a settled dislike to her.

‘I think it is to you I am indebted for the telegram that summoned me here?’ he said by-and-by.

‘Oh, no, not to me directly. It was your cousin’s wish that you should be sent for—a wish he only expressed on Monday, though I had asked him many times if he would not like to see you, his only surviving relative. Had I known your address, or where a letter would reach you, I think I should have ventured to ask you to come down without his permission, but I had no knowledge of this.’

‘And it was only the day before yesterday that my cousin spoke of me for the first time?’

‘Only the day before yesterday. On every previous occasion he gave me a short, impatient answer, telling me not to worry him, and that he had no wish to see anyone, but on Monday he mentioned your name, and told me he wanted particularly to see you. He had no idea where you were to be found, but he thought a telegram addressed to your father’s old lawyer would reach you. I sent the message as he directed.’

‘The lawyer had some difficulty in hunting me out, but I lost no time after I got your message. I cannot, of course, pretend any attachment to a man whom I never saw in my life, but I am pleased that Jasper Treverton should have thought of me at the last, nevertheless. I am here to testify my respect for him, in a perfectly independent character, having not the faintest expectation of inheriting one shilling of his wealth.’

‘I don’t know why you should not expect to inherit his estate, Mr. Treverton,’ Laura Malcolm answered, quietly. ‘To whom else should he leave it, if not to you?’

John Treverton thought this question a piece of gratuitous hypocrisy.

‘Why, to you, of course,’ he replied, ‘his adopted daughter, who have earned his favour by years of patient submission to all his whims and fancies. Surely you must be quite aware of his intentions upon this point, Miss Malcolm, and this affected ignorance of the subject is intended to hoodwink me.’

‘I am sorry you should think so badly of me, Mr. Treverton. I do not know how your cousin has disposed of his money, but I do know that none of it has been left to me.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I have been assured of it by his own lips, not once but many times. When he first adopted me he made a vow that he would leave me no part of his wealth. He had been treated with falsehood and ingratitude by those he had loved, and had found out their mercenary feelings about him. This had soured him a good deal, and he was determined—when he took me under his care out of motives of the purest charity—that he would have one person about him who should love him for his own sake, or not pretend to love him at all. He took an oath to this effect on the night he first brought me home to this house, and fully explained the meaning of that oath to me, though I was quite a child at that time. “I have had toadies and sycophants about me, Laura,” he said, “until I have come to distrust every smiling face. Your smiles shall be true, my dear, for you shall have no motive for falsehood.” On my eighteenth birthday he placed in trust six thousand pounds for my benefit, in order that his death should not leave me unprovided for, but he took occasion at the same time to remind me that this gift was all I must ever expect at his hands.’

John Treverton heard this with a quickened breath, and a new life and eagerness in the expression of his face. The aspect of affairs was quite altered by the fact of this oath sworn long ago by the eccentric old man. He must leave his money to some one. What if he should, indeed, leave it to him, John Treverton?

For some few minutes his heart beat high with a new hope, and then sank again suddenly. Was it not much more likely that Jasper Treverton would find some means of evading the letter of his vow, for the benefit of a beloved adopted daughter, than that he should bequeath his fortune to a kinsman who was a stranger to him?

‘Don’t let me be a fool,’ John Treverton said to himself; ‘there’s not the faintest chance of any such luck for me, and I dare say this girl knows as much, though she is artful enough to pretend complete ignorance of the old man’s designs.’

The butler came in presently to announce that supper was ready for Mr. Treverton in the dining-room below. He went downstairs in answer to this summons, after begging Miss Malcolm to send for him the moment the invalid awoke.

The dining-room was handsomely furnished with massive sideboard and chairs of carved oak, the long, narrow windows draped with dark-red velvet. There was a fine old Venetian glass over the sideboard, and a smaller circular mirror above the old inlaid bureau that occupied the space between the windows opposite. There were a few good cabinet pictures of the Dutch school on the panelled walls, and a pair of fine blue-and-white Delft jars on the high carved oak chimney-piece. A wood fire burned cheerily in the wide grate, and the small round table on which the traveller’s supper had been laid was wheeled close to the edge of the Turkey hearthrug, and had a very comfortable appearance in the eyes of Mr. John Treverton as he seated himself in one of the capacious oak chairs.

In his disturbed state of mind he had little inclination to eat, though the cook had prepared a cosy supper that might have tempted an anchorite; but he did justice to a bottle of excellent claret, and sat for some time, sipping his wine and looking about him thoughtfully, now at the curious old silver tankards and rose-water dishes on the sideboard, now at the Cuyps and Ostades on the dark oak walls. To whom would all these things belong when Jasper Treverton was no more? Throughout the house there were indications of wealth that inspired an almost savage longing in this man’s mind. What a changed life his would be if he should inherit only half of his cousin’s possessions! He thought, with a weary sigh, of the wretched hand-to-mouth existence that he had led of late years, and then thought of the things that he would do if he came in for any share of the old man’s money. He sat meditating thus until the servant came to tell him that Mr. Treverton was awake and had asked to see him. He followed the man back to the study, where he had found Miss Malcolm. The room was empty now, but the curtain was drawn aside from the door of communication, and he passed through this into Jasper Treverton’s bedroom.

Laura Malcolm was seated at the bedside, but she rose as John entered, and slipped quietly away by another door, leaving him alone with his cousin.

‘Sit down, John,’ the old man said in a feeble voice, pointing to the empty chair by the bedside.

‘It is rather late in the day for us two to meet,’ he went on, after a brief pause, ‘but perhaps it is better for us to see each other once before I die. I won’t speak of your father’s quarrel with me. You know all about that, I dare say. We were both in the wrong, very likely; but it has long been too late to undo that. I loved him once, God knows!—Yes, there was a day when I loved Richard Treverton dearly.’

‘I have heard him say as much, sir,’ John answered in subdued tones. ‘I regret that he should have quarrelled with you; I regret much more that he should not have sought a reconciliation.’

‘Your father was always a proud man, John. Perhaps I liked him all the better for that. Most men in his position would have courted me for the sake of my money. He never did that.’

‘It was not in him to do it, sir. He had his faults, I have no doubt, but a sordid nature was not one of them.’

‘I know that,’ answered Jasper Treverton, ‘nor have you ever sought me out, John, or tried to worm yourself into my favour. Yet I suppose you know that you are my sole surviving relative.’

‘Yes, sir, I am quite aware of that.’

‘And you have left me in peace, and have been content to take your chance. Well, you will find yourself none the worse off for having respected yourself and not worried me.’

John Treverton’s face flushed, and the beating of his heart quickened again, as it had quickened when Laura Malcolm told him of his kinsman’s vow.

‘My death will make you a rich man,’ returned Jasper, always speaking with a painful effort, and in so low a voice that John was obliged to bend over his pillow in order to hear him, ‘on one condition—a condition which I do not think you will find it difficult to comply with.’

‘You are very good, sir,’ faltered the young man, almost too agitated to speak. ‘Believe me, I had no expectation of this.’

‘I dare say not,’ replied the other. ‘I took a foolish oath some years ago, and bound myself not to leave my fortune to the only creature I really love. To whom else should I leave it then, but to you—my next of kin? I know nothing against you. I have lived too remote from the world to hear its scandals, and I know not whether you have won good or evil repute among your fellow men; but I do know that you are the son of a man I once loved, and that it will be in your power to carry out my wishes in the spirit, if not in the letter. The rest I trust to Providence.’

After having said this the dying man lay back upon the pillows, and remained silent for some minutes, resting after the exertion involved in so long a speech. John Treverton waited for him to speak again—waited with a tumultuous sense of gladness in his breast, looking round the room now and then. It was a spacious apartment, with handsome antique furniture, and panelled walls hung with old pictures, like those in the dining-room below. Dark-green velvet curtains were closely drawn before the three lofty windows, and in the spaces between them there were curious old cabinets of carved ebony, inlaid with silver. John Treverton looked at all these things, which seemed to be his already, after what the dying man had said to him. How different from the home he had left, the shabby-genteel London lodging, with its tawdry finery and decrepit chairs and tables!

‘What do you think of my adopted daughter, John Treverton?’ the old man asked presently, turning his dim eyes towards his cousin.

The younger man hesitated a little before replying. The question had taken him by surprise. His thoughts had been far away from Laura Malcolm.

‘I think she is very handsome, sir,’ he said, ‘and I dare say she is amiable; but I really have had very little opportunity of forming any opinion about the young lady.’

