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Two Years Ago, Volume II.

by Charles Kingsley · English · Gutenberg #10995 · 624,142 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Two Years Ago, Volume II.

Author: Charles Kingsley


        
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #10995]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWO YEARS AGO, VOLUME II. ***

TWO YEARS AGO

[Illustration]




TWO YEARS AGO

BY
CHARLES KINGSLEY

IN TWO VOLS.--VOL. II


1901




CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

  CHAP

  XV THE CRUISE OF THE WATERWITCH
  XVI COME AT LAST
  XVII BAALZEBUB'S BANQUET
  XVIII THE BLACK HOUND
  XIX BEDDGELERT
  XX BOTH SIDES OF THE MOON AT ONCE
  XXI NATURE'S MELODRAMA
  XXII FOND, YET NOT FOOLISH
  XXIII THE BROAD STONE OF HONOUR
  XXIV THE THIRTIETH OF SEPTEMBER
  XXV THE BANKER AND HIS DAUGHTER
  XXVI TOO LATE
  XXVII A RECENT EXPLOSION IN AN ANCIENT CRATER
  XXVIII LAST CHRISTMAS EVE




TWO YEARS AGO.




CHAPTER XV.

THE CRUISE OF THE WATERWITCH.


The middle of August is come at last; and with it the solemn day on
which Frederick Viscount Scoutbush may be expected to revisit the home
of his ancestors. Elsley has gradually made up his mind to the
inevitable, with a stately sulkiness: and comforts himself, as the time
draws near, with the thought that, after all, his brother-in-law is not
a very formidable personage.

But to the population of Aberalva in general, the coming event is one of
awful jubilation. The shipping is all decked with flags; all the Sunday
clothes have been looked out, and many a yard of new ribbon and pound of
bad powder bought; there have been arrangements for a procession, which
could not be got up; for a speech which nobody would undertake to
pronounce; and, lastly, for a dinner, about which last there was no
hanging back. Yea, also, they have hired from Carcarrow Church-town,
sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of music; for Frank has put
down the old choir band at Aberalva,--another of his mistakes,--and
there is but one fiddle and a clarionet now left in all the town. So the
said town waits all the day on tiptoe, ready to worship, till out of the
soft brown haze the stately Waterwitch comes sliding in, like a white
ghost, to fold her wings in Aberalva bay.

And at that sight the town is all astir. Fishermen shake themselves up
out of their mid-day snooze, to admire the beauty, as she slips on and
on through water smooth as glass, her hull hidden by the vast curve of
the balloon-jib, and her broad wings boomed out alow and aloft, till it
seems marvellous how that vast screen does not topple headlong, instead
of floating (as it seems) self-supporting above its image in the mirror.
Women hurry to put on their best bonnets; the sexton toddles up with the
church key in his hand, and the ringers at his heels; the Coastguard
Lieutenant bustles down to the Manby's mortar, which he has hauled out
in readiness on the pebbles. Old Willis hoists a flag before his house,
and half-a-dozen merchant skippers do the same. Bang goes the harmless
mortar, burning the British nation's powder without leave or licence;
and all the rocks and woods catch up the echo, and kick it from cliff to
cliff, playing at football with it till its breath is beaten out; a
rolling fire of old muskets and bird-pieces crackles along the shore,
and in five minutes a poor lad has blown a ramrod through his hand.
Never mind, lords do not visit Penalva every day. Out burst the bells
above with merry peal; Lord Scoutbush and the Waterwitch are duly "rung
in" to the home of his lordship's ancestors; and he is received, as he
scrambles up the pier steps from his boat, by the curate, the
churchwardens, the Lieutenant, and old Tardrew, backed by half-a-dozen
ancient sons of Anak, lineal descendants of the free fishermen to whom
six hundred years before, St. Just of Penalva did grant privileges hard
to spell, and harder to understand, on the condition of receiving,
whensoever he should land at the quay head, three brass farthings from
the "free fishermen of Aberalva."

Scoutbush shakes hands with curate, Lieutenant, Tardrew, churchwardens;
and then come forward the three farthings, in an ancient leather purse.

"Hope your lordship will do us the honour to shake hands with us too; we
are your lordship's free fishermen, as we have been your forefathers',"
says a magnificent old man, gracefully acknowledging the feudal tie,
while he claims the exemption.

Little Scoutbush, who is the kindest-hearted of men, clasps the great
brown fist in his little white one, and shakes hands heartily with every
one of them, saying,--"If your forefathers were as much taller than
mine, as you are than me, gentlemen, I shouldn't wonder if they took
their own freedom, without asking his leave for it!"

A lord who begins his progress with a jest! That is the sort of
aristocrat to rule in Aberalva! And all agree that evening, at the
Mariners' Rest, that his lordship is as nice a young gentleman as ever
trod deal board, and deserves such a yacht as he's got, and long may he
sail her!

How easy it is to buy the love of men! Gold will not do it: but there is
a little angel, may be, in the corner of every man's eye, who is worth
more than gold, and can do it free of all charges: unless a man drives
him out, and "hates his brother; and so walks in darkness; not knowing
whither he goeth," but running full butt against men's prejudices, and
treading on their corns, till they knock him down in despair--and all
just because he will not open his eyes, and use the light which comes by
common human good-nature!

Presently Tom hurries up, having been originally one of the deputation,
but kept by the necessity of binding up the three fingers which the
ramrod had spared to poor Jem Burman's hand. He bows, and the
Lieutenant--who (Frank being a little shy) acts as her Majesty's
representative--introduces him as "deputy medical man to our district of
the union, sir: Mr. Thurnall."

"Dr. Heale was to have been hero, by the by. Where is Dr. Heale?" says
some one.

"Very sorry, my lord; I can answer for him--professional calls, I don't
doubt--nobody more devoted to your lordship."

One need not inquire where Dr. Heale was: but if elderly men will drink
much brandy-and-water in hot summer days, after a heavy early dinner,
then will those men be too late for deputations and for more important
employments.

"Never mind the doctor, daresay he's asleep after dinner: do him good!"
says the Viscount, hitting the mark with a random shot; and thereby
raising his repute for sagacity immensely with his audience, who laugh
outright.

"Ah! Is it so, then? But--Mr. Thurnall, I think you said?--I am glad to
make your acquaintance, sir. I have heard your name often: you are my
friend Mellot's old friend, are you not?"

"I am a very old friend of Claude Mellot's."

"Well, and there he is on board, and will be delighted to do the honours
of my yacht to you whenever you like to visit her. You and I must know
each other better, sir."

Tom bows low--his lordship does him too much honour: the cunning fellow
knows that his fortune is made in Aberalva, if he chooses to work it
out: but he humbly slips into the rear, for Frank has to be supported,
not being over popular; and the Lieutenant may "turn crusty," unless he
has his lordship to himself, before the gaze of assembled Aberalva.

Scoutbush progresses up the street, bowing right and left, and stopped
half-a-dozen times by red-cloaked old women, who curtsey under his nose,
and will needs inform him how they knew his grandfather, or nursed his
uncle, or how his "dear mother, God rest her soul, gave me this very
cloak as I have on," and so forth; till Scoutbush comes to the
conclusion that they are a very loving and lovable set of people--as
indeed they are--and his heart smites him somewhat for not having seen
more of them in past years.

No sooner is Thurnall released, than he is off to the yacht as fast as
oars can take him, and in Claude's arms.

"Now!" (after all salutations and inquiries have been gone through),
"let me introduce you to Major Campbell." And Tom was presented to a
tall and thin personage, who sat at the cabin table, bending over a
microscope.

"Excuse my rising," said he, holding out a left hand, for the right was
busy. "A single jar will give me ten minutes' work to do again. I am
delighted to meet you: Mellot has often spoken to me of you as a man who
has seen more, and faced death more carelessly, than most men."

"Mellot flatters, sir. Whatsoever I have done, I have given up being
careless about death; for I have some one beside myself to live for."

"Married at last? has Diogenes found his Aspasia?" cried Claude.

Tom did not laugh.

"Since my brothers died, Claude, the old gentleman has only me to look
to. You seem to be a naturalist, sir."

"A dabbler," said the major, with eye and hand still busy.

"I ought not to begin our acquaintance by doubting your word: but these
things are no dabbler's work;" and Tom pointed to some exquisite
photographs of minute corallines, evidently taken under the microscope.

"They are Mellot's."

"Mellot turned man of science? Impossible!"

"No; only photographer. I am tired of painting nature clumsily, and then
seeing a sun-picture out-do all my efforts--so I am turned photographer,
and have made a vow against painting for three years and a day."

"Why, the photographs only give you light and shade."

"They will give you colour, too, before seven years are over--and that
is more than I can do, or any one else. No; I yield to the new dynasty.
The artist's occupation is gone henceforth, and the painter's studio,
like 'all charms, must fly, at the mere touch of cold philosophy.' So
Major Campbell prepares the charming little cockyoly birds, and I call
in the sun to immortalise them."

"And perfectly you are succeeding! They are quite new to me, recollect.
When I left Melbourne, the art had hardly risen there above guinea
portraits of bearded desperadoes, a nugget in one hand and a £50 note in
the other: but this is a new, and what a forward step for science!"

"You are a naturalist, then?" said Campbell, looking up with interest.

"All my profession are, more or less," said Tom, carelessly; "and I have
been lucky enough here to fall on untrodden ground, and have hunted up a
few sea-monsters this summer."

"Really? You can tell one where to search then, and where to dredge, I
hope. I have set my heart on a fortnight's work here, and have been
dreaming at night, like a child before a Twelfth-night party, of all
sorts of impossible hydras, gorgons and chimaeras dire, fished up from
your western deeps."

"I have none of them; but I can give you Turbinolia Milletiana and
Zoanthus Couchii. I have a party of the last gentlemen alive on shore."

The major's face worked with almost childish delight.

"But I shall be robbing you."

"They cost me nothing, my dear sir. I did very well, moreover, without
them, for five-and-thirty years; and I may do equally well for
five-and-thirty more."

"I ought to be able to say the same, surely," answered the Major,
composing his face again, and rising carefully. "I have to thank you,
exceedingly, my dear sir, for your prompt generosity: but it is better
discipline for a man, in many ways, to find things for himself than to
have them put into his hands. So, with a thousand thanks, you shall let
me see if I can dredge a Turbinolia for myself."

This was spoken with so sweet and polished a modulation, and yet so
sadly and severely withal, that Tom looked at the speaker with interest.
He was a very tall and powerful man, and would have been a very handsome
man, both in face and figure, but for the high cheekbone, long neck, and
narrow shoulders, so often seen north of Tweed. His brow was very high
and full; his eyes--grave, but very gentle, with large drooping eyelids
--were buried under shaggy grey eyebrows. His mouth was gentle as his
eyes; but compressed, perhaps by the habit of command, perhaps by secret
sorrow; for of that, too, as well as of intellect and magnanimity,
Thurnall thought he could discern the traces. His face was bronzed by
long exposure to the sun; his close-cut curls, which had once been
auburn, were fast turning white, though his features looked those of a
man under five-and-forty; his cheeks were as smooth shaven as his chin.
A right, self-possessed, valiant soldier he looked; one who could be
very loving to little innocents, and very terrible to full-grown knaves.

"You are practising at self-denial, as usual," said Claude.

"Because I may, at any moment, have to exercise it in earnest. Mr.
Thurnall, can you tell me the name of this little glass arrow, which I
just found shooting about in the sweeping net?"

Tom did know the wonderful little link between the fish and the insect;
and the two chatted over its strange form, till the boat returned to
take them ashore.

"Do you make any stay here?"

"I purpose to spend a fortnight here in my favourite pursuit. I must
draw on your kindness and knowledge of the place to point me out
lodgings."

Lodgings, as it befell, were to be found, and good ones, close to the
beach, and away from the noise of the harbour, on Mrs. Harvey's first
floor; for the local preacher, who generally occupied them, was away.

"But Major Campbell might dislike the noise of the school?"

"The school? What better music for a lonely old bachelor than children's
voices?"

So, by sunset the major was fairly established over Mrs. Harvey's shop.
It was not the place which Tom would have chosen; he was afraid of
"running over" poor Grace, if he came in and out as often as he could
have wished. Nevertheless, he accepted the major's invitation to visit
him that very evening.

"I cannot ask you to dinner yet, sir; for my ménage will be hardly
settled: but a cup of coffee, and an exceedingly good cigar, I think my
establishment may furnish you by seven o'clock to-night;--if you think
them worth walking down for."

Tom, of course, said something civil, and made his appearance in due
time. He found the coffee ready, and the cigars also; but the Major was
busy, in his shirt sleeves, unpacking and arranging jars, nets,
microscopes, and what not of scientific lumber; and Tom proffered his
help.

"I am ashamed to make use of you the first moment that you become my
guest."

"I shall enjoy the mere handling of your tackle," said Tom; and began
breaking the tenth commandment over almost every article he touched; for
everything was first-rate of its kind.

"You seem to have devoted money, as well as thought, plentifully to the
pursuit."

"I have little else to which to devote either; and more of both than is,
perhaps, safe for me."

"I should hardly complain of a superfluity of thought, if superfluity of
money was the condition of it."

"Pray understand me. I am no Dives; but I have learned to want so
little, that I hardly know how to spend the little which I have."

"I should hardly have called that an unsafe state."

"The penniless Faquir who lives on chance handfuls of rice has his
dangers, as well as the rich Parsee who has his ventures out from
Madagascar to Canton. Yes, I have often envied the schemer, the man of
business, almost the man of pleasure; their many wants at least absorb
them in outward objects, instead of leaving them too easily satisfied,
to sink in upon themselves, and waste away in useless dreams."

"You found out the best cure for that malady when you took up the
microscope and the collecting-box."

"So I fancied once. I took up natural history in India years ago to
drive away thought, as other men might take to opium, or to
brandy-pawnee: but, like them, it has become a passion now and a tyranny;
and I go on hunting, discovering, wondering, craving for more knowledge;
and--_cui bono_? I sometimes ask--"

"Why, this at least, sir; that, without such men as you, who work for
mere love, science would be now fifty years behind her present
standing-point; and we doctors should not know a thousand important facts,
which you have been kind enough to tell us, while we have not time to find
them out for ourselves."

"_Sic vos non vobis_--"

"Yes, you have the work, and we have the pay; which is a very fair
division of labour, considering the world we live in."

"And have you been skilful enough to make science pay you here, in such
an out-of-the-way little world as that of Aberalva must be?"

"She is a good stalking-horse anywhere;" and Tom detailed, with plenty
of humour, the effect of his microscope and his lecture on the drops of
water. But his wit seemed so much lost on Campbell, that he at last
stopped almost short, not quite sure that he had not taken a liberty.

"No; go on, I beg you; and do not fancy that I am not interested and
amused too, because my laughing muscles are a little stiff from want of
use. Perhaps, too, I am apt to take things too much _au grand sérieux;_
but I could not help thinking, while you were speaking, how sad it was
that people were utterly ignorant of matters so vitally necessary to
health."

"And I, perhaps, ought not to jest over the subject: but, indeed, with
cholera staring us in the face here, I must indulge in some emotion; and
as it is unprofessional to weep, I must laugh as long as I dare."

The Major dropped his coffee-cup upon the floor, and looked at Thurnall
with so horrified a gaze, that Tom could hardly believe him to be the
same man. Then recollecting himself, he darted down upon the remains of
his cup: and looking up again--"A thousand pardons; but--did I hear you
aright? cholera staring us in the face?"

"How can it be otherwise? It is drawing steadily on from the eastward
week by week; and, in the present state of the town, nothing but some
miraculous caprice of Dame Fortune's can deliver us."

"Don't talk of Fortune, sir! at such a moment. Talk of God!" said the
Major, rising from his chair, and pacing the room. "It is too horrible!
Intolerable! When do you expect it here?"

"Within the month, perhaps,--hardly before. I should have warned you of
the danger, I assure you, had I not understood from you that you were
only going to stay a fortnight."

The Major made an impatient gesture.

"Do you fancy that I am afraid for myself? No; but the thought of its
coming to--to the poor people in the town, you know. It is too dreadful.
I have seen it in India--among my own men--among the natives. Good
heavens, I never shall forget--and to meet the fiend again here, of all
places in the world! I fancied it so clean and healthy, swept by fresh
sea-breezes."

"And by nothing else. A half-hour's walk round would convince you, sir;
I only wish that you could persuade his lordship to accompany you."

"Scoutbush? Of course he will,--he shall,--he must. Good heavens! whose
concern is it more than his? You think, then, that there is a chance of
staving it off--by cleansing, I mean?"

"If we have heavy rains during the next week or two, yes. If this
drought last, better leave ill alone; we shall only provoke the devil by
stirring him up."

"You speak confidently," said the Major, gradually regaining his own
self-possession, as he saw Tom so self-possessed. "Have you--allow me to
ask so important a question--have you seen much of cholera?"

"I have worked through three. At Paris, at St. Petersburgh, and in the
West Indies: and I have been thinking up my old experience for the last
six weeks, foreseeing what would come."

"I am satisfied, sir; perhaps I ought to ask your pardon for the
question."

"Not at all. How can you trust a man, unless you know him?" "And you
expect it within the month? You shall go with me to Lord Scoutbush
to-morrow, and--and now we will talk of something more pleasant." And he
began again upon the zoophites.

Tom, as they chatted on, could not help wondering at the Major's
unexpected passion; and could not help remarking, also, that in spite of
his desire to be agreeable, and to interest his guest in his scientific
discoveries, he was yet distraught, and full of other thoughts. What
could be the meaning of it? Was it mere excess of human sympathy? The
countenance hardly betokened that: but still, who can trust altogether
the expression of a weather-hardened visage of forty-five? So the Doctor
set it down to tenderness of heart, till a fresh vista opened on him.

Major Campbell, he soon found, was as fond of insects as of
sea-monsters: and he began inquiring about the woods, the heaths, the
climate; which seemed to the Doctor, for a long time, to mean nothing
more than the question which he put plainly, "Where have I a chance of
rare insects?" But he seemed, after a while, to be trying to learn the
geography of the parish in detail, and especially of the ground round
Vavasour's house. "However it's no business of mine," thought Thurnall,
and told him all he wanted, till--

"Then the house lies quite in the bottom of the glen? Is there a good
fall to the stream--for a stream I suppose there is?"

Thurnall shook his head. "Cold boggy stewponds in the garden, such as
our ancestors loved, damming up the stream. They must needs have fish in
Lent, we know; and paid the penalty of it by ague and fever."

"Stewponds damming up the stream? Scoutbush ought to drain them
instantly!" said the Major, half to himself. "But still the house lies
high--with regard to the town, I mean. No chance of malaria coming up?"

"Upon my word, sir, as a professional man, that is a thing that I dare
not say. The chances are not great--the house is two hundred yards from
the nearest cottage: but if there be an east wind--"

"I cannot bear this any longer. It is perfect madness!"

"I trust, sir, that you do not think that I have neglected the matter. I
have pointed it all out, I assure you, to Mr. Vavasour."

"And it is not altered?"

"I believe it is to be altered--that is--the truth is, sir, that Mr.
Vavasour shrinks so much from the very notion of cholera, that--"

"That he does not like to do anything which may look like believing in
its possibility?"