‘No, you have seen nothing of her as yet. You will like her better when you come to know her. I cannot doubt that. Her father and I were warm friends, once upon a time. We were at Oxford together, and travelled a good deal in Spain and Italy together, and loved each other well enough, I believe, till circumstances parted us. I need have no shame in owning the cause of our parting now. We loved the same woman, and Stephen Malcolm won her. I thought—whether rightly or wrongly—that I had not been fairly treated in the matter, and Stephen and I parted, never to meet as friends again till Stephen was on his death-bed. The lady jilted him after all, and he did not marry until some years later. When I heard of him next he was in reduced circumstances. I sought him out, found him in a pitiable condition and adopted his daughter—an only child—doubly orphaned. I cannot tell you how dear she soon became to me, but I had made an oath I would leave her nothing, and I have not broken that oath, dearly as I love her.’

‘But you have made some provision for her future, sir?’

‘Yes, I have striven to provide for her future. God grant it may be a happy one. And now call my servant, if you please, John. I have talked a great deal too much as it is.’

‘Only one word before I call the man. Let me tell you, sir, that I am grateful,’ said John Treverton, kneeling down beside the bed, and taking the old man’s wasted hand in his.

‘Prove it when I am gone, John, by trying to carry out my wishes. And now good-night. You had better go to bed.’

‘Will you allow me to sit with you for the rest of the night, sir? I have not the least inclination to sleep.’

‘No, no, there would be no use in your sitting up. If I am well enough to see you again in the morning I will do so. Till then, good-bye.’

The old man’s tone was decisive. John Treverton went out of the room by a door that opened on the gallery. Here he found Jasper Treverton’s valet, a grave-looking, grey-haired man, dozing upon a window seat. He told this man that he was wanted in the sick room, and then went to the study.

Miss Malcolm was still there, sitting in a thoughtful attitude, looking at the fire.

‘What do you think of him?’ she asked, looking up suddenly, as John Treverton entered the room.

‘He does not seem to me so ill as I expected to see him from your account. He has spoken to me with perfect clearness.’

‘I am very glad of that. He seemed a good deal better after that long sleep. I will ring for Trimmer to show you your room, Mr. Treverton.’

‘Are you not going to bed yourself, Miss Malcolm? It is nearly three o’clock.’

‘No. I cannot sleep during this time of suspense. Besides, he may want me at any moment. I shall lie down on that sofa, perhaps, a little before morning.’

‘Have you been keeping watch like this many nights?’

‘For more than a week; but I am not tired. I think when the mind is so anxious the body has no capability of feeling fatigue.’

‘You will find the reaction very severe by-and-by, I fear,’ Mr. Treverton replied; and Trimmer, the old butler, having appeared by this time with a candle, he wished Miss Malcolm good-night.

The room to which Trimmer led John Treverton was on the other side of the house—a large room, with a comfortable fire blazing on the hearth, and reflecting itself in a border of old Dutch tiles. Late as it was, Mr. Treverton sat by the fire thinking for a long time before he went to bed, and even when he did lie down under the shadow of the damask curtains that shrouded the gloomy-looking four-post bed, sleep kept aloof from him. His mind was busy with thoughts of triumph and delight. Innumerable schemes for the future—selfish ones for the most part—crowded and jostled each other in his brain. It was a feverish night altogether—a night which left him unrefreshed and haggard when the cold wintry light came creeping in between the window curtains, and a great clock in the stable yard struck eight.

A countryfied-looking young man, a subordinate of the butler’s, brought the visitor his shaving water, and, on being questioned, informed him that Mr. Treverton the elder had passed a restless night, and was worse that morning.

John Treverton dressed quickly, and went straight to the study next the invalid’s room. He found Laura Malcolm there, looking very wan and pale after her night’s watching. She confirmed the young man’s statement. Jasper Treverton was much worse. His mind had wandered towards daybreak, and he now seemed to recognise no one. His old friend the vicar had been with him, and had read the prayers for the sick, but the dying man had been able to take no part in them. The end was very near at hand, Laura feared.

Mr. Treverton stopped with Miss Malcolm a little while, and then wandered down to the dining-room, where he found an excellent breakfast waiting for him in solitary state. He fancied that the old butler treated him with a peculiar deference, as if aware that he was to be the new master of Treverton Manor. After breakfast he went out into the gardens, which were large, and laid out in an old-fashioned style; straight walks, formal grass-plats, and flower-beds of geometrical design. John Treverton walked here for some time, smoking his cigar and looking up thoughtfully at the great red-brick house with its many windows glittering in the chill January sunshine, and its air of old-world repose.

‘It will be the beginning of a new life,’ he said to himself. ‘I feel myself ten years younger since my interview with the old man last night. Let me see—I shall be thirty on my next birthday. Young enough to begin life afresh—old enough to use wealth wisely.’

CHAPTER II.

JASPER TREVERTON’S WILL.

Jasper Treverton lingered nearly a week after the coming of his kinsman—a week that seemed interminable to the expectant heir, who could not help wishing the old man would make a speedy end of it. What use was that last remnant of life to him lying helpless on his bed, restless, weary, and for the greater part of his time delirious? John Treverton saw him for a few minutes once or twice every day, and looked at him with a sympathising and appropriate expression of countenance, and did really feel compassionately towards him; but his busy thoughts pressed forward to the time when he should have the handling of that feeble sufferer’s wealth, and should be free to begin that new life, bright glimpses whereof shone upon his roving fancy like visions of paradise.

After six monotonous days, every one of which was exactly like the other for John Treverton, who smoked his solitary cigar in the wintry garden, and ate his solitary meals in the great dining-room with his mind always filled by that one subject—the inheritance which seemed so nearly within his grasp—the night came upon which Jasper Treverton’s feeble hold of life relaxed altogether, and he drifted away to the unknown ocean, with his hand in Laura Malcolm’s, and his face turned towards her, with a wan smile upon the faded lips, as he died. After this followed three or four days of wearisome delay, in which the quiet of the darkened rooms seemed intolerable to John Treverton, to whom death was an unfamiliar horror. He avoided the house in these days as much as possible, and spent the greater part of his time in long rambles out into the open country, leaving all the arrangements of the funeral to Mr. Clare, the vicar, who had been Jasper Treverton’s closest friend, and a Mr. Sampson, an inhabitant of the village, who had been the dead man’s solicitor.

The funeral came at last, a very quiet ceremonial, in accordance with Jasper Treverton’s express desire, and the master of Treverton Manor was laid in the vault where many of his ancestors slept the last long sleep. There was a drizzling rain and a low, lead-coloured sky, beneath which the old churchyard looked unspeakably dismal; but John Treverton’s thoughts were far away as he stood by the open grave, while the sublime words of the service fell unheard upon his ear. To-morrow he would be back in London, most likely, with the consciousness of wealth and power, inaugurating that new life which he thought of so eagerly.

He went back to the house, where it was a relief to find the blinds drawn up and the dull gray winter light in the rooms. The will was to be read in the drawing-room—a very handsome room, with white-and-gold panelling, six long windows, and a fireplace at each end. Here Mr. Sampson, the lawyer, seated himself at a table to read the will, in the presence of Mr. Clare, the vicar, Laura Malcolm, and the upper servants of the Manor-house, who took their places in a little group near the door.

The will was very simply worded. It commenced with some bequests to the old servants, a small annuity to Andrew Trimmer, the butler, and sums varying from fifty to two hundred pounds to the coachman and women servants. There was a complimentary legacy of a hundred guineas to Thomas Sampson, and a bequest of old plate to Theodore Clare, the vicar. After these things had been duly set forth the testator went on to leave the remainder of his property, real and personal, to his cousin, John Treverton, provided the said John Treverton should marry his dearly-beloved adopted daughter, Laura Malcolm, within one year of his decease. The estate was to be held in trust during this interval by Theodore Clare and Thomas Sampson, together with all moneys therefrom arising. In the event of this marriage not taking place within the said time, the whole of the estate was to pass into the hands of the said Theodore Clare and the said Thomas Sampson, in trust for the erection of a hospital in the adjacent market town of Beechampton.

Miss Malcolm looked up with a startled expression as this strange bequest was read. John Treverton’s face assumed a sudden pallor that was by no means flattering to the lady whose fate was involved in the singular condition which attached to his inheritance. The situation was an awkward one for both. Laura rose directly the reading of the will was finished, and left the room without a word. The servants retired immediately after, and John Treverton was left alone with the vicar and the lawyer.

‘Allow me to congratulate you, Mr. Treverton,’ said Thomas Sampson, folding up the will, and coming to the fireplace by which John Treverton was seated; ‘you will find yourself a very rich man.’

‘A twelvemonth hence, Mr. Sampson,’ the other answered doubtfully, ‘always provided that Miss Malcolm is willing to accept me for her husband, which she may not be.’