"He says," quoth Tom, parrying the question, but in a somewhat dry tone,
"that he is afraid of alarming Mrs. Vavasour and the servants."

The Major said something under his breath, which Tom did not catch, and
then, in an appeased tone of voice--

"Well, that is at least a fault on the right side. Mrs. Vavasour's
brother, as owner of the place, is of course the proper person to make
the house fit for habitation." And he relapsed into silence, while
Thurnall, who suspected more than met the ear, rose to depart.

"Are you going? It is not late; not ten o'clock yet."

"A medical man, who may be called up at any moment, must make sure of
his 'beauty sleep,'"

"I will walk with you, and smoke my last cigar." So they went out, and
up to Heale's. Tom went in: but he observed that his companion, after
standing awhile in the street irresolutely, went on up the hill, and, as
far as he could see, turned up the lane to Vavasour's.

"A mystery here," thought he, as he put matters to rights in the surgery
ere going upstairs. "A mystery which I may as well fathom. It may be of
use to poor Tom, as most other mysteries are. That is, though, if I can
do it honourably; for the man is a gallant gentleman. I like him, and I
am inclined to trust him. Whatsoever his secret is, I don't think that
it is one which he need be ashamed of. Still, 'there's a deal of human
natur' in man,' and there may be in him:--and what matter if there is?"

Half an hour afterwards the Major returned, took the candle from Grace,
who was sitting up for him, and went upstairs with a gentle "good
night," but without looking at her.

He sat down at the open window, and looked out leaning on the sill.

"Well, I was too late: I daresay there was some purpose in it. When
shall I learn to believe that God takes better care of His own than I
can do? I was faithless and impatient to-night. I am afraid I betrayed
myself before that man. He looks like one, certainly, who could be
trusted with a secret: yet I had rather that he had not mine. It is my
own fault, like everything else! Foolish old fellow that you are,
fretting and fussing to the end! Is not that scene a message from above,
saying, 'Be still, and know that I am God'?"

And the Major looked out upon the summer sea, lit by a million globes of
living fire, and then upon the waves which broke in flame upon the
beach, and then up to the spangled stars above.

"What do I know of these, with all my knowing? Not even a twentieth part
of those medusae, or one in each thousand of those sparks among the
foam. Perhaps I need not know. And yet why was the thirst awakened in
me, save to be satisfied at last? Perhaps to become more intense, with
every fresh delicious draught of knowledge.... Death, beautiful, wise,
kind death; when will you come and tell me what I want to know? I
courted you once and many a time, brave old Death, only to give rest to
the weary. That was a coward's wish, and so you would not come. I ran
you close in Afghanistan, old Death, and at Sobraon too, I was not far
behind you; and I thought I had you safe among that jungle grass at
Aliwal; but you slipped through my hand--I was not worthy of you. And
now I will not hunt you any more, old Death: do you bide your time, and
I mine; though who knows if I may not meet you here? Only when you come
give me not rest, but work. Give work to the idle, freedom to the
chained, sight to the blind!--Tell me a little about finer things than
zoophytes--perhaps about the zoophytes as well--and you shall still be
brave old Death, my good camp-comrade now for many a year."

Was Major Campbell mad? That depends upon the way in which the reader
may choose to define the adjective.

Meanwhile Scoutbush had walked into Penalva Court--where an affecting
scene of reconciliation took place?

Not in the least. Scoutbush kissed Lucia, shook hands with Elsley,
hugged the children, and then settled himself in an arm-chair, and
talked about the weather, exactly as if he had been running in and out
of the house every week for the last three years, and so the matter was
done; and for the first time a _partie carrée_ was assembled in the
dining-room.

The evening passed off at first as uncomfortably as it could, where
three out of the four were well-bred people. Elsley was, of course, shy
before Lord Scoutbush, and Scoutbush was equally shy before Elsley,
though as civil as possible to him; for the little fellow stood in
extreme awe of Elsley's talents, and was afraid of opening his lips
before a poet. Lucia was nervous for both their sakes, as well she might
be; and Valencia had to make all the talking, and succeeded capitally in
drawing out both her brother and her brother-in-law, till both of them
found the other, on the whole more like other people than he had
expected. The next morning's breakfast, therefore, was easy and gracious
enough: and when it was over, and Lucia fled to household matters--

"You smoke, Vavasour?" asked Scoutbush.

Vavasour did not smoke.

"Really? I thought poets always smoked. You will not forbid my having a
cigar in your garden, nevertheless, I suppose! Do walk round with me,
too, and show me the place, unless you are going to be busy."

Oh no; Elsley was at Lord Scoutbush's service, of course, and had really
nothing to do. So out they went.

"Charming old pigeon-hole it is," said its owner, "I have not seen it
since I went into the Guards. Campbell says it's a shame of me, and so
it is one, I suppose; but how beautiful you have made the garden look!"

"Lucia is very fond of gardening," said Elsley, who was very fond of it
also, and had great taste therein; but he was afraid to confess any such
tastes before a man who, he thought, would not understand him.

"And that fine old wood--full of cocks it used to be--I hope you worked
it well last year."

Elsley did not shoot; but he had heard there was plenty of game there.

"Plenty of cocks," said his guest, correcting him; "but for game, the
less we say about that the better. I really wonder you do not shoot; it
fills up time so in the winter."

"There is really no winter to fill up here, thanks to this delicious
climate; and I have my books."

"Ah! I wish I had. I wish heartily," said he, in a confidential tone,
"you, or Campbell, or some of your clever men, would sell me a little of
their book-learning; as Valencia says to me, 'brains are so common in
the world, I wonder how none fell to your share.'"

"I do not think that they are an article which is for sale, if Solomon
is to be believed."

"And if they were, I couldn't afford to buy, with this Irish Encumbered
Estates' Bill. But now, this is one thing I wanted to say. Is everything
here just as you would wish? Of course no one could wish a better
tenant; but any repairs, you know, or improvements which I ought to do
of course? Only tell me what you think should be done; for, of course,
you know more about these things than I do--can't know less."

"Nothing, I assure you, Lord Scoutbush. I have always left those matters
to Mr. Tardrew."

"Ah, my dear fellow, you shouldn't do that. He is such a screw, as all
honest stewards are. Screws me, I know, and I dare say has screwed you
too."

"Never, I assure you. I never gave him the opportunity, and he has been
most civil."

"Well, in future, just order him to do what you like, and just as if you
were landlord, in fact; and if the old man haggles, write to me, and
I'll blow him up. Delighted to have a man of taste like you here, who
can improve the place for me."

"I assure you, Lord Scoutbush, I need nothing, nor does the place. I am
a man of very few wants."

"I wish I were," sighed Scoutbush, pulling out another of Hudson's
highest-priced cigars.

"And I am bound to say"--(and here Elsley choked a little; but the
Viscount's frankness and humility had softened him, and he determined to
be very magnanimous)--"I am bound in honour, after owing to your
kindness such an exquisite retreat--all that either I or Lucia could
have fancied for ourselves, and more--not to trouble you by asking for
little matters which we really do not need."

And so Elsley, instead of simply asking to have the house-drains set
right, which Lord Scoutbush would have done upon the spot, chose to be
lofty-minded, at the risk of killing his wife and children.

"My dear follow, you really must not 'lord' me any more; I hate it. I
must be plain Scoutbush here among my own people, just as I am in the
Guards' mess-room. And as for owing me any,--really, it is we that are
in your debt--to see my sister so happy, and such beautiful children,
and so well too--and altogether--and Valencia so delighted with your
poems--and, and altogether--" and there Lord Scoutbush stopped, having
hoisted, as he considered, the flag of peace once and for all, and very
glad that the thing was over.

Elsley was going to say something in return; but his guest turned the
conversation as fast as he could. "And now, I know you want to be busy,
though you are too civil to confess it; and I must be with that old fool
Tardrew at ten, to settle accounts: he'll scold me if I do not--the
precise old pedant--just as if I was his own child. Good-bye."

"Where are you going, Frederick?" called Lucia, from the window; she had
been watching the interview anxiously enough, and could see that it had
ended well.

"To old Stot-and-kye at the farm: do you want anything?"

"No; only I thought you might be going to the yacht; and Valencia would
have walked down with you. She wants to find Major Campbell."

"I want to scold Major Campbell," said Valencia, tripping out on the
lawn in her walking dress. "Why has he not been here an hour ago? I will
undertake to say that he was up at four this morning."

"He waits to be invited, I suppose," said Scoutbush.

"I suppose I must do it," said Elsley to himself, sighing.

"Just like his primness," said Valencia. "I shall go down and bring him
up myself this minute, and Mr. Vavasour shall come with me. Of course
you will! You do not know what a delightful person he is, when once you
can break the ice."

Elsley, like most vain men, was of a jealous temper; and Valencia's
eagerness to see Major Campbell jarred on him. He wanted to keep the
exquisite creature to himself, and Headley was quite enough of an
intruder already. Beside, the accounts of the new comer, his learning,
his military prowess, the reverence with which all, even Scoutbush,
evidently regarded him, made him prepared to dislike the Major; and all
the more, now he heard that there was an ice-crust to crack. Impulsive
men like Elsley, especially when their self-respect and certainty of
their own position is not very strong, have instinctively a defiant fear
of the strong, calm, self-contained man, especially if he has seen the
world; and Elsley set down Major Campbell as a proud, sarcastic fellow,
before whom he must be at the pains of being continually on his guard.
He wished him a hundred miles away. However, there was no refusing
Valencia anything; so he got his hat, but with so bad a grace, that
Valencia saw his chagrin, and from mere naughtiness of heart amused
herself with it by talking all the way of nothing but Major Campbell.

"And Lucia," she said at last, "will be so glad to see him again. We
knew him so well, you know, in Eaton Square years ago."

"Really," said Elsley, wincing, "I never met him there." He recollected
that Lucia had expressed more pleasure at Major Campbell's coming than
even, at that of her brother; and a dark, undefined phantom entered his
heart, which, though he would have been too proud to confess it to
himself, was none other than jealousy.

"Oh--did you not? No; it was the year before we first knew you. And we
used to laugh at him together, behind his back, and christened him the
wild Indian, because he was so gauche and shy. He was a major in the
Indian army then: but a few months afterwards he sold out, went into the
line--no one could tell why, for he threw away very brilliant
prospects, they say, and might have been a general by now, instead of a
mere major still. But he is so improved since then; he is like an elder
brother to Scoutbush; guides him in everything. I call him the blind
man, and the major his dog!"

"So much the worse," thought Elsley, who disliked the notion of
Campbell's having power over a man to whom he was indebted for his
house-room: but by this time they were at Mrs. Harvey's door.

Mrs. Harvey opened it, curtseying to the very ground: and Valencia ran
upstairs, and knocked at the sitting-room door herself.

"Come in," shouted a pre-occupied voice inside.

"Is that a proper way in which to address a lady, sir?" answered she,
putting in her beautiful head.

Major Campbell was sitting, Elsley could see, in his shirt sleeves,
cigar in mouth, bent over his microscope: but instead of the unexpected
prim voice, he heard a very gay and arch one answer, "Is that a proper
way in which to come peeping into an old bachelor's sanctuary, ma'am? Go
away this moment, till I make myself fit to be seen."

Valencia shut the door again, laughing.

"You seem very intimate with Major Campbell," said Elsley.

"Intimate? I look on him as my father almost. Now, may we come in?" said
she, knocking again in pretty petulance. "I want to introduce Mr.
Vavasour."

"I shall be only too happy," said the Major, opening his door (this time
with his coat on); "there are few persons in the world whom I have more
wished to know than Mr. Vavasour." And he held out his hand, and quite
led Elsley in. He spoke in a tone of grave interest, looking intently at
Elsley as he spoke. Valencia remarked the interest--Elsley only the
compliment.

"It is a great kindness of you to call on me so soon," said he. "I met
Mrs. Vavasour several times in years past; and though I saw very little
of her, I saw enough to long much for the acquaintance of the man who
has been worthy to become her husband."

Elsley blushed, for his conscience smote him a little at that word
"worthy," and muttered some commonplace civility in return. Valencia saw
it, and attributing it to his usual awkwardness, drew off the
conversation to herself.

"Really, Major Campbell! You bring in Mr. Vavasour, and let me walk
behind as I can; and then let me sit three whole minutes in your house
without deigning to speak to me!"

"Ah! my dear Queen Whims!" answered he, returning suddenly to his gay
tone; "and how have you been misbehaving yourself since we met last?"

"I have not been misbehaving myself at all, mon cher Saint Père, as Mr.
Vavasour will answer for me, during the most delightful fortnight I ever
spent!"

"Delightful indeed!" said Elsley, as he was bound to say: but he said it
with an earnestness which made the Major fix his eyes on him. "Why
should he not find any and every fortnight as delightful as his last?"
said he to himself; but now Valencia began bantering him about his books
and his animals; wanting to look through his microscope, pulling off her
hat for the purpose, laughing when her curls blinded her, letting them
blind her in order to toss them back in the prettiest way, jesting at
him about "his old fogies" at the Linnaean Society; clapping her hands
in ecstasy when he answered that they were not old fogies at all, but
the most charming set of men in England, and that (with no offence to
the name of Scoutbush) he was prouder of being an F.L.S., than if he
were a peer of the realm,--and so forth; all which harmless pleasantry
made Elsley cross, and more cross--first, because he did not mix in it;
next, because he could not mix in it if he tried. He liked to be always
in the seventh heaven; and if other people were anywhere else, he
thought them bores.

At last,--"Now, if you will be good for five minutes," said the Major,
"I will show you something really beautiful."

"I can see that," answered she, with the most charming impudence, "in
another glass besides your magnifying one."

"Be it so: but look here, and see what an exquisite world there is, of
which you never dream; and which behaves a great deal better in its
station than the world of which you do dream!"

When Campbell spoke in that way, Valencia was good at once; and as she
went obediently to the microscope, she whispered, "Don't be angry with
me, mon Saint Père."

"Don't be naughty, then, _ma chère enfant_" whispered he; for he saw
something about Elsley's face which gave him a painful suspicion.

She looked long, and then lifted up her head suddenly--"Do come and
look, Mr. Vavasour, at this exquisite little glass fairy, like--I cannot
tell what like, but a pure spirit hovering in some nun's dream! Come!"

Elsley came, and looked; and when he looked he started, for it was the
very same zoophyte which Thurnall had shown him on a certain memorable
day.

"Where did you find the fairy, mon Saint Père?"

"I had no such good fortune. Mr. Thurnall, the doctor, gave it me."

"Thurnall?" said she, while Elsley kept still looking, to hide cheeks
which were growing very red. "He is such a clever man, they say. Where
did you meet him? I have often thought of asking Mr. Vavasour to invite
him up for an evening with his microscope. He seems so superior to the
people round him. It would be a charity, really, Mr. Vavasour."

Vavasour kept his eyes fixed on the zoophyte, and said,--

"I shall be only too delighted, if you wish it."

"You will wish it yourself a second time," chimed in Campbell, "if you
try it once. Perhaps you know nothing of him but professionally.
Unfortunately for professional men, that too often happens."

"Know anything of him--I! I assure you not, save that he attends Mrs.
Vavasour and the children," said Vavasour, looking up at last: but with
an expression of anger which astonished both Valencia and Campbell.

Campbell thought that he was too proud to allow rank as a gentleman to a
country doctor; and despised him from that moment, though, as it
happened, unjustly. But he answered quietly,--

"I assure you, that whatever some country practitioners may be, the
average of them, as far as I have seen, are cleverer men, and even of
higher tone than their neighbours; and Thurnall is beyond the average:
he is a man of the world,--even too much of one,--and a man of science;
and I fairly confess that, what with his wit, his _savoir vivre_, and
his genial good temper, I have quite fallen in love with him in a single
evening; we began last night on the microscope, and ended on all heaven
and earth."

"How I should like to make a third!"

"My dear Queen Whims would hear a good deal of sober sense, then; at
least on one side: but I shall not ask her: for Mr. Thurnall and I have
our deep secrets together."

So spoke the Major, in the simple wish to exalt Tom in a quarter where
he hoped to get him practice; and his "secret" was a mere jest,
unnecessary, perhaps, as he thought afterwards, to pass off Tom's want
of orthodoxy.

"I was a babbler then," said he to himself the next moment; "how much
better to have simply held my tongue!"

"Ah; yes; I know men have their secrets, as well as women," said
Valencia, for the mere love of saying something: but as she looked at
Vavasour, she saw an expression in his face which she had never seen
before. What was it?--All that one can picture for oneself branded into
the countenance of a man unable to repress the least emotion, who had
worked himself into the belief that Thurnall had betrayed his secret.

"My dear Mr. Vavasour," cried Campbell, of course unable to guess the
truth, and supposing vaguely that he was 'ill;' "I am sure that--that
the sun has overpowered you" (the only possible thing he could think
of). "Lie down on the sofa a minute" (Vavasour was actually reeling with
rage and terror), "and I will run up to Thurnall's for salvolatile."

Elsley, who thought him the most consummate of hypocrites, cast on him a
look which he intended to have been withering, and rushed out of the
room, leaving the two staring at each other.

Valencia was half inclined to laugh, knowing Elsley's petulance and
vanity: but the impossibility of guessing a cause kept her quiet.

Major Campbell stood for full five minutes; not as one astounded, but as
one in deep and anxious thought.

"What can be the matter, mon Saint Père?" asked she at last, to break
the silence.

"That there are more whims in the world than yours, dear Queen Whims;
and I fear darker ones. Let us walk up together after this man. I have
offended him."

"Nonsense! I dare say he wanted to get home to write poetry, as you did
not praise what he had written. I know his vanity and flightiness."

"You do?" asked he quickly, in a painful tone. "However, I have offended
him, I can see; and deeply. I must go up, and make things right, for the
sake of--for everybody's sake."

"Then do not ask me anything. Lucia loves him intensely, and let that be
enough for us."

The Major saw the truth of the last sentence no more than Valencia
herself did; for Valencia would have been glad enough to pour out to
him, with every exaggeration, her sister's woes and wrongs, real and
fancied, had not the sense of her own folly with Vavasour kept her
silent and conscience-stricken.

Valencia remarked the Major's pained look as they walked up the street.

"You dear conscientious Saint Père, why will you fret yourself about
this foolish matter? He will have forgotten it all in an hour; I know
him well enough."

Major Campbell was not the sort of person to admire Elsley the more for
throwing away capriciously such deep passion as he had seen him show,
any more than for showing the same.

"He must be of a very volatile temperament."

"Oh, all geniuses are."

"I have no respect for genius, Miss St. Just; I do not even acknowledge
its existence when there is no strength and steadiness of character. If
any one pretends to be more than a man, he must begin by proving himself
a man at all. Genius? Give me common sense and common decency! Does he
give Mrs. Vavasour, pray, the benefit of any of these pretty flights of
genius?"