‘She will scarcely fly in the face of her adopted father’s desire, Mr. Treverton.’

‘I don’t know about that. A woman seldom cares for a husband of any one else’s choosing. I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, or to seem ungrateful to my cousin Jasper, from whom I entertained no expectations whatever a week or so ago: but I cannot help thinking he would have done better by dividing his property between Miss Malcolm and myself, leaving us both free.’

He spoke in a slow, meditative way, and he was pale to the very lips. There was no appearance of triumph or gladness—only an anxious, disappointed expression, which made his handsome face look strangely worn and haggard.

‘There are not many men who would think Laura Malcolm an encumbrance to any fortune, Mr. Treverton,’ said Mr. Clare. ‘I think you will be happier in the possession of such a wife than in the enjoyment of your cousin’s wealth, large as it is.’

‘In the event of the lady’s accepting me as her husband,’ John Treverton again interposed doubtfully.

‘You have an interval of a twelvemonth in which to win her,’ replied the vicar, ‘and things will go hard with you if you fail. I think I can answer for the fact that Miss Malcolm’s affections are disengaged. Of course she, like yourself, is a little startled by the eccentricity of this condition. The position is much more embarrassing for her than for you.’

John Treverton did not reply to this remark, but there was a very blank look in his face as he stood by the fire listening to the vicar’s and the lawyer’s praises of his departed kinsman.

‘Will Miss Malcolm continue to occupy this house?’ he asked presently.

‘I scarcely know what her wishes may be,’ replied Mr. Clare, ‘but I think it would be well if the house were placed at her disposal. I suppose that we as trustees would have power to make her such an offer, Mr. Sampson, with Mr. Treverton’s concurrence.’

‘Of course.’

‘I concur most heartily in any arrangement that may be agreeable to the young lady,’ John Treverton said, in rather a mechanical way. ‘I suppose there is nothing further to detain me here. I can go back to town to-morrow.’

‘Wouldn’t you like to go over the estate before you return to London, Mr. Treverton?’ asked Thomas Sampson. ‘It would be just as well for you to see the extent of a property that is pretty sure to be your own. If you don’t mind taking things in a plain way, I should be very much pleased by your spending a week or so at my house. There’s no one knows the estate better than I do, and I can show you every rood of it.’

‘You are very kind, Mr. Sampson. I shall be glad to accept your hospitality.’

‘That’s what I call friendly. When will you come over to us? This evening? We are all to dine together, I believe. Why shouldn’t you go home with me after dinner? Your presence here can only embarrass Miss Malcolm.’

Having accepted the lawyer’s invitation, John Treverton did not care how soon his visit took place, so it was agreed that he should walk over to ‘The Laurels’ with Mr. Sampson that evening after dinner. But before he went it would be necessary to take some kind of farewell of Laura Malcolm, and the idea of this was now painfully embarrassing to him. It was a thing that must be done, however, and it would be well that it should be done at a seasonable hour; so in the twilight, before dinner, he went up to the study, which he knew was Miss Malcolm’s favourite room, and found her there with an open book lying on her lap and a small tea-tray on the table by her side.

She looked up at him without any appearance of confusion, but with a very pale, sad face. He seated himself opposite her, and it was some moments before he could find words for the simple announcement he had to make. That calm, beautiful face, turned towards him with a grave, expectant look, embarrassed him more than he could have imagined possible.

‘I have accepted an invitation from Mr. Sampson to spend a few days with him before I go back to town, and I have come to bid you good-bye, Miss Malcolm,’ he said at last. ‘I fancied that at such a time as this it would be pleasanter for you to feel yourself quite alone.’

‘You are very good. I do not suppose I shall stay here many days.’

‘I hope you will stay here altogether. Mr. Sampson and Mr. Clare, the trustees, wish it very much. I do not think that I have much power in the affair; but believe me, it is my earnest desire that you should not be in a hurry to leave your old home.’

‘You are very good. I do not think I could stay here alone in this dear old house, where I have been so happy. I know some respectable people in the village who let lodgings. I think I would rather remove to their house as soon as my trunks are packed. I have plenty to live upon, you know, Mr. Treverton. The six thousand pounds your cousin gave me yields an income of over two hundred a year.’

‘You must consult your own wishes, Miss Malcolm. I cannot presume to interfere with your views, anxious as I am for your welfare.’

This was about as much as he would venture to say at this early stage of affairs. He felt his position indescribably awkward, and he wondered at Laura Malcolm’s composure. What ought he to say or do? What could he say that would not seem dictated by the most sordid motive? What disinterested feeling could there ever arise between those two, who were bound together by their common interest in a great estate, who met as strangers to find themselves suddenly dependent upon each other’s caprice?

‘I may call upon you before I leave Hazlehurst, may I not, Miss Malcolm?’ he asked presently, with a kind of desperation.

‘I shall be happy to see you whenever you call.’

‘You are very kind. I’ll not intrude on you any longer this evening, for I am sure you must want quiet and perfect rest. I must go down to dinner with Mr. Sampson and the vicar—rather a dreary kind of entertainment I fear it will be. Good-bye.’

He offered her his hand for the first time since they had met. Hers was very cold, and trembled a little as she gave it to him. He detained it rather longer than he was justified in doing, and looked at her for the first time with something like tender pity in his eyes. Yes, she was very pretty. He would have liked her face better without that expression of coldness and pride, but he could not deny that she was beautiful, and he felt that any young man might be proud to win such a woman for his wife. He did not see his own way to winning her, however; and it seemed to him as if the fortune he had so built upon during all his reveries lately, was now removed very far out of his reach.

The dinner was not such a dismal feast as he had imagined it would be. People are apt to accustom themselves very easily to an old friend’s removal, and the vicar and the lawyer seemed tolerably cheerful about their departed neighbour. They discussed his little eccentricities, his virtues and his foibles, in an agreeable spirit, and did ample justice to his claret, of which, however, Mr. Clare said he had never been quite so good a judge as he had believed himself to be. They sat for a couple of hours over their dessert, sipping some Burgundy of which Jasper Treverton had been especially proud, and John Treverton was the only one of the three who seemed troubled by gloomy thoughts.

It was ten o’clock when Mr. Sampson proposed an adjournment to his own abode. He had sent a little note home to his sister before dinner, telling her of Mr. Treverton’s intended visit, and had ordered a fly from the inn, in which vehicle he and his guest drove to ‘The Laurels,’ a trim, bright-looking, modern house, with small rooms which were the very pink of neatness; so neat and new-looking, indeed, that John Treverton fancied they could never have been lived in, and that the furniture must have been sent home from the upholsterer that very day.

Thomas Sampson was a young man, and a bachelor. He had inherited an excellent business from his father, and had done a good deal to improve it himself, having a considerable capacity for getting on in life, and an ardent love of money-making. He had one sister, who lived with him. She was tolerably good-looking, in a pale, insipid way, with eyes of a cold light blue, and straight, silky hair of a nondescript brown.

This young lady, whose name was Eliza, welcomed John Treverton with much politeness. There were not many men in the neighbourhood of Hazlehurst who could have borne comparison with that splendid military-looking stranger, and Miss Sampson, who did not yet know the terms of Jasper Treverton’s will, supposed that this handsome young man was now master of the Manor and all its dependencies. For his sake she had bestowed considerable pains on the adornment of the spare bedroom, which she had embellished with more fanciful pincushions, and ring-stands and Bohemian glass scent-bottles, than are consistent with the masculine idea of comfort. For his gratification also she had ordered a reckless expenditure of coals in the keeping up of a blazing fire in the same smartly-furnished chamber, which looked unspeakably small and mean to the eyes of John Treverton after the spacious rooms at the Manor-house.

‘I know of a room that will look meaner still,’ he said to himself, ‘for this at least is clean and neat.’

He went to bed, and slept better than he had done for many nights, but his dreams were full of Laura Malcolm. He dreamt that they were being married, and that as she stood beside him at the altar her face changed in some strange, ghastly way into another face, a face he knew only too well.

CHAPTER III.

A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR.