Valencia was frightened. She had never heard her Saint Père speak so
severely and sarcastically; and she feared that if he knew the truth he
would be terribly angry. She had never seen him angry; but she knew well
enough that that passion, when it rose in him in a righteous cause,
would be very awful to see; and she was one of those women who always
grow angry when they are frightened. So she was angry at his calling her
Miss St. Just; she was angry because she chose to think he was talking
at her; though she reasonably might have guessed it, seeing that he had
scolded her a hundred times for want of steadiness of character. She was
more angry than all, because she knew that her own vanity had caused--at
least disagreement--between Lucia and Elsley. All which (combined with
her natural wish not to confess an unpleasant truth about her sister)
justified her, of course, in answering,--

"Miss St. Just does not intrude into the secrets of her sister's married
life; and if she did, she would not repeat them."

Major Campbell sighed, and walked on a few moments in silence, then,--

"Pardon, Miss St. Just; I asked a rude question, and I am sorry for it."

"Pardon you, my dear Saint Père?" cried she, almost catching at his
hand. "Never! I must either believe you infallible, or hate you
eternally. It is I that was naughty; I always am; but you will forgive
Queen Whims?"

"Who could help it?" said the Major, in a sad, sweet tone. "But here is
the postman. May I open my letters?"

"You may do as you like, now you have forgiven me. Why, what is it, mon
Saint Père?"

A sudden shock of horror had passed over the Major's face, as he read
his letter: but it had soon subsided into stately calm.

"A gallant officer, whom we and all the world knew well, is dead of
cholera, at his post, where a man should die.... And, my dear Miss St.
Just, we are going to the Crimea."

"We?--you?"

"Yes. The expedition will really sail, I find."

"But not you?"

"I shall offer my services. My leave of absence will, in any case, end
on the first of September; and even if it did not, my health is quite
enough restored to enable me to walk up to a cannon's mouth."

"Ah, mon Saint Père, what words are these?"

"The words of an old soldier, Queen Whims, who has been so long at his
trade that he has got to take a strange pleasure in it."

"In killing?"

"No; only in the chance of----. But I will not cast an unnecessary
shadow over your bright soul. There will be shadows enough over it soon,
without my help."

"What do you mean?"

"That you, and thousands more as delicate, if not as fair as you, will
see, ere long, what the realities of human life are; and in a way of
which you have never dreamed."

And he murmured, half to himself, the words of the prophet,--"'Thou
saidst, I shall sit as a lady for ever: but these two things shall come
upon thee in one day, widowhood and the loss of children. They shall
even come upon thee,'--No! not in their fulness! There are noble
elements beneath the crust, which will come out all the purer from the
fire; and we shall have heroes and heroines rising up among us as of
old, sincere and earnest, ready to face their work, and to do it, and to
call all things by their right names once more; and Queen Whims herself
will become what Queen Whims might be!"

Valencia was awed, as well she might have been; for there was a very
deep sadness about Campbell's voice.

"You think there will be def--disasters?" said she, at last.

"How can I tell? That we are what we always were, I doubt not. Scoutbush
will fight as merrily as I. But we owe the penalty of many sins, and we
shall pay it."

It would be as unfair, perhaps, as easy, to make Major Campbell a
prophet after the fact, by attributing to him any distinct expectation
of those mistakes which have been but too notorious since. Much of the
sadness in his tone may have been due to his habitual melancholy; his
strong belief that the world was deeply diseased, and that some terrible
purgation would surely come, when it was needed. But it is difficult,
again, to conceive that those errors were altogether unforeseen by many
an officer of Campbell's experience and thoughtfulness.

"We will talk no more of it just now." And they walked up to Penalva
Court, seriously enough.

"Well, Scoutbush, any letters from town?" said the Major.

"Yes."

"You have heard what has happened at D---- Barracks?"

"Yes."

"You had better take care then, that the like of it does not happen
here."

"Here?"

"Yes. I'll tell you all presently. Have you heard from head-quarters?"

"Yes; all right," said Scoutbush, who did not like to let out the truth
before Valencia.

Campbell saw it and signed to him to speak out.

"A11 right?" asked Valencia. "Then you are not going?"

"Ay, but I am! Orders to join my regiment by the first of October, and
to be shot as soon afterwards as is fitting for the honour of my
country. So, Miss Val, you must be quick in making good friends with the
heir-at-law; or else you won't get your bills paid any more."

"Oh, dear, dear!" And Valencia began to cry bitterly. It was her first
real sorrow.

Strangely enough, Major Campbell, instead of trying to comfort her, took
Scoutbush out with him, and left her alone with her tears. He could not
rest till he had opened the whole cholera question.

Scoutbush was honestly shocked. Who would have dreamed it? No one had
ever told him that the cholera had really been there before. What could
he do? Send for Thurnall?

Tom was sent for; and Scoutbush found, to his horror, that what little
he could have ever done ought to have been done three months ago, with
Lord Minchampstead's improvements at Pentremochyn.

The little man walked up and down, and wrung his hands. He cursed
Tardrew for not telling him the truth; he cursed himself for letting the
cottages go out of his power; he cursed A, B, and C, for taking the said
cottages off his hands; he cursed up, he cursed down, he cursed all
around, things which ought to have been cursed, and things which really
ought not--for half of the worst sanatory sinners, in this blessed age
of ignorance, yclept of progress and science (how our grandchildren will
laugh at the epithets!) are utterly unconscious and guiltless ones.

But cursing leaves him, as it leaves other men, very much where he had
started.

To do him justice, he was in one thing a true nobleman, for he was above
all pride; as are most men of rank, who know what their own rank means.
It is only the upstart, unaccustomed to his new eminence, who stands on
his dignity, and "asserts his power."

So Scoutbush begged humbly of Thurnall only to tell him what he could
do.

"You might use your moral influence, my lord."

"Moral influence?" in a tone which implied naively enough, "I'd better
get a little morals myself before I talk of using the same."

"Your position in the parish--"

"My good sir!" quoth Scoutbush in his shrewd way; "do you not know
yourself what these fine fellows who were ready yesterday to kiss the
dust off my feet would say, if I asked leave to touch a single hair of
their rights?--'Tell you what, my lord; we pays you your rent, and you
takes it. You mind your business, and we'll mind our'n.' You forget that
times are changed since my seventeenth progenitor was lord of life and
limb over man and maid in Aberalva."

"And since your seventeenth progenitor took the trouble to live at
Penalva Court," said Campbell, "instead of throwing away what little
moral influence he had by going into the Guards, and spending his time
between Rotten Row and Cowes."

"Hardly fair, Major Campbell!" quoth Tom; "you forget that in the old
times, if the Lord of Aberalva was responsible for his people, he had
also by law the power of making them obey him."

"The long and the short of it is, then," said Scoutbush a little tartly,
"that I can do nothing."

"You can put to rights the cottages which are still in your hands, my
lord. For the rest, my only remaining hope lies in the last person whom
one would usually depute on such an errand."

"Who is that?"

"The schoolmistress."

"The who?" asked Scoutbush.

"The schoolmistress; at whose house Major Campbell lodges."

And Tom told them, succinctly, enough to justify his strange assertion.

"If you doubt me, my lord, I advise you to ask Mr. Headley. He is no
friend of hers; being a high churchman, while she is a little inclined
to be schismatic; but an enemy's opinion will be all the more honest."

"She must be a wonderful woman," said Scoutbush; "I should like to see
her."

"And I too," said Campbell, "I passed a lovely girl on the stairs last
night, and thought no more of it. Lovely girls are common enough in West
Country ports."

"We'll go and see her," quoth his lordship.

Meanwhile, Aberalva pier was astonished by a strange phenomenon. A boat
from the yacht landed at the pier-head, not only Claude Mellot, whose
beard was an object of wonder to the fishermen, but a tall three-legged
box and a little black tent; which, being set upon the pier, became the
scene of various mysterious operations, carried on by Claude and a
sailor lad.

"I say!" quoth one of the fishing elders, after long suspicious silence;
"I say, lads, this won't do. We can't have no outlandish foreigners
taking observations here!"

And then dropped out one wild suspicion after another.

"Maybe he's surveying for a railroad?"

"Maybe he's from the Trinity House, going to make a new harbour; or
maybe a lighthouse. And then we'd better not meddle wi' him."

"I'll tell you what he be. He's that here government chap as the Doctor
said he'd bring down to set our drains right."

"If he goes meddling with our drains, and knocking of our back-yards
about, he'll find himself over quay before he's done."

"Steady! Steady. He come with my loord, mind."

"He might a' taken in his loordship, and be a Roossian spy to the bottom
of him after all. They mak' munselves up into all manner of
disguisements, specially beards. I've seed the Roossians with their
beards many a time."

"Maybe 'tis witchcraft. Look to mun, putting mun's head under that black
bag now! He'm after no good, I'll warrant. If they ben't works of
darkness, what be?"

"Leastwise he'm no right to go spying here on our quay, and never ax
with your leave, or by your leave. I'll just goo mak' mun out."

And Claude, who had just retreated into his tent, had the pleasure of
finding the curtain suddenly withdrawn, and as a flood of light rushed
in, spoiling his daguerreotype plate, hearing a voice as of a sleepy
bear--

"Ax your pardon, sir; but what be you arter here?"

"Murder! shut the screen!" But it was too late; and Claude came out,
while the eldest-born of Anak stood sternly inquiring,--

"I say, what be you arter here, mak' so boold?"

"Taking sun-pictures, my good sir, and you have spoilt one for me."

"Sun-picturs, saith a?" in a very incredulous tone.

"Daguerreotypes of the place, for Lord Scoutbush."

"Oh!--if it's his lordship's wish, of course! Only things is very well
as they are, and needs no mending, thank God. Only, ax pardon, sir. You
see, we don't generally allow no interfering on our pier without lave,
sir; the pier being ourn, we pays for the repairing. So, if his lordship
intends making of alterations, he'd better to have spoken to us first."

"Alterations?" said Claude, laughing; "the place is far too pretty to
need any improvement."

"Glad you think so, sir! But whatever be you arter here?"

"Taking views! I'm a painter, an artist! I'll take your portrait, if you
like!" said Claude, laughing more and more.

"Bless my heart, what vules we be! 'Tis a paainter gentleman, lads!"
roared he.

"What on earth did you take me for? A Russian spy?"

The elder shook his head; grinned solemnly; and peace was concluded.
"We'm old-fashioned folks here, you see, sir; and don't like no
new-fangled meddlecomes. You'll excuse us; you'm very welcome to do what
you like, and glad to see you here." And the old fellow made a stately
bow, and moved away.

"No, no! you must stay and have your portrait taken; you'll make a fine
picture."

"Hum; might ha', they used to say, thirty years agone; I'm over old now.
Still, my old woman might like it. Make so bold, sir, but what's your
charge?"

"I charge nothing. Five minutes' talk with an honest man will pay me."

"Hum: if you'd a let me pay you, sir, well and good; but I maunt take up
your time for nought; that's not fair."

However, Claude prevailed, and in ten minutes he had all the sailors on
the quay round him; and one after another came forward blushing and
grinning to be "taken off." Soon the children gathered round, and when
Valencia and Major Campbell came on the pier, they found Claude in the
midst of a ring of little dark-haired angels; while a dozen honest
fellows grinned when their own visages appeared, and chaffed each other
about the sweethearts who were to keep them while they were out at sea.
And in the midst little Claude laughed and joked, and told good stories,
and gave himself up, the simple, the sunny-hearted fellow, to the
pleasure of pleasing, till he earned from one and all the character of
"the pleasantest-spokenest gentleman that was ever into the town."

"Here's her ladyship! make room for her ladyship!" But Claude held up a
warning hand. He had just arranged a masterpiece,--half-a-dozen of the
prettiest children, sitting beneath a broken boat, on spars, sails,
blocks, lobster-pots, and what not, arranged in picturesque confusion;
while the black-bearded sea-kings round were promising them rock and
bulls-eyes, if they would only sit still like "gude maids."

But at Valencia's coming the children all looked round, and jumped up
and curtsied, and then were afraid to sit down again.

"You have spoilt my group, Miss St. Just, and you must mend it!"

Valencia caught the humour, regrouped them all forthwith; and then
placed herself in front of them by Claude's side.

"Now, be good children! Look straight at me, and listen!" And lifting up
her finger, she began to sing the first song of which she could think,
"The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers."

She had no need to bid the children look at her and listen; for not only
they, but every face upon the pier was fixed upon her; breathless,
spell-bound, at once by her magnificent beauty and her magnificent
voice, as up rose, leaping into the clear summer air, and rolling away
over the still blue sea, that glorious melody which has now become the
national anthem to the nobler half of the New World. Honour to woman,
and honour to old England, that from Felicia Hemans came the song which
will last, perhaps, when modern Europe shall have shared the fate of
ancient Rome and Greece!

Valencia's singing was the reflex of her own character; and therefore,
perhaps, all the more fitted to the song, the place, and the audience.
It was no modest cooing voice, tender, suggestive, trembling with
suppressed emotion, such as, even though narrow in compass, and dull in
quality, will touch the deepest fibres of the heart, and, as delicate
scents will sometimes do, wake up long-forgotten dreams, which seem
memories of some antenatal life.

It was clear, rich, massive, of extraordinary compass, and yet full of
all the graceful ease, the audacious frolic, of perfect physical health,
and strength, and beauty; had there been a trace of effort in it, it
might have been accused of "bravura:" but there was no need of effort
where nature had bestowed already an all but perfect organ, and all that
was left for science was to teach not power, but control. Above all, it
was a voice which you trusted; after the first three notes you felt that
that perfect ear, that perfect throat, could never, even by the
thousandth part of a note, fall short of melody; and you gave your soul
up to it, and cast yourself upon it, to bear you up and away, like a
fairy steed, whither it would, down into the abysses of sadness, and up
to the highest heaven of joy; as did those wild and rough, and yet
tenderhearted and imaginative men that day, while every face spoke new
delight, and hung upon those glorious notes,--

  "As one who drinks from a charmed cup
  Of sparkling, and foaming, and murmuring wine"--

and not one of them, had he had the gift of words, but might have said
with the poet:--

 "I have no life, Constantia, now but thee,
  While, like the world-surrounding air, thy song
Flows on, and fills all things with melody.
  Now is thy voice tempest swift and strong,
On which, like one in a trance upborne,
  Secure o'er rocks and waves I sweep,
Rejoicing like a cloud of morn.
  Now 'tis the breath of summer night,
Which, when the starry waters sleep
  Round western isles, with incense-blossoms bright,
  Lingering, suspends my soul in its voluptuous flight."

At last it ceased: and all men drew their breaths once more; while a
low murmur of admiration ran through the crowd, too well-bred to applaud
openly, as they longed to do.

"Did you ever hear the like of that, Gentleman Jan?"

"Or see? I used to say no one could hold a candle to our Grace but she--
she looked like a born queen all the time!"

"Well, she belongs to us, too, so we've a right to be proud of her. Why,
here's our Grace all the while!"

True enough; Grace had been standing among the crowd all the while,
rapt, like them, her eyes fixed on Valencia, and full, too, of tears.
They had been called up first by the melody itself, and then, by a chain
of thought peculiar to Grace, by the faces round her.

"Ah! if Grace had been here!" cried one, "we'd have had her dra'ed off
in the midst of the children."

"Ah! that would ha' been as nat'ral as life!"

"Silence, you!" says Gentleman Jan, who generally feels a mission to
teach the rest of the quay good manners, "'Tis the gentleman's pleasure
to settle who he'll dra' off, and not wer'n."

To which abnormal possessive pronoun, Claude rejoined,--

"Not a bit! whatever you like. I could not have a better figure for the
centre. I'll begin again."

"Oh, do come and sit among the children, Grace!" says Valencia.

"No, thank your ladyship."

Valencia began urging her; and many a voice round, old as well as young,
backed the entreaty.

"Excuse me, my lady," and she slipped into the crowd; but as she went
she spoke low, but clear enough to be heard by all: "No: it will be time
enough to flatter me, and ask for my picture, when you do what I tell
you--what God tells you!"

"What's that, then, Grace dear?"

"You know! I've asked you to save your own lives from cholera, and you
have not the common sense to do it. Let me go home and pray for you!"

There was an awkward silence among the men, till some fellow said,--

"She'm gone mad after that doctor, I think, with his muck-hunting
notions."

And Grace went home, to await the hour of afternoon school.

"What a face!" said Mellot.

"Is it not? Come and see her in her school, when the children go in at
two o'clock. Ah! there are Scoutbush and St. Père."

"We are going to the school, my lord. Don't you think that, as patron of
things in general here, it would look well if you walked in, and
signified your full approbation of what you know nothing about?"

"So much so, that I was just on my way there with Campbell. But I must
just speak to that lime-burning fellow. He wants a new lease of the
kiln, and I suppose he must have it. At least, here he comes, running at
me open-mouthed, and as dry as his own waistband. It makes one thirsty
to look at him. I'll catch you up in five minutes!"

So the three went off to the school.

       *       *       *       *       *

Grace was telling, in her own sweet way, that charming story of the
Three Trouts, which, by the by, has been lately pirated (as many things
are) by a religious author, whose book differs sufficiently from the
liberal and wholesome morality of the true author of the tale.

"What a beautiful story, Grace!" said Valencia. "You will surpass Hans
Anderssen some day."

Grace blushed, and was silent a moment.

"It is not my own, my lady."

"Not your own? I should have thought that no one but you and Anderssen
could have made such an ending to it."

Grace gave her one of those beseeching, half-reproachful looks, with
which she always answered praise; and then,--"Would you like to hear the
children repeat a hymn, my lady?"

"No. I want to know where that story came from."

Grace blushed, and stammered.

"I know where," said Campbell. "You need not be ashamed of having read
the book, Miss Harvey. I doubt not that you took all the good from it,
and none of the harm, if harm there be."

Grace looked at him; at once surprised and relieved.

"It was a foolish romance-book, sir, as you seem to know. It was the
only one which I ever read, except Hans Anderssen's,--which are not
romances, after all. But the beginning was so full of God's truth, sir,
--romance though it was,--and gave me such precious new light about
educating children, that I was led on unawares. I hope I was not wrong."

"This schoolroom proves that you were not," said Campbell. "'To the
pure, all things are pure.'"

"What is this mysterious book? I must know!" said Valencia.

"A very noble romance, which I made Mellot read once, containing the
ideal education of an English nobleman, in the middle of the last
century."

"The Fool of Quality?" said Mellot. "Of course! I thought I had heard
the story before. What a well-written book it is, too, in spite of all
extravagance and prolixity. And how wonderfully ahead of his generation
the man who wrote it, in politics as well as in religion!"

"I must read it," said Valencia. "You must lend it me, Saint Père."

"Not yet, I think."

"Why?" whispered she, pouting. "I suppose I am not as pure as Grace
Harvey?"

"She has the children to educate, who are in daily contact with coarse
sins, of which you know nothing--of which she cannot help knowing. It
was written in an age when the morals of our class (more shame to us)
were on the same level with the morals of her class now. Let it alone. I
often have fancied I should edit a corrected edition of it. When I do,
you shall read that."

"Now, Miss Harvey," said Mellot, who had never taken his eyes off her
face, "I want to turn schoolmaster, and give your children a drawing
lesson. Get your slates, all of you!"

And taking possession of the black board and a piece of chalk, Claude
began sketching them imps and angels, dogs and horses, till the school
rang with shrieks of delight.

"Now," said he, wiping the board, "I'll draw something, and you shall
copy it."

And, without taking off his hand, he drew a single line; and a profile
head sprang up, as if by magic, under his firm, unerring touch.

"Somebody?" "A lady!" "No, 'taint; 'tis schoolmistress!"

"You can't copy that; I'll draw you another face." And he sketched a
full face on the board.

"That's my lady." "No, it's schoolmistress again!" "No it's not!"

"Not quite sure, my dears?" said Claude, half to himself. "Then here!"
and wiping the board once more, he drew a three-quarters face, which
elicited a shout of approbation.

"That's schoolmistress, her very self!"

"Then you cannot do anything better than try and draw it. I'll show you
how." And going over the lines again, one by one, the crafty Claude
pretended to be giving a drawing lesson, while he was really studying
every feature of his model.

"If you please, my lady," whispered Grace to Valencia; "I wish the
gentleman would not."

"Why not?"

"Oh, madam, I do not judge any one else: but why should this poor
perishing flesh be put into a picture? We wear it but for a little
while, and are blessed when we are rid of its burden. Why wish to keep a
copy of what we long to be delivered from?"

"It will please the children, Grace," said Valencia, puzzled. "See how
they are all trying to copy it, from love of you."

"Who am I? I want them to do things from love of God. No, madam, I was
pained (and no offence to you) when I was asked to have my likeness
taken on the quay. There's no sin in it, of course: but let those who
are going away to sea, and have friends at home, have their pictures
taken: not one who wishes to leave behind her no likeness of her own,
only Christ's likeness in these children; and to paint Him to other
people, not to be painted herself. Do ask him to rub it out, my lady!"

"Why, Grace, we were all just wishing to have a likeness of you. Every
one has their picture taken for a remembrance."

"The saints and martyrs never had theirs, as far as I ever heard, and
yet they are not forgotten yet. I know it is the way of great people
like you. I saw your picture once, in a book Miss Heale had; and did not
wonder, when I saw it, that people wished to remember such a face as
yours: and since I have seen you, I wonder still less."

"My picture? where?"

"In a book--'The Book of Beauty,' I believe they called it."

"My dear Grace," said Valencia, laughing and blushing, "if you ever
looked in your glass, you must know that you are quite as worthy of a
place in 'The Book of Beauty' as I am."

Grace shook her head with a serious smile. "Every one in their place,
madam. I cannot help knowing that God has given me a gift: but why, I
cannot tell. Certainly not for the same purpose as He gave it to you
for,--a simple country girl like me. If He have any use for it, He will
use it, as He does all His creatures, without my help. At all events it
will not last long; a few years more, perhaps a few months, and it will
be food for worms; and then people will care as little about my looks as
I care now. I wish, my lady, you would stop the gentleman!"

"Mr. Mellot, draw the children something simpler, please;--a dog or a
cat." And she gave Claude a look which he obeyed.

Valencia felt in a more solemn mood than usual as she walked home that
day.

"Well," said Claude, "I have here every line and shade, and she cannot
escape me. I'll go on board and paint her right off from memory, while
it is fresh. Why, here come Scoutbush and the Major."

"Miss Harvey," said Scoutbush, trying, as he said to Campbell, "to look
as grand as a sheep-dog among a pack of fox-hounds, and very thankful
all the while he had no tail to be bitten off"--"Miss Harvey, I--we--
have heard a great deal in praise of your school; and so I thought I
should like to come and see it."

"Would your lordship like to examine the children?" says Grace,
curtseying to the ground.

"No--thanks--that is--I have no doubt you teach them all that's right,
and we are exceedingly gratified with the way in which you conduct the
school.--I say Val," cried Scoutbush, who could support the part of
patron no longer, "what pretty little ducks they are, I wish I had a
dozen of them! Come you here!" and down he sat on a bench, and gathered
a group round him.

"Now, are you all good children? I'm sure you look so!" said he, looking
round into the bright pure faces, fresh from Leaven, and feeling himself
the nearer heaven as he did so. "Ah! I see Mr. Mellot's been drawing you
pictures. He's a clever man, a wonderful man, isn't he? I can't draw you
pictures, nor tell you stories, like your schoolmistress. What shall I
do?"

"Sing to them, Fred!" said Valencia.

And he began warbling a funny song, with a child on each knee, and his
arms round three or four more, while the little faces looked up into
his, half awe-struck at the presence of a live lord, half longing to
laugh, but not sure whether it would be right.

Valencia and Campbell stood close together, exchanging looks.

"Dear fellow!" whispered she, "so simple and good when he is himself!
And he must go to that dreadful war!"

"Never mind. Perhaps by this very act he is earning permission to come
back again, a wiser and a more useful man."

"How then?"

"Is he not making friends with angels who always behold our Father's
face? At least he is showing capabilities of good, which God gave; and
which therefore God will never waste."

"Now, shall I sing you another song?"

"Oh yes, please!" rose from a dozen little mouths.

"You must not be troublesome to his lordship," says Grace.

"Oh no, I like it. I'll sing them one more song, and then--I want to
speak to you, Miss Harvey."

Grace curtsied, blushed, and shook all over. What could Lord Scoutbush
want to say to her?

That indeed was not very easy to discover at first; for Scoutbush felt
so strongly the oddity of taking a pretty young woman into his counsel
on a question of sanitary reform, that he felt mightily inclined to
laugh, and began beating about the bush, in a sufficiently confused
fashion.

"Well, Miss Harvey, I am exceedingly pleased with--with what I have seen
of the school--that is, what my sister tells, and the clergyman--"

"The clergyman?" thought Grace, surprised, as she well might be, at what
was entirely an impromptu invention of his lordship's.

"And--and--there is ten pounds toward the school, and--and, I will give
an annual subscription the same amount."

"Mr. Headley receives the subscriptions, my lord," said Grace, drawing
back from the proffered note.

"Of course," quoth Scoutbush, trusting again to an impromptu: "but this
is for yourself--a small mark of our sense of your--your usefulness."

If any one has expected that Grace is about to conduct herself, during
this interview, in any wise like a prophetess, tragedy queen, or other
exalted personage; to stand upon her native independence, and scorning
the bounty of an aristocrat, to read the said aristocrat a lecture on
his duties and responsibilities, as landlord of Aberalva town; then will
that person be altogether disappointed. It would have looked very well,
doubtless: but it would have been equally untrue to Grace's womanhood,
and to her notions of Christianity. Whether all men were or were not
equal in the sight of Heaven, was a notion which, had never crossed her
mind. She knew that they would all be equal in heaven, and that was
enough for her. Meanwhile, she found lords and ladies on earth, and
seeing no open sin in the fact of their being richer and more powerful
than she was, she supposed that God had put them where they were; and
she accepted them simply as facts of His kingdom. Of course they had
their duties, as every one has: but what they were she did not know, or
care to know. To their own master they stood or fell; her business was
with her own duties, and with her own class, whose good and evil she
understood by practical experience. So when a live lord made his
appearance in her school, she looked at him with vague wonder and
admiration, as a being out of some other planet, for whom she had no
gauge or measure: she only believed that he had vast powers of doing
good unknown to her; and was delighted by seeing him condescend to play
with her children. The truth may be degrading, but it must be told.
People, of course, who know the hollowness of the world, and the vanity
of human wealth and honour, and are accustomed to live with lords and
ladies, see through all that, just as clearly as any American republican
does; and care no more about walking down Pall-Mall with the Marquis of
Carabas, who can get them a place or a living, than with Mr. Two-shoes,
who can only borrow ten pounds of them; but Grace was a poor simple
West-country girl; and as such we must excuse her, if, curtseying to the
very ground, with tears of gratitude in her eyes, she took the ten-pound
note, saying to herself, "Thank the Good Lord! This will just pay
mother's account at the mill."

Likewise we must excuse her if she trembled a little, being a young
woman--though being also a lady, she lost no jot of self-possession--
when his lordship went on in as important a tone as he could--

"And--and I hear, Miss Harvey, that you have a great influence over
these children's parents."

"I am afraid some one has misinformed your lordship," said Grace, in a
low voice.

"Ah!" quoth Scoutbush, in a tone meant to be reassuring; "it is quite
proper in you to say so. What eyes she has! and what hair! and what
hands, too!" (This was, of course, spoken mentally.) "But we know
better; and we want you to speak to them, whenever you can, about
keeping their houses clean, and all that, in case the cholera should
come." And Scoutbush stopped. It was a quaint errand enough; and
besides, as he told Mellot frankly, "I could think of nothing but those
wonderful eyes of hers, and how like they were to La Signora's."

Grace had been looking at the ground all the while. Now she threw upon
him one of her sudden, startled looks, and answered slowly, as her eyes
dropped again:

"I have, my lord; but they will not listen to me."

"Won't listen to you? Then to whom will they listen?"

"To God, when He speaks Himself," said she, still looking on the ground.
Scoutbush winced uneasily. He was not accustomed to solemn words, spoken
so solemnly.

"Do you hear this, Campbell? Miss Harvey has been talking to these
people already, and they won't hear her."

"Miss Harvey, I dare say, is not astonished at that. It is the usual
fate of those who try to put a little common sense into their
fellow-men."

"Well, and I shall, at all events, go off and give them my mind on the
matter; though I suppose (with a glance at Grace) I can't expect to be
heard where Miss Harvey has not been."

"Oh, my lord," cried Grace, "if you would but speak--" And there she
stopped; for was it her place to tell him his duty? No doubt he had
wiser people than her to counsel him.

But the moment the party left the school, Grace dropped into her chair;
her head fell on the table, and she burst into an agony of weeping,
which brought the whole school round her.

"Oh, my darlings! my darlings!" cried she at last, looking up, and
clasping them to her by twos and threes; "Is there no way of saving you?
No way! Then we must make the more haste to be good, and be all ready
when Jesus comes to take us." And shaking off her passion with one
strong effort, she began teaching those children as she had never taught
them before, with a voice, a look, as of Stephen himself when he saw the
heavens opened.

For that burst of weeping was the one single overflow of long pent
passion, disappointment, and shame.

She had tried, indeed. Ever since Tom's conversation and Frank's sermon
had poured in a flood of new light on the meaning of epidemics, and
bodily misery, and death itself, she had been working as only she could
work; exhorting, explaining, coaxing, warning, entreating with tears,
offering to perform with her own hands the most sickening offices; to
become, if no one else would, the common scavenger of the town. There
was no depth to which, in her noble enthusiasm, she would not have gone
down. And behold, it had been utterly in vain! Ah! the bitter
disappointment of finding her influence fail her utterly, the first time
that it was required for a great practical work! They would let her talk
to them about their souls, then!--They would even amend a few sins here
and there, of which they had been all along as well aware as she. But to
be convinced of a new sin; to have their laziness, pride, covetousness,
touched; that, she found, was what they would not bear; and where she
had expected, if not thanks, at least a fair hearing, she had been met
with peevishness, ridicule, even anger and insult.

Her mother had turned against her. "Why would she go getting a bad name
from every one, and driving away customers?" The preachers, who were (as
is too common in West-country villages) narrow, ignorant, and somewhat
unscrupulous men, turned against her. They had considered the cholera,
if it was to come, as so much spiritual capital for themselves; an
occasion which they could "improve" into a sensation, perhaps a
"revival;" and to explain it upon mere physical causes was to rob them
of their harvest. Coarse viragos went even farther still, and dared to
ask her "whether it was the curate or the doctor she was setting her cap
at: for she never had anything in her mouth now but what they had said?"
And those words went through her heart like a sword. Was she
disinterested? Was not love for Thurnall, the wish to please him,
mingling with all her earnestness? And again, was not self-love mingling
with it? and mingling, too, with the disappointment, even indignation,
which she felt at having failed? Ah--what hitherto hidden spots of
self-conceit, vanity, pharisaic pride, that bitter trial laid bare, or
seemed to lay, till she learned to thank her unseen Guide even for it!

Perhaps she had more reason to be thankful for her humiliation than she
could suspect, with her narrow knowledge of the world. Perhaps that
sudden downfall of her fancied queenship was needed, to shut her out,
once and for all, from that downward path of spiritual intoxication,
followed by spiritual knavery, which, as has been hinted, was but too
easy for her.

But meanwhile the whole thing was but a fresh misery. To bear the burden
of Cassandra day and night, seeing in fancy--which yet was truth--the
black shadow of death hanging over that doomed place; to dream of whom
it might sweep off;--perhaps, worst of all, her mother, unconfessed and
impenitent!

Too dreadful! And dreadful, too, the private troubles which were
thickening fast; and which seemed, instead of drawing her mother to her
side, to estrange her more and more, for some mysterious reason. Her
mother was heavily in debt. This ten pounds of Lord Scoutbush's would
certainly clear off the miller's bill. Her scanty quarter's salary,
which was just due, would clear off a little more. But there was a
long-standing account of the wholesale grocer's for five-and-twenty
pounds, for which Mrs. Harvey had given a two months' bill. That bill
would become due early in September: and how to meet it, neither mother
nor daughter knew; it lay like a black plague-spot on the future, only
surpassed in horror by the cholera itself.

It might have been three or four days after, that Claude, lounging after
breakfast on deck, was hailed from a dingy, which contained Captain
Willis and Gentleman Jan.

"Might we take the liberty of coming aboard to speak with your honour?"

"By all means!" and up the side they came; their faces evidently big
with some great purpose, and each desirous that the other should begin.

"You speak, Captain," says Jan, "you'm oldest;" and then he began
himself. "If you please, sir, we'm come on a sort of deputation--Why
don't you tell the gentleman, Captain?" Willis seemed either doubtful
of the success of his deputation, or not over desirous thereof; for,
after trying to put John Beer forward as spokesman, he began:--

"I'm sorry to trouble you, sir, but these young men will have it so--and
no shame to them--on a matter which I think will come to nothing. But
the truth is, they have heard that you are a great painter, and they
have taken it into their heads to ask you to paint a picture for them."

"Not to ask you a favour, sir, mind!" interrupted Jan; "we'd scorn to be
so forward; we'll subscribe and pay for it, in course, any price in
reason. There's forty and more promised already."

"You must tell me, first, what the picture is to be about," said Claude,
puzzled and amused.

"Why didn't you tell the gentleman, Captain?"

"Because I think it is no use; and I told them all so from the first.
The truth is, sir, they want a picture of my--of our schoolmistress, to
hang up in the school or somewhere--"

"That's it, dra'ed out all natural, in paints, and her bonnet, and her
shawl, and all, just like life; we was a going to ax you to do one of
they garrytypes; but she would have'n noo price; besides tan't cheerful
looking they sort, with your leave; too much blackamoor wise, you see,
and over thick about the nozzes, most times, to my liking; so we'll pay
you and welcome, all you ask."

"Too much blackamoor wise, indeed!" said Claude, amused. "And how much
do you think I should ask?"

No answer.

"We'll settle that presently. Come down into the cabin with me."

"Why, sir, we couldn't make so hold. His lordship--"

"Oh, his lordship's on shore, and I am skipper for the time; and if not,
he'd be delighted to see two good seamen here. So come along."

And down they went.

"Bowie, bring these gentlemen some sherry!" cried Claude, turning over
his portfolio. "Now then, my worthy friends, is that the sort of thing
you want?"

And he spread on the table a water-colour sketch of Grace.

The two worthies gazed in silent delight, and then looked at each other,
and then at Claude, and then at the picture.

"Why, sir," said Willis; "I couldn't have believed it! You've got the
very smile of her, and the sadness of her too, as if you'd known her a
hundred year!"

"'Tis beautiful!" sighed Jan, half to himself. Poor fellow, he had
cherished, perhaps, hopes of winning Grace after all.

"Well, will that suit you?"

"Why, sir, make so bold:--but what we thought on was to have her drawn
from head to foot, and a child standing by her like, holding to her
hand, for a token as she was schoolmistress; and the pier behind, maybe,
to signify as she was our maid, and belonged to Aberalva."

"A capital thought! Upon my word, you're men of taste here in the West;
but what do you think I should charge for such a picture as that?"

"Name your price, sir," said Jan, who was in high good humour at
Claude's approbation.

"Two hundred guineas?"

Jan gave a long whistle.

"I told you so, Captain Beer," said Willis, "or ever we got into the
boat."

"Now," said Claude, laughing, "I've two prices, ore's two hundred, and
the other is just nothing; and if you won't agree to the one, you must
take the other."

"But we wants to pay, we'd take it an honour to pay, if we could afford
it."

"Then wait till next Christmas."

"Christmas?"

"My good friend, pictures are not painted in a day. Next Christmas, if I
live, I'll send you what you shall not be ashamed of, or she either, and
do you club your money and put it into a handsome gold frame."

"But, sir," said Willis, "this will give you a sight of trouble, and all
for our fancy."

"I like it, and I like you! You're fine fellows, who know a noble
creature when God sends her to you; and I should be ashamed to ask a
farthing of your money. There, no more words!"

"Well, you are a gentleman, sir!" said Gentleman Jan.

"And so are you," said Claude. "Now I'll show you some more sketches."

"I should like to know, sir," asked Willis, "how you got at that
likeness. She would not hear of the thing, and that's why I had no
liking to come troubling you about nothing."

Claude told them, and Jan laughed heartily, while Willis said,--

"Do you know, sir, that's a relief to my mind. There is no sin in being
drawn, of course; but I didn't like to think my maid had changed her
mind, when once she'd made it up."

So the deputation retired in high glee, after Willis had entreated
Claude and Beer to keep the thing a secret from Grace.

It befell that Claude, knowing no reason why he should not tell Frank
Headley, told him the whole story, as a proof of the chivalry of his
parishioners, in which he would take delight.

Frank smiled, but said little; his opinion of Grace was altering fast. A
circumstance which occurred a few days after altered it still more.

Scoutbush had gone forth, as he threatened, and exploded in every
direction, with such effect as was to be supposed. Everybody promised
his lordship to do everything. But when his lordship's back was turned,
everybody did just nothing. They knew very well that he could not make
them do anything; and what was more, in some of the very worst cases,
the evil was past remedy now, and better left alone. For the drought
went on pitiless. A copper sun, a sea of glass, a brown easterly blight,
day after day, while Thurnall looked grimly aloft and mystified the
sailors with--

"Fine weather for the Flying Dutchman, this!"

"Coffins sail fastest in a calm."

"You'd best all out to the quay-head, and whistle for a wind: it would
be an ill one that would blow nobody good just now!"

But the wind came not, nor the rain; and the cholera crept nearer and
nearer: while the hearts of all in Aberalva were hardened, and out of
very spite against the agitators, they did less than they would have
done otherwise. Even the inhabitants of the half-a-dozen cottages, which
Scoutbush, finding that they were in his own hands, whitewashed by main
force, filled the town with lamentations over his lordship's tyranny.
True--their pig-styes were either under their front windows; or within
two feet of the wall: but to pull down a poor man's pig-stye!--they
might ever so well be Rooshian slaves!--and all the town was on their
side; for pigs were the normal inhabitants of Aberalva back-yards.

Tardrew's wrath, of course, knew no bounds; and meeting Thurnall
standing at Willis's door, with Frank and Mellot, he fell upon him
open-mouthed.