The next day was fine, and Mr. Sampson and his visitor set out in a dogcart directly after breakfast on a tour of inspection. They got over a good deal of ground between an eight o’clock breakfast and a six o’clock dinner, and John Treverton had the pleasure of surveying many of the broad acres that were in all probability to be his own; but the farms which lay within a drive of Hazlehurst did not constitute a third of Jasper Treverton’s possessions. Mr. Sampson told his companion that the estates were worth about eleven thousand a year altogether, besides which there was an income of about three thousand more accruing from money in the funds. The old man had begun life with only six thousand a year, but some of his land bordered closely on the town of Beechampton, and had developed from agricultural land into building land in a manner that had increased its value seven-fold. He had lived quietly, and had added to his estate year after year by fresh purchases and investments, until it reached its present amount. To hear of such wealth was like some dream of fairyland to John Treverton. Mr. Sampson spoke of it as if to all intents and purposes it were already in the other’s possession. His sound legal mind could not conceive the possibility of any sentimental objection on the part of either the gentleman or the lady to the carrying out of a condition which was to secure the possession of that noble estate to both. Of course, in due time Mr. Treverton would make Miss Malcolm a formal offer, and she would accept him. Idiocy so abject on the part of either the gentleman or the lady as a refusal to comply with so easy a condition was scarcely within the limits of human folly.

Looking at the matter from this point of view, Mr. Sampson was surprised to perceive a certain air of gloom and despondency about his companion which seemed quite unnatural to a man in his position. John Treverton’s eye kindled with a gleam of triumph as he gazed across the broad, bare fields which the lawyer showed him; but in the next minute his face grew sombre again, and he listened to the description of the property with an absent air that was inexplicable to Thomas Sampson. The solicitor ventured to say as much by-and-by, when they were driving homeward through the winter dusk.

‘Well, you see, my dear Sampson, there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip,’ John Treverton answered, with that light, airy tone which most people found particularly agreeable. ‘I must confess that the manner in which this estate has been left is rather a disappointment to me. My cousin Jasper told me that his death would make me a rich man. Instead of this I find myself with a blank year of waiting before me, and with my chances of coming into possession of this fortune entirely dependent upon the whims and caprices of a young lady.’

‘You don’t suppose for a moment that Miss Malcolm will refuse you?’

John Treverton was so long before he answered this question that the lawyer presently repeated it in a louder tone, fancying that it had not been heard upon the first occasion.

‘Do I think she’ll refuse me?’ repeated Mr. Treverton, in rather an absent tone. ‘Well, I don’t know about that. Women are apt to have romantic notions on the money question. She has enough to live upon, you see. She told me as much last night, and she may prefer to marry some one else. The very terms of this will are calculated to set a high-spirited girl against me.’

‘But she would know that in refusing you she would deprive you of the estate, and frustrate the wishes of her friend and benefactor. She’d scarcely be so ungrateful as to do that. Depend upon it, she’ll consider it her duty to accept you—not a very unpleasant duty either, to marry a man with fourteen thousand a year. Upon my word, Mr. Treverton, you seem to have a very poor opinion of yourself, when you imagine the possibility of Laura Malcolm refusing you.’

John Treverton made no reply to this remark, and was silent during the rest of the drive. His spirits improved, or seemed to improve a little at dinner, however, and he did his best to make himself agreeable to his host and hostess. Miss Sampson thought him the most agreeable man she had ever met, especially when he consented to sit down to chess with her after dinner, and from utter listlessness and absence of mind allowed her to win three games running.

‘What do you think of Miss Malcolm, Mr. Treverton?’ she asked, by-and-by, as she was pouring out the tea.

‘You mustn’t ask Mr. Treverton any questions on that subject, Eliza,’ said her brother, with a laugh.

‘Why not?’

‘For a reason which I am not at liberty to discuss.’

‘Oh, indeed!’ said Miss Sampson, with a sudden tightening of her thin lips. ‘I had no idea—at least I thought—that Laura Malcolm was almost a stranger to Mr. Treverton.’

‘And you’re quite right in your supposition, Miss Sampson,’ answered John Treverton, ‘nor is there any reason why the subject should be tabooed. I think Miss Malcolm very handsome, and that her manner is remarkable for grace and dignity—and that is all I am able to think about her at present, for we are, as you say, almost strangers to each other. As far as I could judge she seemed to me to be warmly attached to my cousin Jasper.’

Eliza Sampson shook her head rather contemptuously.

‘She had reason to be fond of him,’ she said. ‘Of course you are aware that she was completely destitute when he brought her home, and her family were, I believe, a very disreputable set.’

‘I fancy you must be mistaken, Miss Sampson,’ John Treverton answered, with some warmth. ‘My cousin Jasper told me that Stephen Malcolm had been his friend and fellow-student at the University. He may have died poor, but I heard nothing which implied that he had fallen into disreputable courses.’

‘Oh, really,’ said Miss Sampson; ‘of course you know best and no doubt whatever your cousin told you was correct. But to tell the truth Miss Malcolm has never been a favourite of mine. There’s a reserve about her that I’ve never been able to get over. I know the gentlemen admire her very much, but I don’t think she’ll ever have many female friends. And what is of so much consequence to a young woman as a female friend?’ concluded the lady sententiously.

‘Oh, the gentlemen admire her very much, do they?’ repeated John Treverton. ‘I suppose, then, she has had several opportunities of marrying already?’

‘I don’t know about that, but I know of one man who is over head and ears in love with her.’

‘Would it be any breach of confidence on your part to say who the gentleman is?’

‘Oh, dear, no. I found out the secret for myself, I assure you. Miss Malcolm has never condescended to tell me anything about her affairs. It is Edward Clare, the vicar’s son. I have seen them a good deal together. He used to be always making some excuse for dropping in at the Manor-house to talk to Mr. Treverton about old books, and papers for the Archæological Society, and so on, and anybody could see that it was for Miss Malcolm’s sake he spent so much of his time there.’

‘Do you think she cared about him?’

‘Goodness knows. There’s no getting at what she thinks about anyone. I did once ask her the question, but she turned it off in her cold, haughty way, saying that she liked Mr. Clare as a friend, and all that kind of thing.’

Thomas Sampson had looked rather uneasy during this conversation.

‘You mustn’t listen to my sister’s foolish gossip, Treverton,’ he said; ‘it’s hard enough to keep women from talking scandal anywhere, but in such a place as this they seem to have nothing else to do.’

John Treverton had taken his part in this conversation with a keener interest than he was prepared to acknowledge himself capable of feeling upon the subject of Laura Malcolm. What was she to him, that he should feel such a jealous anger against this unknown Edward Clare? Were not all his most deeply-rooted feelings in her disfavour? Was she not rendered unspeakably obnoxious to him by the terms of his kinsman’s will?

‘There’s something upon that man’s mind, Eliza,’ said Mr. Sampson, as he stood upon the hearthrug, warming himself in a thoughtful manner before the fire for a few minutes, after his guest had gone to bed. ‘Mark my words, Eliza, there’s something on John Treverton’s mind.’

‘What makes you think so, Tom?’

‘Because he’s not a bit elated about the property that he has come into, or will come into in a year’s time. And it isn’t in human nature for a man to come into fourteen thousand a year which he never expected to inherit, and take it as coolly as this man takes it.’

‘What do you mean by a year’s time, Tom? Hasn’t he got the estate now?’

‘No, Eliza; that’s the rub.’ And Mr. Sampson went on to explain to his sister the terms of Jasper Treverton’s will, duly warning her that she was not to communicate her knowledge of the subject to anyone, on pain of his lasting displeasure.

Thomas Sampson was too busy next day to devote himself to his guest; so John Treverton went for a long ramble, with a map of the Treverton Manor estate in his pocket. He skirted many a broad field of arable and pasture land, and stood at the gates of farmhouse gardens, looking at the snug homesteads, the great barns and haystacks, the lazy cattle standing knee-deep in the litter of a straw-yard, and wondering whether he should ever be master of these things. He walked a long way, and came home with a slow step and a thoughtful air in the twilight. About a mile from Hazlehurst he emerged from a narrow lane on to a common, across which there was a path leading to the village. As he came out of this lane he saw the figure of a lady in mourning a little way before him. Something in the carriage of the head struck him as familiar; he hurried after the lady, and found himself walking beside Laura Malcolm.

‘You are out rather late, Miss Malcolm,’ he said, not knowing very well what to say.

‘It gets dark so quickly at this time of the year. I have been to see some people at Thorley, about a mile and a half from here.’

‘You do a great deal of visiting among the poor, I suppose?’

‘Yes, I have been always accustomed to spend two or three days a week amongst them. They have come to know me very well, and to understand me, and, much as people are apt to complain of the poor, I have found them both grateful and affectionate.’

John Treverton looked at her thoughtfully. She had a bright colour in her cheeks this evening, a rosy tint which lighted up her dark eyes with a brilliancy he had never seen in them before. He walked by her side all the way back to Hazlehurst, talking first about the villagers she had been visiting, and afterwards about her adopted father, whose loss she seemed to feel deeply. Her manner this evening appeared perfectly frank and natural, and when John Treverton parted from her at the gates of the Manor-house, it was with the conviction that she was no less charming than she was beautiful.