"Well, sir! I've a crow to pick with you."

"Pick away!" quoth Tom.

"What business have you meddling between his lordship and me?"

"That is my concern," quoth Tom, who evidently was not disinclined to
quarrel. "I am not here to give an account to you of what I choose to
do."

"I'll tell you what, sir; ever since you've been in this parish you've
been meddling, you and Mr. Headley too,--I'll say it to your faces,--
I'll speak the truth to any man, gentle or simple; and that ain't enough
for you, but you must come over that poor half-crazed girl, to set her
plaguing honest people, with telling 'em they'll all be dead in a month,
till nobody can eat their suppers in peace: and that again ain't enough
for you, but you must go to my lord with your--"

"Hold hard!" quoth Tom. "Don't start two hares at once. Let's hear that
about Miss Harvey again!"

"Miss Harvey? Why, you should know better than I."

"Let's hear what you know."

"Why, ever since that night Trebooze caught you and her together--"

"Stop!" said Tom, "that's a lie."

"Everybody says so."

"Then everybody lies, that's all; and you may say I said so, and take
care you don't say it again yourself. But what ever since that night?"

"Why, I suppose you come over the poor thing somehow, as you seem minded
to do over every one as you can. But she's been running up and down the
town ever since, preaching to 'em about windilation, and drains, and
smells, and cholera, and its being a judgment of the Lord against dirt,
till she's frightened all the women so, that many's the man as has had
to forbid her his house.--But you know that as well as I."

"I never heard a word of it before: but now I have, I'll give you my
opinion on it. That she is a noble, sensible girl, and that you are all
a set of fools who are not worthy of her; and that the greatest fool of
the whole is you, Mr. Tardrew. And when the cholera comes, it will serve
you exactly right if you are the first man carried off by it. Now, sir,
you have given me your mind, and I have given you mine, and I do not
wish to hear anything more of you. Good morning!"

"You hold your head mighty high, to be sure, since you've had the run of
his lordship's yacht."

"If you are impertinent, sir, you will repent it. I shall take care to
inform his lordship of this conversation."

"My dear Thurnall," said Headley, as Tardrew withdrew, muttering curses,
"the old fellow is certainly right on one point."

"What then?"

"That you have wonderfully changed your tone. Who was to eat any amount
of dirt, if he could but save his influence thereby?"

"I have altered my plans. I shan't stay here long: I shall just see this
cholera over, and then vanish."

"No?"

"Yes. I cannot sit here quietly, listening to the war-news. It makes me
mad to be up and doing. I must eastward-ho, and see if trumps will not
turn up for me at last. Why, I know the whole country, half-a-dozen of
the languages,--oh, if I could get some secret-service work! Go I must.
At worst I can turn my hand to doctoring Bashi-bazouks."

"My dear Tom, when will you settle down like other men?" cries Claude.

"I would now, if there was an opening at Whitbury, and low as life would
be, I'd face it for my father's sake. But here I cannot stay."

Both Claude and Headley saw that Tom had reasons which he did not choose
to reveal. However, Claude was taken into his confidence that very
afternoon.

"I shall make a fool of myself with that schoolmistress. I have been
near enough to it a dozen times already; and this magnificent conduct of
hers about the cholera has given the finishing stroke to my brains. If I
stay on here, I shall marry her: I know I shall! and I won't--I'd go
to-morrow, if it were not that I'm bound, for my own credit, to see the
cholera safe into the town, and out again."

Tom did not hint a word of the lost money, or of the month's delay which
Grace had asked of him. The month was drawing fast to a close now,
however: but no sign of the belt. Still, Tom had honour enough in him to
be silent on the point, even to Claude.

"By the by, have you heard from the wanderers this week?"

"I heard from Sabina this morning. Marie is very poorly, I fear. They
have been at Kissingen, bathing; and are going to Bertrich: somebody has
recommended the baths there."

"Bertrich! Where's Bertrich?"

"The most delicious little nest of a place, half way up the Moselle,
among the volcano craters."

"Don't know it. Have they found that Yankee?"

"No."

"Why, I thought Sabina had a whole detective force of pets and protégés,
from Boulogne to Rome."

"Well, she has at least heard of him at Baden; and then again at
Stuttgard: but he has escaped them as yet."

"And poor Marie is breaking her heart all the while? I'll tell you what,
Claude, it will be well for him if he escapes me as well as them."

"What do you mean?"

"I certainly shan't go to the East without shaking hands once more with
Marie and Sabina; and if in so doing I pass that fellow, it's a pity if
I don't have a snap shot at him."

"Tom! Tom! I had hoped your duelling days were over."

"They will be, over, when one can get the law to punish such puppies;
but not till then. Hang the fellow! What business had he with her at
all, if he didn't intend to marry her?"

"I tell you, as I told you before, it is she who will not marry him."

"And yet she's breaking her heart for him. I can see it all plain
enough, Claude. She has found him out only too late. I know him--
luxurious, selfish, blazé; would give a thousand dollars to-morrow, I
believe, like the old Roman, for a new pleasure: and then amuses himself
with her till he breaks her heart! Of course she won't many him: because
she knows that if he found out her Quadroon blood--ah, that's it! I'll
lay my life he has found it out already, and that is why he has bolted!"

Claude had no answer to give. That talk at the Exhibition made it only
too probable.

"You think so yourself, I see! Very well. You know that whatever I have
been to others, that girl has nothing against me."

"Nothing against you? Why, she owes you honour, life, everything."

"Never mind that. Only when I take a fancy to begin, I'll carry it
through. I took to that girl, for poor Wyse's sake; and I'll behave by
her to the last as he would wish; and he who insults her, insults me. I
won't go out of my way to find Stangrave: but if I do, I'll have it
out!"

"Then you will certainly fight. My dearest Tom, do look into your own
heart, and see whether you have not a grain or two of spite against him
left. I assure you you judge him too harshly."

"Hum--that must take its chance. At least, if we fight, we fight fairly
and equally. He is a brave man--I will do him that justice--and a cool
one; and used to be a sweet shot. So he has just as good a chance of
shooting me, if I am in the wrong, as I have of shooting him, if he is."

"But your father?"

"I know. That is very disagreeable; and all the more so because I am
going to insure my life--a pretty premium they will make me pay!--and if
I'm killed in a duel, it will be forfeited. However, the only answer to
that is, that either I shan't fight, or if I do, I shan't be killed. You
know I don't believe in being killed, Claude."

"Tom! Tom! The same as ever!" said Claude sadly.

"Well, old man, and what else would you have me? Nobody could ever alter
me, you know; and why should I alter myself? Here I am, after all, alive
and jolly; and there is old daddy, as comfortable as he ever can be on
earth: and so it will be to the end of the chapter. There! let's talk of
something else."




CHAPTER XVI.

COME AT LAST.


Now, as if in all things Tom Thurnall and John Briggs were fated to
take opposite sides, Campbell lost ground with Elsley as fast as he
gained it with Thurnall. Elsley had never forgiven himself for his
passion that first morning. He had shown Campbell his weak side, and
feared and disliked him accordingly. Beside, what might not Thurnall
have told Campbell about him? And what use might not the Major make of
his secret? Besides, Elsley's dread and suspicion increased rapidly when
he discovered that Campbell was one of those men who live on terms of
peculiar intimacy with many women; whether for his own good or not,
still for the good of the women concerned. For only by honest purity,
and moral courage superior to that of the many, is that dangerous post
earned; and women will listen to the man who will tell them the truth,
however sternly; and will bow, as before a guardian angel, to the strong
insight of him whom they have once learned to trust. But it is a
dangerous office, after all, for layman as well as for priest, that of
father-confessor. The experience of centuries has shown that they must
needs exist, wherever fathers neglect their daughters, husbands their
wives; wherever the average of the women cannot respect the average of
the men. But the experience of centuries should likewise have taught
men, that the said father-confessors are no objects of envy; that their
temptations to become spiritual coxcombs (the worst species of all
coxcombs), if not intriguers, bullies, and worse, are so extreme, that
the soul which is proof against them must be either very great, or very
small indeed. Whether Campbell was altogether proof, will be seen
hereafter. But one day Elsley found out that such was Campbell's
influence, and did not love him the more for the discovery.

They were walking round the garden after dinner; Scoutbush was licking
his foolish lips over some commonplace tale of scandal.

"I tell you, my dear fellow, she's booked; and Mellot knows it as well
as I. He saw her that night at Lady A's."

"We saw the third act of the comi-tragedy. The fourth is playing out
now. We shall see the fifth before the winter."

"Non sine sanguine!" said the Major.

"Serve the wretched stick right, at least," said Scoutbush. "What right
had he to marry such a pretty woman?"

"What right had they to marry her up to him?" said Claude. "I don't
blame poor January. I suppose none of us, gentlemen, would have refused
such a pretty toy, if we could have afforded it as he could."

"Whom do you blame then?" asked Elsley.

"Fathers and mothers who prate hypocritically about keeping their
daughters' minds pure; and then abuse a girl's ignorance, in order to
sell her to ruin. Let them keep her mind pure, in heaven's name; but let
them consider themselves all the more bound in honour to use on her
behalf the experience in which she must not share."

"Well," drawled Scoutbush, "I don't complain of her bolting; she's a
very sweet creature, and always was: but, as Longreach says,--and a very
witty fellow he is, though you laugh at him,--'If she'd kept to us, I
shouldn't have minded: but as Guardsmen, we must throw her over. It's an
insult to the whole Guards, my dear fellow, after refusing two of us, to
marry an attorney, and after all to bolt with a plunger.'"

What bolting with a plunger might signify, Elsley knew not: but ere he
could ask, the Major rejoined, in an abstracted voice--

"God help us all! And this is the girl I recollect, two years ago,
singing there in Cavendish Square, as innocent as a nestling thrush!"

"Poor child!" said Mellot, "sold at first--perhaps sold again now. The
plunger has bills out, and she has ready money. I know her settlements."

"She shan't do it," said the Major quietly: "I'll write to her
to-night."

Elsley looked at him keenly. "You think, then, sir, that you can, by
simply writing, stop this intrigue?"

The Major did not answer. He was deep in thought.

"I shouldn't wonder if he did," said Scoutbush; "two to one on his
baulking the plunger!"

"She is at Lord ----'s now, at those silly private theatricals. Is he
there?"

"No," said Mellot; "he tried hard for an invitation--stooped to work me
and Sabina. I believe she told him that she would sooner see him in the
Morgue than help him; and he is gone to the moors now, I believe."

"There is time then: I will write to her to-night;" and Campbell took up
his hat and went home to do it.

"Ah," said Scoutbush, taking his cigar meditatively from his mouth, "I
wonder how he does it! It's a gift, I always say, a wonderful gift!
Before he has been a week in a house, he'll have the confidence of every
woman in it,--and 'gad, he does it by saying the rudest things!--and the
confidence of all the youngsters the week after."

"A somewhat dangerous gift," said Elsley, drily.

"Ah, yes; he might play tricks if he chose: but there's the wonder, that
he don't. I'd answer for him with my own sister. I do every day of my
life--for I believe he knows how many pins she puts into her dress--and
yet there he is. As I said once in the mess-room--there was a youngster
there who took on himself to be witty, and talked about the still sow
supping the milk--the snob! You recollect him, Mellot? the attorney's
son from Brompton, who sold out;--we shaved his mustachios, put a bear
in his bed, and sent him home to his ma--And he said that Major Campbell
might be very pious, and all that: but he'd warrant--they were the
fellow's own words,--that he took his lark on the sly, like other men--
the snob! so I told him, I was no better than the rest, and no more I
am; but if any man dared to say that the Major was not as honest as his
own sister, I was his man at fifteen paces. And so I am, Claude!"

All which did not increase Elsley's love to the Major, conscious as he
was that Lucia's confidence was a thing which he had not wholly; and
which it would be very dangerous to him for any other man to have at
all.

Into the drawing-room they went. Frank Headley had been asked up to tea;
and he stood at the piano, listening to Valencia's singing.

As they came in, the maid came in also. "Mr. Thurnall wished to speak to
Major Campbell."

Campbell went out, and returned in two minutes somewhat hurriedly.

"Mr. Thurnall wishes Lord Scoutbush to be informed at once, and I think
it is better that you should all know it--that--it is a painful
surprise:--but there is a man ill in the street, whose symptoms he does
not like, he says."

"Cholera?" said Elsley.

"Call him in," said Scoutbush.

"He had rather not come in, he says."

"What! is it infectious?"

"Certainly not, if it be cholera, but--"

"He don't wish to frighten people, quite right:" (with a half glance at
Elsley;) "but is it cholera, honestly?"

"I fear so."

"Oh, my children!" said poor Mrs. Vavasour.

"Will five pounds help the poor fellow?" said Scoutbush.

"How far off is it?" asked Elsley.

"Unpleasantly near. I was going to advise you to move at once."

"You hear what they are saying?" asked Valencia of Frank.

"Yes, I hear it," said Frank, in a quiet meaning tone.

Valencia thought that he was half pleased with the news. Then she
thought him afraid; for he did not stir.

"You will go instantly, of course?"

"Of course I shall. Good-bye! Do not be afraid. It is not infectious."

"Afraid? And a soldier's sister?" said Valencia, with a toss of her
beautiful head, by way of giving force to her somewhat weak logic.

Frank left the room instantly, and met Thurnall in the passage.

"Well, Headley, it's here before we sent for it, as bad luck usually
is."

"I know. Let me go! Where is it? Whose house?" asked Frank in an excited
tone.

"Humph!" said Thurnall, looking intently at him, "that is just what I
shall not tell you."

"Not tell me?"

"No, you are too pale, Headley. Go back and get two or three glasses of
wine, and then we will talk of it."

"What do you mean? I must go instantly! It is my duty,--my parishioner!"

"Look here, Headley! Are you and I to work together in this business, or
are we not?"

"Why not, in heaven's name?"

"Then I want you, not for cure, but for prevention. You can do them no
good when they have once got it. You may prevent dozens from having it
in the next four-and-twenty hours, if you will be guided by me."

"But my business is with their souls, Thurnall."

"Exactly;--to give them the consolations of religion, as they call it.
You will give them to the people who have not taken it. You may bring
them safe through it by simply keeping up their spirits; while if you
waste your time on poor dying wretches--"

"Thurnall, you must not talk so! I will do all you ask: but my place is
at the death-bed, as well as elsewhere. These perishing souls are in my
care."

"And how do you know, pray, that they are perishing?" answered Tom, with
something very like a sneer. "And if they were, do you honestly believe
that any talk of yours can change in five minutes a character which has
been forming for years, or prevent a man's going where he ought to go,--
which, I suppose, is the place to which he deserves to go?"

"I do," said Frank, firmly.

"Well. It is a charitable and hopeful creed. My great dread was, lest
you should kill the poor wretches before their time, by adding to the
fear of cholera the fear of hell. I caught the Methodist parson at that
work an hour ago, took him by the shoulders and shot him out into the
street. But, my dear Headley" (and Tom lowered his voice to a whisper),
"wherever poor Tom Beer deserved to go to, he is gone to it already. He
has been dead this twenty minutes."

"Tom Beer dead? One of the finest fellows in the town! And I never sent
for?"

"Don't speak so loud, or they will hear you. I had no time to send for
you; and if I had, I should not have sent, for he was past attending to
you from the first. He brought it with him, I suppose, from C----. Had
had warnings for a week, and neglected them. Now listen to me: that man
was but two hours ill; as sharp a case as I ever saw, even in the West
Indies. You must summon up all your good sense, and play the man for a
fortnight; for it's coming on the poor souls like hell!" said Tom
between his teeth, and stamped his foot upon the ground. Frank had never
seen him show so much feeling; he fancied he could see tears glistening
in his eyes.

"I will, so help me God!" said Frank.

Tom held out his hand, and grasped Frank's.

"I know you will. You're all right at heart. Only mind three things:
don't frighten them; don't tire yourself; don't go about on an empty
stomach; and then we can face the worst like men. And now go in, and say
nothing to these people. If they take a panic we shall have some of them
down to-night as sure as fate. Go in, keep quiet, persuade them to bolt
anywhere on earth by daylight to-morrow. Then go home, eat a good
supper, and come across to me; and if I'm out, I'll leave word where."

Frank went back again; he found Campbell, who had had his cue from Tom,
urging immediate removal as strongly as he could, without declaring the
extent of the danger. Valencia was for sending instantly for a fly to
the nearest town, and going to stay at a watering-place some forty miles
off. Elsley was willing enough at heart, but hesitated; he knew not, at
the moment, poor fellow, where to find the money. His wife knew that she
could borrow of Valencia; but she, too, was against the place. The
cholera would be in the air for miles round. The journey in the hot sun
would make the children sick and ill; and watering-place lodgings were
such horrid holes, never ventilated, and full of smells--people caught
fevers at them so often. Valencia was inclined to treat this as
"mother's nonsense;" but Major Campbell said gravely, that Mrs. Vavasour
was perfectly right as to fact, and her arguments full of sound reason;
whereon Valencia said that "of course if Lucia thought it, Major
Campbell would prove it; and there was no arguing with such Solons as
he--"

Which Elsley heard, and ground his teeth. Whereon little Scoutbush cried
joyfully,--

"I have it; why not go by sea? Take the yacht, and go! Where? Of course
I have it again. 'Pon my word I'm growing clever, Valencia, in spite of
all your prophecies. Go up the Welsh coast. Nothing so healthy and airy
as a sea-voyage: sea as smooth as a mill-pond, too, and likely to be.
And then land, if you like, at Port Madoc, as I meant to do; and there
are my rooms at Beddgelert lying empty. Engaged them a week ago,
thinking I should be there by now; so you may as well keep them aired
for me. Come, Valencia, pack up your millinery! Lucia, get the cradles
ready, and we'll have them all on board by twelve. Capital plan,
Vavasour, isn't if? and, by Jove, what stunning poetry you will write
there under Snowdon!"

"But will you not want your rooms yourself, Lord Scoutbush?" said
Elsley.

"My dear fellow, never mind me. I shall go across the country, I think,
see an old friend, and get some otter-hunting. Don't think of me, till
you're there, and then send the yacht back for me. She must be doing
something, you know; and the men are only getting drunk every day here.
Come--no arguing about it, or I shall turn you all out of doors into the
lane, eh?"

And the little fellow laughed so good-naturedly, that Elsley could not
help liking him: and feeling that he would be both a fool, and cruel to
his family, if he refused so good an offer, he gave in to the scheme,
and went out to arrange matters: while Scoutbush went out into the hall
with Campbell, and scrambled into his pea-jacket, to go off to the yacht
that moment.

"You'll see to them, there's a good fellow," as they lighted their
cigars at the door. "That Vavasour is greener than grass, you know,
_tant pis_ for my poor sister."

"I am not going."

"Not going?"

"Certainly not; so my rooms will be at their service; and you had much
better escort them yourself. It will be much less disagreeable for
Vavasour, who knows nothing of commanding sailors," or himself, thought
the Major, "than finding himself master of your yacht in your absence,
and you will get your fishing as you intended."

"But why are you going to stay?"

"Oh, I have not half done with the sea-beasts here. I found too new ones
yesterday."

"Quaint old beetle-hunter you are, for a man who has fought in
half-a-dozen battles!" and Scoutbush walked on silently for five minutes.

Suddenly he broke out--

"I cannot! By George, I cannot; and what's more, I won't!"

"What?"

"Run away. It will look so--so cowardly, and there's the truth of it,
before those fine fellows down there: and just as I am come among them,
too! The commander-in-chief to turn tail at the first shot! Though I
can't be of any use, I know, and I should have liked a fortnight's
fishing so," said he in a dolorous voice, "before going to be eaten up
with flies at Varna--for this Crimean expedition is all moonshine."

"Don't be too sure of that," said Campbell. "We shall go; and some of us
who go will never come back, Freddy. I know those Russians better than
many, and I have been talking them over lately with Thurnall, who has
been in their service."

"Has he been at Sevastopol?"

"No. Almost the only place on earth where he has not been: but from all
he says, and from all I know, we are undervaluing our foes, as usual,
and shall smart for it!"

"We'll lick them, never fear!"

"Yes; but not at the first round. Scoutbush, your life has been child's
play as yet. You are going now to see life in earnest,--the sort of life
which average people have been living, in every age and country, since
Adam's fall; a life of sorrow and danger, tears and blood, mistake,
confusion, and perplexity; and you will find it a very new sensation;
and, at first, a very ugly one. All the more reason for doing what good
deeds you can before you go; for you may have no time left to do any on
the other side of the sea."

Scoutbush was silent awhile.

"Well; I'm afraid of nothing, I hope: only I wish one could meet this
cholera face to face, as one will those Russians, with a good sword in
one's hand, and a good horse between one's knees; and have a chance of
giving him what he brings, instead of being kicked off by the cowardly
Rockite, no one knows how; and not even from behind a turf dyke, but out
of the very clouds."

"So we all say, in every battle, Scoutbush. Who ever sees the man who
sent the bullet through him? And yet we fight on. Do you not think the
greatest terror, the only real terror, in any battle, is the chance
shot? which come from no one knows where, and hit no man can guess whom?
If you go to the Crimea, as you will, you will feel what I felt at the
Cape, and Cabul, and the Punjab, twenty times,--the fear of dying like a
dog, one knew not how."

"And yet I'll fight, Campbell!"

"Of course you will, and take your chance. Do so now!"

"By Jove, Campbell--I always say it--you're the most sensible man I ever
met; and, by Jove, the doctor comes the next. My sister shall have the
yacht, and I'll go up to Penalva."

"You will do two good deeds at once, then," said the Major. "You will do
what is right, and you will give heart to many a poor wretch here.
Believe me, Scoutbush, you will never repent of this."

"By Jove, it always does one good to hear you talk in that way,
Campbell! One feels--I don't know--so much of a man when one is with
you; not that I shan't take uncommonly good care of myself, old fellow;
that is but fair: but as for running away, as I said, why--why--why I
can't, and so I won't!"

"By the by," said the Major, "there is one thing which I have forgotten,
and which they will never recollect. Is the yacht victualled--with fresh
meat and green stuff, I mean?"

"Whew--w--"

"I will go back, borrow a lantern, and forage in the garden, like an old
campaigner. I have cut a salad with my sword before now."

"And made it in your helmet, with macassar sauce?" And the two went
their ways.

Meanwhile, before they had left the room, a notable conversation had
been going on between Valencia and Headley.

Headley had re-entered the room so much paler than he went out, that
everybody noticed his altered looks. Valencia chose to attribute them to
fear.

"So! Are you returned from the sick man already, Mr. Headley?" asked
she, in a marked tone.

"I have been forbidden by the doctor to go near him at present, Miss St.
Just," said he quietly, but in a sort of under-voice, which hinted that
he wished her to ask no more questions. A shade passed over her
forehead, and she began chatting rather noisily to the rest of the
party, till Elsley, her brother, and Campbell went out.

Valencia looked up at him, expecting him to go too. Mrs. Vavasour began
bustling about the room, collecting little valuables, and looking over
her shoulders at the now unwelcome guest. But Frank leaned back in a
cosy arm-chair, and did not stir. His hands were clasped on his knees;
he seemed lost in thought; very pale: but there was a firm set look
about his lips which attracted Valencia's attention. Once he looked up
in Valencia's face, and saw that she was looking at him. A flush came
over his cheeks for a moment, and then he seemed as impassive as ever.
What could he want there! How very gauche and rude of him; so unlike
him, too! And she said, civilly enough, to him, "I fear, Mr. Headley, we
must begin packing up now."

"I fear you must, indeed," answered he, as if starting from a dream. He
spoke in a tone, and with a look, which made both the women start; for
what they meant it was impossible to doubt.

"I fear you must. I have foreseen it a long time; and so, I fear (and he
rose from his seat), must I, unless I mean to be very rude. You will at
least take away with you the knowledge, that you have given to one
person's existence, at least for a few weeks, pleasure more intense than
he thought earth could hold."

"I trust that pretty compliment was meant for me," said Lucia, half
playful, half reproving.

"I am sure that it ought not to have been meant for me," said Valencia,
more downright than her sister. Both could see for whom it was meant, by
the look of passionate worship which Frank fixed on a face which, after
all, seemed made to be worshipped.

"I trust that neither of you," answered he, quietly, "think me
impertinent enough to pretend to make love, as it is called, to Miss St.
Just. I know who she is, and who I am. Gentleman as I am, and the
descendant of gentlemen" (and Frank looked a little proud, as he spoke,
and very handsome), "I see clearly enough the great gulf fixed between
us; and I like it; for it enables me to say truth which I otherwise dare
not have spoken; as a brother might say to a sister, or a subject to a
queen. Either analogy will do equally well and equally ill."

Frank, without the least intending it, had taken up the very strongest
military position. Let a man once make a woman understand, or fancy,
that he knows that he is nothing to her; and confess boldly that there
is a great gulf fixed between them, which he has no mind to bridge over:
and then there is little that he may not see or do, for good or for
evil.

And therefore it was that Lucia answered gently, "I am sure you are not
well, Mr. Headley. The excitement of the night has been too much for
you."

"Do I look excited, my dear madam?" he answered quietly. "I assure you
that I am as calm as a man must be who believes that he has but a few
days to live, and trusts, too, that when he dies, he will be infinitely
happier than he ever has been on earth, and lay down an office which he
has never discharged otherwise than ill; which has been to him a
constant source of shame and sorrow."

"Do not speak so!" said Valencia, with her Irish impetuous generosity;
"you are unjust to yourself. We have watched you, felt for you, honoured
you, even when we differed from you"--What more she would have said, I
know not, but at that moment Elsley's peevish voice was heard calling
over the stairs, "Lucia! Lucia?"

"Oh dear! He will wake the children!" cried Lucia, looking at her
sister, as much as to say, "How can I leave you!"

"Run, run, my dear creature!" said Valencia, with a self-confident
smile: and the two were left alone.

The moment that Mrs. Vavasour left the room, there vanished from Frank's
face that intense look of admiration which had made even Valencia
uneasy. He dropped his eyes, and his voice faltered as he spoke again.
He acknowledged the change in their position, and Valencia saw that he
did so, and liked him the better for it.

"I shall not repeat, Miss St. Just, now that we are alone, what I said
just now of the pleasure which I have had during the last month. I am
not poetical, or given to string metaphors together; and I could only go
over the same dull words once more. But I could ask, if I were not
asking too much, leave to prolong at least a shadow of that pleasure to
the last moment. That I shall die shortly, and of this cholera, is with
me a fixed idea, which nothing can remove. No, madam--it is useless to
combat it! But had I anything, by which to the last moment I could bring
back to my fancy what has been its sunlight for so long; even if it were
a scrap of the hem of your garment, aye, a grain of dust off your feet--
God forgive me! He and His mercy ought to be enough to keep me up: but
one's weakness may be excused for clinging to such slight floating
straws of comfort."

Valencia paused, startled, and yet affected. How she had played with
this deep pure heart! And yet, was it pure? Did he wish, by exciting her
pity, to trick her into giving him what he might choose to consider a
token of affection?

And she answered coldly enough--

"I should be sorry, after what you have just said, to chance hurting you
by refusing. I put it to your own good feeling--have you not asked
somewhat too much?"

"Certainly too much, madam, in any common case," said he, quite unmoved.
"Certainly too much, if I asked you for it, as I do not, as the token of
an affection which I know well you do not, cannot feel. But--take my
words as they stand--were you to--It would be returned if I die, in a
few weeks; and returned still sooner if I live. And, madam," said he
lowering his voice, "I vow to you, before Him who sees us both, that, as
far as I am concerned, no human being shall ever know of the fact."

Frank had at last touched the wrong chord.

"What, Mr. Headley? Can you think that I am to have secrets in common
with you, or with any other man? No, sir! If I granted your request, I
should avow it as openly as I shall refuse it."

And she turned sharply toward the door.

Frank Headley was naturally a shy man: but extreme need sometimes
bestows on shyness a miraculous readiness--(else why, in the long run,
do the shy men win the best wives? which is a fact, and may be proved by
statistics, at least as well as anything else can) so he quietly stepped
to Valencia's side, and said in a low voice--

"You cannot avow the refusal half as proudly as I shall avow the
request, if you will but wait till your sister's return. Both are
unnecessary, I think: but it will only be an honour to me to confess,
that, poor curate as I am--"

"Hush!" and Valencia walked quietly up to the table, and began turning
over the leaves of a book, to gain time for her softened heart and
puzzled brain.

In five minutes Frank was beside her again. The book was Tennyson's
"Princess." She had wandered--who can tell why?--to that last exquisite
scene, which all know; and as Valencia read, Frank quietly laid a finger
on the book, and arrested her eyes at last--

  "If you be, what I think you, some sweet dream.
  Stoop down, and seem to kiss me ere I die!"

Valencia shut the book up hurriedly and angrily. A moment after she had
made up her mind what to do, and with the slightest gesture in the
world, motioned Frank proudly and coldly to follow her back into the
window. Had she been a country girl, she would have avoided the ugly
matter; but she was a woman of the world enough to see that she must,
for her own sake and his, talk it out reasonably.

"What do you mean, Mr. Headley? I must ask! You told me just now that
you had no intention of making love to me."

"I told you the truth," said he, in his quiet impassive voice. "I fixed
on these lines as a _pis aller_; and they have done all and more than I
wished, by bringing you back here for at least a moment."

"And do you suppose--you speak like a rational man, therefore, I must
treat you as one--that I can grant your request?"

"Why not? It is an uncommon one. If I have guessed your character
aright, you are able to do uncommon things. Had I thought you enslaved
by etiquette, and by the fear of a world which you can make bow at your
feet if you will, I should not have asked you. But,"--and here his voice
took a tone of deepest earnestness--"grant it--only grant it, and you
shall never repent it. Never, never, never will I cast one shadow over a
light which has been so glorious, so life-giving; which I watched with
delight, and yet lose without regret. Go your way, and God be with you!
I go mine; grant me but a fortnight's happiness, and then, let what will
come!"

He had conquered. The quiet earnestness of the voice, the child-like
simplicity of the manner, of which every word conveyed the most delicate
flattery--yet, she could see, without intending to flatter, without an
after-thought--all these had won the impulsive Irish nature. For all the
dukes and marquises in Belgravia she would not have done it; for they
would have meant more than they said, even when they spoke more
clumsily: but for the plain country curate she hesitated, and asked
herself, "What shall I give him?"

The rose from her bosom? No. That was too significant at once, and too
commonplace; besides, it might wither, and he find an excuse for not
restoring it. It must be something valuable, stately, formal, which he
must needs return. And she drew off a diamond hoop, and put it quietly
into his hand.

"You promise to return if?"

"I promised long ago."

He took it, and lifted it--she thought that he was going to press it to
his lips. Instead, he put it to his forehead, bowing forward and moved
it slightly. She saw that he made with it the sign of the Cross.

"I thank you," he said, with a look of quiet gratitude. "I expected as
much, when you came to understand my request. Again, thank you!" and he
drew back humbly, and left her there alone; while her heart smote her
bitterly for all the foolish encouragement which she had given to one so
tender and humble, and delicate and true.

And so did Frank Headley get what he wanted; by that plain earnest
simplicity, which has more power (let worldlings pride themselves as
they will on their knowledge of women) than all the cunning wiles of the
most experienced rake; and only by aping which, after all, can the rake
conquer. It was a strange thing for Valencia to do, no doubt: but the
strange things which are done in the world (which are some millions
daily) are just what keep the world alive.




CHAPTER XVII.

BAALZEBUB'S BANQUET.


The next day there were three cholera cases: the day after there were
thirteen.

He had come at last, Baalzebub, God of flies, and of what flies are bred
from; to visit his self-blinded worshippers, and bestow on them his own
Cross of the Legion of Dishonour. He had come suddenly, capriciously,
sportively, as he sometimes comes; as he had come to Newcastle the
summer before, while yet the rest of England was untouched. He had
wandered all but harmless about the West country that summer; as if his
maw had been full glutted five years before, when he sat for many a week
upon the Dartmoor hills, amid the dull brown haze, and sun-burnt bents,
and dried-up watercourses of white dusty granite, looking far and wide
over the plague-struck land, and listening to the dead-bell booming all
day long in Tavistock churchyard. But he was come at last, with appetite
more fierce than ever, and had darted aside to seize on Aberalva, and
not to let it go till he had sucked his fill.

And all men moved about the streets slowly, fearfully; conscious of some
awful unseen presence, which might spring on them from round every
corner; some dreadful inevitable spell, which lay upon them like a
nightmare weight; and walked to and fro warily, looking anxiously into
each other's faces, not to ask, "How are you?" but "How am I?" "Do I
look as if--?" and glanced up ever and anon restlessly, as if they
expected to see, like the Greeks, in their tainted camp, by Troy, the
pitiless Sun-god shooting his keen arrows down on beast and man.

All night long the curdled cloud lay low upon the hills, wrapping in its
hot blanket the sweltering breathless town; and rolled off sullenly when
the sun rose high, to let him pour down his glare, and quicken into evil
life all evil things. For Baalzebub is a sunny fiend; and loves not
storm and tempest, thunder, and lashing rains; but the broad bright sun,
and broad blue sky, under which he can take his pastime merrily, and
laugh at all the shame and agony below; and, as he did at his great
banquet in New Orleans once, madden all hearts the more by the contrast
between the pure heaven above and the foul hell below.

And up and down the town the foul fiend sported, now here now there;
snapping daintily at unexpected victims, as if to make confusion worse
confounded: to belie Thurnall's theories and prognostics, and harden the
hearts of fools by fresh excuses for believing that he had nothing to do
with drains and water; that he was "only"--such an only!--"the
Visitation of God."

He has taken old Beer's second son; and now he clutches at the old man
himself; then across the street to Gentleman Jan, his eldest: but he is
driven out from both houses by chloride of lime and peat dust, and the
colony of the Beers has peace awhile.

Alas! there are victims enough and to spare beside them, too ready for
the sacrifice, and up the main street he goes unabashed, springing in at
one door and at another, on either side of the street, but fondest of
the western side, where the hill slopes steeply down to the house-backs.

He fleshes his teeth on every kind of prey. The drunken cobbler dies, of
course: but spotless cleanliness and sobriety does not save the mother
of seven children, who has been soaking her brick floor daily with water
from a poisoned well, defiling where she meant to clean. Youth does not
save the buxom lass, who has been filling herself, as girls will do,
with unripe fruit: nor innocence the two fair children who were sailing
their feather-boats yesterday in the quay-pools, as they have sailed
them for three years past, and found no hurt; piety does not save the
bed-ridden old dame, bed-ridden in the lean-to garret, who moans, "It is
the Lord!" and dies. It is "the Lord" to her, though Baalzebub himself
be the angel of release.

And yet all the while sots and fools escape where wise men fall; weakly
women, living amid all wretchedness, nurse, unharmed, strong men who
have breathed fresh air all day. Of one word of Scripture at least
Baalzebub is mindful; for "one is taken and another left."

Still, there is a method in his seeming madness. His eye falls on a
blind alley, running back from the main street, backed at the upper end
by a high wall of rock. There is a God-send for him--a devil's-send,
rather, to speak plain truth: and in he dashes; and never leaves that
court, let brave Tom wrestle with him as he may, till he has taken one
from every house.

That court belonged to Treluddra, the old fish-jowder. He must do
something. Thurnall attacks him; Major Campbell, Headley; the neighbours
join in the cry; for there is no mistaking cause and effect there, and
no one bears a great love to him; besides, terrified and
conscience-stricken men are glad of a scapegoat; and some of those who
were his stoutest backers in the vestry are now, in their terror, the
loudest against him, ready to impute the whole cholera to him. Indeed,
old Beer is ready to declare that it was Treluddra's fish-heaps which
poisoned him and his: so, all but mobbed, the old sinner goes up--to set
the houses to rights? No; to curse the whole lot for a set of pigs, and
order them to clean the place out themselves, or he will turn them into
the street. He is one of those base natures, whom fact only lashes into
greater fury,--a Pharaoh whose heart the Lord himself can only harden;
such men there are, and women, too, grown grey in lies, to reap at last
the fruit of lies. But he carries back with him to his fish-heaps a
little invisible somewhat which he did not bring; and ere nightfall he
is dead hideously; he, his wife, his son:--and now the Beers are down
again, and the whole neighbourhood of Treluddra's house is wild with
disgusting agony.

Now the fiend is hovering round the fish-curing houses: but turns back,
disgusted with the pure scent of the tan-yard, where not hides, but nets
are barked; skips on board of a brig in the quay-pool; and a poor
collier's 'prentice dies, and goes to his own place. What harm has he
done? Is it his sin that, ill-fed and well-beaten daily, he has been
left to sleep on board, just opposite the sewer's mouth, in a berth some
four feet long by two feet high and broad?

Or is it that poor girl's sin who was just now in Heale's shop, talking
to Miss Heale safe and sound, that she is carried back into it, in
half-an-hour's time, fainting, shrieking? One must draw a veil over the
too hideous details.

No, not her fault: but there, at least, the curse has not come without a
cause. For she is Tardrew's daughter.

But whither have we got? How long has the cholera been in Aberalva? Five
days, five minutes, or five years? How many suns have risen and set
since Frank Headley put into his bosom Valencia's pledge!

It would be hard for him to tell; and hard for many more: for all the
days have passed as in a fever dream. To cowards the time has seemed
endless; and every moment, ere their term shall come, an age of terror,
of self-reproach, of superstitious prayers, and cries, which are not
repentance. And to some cowards, too, the days have seemed but as a
moment; for they have been drunk day and night.

Strange and hideous, yet true.

It has now become a mere commonplace, the strange power which great
crises, pestilences, famines, revolutions, invasions, have to call out
in their highest power, for evil and for good alike, the passions and
virtues of man; how, during their stay, the most desperate recklessness,
the most ferocious crime, side by side with the most heroic and
unexpected virtue, are followed generally by a collapse and a moral
death, alike of virtue and of vice. We should explain this now-a-days,
and not ill, by saying that these crises put the human mind into a state
of exaltation: but the truest explanation, after all, lies in the old
Bible belief, that in these times there goes abroad the unquenchable
fire of God, literally kindling up all men's hearts to the highest
activity, and showing, by the light of their own strange deeds, the
inmost recesses of their spirits, till those spirits burn down again,
self-consumed, while the chaff and stubble are left as ashes, not
valueless after all, as manure for some future crop; and the pure gold,
if gold there be, alone remains behind.