And yet he gave a short, impatient sigh as he turned away from the great iron gates to walk to The Laurels, and it was only by an effort that he kept up an appearance of cheerfulness through the long evening, in the society of the two Sampsons and a bluff, red-cheeked gentleman-farmer, who had been invited to dinner, and to take a hand in a friendly rubber afterwards.

John Treverton spent the following day in the dogcart with Mr. Sampson, inspecting more farms, and getting a clearer idea of the extent and nature of the Treverton property that lay within a drive of Hazlehurst. He told his host that he would be compelled to go back to town by an early train on the next morning. After dinner that evening Mr. Sampson had occasion to retire to his office for an hour’s work upon some important piece of business, so John Treverton, not very highly appreciating the privilege of a prolonged tête-à-tête with the fair Eliza, put on his hat and went out of doors to smoke a cigar in the village street.

Some fancy, he scarcely knew what, led him towards the Manor-house; perhaps because the lane outside the high garden wall at the side of the house was a quiet place for the smoking of a meditative cigar. In this solitary lane he paced for some time, coming round to the iron gates two or three times to look across the park-like grounds at the front of the house, whose closely-shuttered windows showed no ray of light.

‘I wonder if I could be a happy man,’ he asked himself, ‘as the master of that house, with a beautiful wife and an ample fortune? There was a time when I fancied I could only exist in the stir and bustle of a London life, but perhaps, after all, I should not make a bad country gentleman if I were happy.’

On going back to the lane after one of these meditative pauses before the iron gates, John Treverton was surprised to find that he was no longer alone there. A tall man, wrapped in a loose great-coat, and with the lower part of his face hidden in the folds of a woollen scarf, was walking slowly to and fro before a narrow little wooden door in the garden wall. In that uncertain light, and with so much of his face hidden by the brim of his hat and the folds of his scarf, it was impossible to tell what this man was like, but John Treverton looked at him with a very suspicious feeling as he passed him near the garden door, and walked on to the end of the lane. When he turned back he was surprised to see that the door was open, and that the man was standing on the threshold, talking to some one within. He went quickly back in order to see, if possible, who this some one was, and as he came close to the garden door he heard a voice that he knew very well indeed—the voice of Laura Malcolm.

‘There is no fear of our being interrupted,’ she said. ‘I would rather talk to you in the garden.’

The man seemed to hesitate a little, muttered something about ‘the servants,’ and then went into the garden, the door of which was immediately shut.

John Treverton was almost petrified by this circumstance. Who could this man be whom Miss Malcolm admitted to her presence in this stealthy manner? Who could he be except some secret lover, some suitor she knew to be unworthy of her, and whose visits she was fain to receive in this ignoble fashion. The revelation was unspeakably shocking to John Treverton; but he could in no other manner account for the incident which he had just witnessed. He lit another cigar, determined to wait in the lane till the man came out again. He walked up and down for about twenty minutes, at the end of which time the garden door was re-opened, and the stranger emerged and walked hastily away, John following him at a respectable distance. He went to an inn not far from the Manor-house, where there was a gig waiting for him, with a man nodding sleepily over the reins. He jumped lightly into the vehicle, took the reins from the man’s hands and drove away at a smart pace, very much to the discomfiture of Mr. Treverton, who had not been able to see his face, and who had no means of tracing him any further. He did, indeed, go into the little inn and call for soda-water and brandy, in order to have an excuse for asking who the gentleman was who had just driven away; but the innkeeper knew nothing more than that the gig had stopped before his door half-an-hour or so, and that the horse had had a mouthful of hay.

‘The man as stopped with the horse and gig came in for a glass of brandy to take out to the gentleman,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t see the gentleman’s face.’

John Treverton went back to The Laurels after this, very ill at ease. He determined to see Miss Malcolm next morning before he left Hazlehurst, in order, if possible, to find out something about this mysterious reception of the unknown individual in the loose coat. He made his plans, therefore, for going to London by an afternoon train, and at one o’clock presented himself at the Manor-house.

Miss Malcolm was at home, and he was ushered once more into the study, where he had first seen her.

He told her of his intended departure, an announcement which was not calculated to surprise her very much, as he had told her the same thing when they met on the common. They talked a little of indifferent subjects; she with perfect ease of manner, he with evident embarrassment; and then, after rather an awkward pause, he began:—

‘Oh, by the way, Miss Malcolm, there is a circumstance which I think it my duty to mention to you. It is perhaps of less importance than I am inclined to attach to it, but in a lonely country house like this one cannot be too careful. I was out walking rather late last night, smoking my solitary cigar, and I happened to pass through the lane at the side of these grounds.’

He paused a moment. Laura Malcolm gave a perceptible start, and he fancied that she was paler than she had been before he began to speak of this affair; but her eyes met his with a steady, inquiring look, and never once faltered in their gaze as he went on:—

‘I saw a tall man, very much muffled up in an overcoat and neckerchief—with his face quite hidden, in fact—walking up and down before the little door in the wall, and five minutes afterwards I was surprised by seeing the door opened, and the man admitted to the garden. The secret kind of way in which the thing was done was calculated to alarm anyone interested in the inmates of this house. I concluded, of course, that it was one of the servants who admitted some follower of her own in this clandestine manner.’

He could not meet Laura Malcolm’s eyes quite steadily as he said this, but the calm scrutiny of hers never changed. It was John Treverton who faltered and looked down.

‘Some follower of her own,’ Miss Malcolm repeated. ‘You know, then, that the person who let this stranger into the garden was a woman?’

‘Yes,’ he answered, not a little startled by her self-possession. ‘I heard a woman’s voice. I took the trouble to follow the man when he came out again, and I discovered that he was a stranger to this place, a fact which, of course, makes the affair so much the more suspicious. I know that robberies are generally managed by collusion with some servant, and I know that the property in this house is of a kind to attract the attention of professional burglars. I considered it, therefore, my duty to inform you of what I had seen.’

‘You are very good, but I can fortunately set your mind quite at rest with regard to the plate and other valuables in this house. The man you saw last night is not a burglar, and it was I who admitted him to the garden.’

‘Indeed?’

‘Yes. He is a relation of mine, who wished to see me without making his appearance here the subject of gossip among the Hazlehurst people. He wrote to me, telling me that he was about to travel through this part of the country, and asking me to give him a private interview. It suited his humour best to come to this place after dark, and to leave it unobserved, as he thought.’

‘I trust you will not think me intrusive for having spoken of this subject, Miss Malcolm?’

‘Not at all. It was natural you should be interested in the welfare of the house.’

‘And in yours. I hope that you will believe that was nearer my thoughts than any sordid fears as to the safety of the old plate and pictures. And now that I am leaving Hazlehurst, Miss Malcolm, may I venture to ask your plans for the future?’

‘They are scarcely worth the name of plans. I intend moving from this house to the lodgings I spoke of the other day; that is all.’

‘Don’t you think you will find living alone very dull? Would it not be better for you to go into a school, or some place where you could have society?’

‘I have thought of that, but I don’t fancy I should quite like the monotonous routine of a school. I am prepared to find my life a little dull, but I am very fond of this place, and I am not without friends here.’

‘I can quite imagine that. You ought to have many friends in Hazlehurst.’

‘But I have not many friends. I have not the knack of forming friendships. There are only two or three people in the world whose regard I feel sure of, or who seem to understand me.’

‘I hope your heart is not quite inaccessible to new claims. There is a subject which I dare not speak of just yet, which it might be cruel to urge upon you at a time when I know your mind is full of grief for the dead; but when the fitting time does come I trust I may not find my case quite hopeless.’

He spoke with a hesitation which seemed strange in so experienced a man of the world. Laura Malcolm looked up at him with the same steady gaze with which her eyes had met his when he spoke of the incident of the previous night.

‘When the fitting time comes you will find me ready to act in obedience to the wishes of my benefactor,’ she answered quietly. ‘I do not consider that the terms of his will are calculated to secure happiness for either of us; but I loved him too dearly—I respect his memory too sincerely to place myself in opposition to his plans.’

‘Why should not our happiness be secured by that will, Laura?’ John Treverton asked, with sudden tenderness. ‘Is there no hope that I may ever win your love?’

She shook her head sadly.

‘Love very seldom grows out of a position such as ours, Mr. Treverton.’

‘We may prove a happy exception to the general rule. But I said I would not talk of this subject to-day. I only wish you to believe that I am not altogether mercenary—that I would rather forego this fortune than force a hateful alliance upon you.’