Even so it was in Aberalva during that fearful week. The drunkards drank
more; the swearers swore more than ever; the unjust shopkeeper clutched
more greedily than ever at the last few scraps of mean gain which
remained for him this side the grave; the selfish wrapped themselves up
more brutally than ever in selfishness; the shameless woman mingled
desperate debauchery with fits of frantic superstition; and all base
souls cried out together, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!"

But many a brave man and many a weary woman possessed their souls in
patience, and worked on, and found that as their day their strength
should be. And to them the days seemed short indeed; for there was too
much to be done in them for any note of time.

Headley and Campbell, Grace and old Willis, and last, but not least, Tom
Thurnall,--these and three or four brave women, organised themselves
into a right-gallant and well-disciplined band, and commenced at once a
visitation from house to house, saving thereby, doubtless, many a life:
but ere eight-and-forty hours were passed, the house visitation
languished. It was as much as they could do to attend to the acute
cases.

And little Scoutbush? He could not nurse, nor doctor: but what he could,
he did. He bought, and fetched all that money could procure. He galloped
over to the justices, and obtained such summary powers as he could; and
then, like a true Irishman, exceeded them recklessly, breaking into
premises right and left, in an utterly burglarious fashion; he organised
his fatigue-party, as he called them, of scavengers, and paid the
cowardly clods five shillings a day each to work at removing all
removable nuisances; he walked up and down the streets for hours, giving
the sailors cigars from his own case, just to show them that he was not
afraid, and therefore they need not be: and if it was somewhat his fault
that the horse was stolen, he at least did his best after the event to
shut the stable-door. The five real workers toiled on, meanwhile, in
perfect harmony and implicit obedience to the all-knowing Tom, but with
the most different inward feelings. Four of them seemed to forget death
and danger; but each remembered them in his own fashion.

Major Campbell longed to die, and courted death. Frank believed that he
should die, and was ready for death. Grace longed to die, but knew that
she should not die till she had found Tom's belt, and was content to
wait. Willis was of opinion that an "old man must die some day, and
somehow,--as good one way as another;" and all his concern was to run
about after his maid, seeing that she did not tire herself, and obeying
all her orders with sailor-like precision and cleverness.

And Tom? He just thought nothing about death and danger at-all. Always
smiling, always cheerful, always busy, yet never in a hurry, he went up
and down, seemingly ubiquitous. Sleep he got when he could, and food as
often as he could; into the sea he leapt, morning and night, and came
out fresher every time; the only person in the town who seemed to grow
healthier, and actually happier, as the work went on.

"You really must be careful of yourself," said Campbell, at last. "You
carry no charmed life."

"My dear sir, I am the most cautious and selfish man in the town. I am
living by rule; I have got--and what greater pleasure?--a good stand-up
fight with an old enemy; and be sure I shall keep myself in condition
for it. I have written off for help to the Board of Health, and I shall
not be shoved against the ropes till the Government man comes down."

"And then?"

"I shall go to bed and sleep for a month. Never mind me; but mind
yourself: and mind that curate; he's a noble brick;--if all parsons in
England were like him, I'd--What's here now?"

Miss Heale came shrieking down the street.

"Oh, Mr. Thurnall! Miss Tardrew! Miss Tardrew!"

"Screaming will only make you ill, too, Miss. Where is Miss Tardrew?"

"In the surgery,--and my mother!"

"I expected this," said Tom. "The old man will go next."

He went into the surgery. The poor girl was in collapse already. Mrs.
Heale was lying on the sofa, stricken. The old man hanging over her,
brandy bottle in hand.

"Put away that trash!" cried Tom; "you've had too much already."

"Oh, Mr. Thurnall, she's dying, and I shall die too!"

"You! you were all right this morning."

"But I shall die; I know I shall, and go to hell!"

"You'll go where you ought; and if you give way to this miserable
cowardice, you'll go soon enough. Walk out, sir! Make yourself of some
use, and forget your fear! Leave Mrs. Heale to me."

The wretched old man obeyed him, utterly cowed, and went out: but not to
be of use: he had been hopelessly boozy from the first--half to fortify
his body against infection, half to fortify his heart against
conscience. Tom had never reproached him for his share in the public
folly. Indeed, Tom had never reproached a single soul. Poor wretches who
had insulted him had sent for him, with abject shrieks. "Oh, doctor,
doctor, save me! Oh, forgive me! oh, if I'd minded what you said! Oh,
don't think of what I said!" And Tom had answered cheerfully, "Tut-tut;
never mind what might have been; let's feel your pulse."

But though Tom did not reproach Heale, Heale reproached himself. He had
just conscience enough left to feel the whole weight of his abused
responsibility, exaggerated and defiled by superstitious horror; and
maudlin tipsy, he wandered about the street, moaning that he had
murdered his wife, and all the town, and asking pardon of every one he
met; till seeing one of the meeting-houses open, he staggered in, in the
vain hope of comfort which he knew he did not deserve.

In half-an-hour Tom was down the street again to Headley's. "Where is
Miss Harvey?"

"At the Beers'."

"She must go up to Heale's instantly. The mother will die. Those cases
of panic seldom recover. And Miss Heale may very likely follow her. She
has shrieked and sobbed herself into it, poor fool! and Grace must go to
her at once; she may bring her to common sense and courage, and that is
the only chance."

Grace went, and literally talked and prayed Miss Heale into life again.

"You are an angel," said Tom to her that very evening, when he found the
girl past danger.

"Mr. Thurnall!" said Grace, in a tone of sad and most meaning reproof.

"But you are! And these owls are not worthy of you."

"This is no time for such language, sir! After all, what am I doing more
than you?" And Grace went upstairs again, with a cold hard countenance
which belied utterly the heart within.

That was the critical night of all. The disease seemed to have done its
worst in the likeliest spots: but cases of panic increased all the
afternoon; and the gross number was greater than ever.

Tom did not delay inquiring into the cause: and he discovered it.
Headley, coming out the next morning, after two hours' fitful sleep, met
him at the gate: his usual business-like trot was exchanged for a fierce
and hurried stamp. When he saw Frank, he stopped short, and burst out
into a story which was hardly intelligible, so interlarded was it with
oaths.

"For Heaven's sake! Thurnall, calm yourself, and do not swear so
frightfully; it is so unlike you! What can have upset you thus?"

"Why should I not curse and swear in the street," gasped he, "while
every fellow who calls himself a preacher is allowed to do it in the
pulpit with impunity! Fine him five shillings for every curse, as you
might if people had courage and common sense, and then complain of me! I
am a fool, I know, though. But I cannot stand it! To have all my work
undone by a brutal ignorant fanatic!--It is too much! Here, if you will
believe it, are those preaching fellows getting up a revival, or some
such invention, just to make money out of the cholera! They have got
down a great gun from the county town. Twice a-day they are preaching at
them, telling them that it is all God's wrath against their sins; that
it is impious to interfere, and that I am fighting against God, and the
end of the world is coming, and they and the devil only know what. If I
meet one of them, I'll wring his neck, and be hanged for it! Oh, you
parsons! you parsons!" and Tom ground his teeth with rage.

"Is it possible? How did you find this out?"

"Mrs. Heale had been in, listening to their howling, just before she was
taken. Heale went in when I turned him out of doors; came home raving
mad, and is all but blue now. Three cases of women have I had this
morning, all frightened into cholera, by their own confession, by last
night's tomfoolery.--Came home howling, fainted, and were taken before
morning. One is dead, the other two will die. You must stop it, or I
shall have half-a-dozen more to-night. Go into the meeting, and curse the
cur to his face!"

"I cannot," cried Frank, with a gesture of despair, "I cannot!"

"Ah, your cloth forbids you, I suppose, to enter the non-conformist
opposition shop."

"You are unjust, Thurnall! What are such rules at a moment like this?
I'd break them, and the bishop would hold me guiltless. But I cannot
speak to these people. I have no eloquence--no readiness--they do not
trust me--would not believe me--God help me!" and Frank covered his face
with his hands, and burst into tears.

"Not that, for Heaven's sake!" said Tom, "or we shall have you blue
next, my good fellow. I'd go myself, but they'd not hear me, for
certain; I am no Christian, I suppose: at least, I can't talk their
slang:--but I know who can! We'll send Campbell!"

Frank hailed the suggestion with rapture, and away they went: but they
had an hour's good search from sufferer to sufferer before they found
the Major.

He heard them quietly. A severe gloom settled over his face. "I will
go," said he.

At six o'clock that evening, the meeting-house was filling with
terrified women, and half-curious, half-sneering, men; and among them
the tall figure of Major Campbell, in his undress uniform (which he had
put on, wisely, to give a certain dignity to his mission), stalked in,
and took his seat in the back benches.

The sermon was what he expected. There is no need to transcribe it. Such
discourses may be heard often enough in churches as well as chapels. The
preacher's object seemed to be--for some purpose or other which we have
no right to judge--to excite in his hearers the utmost intensity of
selfish fear, by language which certainly, as Tom had said, came under
the law against profane cursing and swearing. He described the next
world in language which seemed a strange jumble of Virgil's Aeneid, the
Koran, the dreams of those rabbis who crucified our Lord, and of those
mediaeval inquisitors who tried to convert sinners (and on their own
ground, neither illogically nor over-harshly) by making this world for a
few hours as like as possible to what, so they held, God was going to
make the world to come for ever.

At last he stopped suddenly, when he saw that the animal excitement was
at the very highest; and called on all who felt "convinced" to come
forward and confess their sins.

In another minute there would have been (as there have been ere now)
four or five young girls raving and tossing upon the floor, in mad
terror and excitement; or, possibly, half the congregation might have
rushed out (as a congregation has rushed out ere now) headed by the
preacher himself, and ran headlong down to the quay-pool, with shrieks
and shouts, declaring that they had cast the devil out of Betsey
Pennington, and were hunting him into the sea: but Campbell saw that the
madness must be stopped at once; and rising, he thundered, in a voice
which brought all to their senses in a moment--

"Stop! I, too, have a sermon to preach to you; I trust I am a Christian
man, and that not of last year's making, or the year before. Follow me
outside, if you be rational beings, and let me tell you the truth--God's
truth! Men!" he said, with an emphasis on the word, "you at least, will
give me a fair hearing, and you too, modest married women! Leave that
fellow with the shameless hussies who like to go into fits at his feet."

The appeal was not in vain. The soberer majority followed him out; the
insane minority soon followed, in the mere hope of fresh excitement;
while the preacher was fain to come also, to guard his flock from the
wolf. Campbell sprang upon a large block of stone, and taking off his
cap, opened his mouth, and spake unto them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Readers will doubtless desire to hear what Major Campbell said: but they
will be disappointed; and perhaps it is better for them that they should
be. Let each of them, if they think it worth while, write for themselves
a discourse fitting for a Christian man, who loved and honoured his
Bible too much to find in a few scattered texts, all misinterpreted, and
some mistranslated, excuses for denying fact, reason, common justice,
the voice of God in his own moral sense, and the whole remainder of the
Bible from beginning to end.

Whatsoever words he spoke they came home to those wild hearts with
power. And when he paused, and looked intently into the faces of his
auditory, to see what effect he was producing, a murmur of assent and
admiration rose from the crowd, which had now swelled to half the
population of the town. And no wonder; no wonder that, as the men were
enchained by the matter, so were the women by the manner. The grand
head, like a grey granite peak against the clear blue sky; the tall
figure, with all its martial stateliness and ease; the gesture of his
long arm, so graceful, and yet so self-restrained; the tones of his
voice which poured from beneath that proud moustache, now tender as a
girl's, now ringing like a trumpet over roof and sea. There were old men
there, old beyond the years of man, who said they had never seen nor
heard the like: but it must be like what their fathers had told them of,
when John Wesley, on the cliffs of St. Ives, out-thundered the thunder
of the gale. To Grace he seemed one of the old Scotch Covenanters of
whom she had read, risen from the dead to preach there from his rock
beneath the great temple of God's air, a wider and a juster creed than
theirs. Frank drew Thurnall's arm through his, and whispered, "I shall
thank you for this to my dying day:" but Thurnall held down his head. He
seemed deeply moved. At last, half to himself,--

"Humph! I believe that between this man and that girl, you will make a
Christian even of me some day!"

But the lull was only for a moment. For Major Campbell, looking round,
discerned among the crowd the preacher, whispering and scowling amid a
knot of women; and a sudden fit of righteous wrath came over him.

"Stand out there, sir, you preacher, and look me in the face, if you
can!" thundered he. "We are here on common ground as free men, beneath
God's heaven and God's eye. Stand out, sir! and answer me if you can; or
be for ever silent!"

Half in unconscious obedience to the soldier-like word of command, half
in jealous rage, the preacher stepped forward, gasping for breath,--
"Don't listen to him! He is a messenger of Satan, sent to damn you--a
lying prophet! Let the Lord judge between me and him! Stop your ears--a
messenger of Satan--a Jesuit in disguise!"

"You lie, and you know that you lie!" answered Campbell, twirling slowly
his long moustache, as he always did when choking down indignation. "But
you have called on the Lord to judge; so do I. Listen to me, sir! Dare
you, in the presence of God, answer for the words which you have spoken
this day?"

A strange smile came over the preacher's face.

"I read my title clear, sir, to mansions in the skies. Well for you if
you could do the same."

Was it only the setting sun, or was it some inner light from the depths
of that great spirit, which shone out in all his countenance, and filled
his eyes with awful inspiration, as he spoke, in a voice calm and sweet,
sad and regretful, and yet terrible from the slow distinctness of every
vowel and consonant?

"Mansions in the skies? You need not wait till then, sir, for the
presence of God. Now, here, you and I are before God's judgment-seat.
Now, here, I call on you to answer to Him for the innocent lives which
you have endangered and destroyed, for the innocent souls to whom you
have slandered their heavenly Father by your devil's doctrines this day!
You have said it. Let the Lord judge between you and me. He knows best
how to make His judgment manifest."

He bowed his head awhile, as if overcome by the awful words which he had
uttered, almost in spite of himself, and then stepped slowly down from
the stone, and passed through the crowd, which reverently made way for
him; while many voices cried, "Thank you, sir! Thank you!" and old
Captain Willis, stepping forward, held out his hand to him, a quiet
pride in his grey eye.

"You will not refuse an old fighting man's thanks, sir? This has been
like Elijah's day with Baal's priests on Carmel."

Campbell shook his hand in silence: but turned suddenly, for another and
a coarser voice caught his ear. It was Jones, the Lieutenant's.

"And now, my lads, take the Methodist Parson, neck and heels, and heave
him into the quay pool, to think over his summons!"

Campbell went back instantly. "No, my dear sir, let me entreat you for
my sake. What has passed has been too terrible to me already; if it has
done any good, do not let us break it by spoiling the law."

"I believe you're right, sir: but my blood is up, and no wonder. Why,
where is the preacher?"

He had stood quite still for several minutes after Campbell's
adjuration. He had, often perhaps, himself hurled forth such words in
the excitement of preaching; but never before had he heard them
pronounced in spirit and in truth. And as he stood, Thurnall, who had
his doctor's eye on him, saw him turn paler and more pale. Suddenly he
clenched his teeth, and stooped slightly forwards for a moment, drawing
his breath. Thurnall walked quickly and steadily up to him.

Gentleman Jan and two other riotous fellows had already laid hold of
him, more with the intention of frightening, than of really ducking him.

"Don't! don't!" cried he, looking round with eyes wild--but not with
terror.

"Hands off, my good lads," said Tom quietly. "This is my business now,
not yours, I can tell you."

And passing the preacher's arm through his own, with a serious face, Tom
led him off into the house at the back of the chapel.

In two hours more he was blue; in four he was a corpse. The judgment, as
usual, had needed no miracle to enforce it.

Tom went to Campbell that night, and apprised him of the fact. "Those
words of yours went through him, sir, like a Minié bullet. I was afraid
of what would happen when I heard them."

"So was I, the moment after they were spoken. But, sir, I felt a power
upon me,--you may think it a fancy,--that there was no resisting."

"I dare impute no fancies, when I hear such truth and reason as you
spoke upon that stone, sir."

"Then you do not blame me?" asked Campbell, with a subdued, almost
deprecatory voice, such as Thurnall had never heard in him before.

"The man deserved to die, and he died, sir. It is well that there are
some means left on earth of punishing offenders whom the law cannot
touch."

"It is an awful responsibility."

"Not more awful than killing a man in battle, which we both have done,
sir, and yet have felt no sting of conscience."

"An awful responsibility still. Yet what else is life made up of, from
morn to night, but of deeds which may earn heaven or hell?... Well, as
he did to others, so was it done to him. God forgive him! At least, our
cause will be soon tried and judged: there is little fear of my not
meeting him again--soon enough." And Campbell, with a sad smile, lay
back in his chair and was silent.

"My dear sir," said Tom, "allow me to remind you, after this excitement
comes a collapse; and that is not to be trifled with just now. Medicine
I dare not give you. Food I must."

Campbell shook his head.

"You must go now, my dear fellow. It is now half-past ten, and I will be
at Pennington's at one o'clock, to see how he goes on; so you need not
go there. And, meanwhile, I must take a little medicine."

"Major, you are not going to doctor yourself?" cried Tom.

"There is a certain medicine called prayer, Mr. Thurnall--an old
specific for the heart-ache, as you will find one day--which I have been
neglecting much of late, and which I must return to in earnest before
midnight. Good-bye, God bless and keep you!" And the Major retired to
his bed-room, and did not stir off his knees for two full hours. After
which he went to Pennington's, and thence somewhere else; and Tom met
him at four o'clock that morning musing amid unspeakable horrors, quiet,
genial, almost cheerful.

"You are a man," said Tom to himself; "and I fancy at times something
more than a man; more than me at least."

Tom was right in his fear that after excitement would come collapse; but
wrong as to the person to whom it would come. When he arrived at the
surgery door, Headley stood waiting for him.

"Anything fresh? Have you seen the Heales?"

"I have been praying with them. Don't be frightened. I am not likely to
forget the lesson of this afternoon."

"Then go to bed. It is full twelve o'clock."

"Not yet, I fear. I want you to see old Willis. All is not right."

"Ah! I thought the poor dear old man would kill himself. He has been
working too hard, and presuming on his sailor's power of tumbling in and
taking a dog's nap whenever he chose."

"I have warned him again and again: but he was working so magnificently,
that one had hardly heart to stop him. And beside, nothing would part
him from his maid."

"I don't wonder at that:" quoth Tom to himself. "Is she with him?"

"No: he found himself ill; slipped home on some pretence; and will not
hear of our telling her."

"Noble old fellow! Caring for every one but himself to the last." And
they went in.

It was one of those rare cases, fatal, yet merciful withal, in which the
poison seems to seize the very centre of the life, and to preclude the
chance of lingering torture, by one deadening blow.