Miss Malcolm made no reply to this speech, and after a few minutes’ talk upon indifferent subjects, John Treverton wished her good-bye.

‘She would accept me,’ he said to himself as he left the house. ‘Her words seemed to imply as much; the rest remains with me. The ice has been broken, at any rate. But who can that man be, and why did he visit her in such a secret, ignominious manner? If we were differently circumstanced, if I loved her, I should insist upon a fuller explanation.’

He went back to The Laurels, to bid his friends the Sampsons good-bye. The lawyer was ready to drive him over to the station, and made him promise to run down to Hazlehurst again as soon as he was able, and to make The Laurels his headquarters on that and all other occasions.

‘You’ll have plenty of love-making to do between this and the end of the year,’ Mr. Sampson said, facetiously.

He was in very good spirits, having that morning made an advance of money to Mr. Treverton on extremely profitable terms, and he felt a personal interest in that gentleman’s courtship and marriage.

John Treverton went back to town in almost as thoughtful a mood as that in which he had made the journey to Hazlehurst. Plan his course as he might, there was a dangerous coast ahead of him, which he doubted his ability to navigate. Very far away gleamed the lights of the harbour, but between that harbour and the frail bark that carried his fortunes how many shoals and rocks there were whose perils he must encounter before he could lie safe at anchor?

CHAPTER IV.

LA CHICOT.

About this time there appeared among the multifarious placard which adorned the dead walls and hoardings and railway arches and waste spaces of London one mystical dissyllable, which was to be seen everywhere.

Chicot. In gigantic yellow capitals on a black ground. The dullest eye must needs see it, the slowest mind must needs be stirred with vague wonder. Chicot! What did it mean? Was it a name or a thing? A common or a proper noun? Something to eat or something to wear? A quack medicine for humanity, or an ointment to cure the cracked heels of horses? Was it a new vehicle, a patent cab destined to supersede the world-renowned Hansom, or a new machine for cutting up turnips and mangold-wurzel? Was it the name of a new periodical? Chicot! There was something taking in the sound. Two short, crisp syllables, tripping lightly off the tongue. Chicot! The street arabs shouted the word as a savage cry, neither knowing nor caring what it meant. But before those six-sheet posters had lost their pristine freshness most of the fast young men about London, the medical students and articled clerks, the dapper gentlemen at the War Office, the homelier youths from Somerset House, the shining-hatted City swells who came westward as the sun sloped to his rest, knew all about Chicot. Chicot was Mademoiselle Chicot, premiere danseuse at the Royal Prince Frederick Theatre and Music-hall, and she was, according to the highest authorities on the Stock Exchange and in the War Office, quite the handsomest woman in London. Her dancing was distinguished for its audacity rather than for high art. She was no follower of the Taglioni school of saltation. The grace, the refinement, the chaste beauties of that bygone age were unknown to her. She would have ‘mocked herself of you’ if you had talked to her about the poetry of motion. But for flying bounds across the stage—for wild pirouettings on tiptoe—for the free use of the loveliest arms in creation—for a bold backward curve of a full white throat more perfect than ever sculptor gave his marble bacchanal, La Chicot was unrivalled.

She was thoroughly French. Of that there was no doubt. She was no scion of the English houses of Brown, Jones, or Robinson, born and bred in a London back slum, and christened plain Sarah or Mary, to be sophisticated later into Celestine or Mariette. Zaïre Chicot was a weed grown on Gallic soil. All that there was of the most Parisian La Chicot called herself; but her accent and many of her turns of phrase belied her, and to the enlightened ear of her compatriots betrayed her provincial origin. The loyal and pious province of Brittany claimed the honour of La Chicot’s birth. Her innocent childhood had been spent among the fig-trees and saintly shrines of Auray. Not till her nineteenth year had she seen the long, dazzling boulevards stretching into unfathomable distance before her eyes; the multitudinous lamps; the fairy-like kiosks—all infinitely grander and more beautiful than the square of Duguesclin at Dinan illuminated with ten thousand lampions on a festival night. Here in Paris life seemed an endless festival.

Paris is a mighty schoolmaster, a grand enlightener of the provincial intellect. Paris taught La Chicot that she was beautiful. Paris taught La Chicot that it was pleasanter to whirl and bound among serried ranks of other Chicots in the fairy spectacle of ‘The Sleeping Beauty,’ or the ‘Hart with the Golden Collar,’ clad in scantiest drapery, but sparkling with gold and spangles, with hair flowing wild as a Mænad’s, and satin boots at two napoleons the pair, than to toil among laundresses on the quay. La Chicot had come to Paris to get her living, and she got it very pleasantly for herself as a member of the corps de ballet, a cypher in the sum total of those splendid fairy spectacles, but a cypher whose superb eyes and luxuriant hair, whose statuesque figure and youthful freshness did not fail to attract the notice of individuals.

She was soon known as the belle of the ballet, and speedily made herself obnoxious to the principal dancers, who resented her superior charms as an insolence, and took every occasion to snub her. But while her own sex was unkind, the sterner sex showed itself gentle to la belle Chicot. The ballet-master taught her steps which he taught to none other of the sisterhood under his tuition; he made opportunities for giving her a solo dance now and then; he pushed her to the front; and at his advice she migrated from the large house where she was nobody, to a smaller house in the students’ quarter, a popular little theatre on the left bank of the Seine, amidst a labyrinth of narrow streets and tall houses between the School of Medicine and the Sorbonne, where she soon became everybody. C’était le plus gentil de mes rats, cried the ballet-master regretfully, when La Chicot had been tempted away. Cette petite ira loin, said the manager, vexed with himself for having let his handsomest coryphée slip through his fingers; elle a du chien.

At the Students’ Theatre it was that La Chicot met with her fate, or in other words, it was here that her husband first saw her. He was an Englishman, leading a rather wild life in this students’ quarter of Paris, living from hand to mouth, very poor, very clever, very badly qualified to get his own living. He was gifted with those versatile talents which rarely come to a focus or achieve any important result. He painted, he etched, he sang, he played on three or four instruments with taste and fancy, but little technical skill; he wrote for the comic papers, but the comic papers generally rejected or neglected his contributions. If he had invented a lucifer match, or originated an improvement in the sewing-machine, he might have carved his way to fortune; but these drawing-room accomplishments of his hardly served to keep him from starving. Not a very eligible suitor, one would imagine, for a young lady from the provinces who wished to make a great figure in life; but he was handsome, well-bred, with that unmistakable air of gentle birth which neither poverty nor Bohemianism can destroy, and in the opinion of La Chicot the most fascinating man she had ever seen. In a word, he admired the lovely ballet-dancer, and the ballet-dancer adored him. It was an infatuation on both sides—his first great passion and hers. Both were strong in their faith in their own talents and the future; both believed that they had only to live in order to become rich and famous. La Chicot was not of a calculating temper. She was fond of money, but only of money to spend in the immediate present; money for fine dresses, good dinners, wine that foamed and sparkled, and plenty of promenading in hired carriages in the Bois de Boulogne. Money for the future, for sickness, for old age, for the innumerable necessities of life, she never thought of. Without having ever read Horace, or perhaps ever having heard of his existence, she was profoundly Horatian in her philosophy. To snatch the pleasure of the day, and let to-morrow take care of itself, was the beginning and end of her wisdom. She loved the young Englishman, and she married him, knowing that he had not a napoleon beyond the coin that was to pay for their wedding dinner, utterly reckless as to the consequences of their marriage, and as ignorant and unreasoning in her happiness as a child. To have a handsome man—a gentleman by birth and education—for her lover and slave,—to have the one man who had ensnared her fancy tied to her apron-string for ever,—this was La Chicot’s notion of happiness. She was a strong-minded young woman, who to this point had made her way in life unaided by relatives or friends, uncared for, uncounselled, untaught, a mere straw upon the tide of life, but not without a fixed idea of her own as to where she wanted to drift. She desired no guardianship from a husband. She did not expect him to work for her, or support her; she was quite resigned to the idea that she was to be the breadwinner. This child of the people set a curious value upon the name gentleman. The fact that her husband belonged to a superior race made up, in her mind, for a great many shortcomings. That he should be variable, reckless, a creature of fits and starts, beginning a picture with zeal in the morning, to throw it aside with disgust in the evening, seemed only natural. That was race. Could you put a hunter to the same kind of work which the patient packhorse performs without a symptom of revolt? La Chicot hugged the notion of her husband’s superiority to that drudging herd from which she had sprung. His very vices were in her mind virtues.

They were married, and as La Chicot was a person of some importance in her own small world, while the young Englishman had done nothing to distinguish himself, the husband came somehow to be known by the name of the wife, and was spoken of everywhere as Monsieur Chicot.

It was an odd kind of life which these two led in their meagrely-furnished rooms on the third floor of a dingy house in a dingy street of the students’ quarter; an odd, improvident, dissipated life, in which night was turned into day, and money spent like water, and nothing desired or obtained out of existence except pleasure, the gross, sensual pleasures of dining and drinking; the wilder pleasure of play, and moonlight drives in the Bois; the Sabbath delights of free-and-easy rambles in rural neighbourhoods, beside the silvery Seine, on the long summer days, when a luxurious idler could rise at noon without feeling the effort too hard a trial; winding up always with a dinner at some rustic house of entertainment, where there was a vine-curtained arbor that one could dine in, and where one could see the dinner being cooked in a kitchen with a wide window opening on yard and garden, and hear the balls clicking in the low-ceiled billiard-room. There were winter Sundays, when it seemed scarcely worth one’s while to get up at all, till the scanty measure of daylight had run out, and the gas was aflame on the boulevards, and it was time to think of where one should dine. So the Chicots spent the first two years of their married life, and it may be supposed that an existence of this kind quite absorbed Madame Chicot’s salary, and that there was no surplus to be put by for a rainy day. Had La Chicot inhabited a world in which rain and foul weather were unknown, she could not have troubled herself less about the possibilities of the future. She earned her money gaily, and spent it royally; domineered over her husband on the strength of her superb beauty; basked in the sunshine of temporary prosperity; drank more champagne than was good for her constitution or her womanhood; grew a shade coarser every year; never opened a book or cultivated her mind in the smallest degree; scorned all the refinements of life; looked upon picturesque scenes and rustic landscapes as a fitting background for the riot and drunkenness of a Bohemian picnic, and as good for nothing else; never crossed the threshold of a church, or held out her hand in an act of charity; lived for herself and her own pleasure; and had no more conscience than the butterflies, and less sense of duty than the birds.

If Jack Chicot had any compunction about the manner in which he and his wife were living, and the way they spent their money, he did not give any expression to his qualms of conscience. It may be that he was restrained by a false sense of delicacy, and that he considered his wife had a right to do what she liked with her own. His own earnings were small, and intermittent—a water-colour sketch sold to the dealers, a dramatic criticism accepted by the director of a popular journal. Money that came so irregularly went as it came.

‘Jack comes to have sold a picture!’ cried the wife; ‘that great impostor of mine has taken it into his head to work. Let us go and dine at the “Red Mill.” Jack shall make the cost.’

And then it was but to whistle for a couple of light open carriages, which, in this city of pleasure, stand in every street, tempting the idler to excursionize; to call together the half-dozen chosen friends of the moment, and away to the favourite restaurant to order a private room and a little dinner, bien soigné, and one’s particular brand of champagne, and then, hey for a drive in the merry green wood, while the marmitons are perspiring over their casseroles, and anon back to a noisy feast, eaten in the open air, perhaps, under the afternoon sunshine, for La Chicot has to be at her theatre before seven, since at eight all Bohemian Paris will be waiting, eager and open-mouthed, to see the dancer with wild eyes and floating hair come bounding on to the stage. La Chicot was growing more and more like a Thracian Mænad as time went on. Her dancing was more audacious, her gestures more electrical. There was a kind of inspiration in those wild movements, but it was the inspiration of a Bacchante, not the calm grace of dryad or sea-nymph. You could fancy her whirling round Pentheus, mixed with the savage throng of her sister Mænads, thirsting for vengeance and murder; a creature to be beheld from afar with wondering admiration, but a being to be shunned by all lovers of peaceful lives and tranquil paths. Those who knew her best used to speak pretty freely about her in the second year of her wedded life, and her third season at the Théâtre des Etudiants.

‘La Chicot begins to drink like a fish,’ said Antoine, of the orchestra, to Gilbert, who played the comic fathers. ‘I wonder whether she beats her husband when she has had too much champagne?’

‘They lead but a cat-and-dog sort of life, I believe,’ answered the comedian; ‘one day all sunshine, the next stormy weather. Renaud, the painter, who has a room on the same story, tells me that it sometimes hails cups and saucers and empty champagne-bottles when the weather is stormy in the Chicot domicile. But those two are desperately fond of each other all the same.’

‘I should not appreciate such fondness,’ said the fiddler; ‘when I marry it will not be for beauty. I would not have as handsome a wife as La Chicot if I could have her for the asking. A woman of that stamp is created to be the torment of her husband’s life. I find that this Jack is not the fellow he used to be before he married. C’est un garçon bémolisé par le mariage.’

When the Chicots had been man and wife for about three years—a long apprenticeship of bliss or woe—the lady’s power of attracting an audience to the little theatre in the students’ quarter began visibly to wane. The parterre grew thin, the students yawned or talked to each other in loud whispers while the dancer was executing her most brilliant steps. Even her beauty had ceased to charm. The habitués of the theatre knew that beauty by heart.

‘C’est cliché comme une tartine de journal,’ said one. ‘C’est connu comme le dôme des Invalides,’ said another. ‘Cela fatigue; on commence à se désillusionner sur La Chicot.’

La Chicot saw the decline of her star, and that lively temper of hers, which had been growing more and more impulsive during the last three years, took reverse of fortune in no good spirit. She used to come home from the theatre in a diabolical humour, after having danced to empty benches and a languid audience, and Jack Chicot had to pay the cost. She would quarrel with him about a straw, a nothing, on these occasions. She abused the students who stayed away from the theatre in roundest and strongest phraseology. She was still more angry with those who came and did not applaud. She upbraided Jack for his helplessness. Was there ever such a husband? He could not advance her interests in the smallest degree. Had she married any one else—one of those little gentlemen who wrote for the papers, for instance—she would have been engaged at one of the boulevard theatres before now. She would be the rage among the best people in Paris. She would be earning thousands. But her husband had no influence with managers or newspapers, not enough to get a puff paragraph inserted in the lowest of the little journals. It was desolating.

This upbraiding was not without its effect upon Jack Chicot. He was a good-tempered fellow by nature, prone to take life easily. In all their quarrels it was his wife who took the leading part. When the cups and saucers and empty bottles went flying, she was the Jove who hurled those thunderbolts. Jack was too brave to strike a woman, too proud to lower himself to the level of his wife’s degradation. He suffered and was silent. He had found out his mistake long ago. The delusion had been brief, the repentance was long. He knew that he had bound himself to a low-born, low-bred fury. He knew that his only chance of escaping suicide was to shut his eyes to his surroundings, and to take what pleasure he could out of a disreputable existence. His wife’s reproaches stung him into activity. He wrote half-a-dozen letters to old friends in London—men more or less connected with the press or the theatres—asking them to get La Chicot an engagement. In these letters he wrote of her only as a clever woman in whose career he was interested; he shrank curiously from acknowledging her as his wife. He took care to enclose cuttings from the Parisian journals in which the dancer’s beauty and chic, talent and originality, were lauded. The result of this trouble on his part was a visit from Mr. Smolendo, the enterprising proprietor of the Prince Frederick Theatre, who had come to Paris in search of novelty, and the engagement of Mademoiselle Chicot for that place of entertainment. Mr. Smolendo had been going in strongly for ballet of late. His scenery, his machinery, his lime-light and dresses were amongst the best to be seen in London. Everybody went to the Prince Frederick. It had begun its career as a music-hall, and had only lately been licensed as a theatre. There was a flavour of Bohemianism about the house, but it only gave a zest to the entertainment. All the most notorious Parisian successes in the way of spectacular drama, all the fairy extravaganzas and demon ballets and comic operettas, were reproduced by Mr. Smolendo at the Prince Frederick. He knew where to find the prettiest actresses, the best dancers, the freshest voices. His chorus and his ballet were the most perfect in London. In a word, Mr. Smolendo had discovered the secret of dramatic success. He had found out that perfection always pays.

La Chicot’s beauty was startling and incontestible. There could not be two opinions about that. Her dancing was eccentric and clever. Mr. Smolendo had seen much better dancing from more carefully-trained dancers, but what La Chicot wanted in training she made up for with dash and audacity.

‘She won’t last many seasons. She’s like one of those high-stepping horses that knock themselves to pieces in a year or two,’ Mr. Smolendo said to himself; ‘but she’ll take the town by storm, and she’ll draw better for her first three seasons than any star I’ve had since I began management.’

La Chicot was delighted at being engaged by a London manager, who offered her a better salary than she was getting at the students’ theatre. She did not like the idea of London, which she imagined a city given over to fog and lung disease, but she was very glad to leave the scene where she felt that her laurels were fast withering. She gave her husband no thanks for his intervention, and went on railing at him for not having got her an engagement on the boulevard.

‘It is to bury myself to go to your dismal London,’ she exclaimed; ‘but anything is better than to dance to an assembly of idiots and cretins.’

‘London is not half a bad place,’ answered Jack Chicot, with his listless air, as of a man long wearied of life, and needing a stimulant as strong as aquafortis to rouse him to animation. ‘It is a big crowd in which one may lose one’s identity. Nobody knows one, one knows nobody. A man’s sense of shame gets comfortably deadened in London. He can walk the streets without feeling that fingers are being pointed at him. It is all the same to the herd whether he has just come out of a penitentiary or a palace. Nobody cares.’

The Chicots crossed the Channel, and took lodgings in a street in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, near which, as everyone knows, the Prince Frederick is situated. It was a dingy street, offering scanty attractions to the stranger, but it was a street which from the days of Garrick and Woffington had been favoured by actors and actresses, and Mr. Smolendo recommended the Chicots to seek a lodging there. He gave them the names of three or four householders who let lodgings to ‘the profession,’ and among these Madame Chicot made her choice.

The apartments which pleased her best were two fair-sized rooms on a first floor, furnished with a tawdry pretentiousness which would have been odious to a refined eye, and which was particularly offensive to Jack’s artistic taste. The cheap velvet on the chairs, the gaudy tapestry curtains, the tarnished ormolu clock and candelabra, delighted La Chicot. It was almost Parisian, she told her husband.

The drawing-room and bedroom communicated with folding-doors. There was a little third room—a mere hole—with a window looking northward, which would do for Jack to paint in. That convenience reconciled Jack to the shabby finery of the sitting-room, the doubtful purity of the bedroom, the woe-begone air of the street, with its half-dozen dingy shops sprinkled among the private houses, like an eruption.

‘How it is ugly, your London!’ exclaimed La Chicot. ‘Is it that all the city resembles this, by example?’

‘No,’ answered Jack, with his cynical air. ‘There are brighter-looking streets, where the respectable people live.’

‘What do you call respectable people?’

‘The people who pay income-tax on two or three thousand a year.’

Jack inquired as to the other lodgers. It was as well to find out what kind of neighbours they were to have.

‘I am not particular,’ said Jack, in French, to his wife, ‘but I should not like to find myself living cheek by jowl with a burglar.’

‘Or a spy,’ suggested Zaïre.

‘We have no spies in London. That is a profession which has never found a footing on this side of the Channel.’

The landlady was a lean-looking widow, with a false front of gingery curls, and a cap that quivered all over with artificial flowers on corkscrew wires. Her long nose was tinted at the extremity, and her eyes had a luminous yet glassy look, suggestive of ardent spirits.

‘I have only one lady in the parlours,’ she explained, ‘and a very clever lady she is too, and quite the lady—Mrs. Rawber, who plays leading business at the Shakespeare. You must have heard of her. She’s a great woman.’

Mr. Chicot apologized for his ignorance. He had been living so long in Paris that he knew nothing of Mrs. Rawber.

‘Ah,’ sighed the landlady, ‘you don’t know how much you’ve lost. Her Lady Macbeth is as fine as Mrs. Siddons’s.’

‘Did you ever see Mrs. Siddons?’

‘No, but I’ve heard my mother talk about her. She couldn’t have been greater in the part than Mrs. Rawber. You should go and see her some night. She’d make your flesh creep.’

‘And a respectable old party, I suppose,’ suggested Jack Chicot.

‘As regular as clockwork. Church every Sunday morning and evening. No hot suppers. Crust of bread and cheese and glass of ale left ready on her table against she comes home—lets herself in with her key—no sitting up for her. Chop and imperial pint of Guinness at two o’clock, when there ain’t no rehearsal; something plain and simple that can be kept hot on the oven top, when the rehearsal’s late. She’s a model lodger. No perquisites, but pay as regular as the Saturday comes round, and always the lady.’

‘Ah,’ said Jack, ‘that’s satisfactory. How about upstairs? I suppose you’ve another pattern of commonplace respectability on your second floor?’

The landlady gave a faint cough, as if she were troubled with a sudden catching of the breath, and her eyes wandered absently to the window, where she seemed to ask counsel from the grey October sky.

‘Who are your upstairs lodgers?’ asked Jack Chicot, repeating his inquiry with a shade of impatience.

‘Lodgers? No, sir. There’s only one gentleman on my second floor. I have never laid myself out for families. Children are such mischievous young monkeys, and always tramping up and down stairs, or endangering their lives leaning out of winder, or leaving the street door open. And the damage they do the furniture! Well, nobody can understand that except them as have passed through the ordeal. No, sir, for the last six years I haven’t had a child across my threshold.’

‘I wasn’t inquiring about children,’ said Mr. Chicot; ‘I was asking about your upstairs lodger.’

‘He’s a single gentleman, sir.’

‘Young?’

‘No, sir; middle-aged.’

‘An actor?’

‘No, sir. He has nothing to do with the theatres.’

‘What is he?’

‘Well, sir, he is a gentleman—everyone can see that—but a gentleman as has run through his property. I should gather from his ways that he must have had a great deal of property, and that he’s run through most of it. He is not quite so regular in his payments as I could wish—but he does pay,—and he’s very little trouble, for he’s often away for a week at a time, the rent running on all the same, of course.’

‘That would hardly matter to him if he doesn’t pay it,’ said Chicot.

‘Oh, but he does pay, sir. He’s dilatory, but I get my money. A poor widow like me couldn’t afford to lose by the best of lodgers.’

‘What is the gentleman’s name?’

‘Mr. Desrolles.’

‘That sounds like a foreign name.’

‘It may, sir, but the gentleman’s English. I haven’t in a general way laid myself out for foreigners,’ said the landlady, with a glance at La Chicot, ‘though this is rather a foreign neighbourhood.’

The lodgings were taken, and Jack Chicot and his wife began a new phase of existence in London. The life lacked much that had made their life in Paris tolerable—the careless gaiety, the brighter skies, the Bohemian pleasures of the French city—and Jack Chicot felt as if a dense black curtain had been drawn across his youth and all its delusions, leaving him outside in a cold, commonplace world, a worn-out, disappointed man, old before his time.

He missed the gay, happy-go-lucky comrades who had helped him to forget his troubles. He missed the drives in the leafy wood, the excursions to suburban dining-houses, the riotous suppers after midnight, all the merry dissipations of his Parisian life. London pleasures were dull and heavy. London suppers meant no more than eating and drinking too many oysters and too much wine.

Mr. Smolendo’s expectations were fully realised. La Chicot made a hit at the Prince Frederick. Those flaming posters under every railway arch and on every hoarding in London were not in vain. The theatre was crowded nightly, and La Chicot was applauded to the echo. She breathed anew the intoxicating breath of success, and she grew daily more insolent and more reckless, spent more money, drank more champagne, and was more eager for pleasure, flattery, and fine dress. The husband looked on with a gloomy face. They were no longer the adoring young couple who had walked away arm-in-arm from the Mairie, smiling and happy, to share their wedding dinner with the chosen companions of the moment. The wife was now only affectionate by fits and starts, the husband had a settled air of despondency which nothing but wine could banish, and which, like the seven other spirits, returned with greater power after a temporary banishment. The wife loved the husband just well enough to be desperately jealous of his least civility to another woman. The husband had long ceased to be jealous, except of his own honour.

Among the frequenters of the Prince Frederick there was one who at this time was to be seen there almost nightly. He was a man of about five-and-twenty, tall, broad-shouldered, with strongly-marked features and the eye of a hawk; a man whose clothes were well worn, and whose whole appearance was slovenly, yet who looked like a gentleman; evidently uncared for, possibly destitute, but however low he might have sunk, a gentleman still.

He was a medical student, and one of the hardest workers at St. Thomas’s—a man who had chosen his profession because he loved it, and whose love increased with his labour. Those who knew most about him said that he was a man destined to make his mark upon the age in which he lived. But he was not a man to achieve rapid success, to distinguish himself by a happy accident. He went slowly to work, sounded the bottom of every well, took up every subject as resolutely as if it were the one subject he had chosen for his especial study, flung himself into every scientific question with the feverish ardour of a lover, yet worked with the steadiness and self-denial of a Greek athlete. For all the vulgar pleasures of life, for wine or play, for horse-racing, or riot of any kind, this young surgeon cared not a jot. He was so little a haunter of theatres, that those of his fellow-students who recognised him night after night at the Prince Frederick were surprised at his frequent presence in such a place.