The old man lay paralysed, cold, pulseless, but quite collected and
cheerful. Tom looked, inquired, shook his head, and called for a hot
bath of salt and water.

"Warmth we must have, somehow. Anything to keep the fire alight."

"Why so, sir?" asked the old man "The fire's been flickering down this
many a year. Why not let it go out quietly, at three-score years and
ten? You're sure my maid don't know?"

They put him into his bath, and he revived a little.

"No; I am not going to get well; so don't you waste your time on me,
sirs! I'm taken while doing my duty, as I hoped to be. And I've lived to
see my maid do hers, as I knew she would, when the Lord called on her. I
have,--but don't tell her, she's well employed, and has sorrows enough
already, some that you'll know of some day--"

"You must not talk," quoth Tom, who guessed his meaning, and wished to
avoid the subject.

"Yes, but I must, sir. I've no time to lose. If you'd but go and see
after those poor Heales, and come again. I'd like to have one word with
Mr. Headley; and my time runs short."

"A hundred, if you will," said Frank.

"And now, sir," when they were alone, "only one thing, if you'll excuse
an old sailor," and Willis tried vainly to make his usual salutation;
but the cramped hand refused to obey,--"and a dying one too."

"What is it?"

"Only don't be hard on the people, sir; the people here. They're
good-hearted souls, with all their sins, if you'll only take them as you
find them, and consider that they've had no chance."

"Willis, Willis, don't talk of that! I shall be a wiser man henceforth,
I trust. At least I shall not trouble Aberalva long."

"Oh, sir, don't talk so; and you just getting a hold of them!"

"I?"

"Yes, you, sir. They've found you out at last, thank God. I always knew
what you were and said it. They've found you out in the last week; and
there's not a man in the town but what would die for you, I believe."

This announcement staggered Frank. Some men it would have only hardened
in their pedantry, and have emboldened them to say: "Ah! then these men
see that a High Churchman can work like any one else, when there is a
practical sacrifice to be made. Now I have a standing ground which no
one can dispute from which to go on, and enforce my idea of what he
ought to be."

But, rightly or wrongly, no such thought crossed Frank's mind. He was
just as good a Churchman as ever--why not? Just as fond of his own ideal
of what a parish and a Church Service ought to be--why not? But the only
thought which did rise in his mind was one of utter self-abasement.

"Oh, how blind I have been! How I have wasted my time in laying down the
law to these people: fancying myself infallible, as if God were not as
near to them as He is to me--certainly nearer than to any book on my
shelves--offending their little prejudices, little superstitions, in my
own cruel self-conceit and self-will! And now, the first time that I
forget my own rules; the first time that I forget almost that I am a
priest, even a Christian at all! that moment they acknowledge me as a
priest, as a Christian. The moment I meet them upon the commonest human
ground, helping them as one heathen would help another, simply because
he was his own flesh and blood, that moment they soften to me and show
me how much I might have done with them twelve months ago, had I had but
common sense!"

He knelt down and prayed by the old man, for him and for himself.

"Would it be troubling you, sir?" said the old man at last. "But I'd
like to take the Sacrament before I go."

"Of course. Whom shall I ask in?"

The old man paused awhile. "I fear it's selfish: but it seems to me I
would not ask it, but that I know I'm going. I should like to take it
with my maid, once more before I die."

"I'll go for her," said Frank, "the moment Thurnall comes back to watch
you."

"What need to go yourself, sir? Old Sarah will go, and willing."

Thurnall came in at that moment.

"I am going to fetch Miss Harvey. Where is she, Captain?"

"At Janey Headon's, along with her two poor children."

"Stay," said Tom, "that's a bad quarter, just at the fish-house back.
Have some brandy before you start?"

"No! no Dutch courage!" and Frank was gone. He had a word to say to
Grace Harvey, and it must be said at once.

He turned down the silent street, and turned up over stone stairs,
through quaint stone galleries and balconies such as are often huddled
together on the cliff sides in fishing towns; into a stifling cottage,
the door of which had been set wide open in the vain hope of fresh air.
A woman met him, and clasped both his hands, with tears of joy.

"They're mending, sir! They're mending, else I'd have sent to tell you.
I never looked for you so late."

There was a gentle voice in the next room. It was Grace's.

"Ah, she's praying by them now. She'm giving them all their medicines
all along! Whatever I should have done without her?--and in and out all
day long, too; till one fancies at whiles the Lord must have changed her
into five or six at once, to be everywhere to the same minute."

Frank went in, and listened to her prayer. Her face was as pale and calm
as the pale, calm faces of the two worn-out babes, whose heads lay on
the pillow close to hers: but her eyes were lit up with an intense
glory, which seemed to fill the room with love and light.

Frank listened: but would not break the spell.

At last she rose, looked round and blushed.

"I beg your pardon, sir, for taking the liberty. If I had known that you
were about, I would have sent: but hearing that you were gone home, I
thought you would not be offended, if I gave thanks for them myself.
They are my own, sir, as it were--"

"Oh, Miss Harvey, do not talk so! While you can pray as you were praying
then, he who would silence you might be silencing unawares the Lord
himself!"

She made no answer, though the change in Frank's tone moved her; and
when he told her his errand, that thought also passed from her mind.

At last, "Happy, happy man!" she said calmly; and putting on her bonnet,
followed Frank out of the house.

"Miss Harvey," said Frank, as they hurried up the street, "I must say
one word to you, before we take that Sacrament together."

"Sir?"

"It is well to confess all sins before the Eucharist, and I will confess
mine. I have been unjust to you. I know that you hate to be praised; so
I will not tell you what has altered my opinion. But Heaven forbid that
I should ever do so base a thing, as to take the school away from one
who is far more fit to rule in it than ever I shall be!"

Grace burst into tears.

"Thank God! And I thank you, sir! Oh, there's never a storm but what
some gleam breaks through it! And now, sir, I would not have told you it
before, lest you should fancy that I changed for the sake of gain--
though, perhaps, that is pride, as too much else has been. But you will
never hear of me inside either of those chapels again."

"What has altered your opinion of them, then?"

"It would take long to tell, sir: but what happened this morning filled
the cup. I begin to think, sir, that their God and mine are not the
same. Though why should I judge them, who worshipped that other God
myself till no such long time since; and never knew, poor fool, that the
Lord's name was Love?"

"I have found out that, too, in these last days. More shame to me than
to you that I did not know it before."

"Well for us both that we do know it now, sir. For if we believed Him
now, sir, to be aught but perfect Love, how could we look round here
to-night, and not go mad?"

"Amen!" said Frank.

And how had the pestilence, of all things on earth, revealed to those
two noble souls that God is Love?

Let the reader, if he have supplied Campbell's sermon, answer the
question for himself.

They went in, and upstairs to Willis.

Grace bent over the old man, tenderly, but with no sign of sorrow.
Dry-eyed, she kissed the old man's forehead; arranged his bed-clothes,
woman-like, before she knelt down; and then the three received the
Sacrament together.

"Don't turn me out," whispered Tom. "It's no concern of mine, of course;
but you are all good creatures, and, somehow, I should like to be with
you."

So Tom stayed; and what thoughts passed through his heart are no concern
of ours.

Frank put the cup to the old man's lips; the lips closed, sipped,--then
opened ... the jaw had fallen.

"Gone," said Grace quietly.

Frank paused, awe-struck.

"Go on, sir," said she, in a low voice. "He hears it all more clearly
than he ever did before." And by the dead man's side Frank finished the
Communion Service.

Grace rose when it was over, kissed the calm forehead, and went out
without a word.

"Tom," said Frank, in a whisper, "come into the next room with me."

Tom hardly heard the tone in which the words were spoken, or he would
perhaps have answered otherwise than he did.

"My father takes the Communion," said he, half to himself. "At least, it
is a beautiful old--"

Howsoever the sentence would have been finished, Tom stopped short--

"Hey?--What does that mean?"

"At last?" gasped Frank, gently enough. "Excuse me!" He was bowed almost
double, crushing Thurnall's arm in the fierce gripe of pain. "Pish!--
Hang it!--Impossible!--There, you are all right now!"

"For the time. I can understand many things now. Curious sensation it
is, though. Can you conceive a sword put in on one side of the waist,
just above the hip-bone, and drawn through, handle and all, till it
passes out at the opposite point?"

"I have felt it twice; and therefore you will be pleased to hold your
tongue and go to bed. Have you had any warnings?"

"Yes,--no,--that is--this morning: but I forgot. Never mind!--What
matter a hundred years hence I There it is again!--God help me!"

"Humph!" growled Thurnall to himself. "I'd sooner have lost a dozen of
these herring-hogs, whom nobody misses, and who are well out of their
life-scrape: but the parson, just as he was making a man!"

There is no use in complaints. In half an hour Frank is screaming like a
woman, though he has bitten his tongue half through to stop his screams.




CHAPTER XVIII.

THE BLACK HOUND.


Pah! Let us escape anywhere for a breath of fresh air, for even the
scent of a clean turf. We have been watching saints and martyrs--perhaps
not long enough for the good of our souls, but surely too long for the
comfort of our bodies. Let us away up the valley, where we shall find,
it not indeed a fresh healthful breeze (for the drought lasts on), at
least a cool refreshing down-draught from Carcarrow Moor before the sun
gets up. It is just half-past four o'clock, on a glorious August
morning. We shall have three hours at least before the heavens become
one great Dutch-oven again.

We shall have good company, too, in our walk; for here comes Campbell
fresh from his morning's swim, swinging up the silent street toward
Frank Headley's lodging.

He stops, and tosses a pebble against the window-pane. In a minute or
two Thurnall opens the street-door and slips out to him.

"Ah, Major! Overslept myself at last; that sofa is wonderfully
comfortable. No time to go down and bathe. Ill get my header somewhere
up the stream."

"How is he?"

"He? sleeping like a babe, and getting well as fast as his soul will
allow his body. He has something on his mind. Nothing to be ashamed of,
though, I will warrant; for a purer, nobler fellow I never met."

"When can we move him?"

"Oh, to-morrow, if he will agree. You may all depart and leave me and
the Government man to make out the returns of killed and wounded. We
shall have no more cholera. Eight days without a new case. We shall do
now. I'm glad you are coming up with us."

"I will just see the hounds throw off, and then go back and get
Headley's breakfast."

"No, no! you mustn't, sir: you want a day's play."

"Not half as much as you. And I am in no hunting mood just now. Do you
take your fill of the woods and the streams, and let me see our patient.
I suppose you will be back by noon?"

"Certainly." And the two swing up the street, and out of the town, along
the vale toward Trebooze.

For Trebooze of Trebooze has invited them, and Lord Scoutbush, and
certain others, to come out otter-hunting; and otter-hunting they will
go.

Trebooze has been sorely exercised, during the last fortnight, between
fear of the cholera and desire of calling upon Lord Scoutbush--"as I
ought to do, of course, as one of the gentry round; he's a Whig, of
course, and no more to me than anybody else; but one don't like to let
politics interfere;" by which Trebooze glosses over to himself and
friends the deep Hunkeydom with which he lusteth after a live lord's
acquaintance, and one especially in whom he hopes to find even such a
one as himself.... "Good fellow, I hear he is, too,--good sportsman,
smokes like a chimney," and so forth.

So at last, when the cholera has all but disappeared, he comes down to
Penalva, and introduces himself, half swaggering, half servile; begins
by a string of apologies for not having called before,--"Mrs. Trebooze
so afraid of infection, you see, my lord,"--which is a lie: then
blunders out a few fulsome compliments to Scoutbush's courage in
staying; then takes heart at a little joke of Scoutbush's, and tries the
free and easy style; fingers his lordship's high-priced Hudsons, and
gives a broad hint that he would like to smoke one on the spot; which
hint is not taken, any more than the bet of a "pony" which he offers
five minutes afterwards, that he will jump his Irish mare in and out of
Aberalva pound; is utterly "thrown on his haunches" (as he informs his
friend Mr. Creed afterwards) by Scoutbush's praise of Tom Thurnall, as
an "invaluable man, a treasure in such an out-of-the-way place, and
really better company than ninety-nine men out of a hundred;" recovers
himself again when Scoutbush asks after his otter-hounds, of which he
has heard much praise from Tardrew; and launches out once more into
sporting conversation of that graceful and lofty stamp which may be
perused and perpended in the pages of "Handley Cross," and "Mr. Sponge's
Sporting Tour," books painfully true to that uglier and baser side of
sporting life, which their clever author has chosen so wilfully to
portray.

So, at least, said Scoutbush to himself, when his visitor had departed.

"He's just like a page out of Sponge's Tour, though he's not half as
good a fellow as Sponge himself; for Sponge knew he was a snob, and
lived up to his calling honestly: but this fellow wants all the while to
play at being a gentleman; and--Ugh! how the fellow smelt of brandy, and
worse! His hand, too, shook as if he had the palsy, and he chattered and
fidgetted like a man with St. Vitus's dance."

"Did he, my lord?" quoth Tom Thurnall, when he heard the same, in a very
meaning tone.

And Trebooze, "for his part, couldn't make out that lord--uncommonly
agreeable, and easy, and all that: but shoves a fellow off, and sets him
down somehow, and in such a ---- civil way, that you don't know where to
have him."

However, Trebooze departed in high spirits; for Lord Scoutbush has
deigned to say that he will be delighted to see the otter-hounds work
any morning that Trebooze likes, and anyhow--no time too early for him.
"He will bring his friend Major Campbell?"

"By all means."

"Expect two or three sporting gentlemen from the neighbourhood, too.
Regular good ones, my lord--though they are county bucks--very much
honoured to make your lordship's acquaintance."

Scoutbush expresses himself equally honoured by making their
acquaintance, in a tone of bland simplicity, which utterly puzzles
Trebooze, who goes a step further.

"Your lordship'll honour us by taking pot luck afterwards. Can't show
you French cookery, you know, and your souffleys and glacys, and all
that. Honest saddle o' mutton, and the grounds of old port.--My father
laid it down, and I take it up, eh?" And Trebooze gave a wink and a
nudge of his elbow, meaning to be witty.

His lordship was exceedingly sorry; it was the most unfortunate
accident: but he had the most particular engagement that very afternoon,
and must return early from the otter-hunt, and probably sail the next
day for Wales. "But," says the little man, who knows all about
Trebooze's household, "I shall not fail to do myself the honour of
calling on Mrs. Trebooze, and expressing my regret," etc.

So to the otter-hunt is Scoutbush gone, and Campbell and Thurnall after
him; for Trebooze has said to himself, "Must ask that blackguard of a
doctor--hang him! I wish he were an otter himself; but if he's so thick
with his lordship it won't do to quarrel." For, indeed, Thurnall might
tell tales. So Trebooze swallows his spite and shame,--as do many folk
who call themselves his betters, when they have to deal with a great
man's hanger-on,--and sends down a note to Tom:

"Mr. Trebooze requests the pleasure of Mr. Thurnall's company with his
hounds at----"

And Tom accepts--why not? and chats with Campbell, as they go, on many
things; and among other things on this,--

"By the by," said he, "I got an hour's shore-work yesterday afternoon,
and refreshing enough it was. And I got a prize, too. The sucking
barnacle which you asked for: I was certain I should get one or two, if
I could have a look at the pools this week. Jolly little dog! he was
paddling and spinning about last night, and enjoying himself, 'ere age
with creeping'--What is it?--'hath clawed him in his clutch.' That
fellow's destiny is not a hopeful analogy for you, sir, who believe that
we shall rise after we die into some higher and freer state."

"Why not?"

"Why, which is better off, the free swimming larva, or the perfect
cirrhipod, rooted for ever motionless to the rock?"

"Which is better off, the roving young fellow who is sowing his wild
oats, or the man who has settled down, and become a respectable
landowner with a good house over his head?"

"And begun to propagate his species? Well, you have me there, sir, as
far as this life is concerned; but you will confess that the barnacle's
history proves that all crawling grubs don't turn into butterflies."

"I daresay the barnacle turns into what is best for him; at all events,
what he deserves. That rule of yours will apply to him, to whomsoever it
will not."

"And so does penance for the sins of his youth, as some of us are to do
in the next world?"

"Perhaps yes; perhaps no; perhaps neither."

"Do you speak of us, or the barnacle?"

"Of both."

"I am glad of that; for on the popular notion of our being punished a
million years hence for what we did when we were lads, I never could see
anything but a misery and injustice in our having come into the world at
all."

"I can," said the Major quietly.

"Of course I meant nothing rude: but I had to buy my experience, and
paid for it dearly enough in folly."

"So had I to buy mine."

"Then why be punished over and above? Why have to pay for the folly,
which was itself only the necessary price of experience'?"

"For being, perhaps, so foolish as not to use the experience after it
has cost you so dear."

"And will punishment cure me of the foolishness?"

"That depends on yourself. If it does, it must needs be so much the
better for you. But perhaps you will not be punished, but forgiven."

"Let off? That would be a very bad thing for me, unless I become a very
different man from what I have been as yet. I am always right glad now
to get a fall whenever I make a stumble. I should have gone to sleep in
my tracks long ago else, as one to do in the back woods on a long elk
hunt."

"Perhaps you may become a very different man."

"I should be sorry for that, even if it were possible."

"Why? Do you consider yourself perfect?"

"No.... But somehow, Thomas Thurnall is an old friend of mine, the first
I ever had; and I should be sorry to lose his company."

"I don't think you need fear doing so. You have seen an insect go
through strange metamorphoses, and yet remain the same individual; why
should not you and I do so likewise?"

"Well?"

"Well--There are some points about you, I suppose, which you would not
be sorry to have altered?"

"A few," quoth Tom, laughing. "I do not consider myself quite perfect
yet."

"What if those points were not really any part of your character, but
mere excrescences of disease: or if that be too degrading a notion, mere
scars of old wounds, and of the wear and tear of life; and what if, in
some future life, all those disappeared, and the true Mr. Thomas
Thurnall, pure and simple, were alone left?"

"It is a very hopeful notion. Only, my dear sir, one is quite
self-conceited enough in this imperfect state. What intolerable coxcombs
we should all be if we were perfect, and could sit admiring ourselves for
ever and ever!"

"But what if that self-conceit and self-dependence were the very root of
all the disease, the cause of all the scars, the very thing which will
have to be got rid of, before our true character and true manhood can be
developed?"

"Yes, I understand. Faith and humility.... You will forgive me, Major
Campbell. I shall learn to respect those virtues when good people have
defined them a little more exactly, and can show me somewhat more
clearly in what faith differs from superstition, and humility from
hypocrisy."

"I do not think any man will ever define them for you. But you may go
through a course of experiences, more severe, probably, than pleasant,
which may enable you at last to define them for yourself."

"Have you defined them?" asked Tom, bluntly, glancing round at his
companion.

"Faith?--Yes, I trust. Humility?--No, I fear."

"I should like to hear your definition of the former, at least."

"Did I not say that you must discover it for yourself?"

"Yes. Well. When the lesson comes, if it does come, I suppose it will
come in some learnable shape; and till then, I must shift for myself--
and if self-dependence he a punishable sin, I shall, at all events, have
plenty of company whithersoever I go. There is Lord Scoutbush and
Trebooze!"

Why did not Campbell speak his mind more clearly to Thurnall?

Because he knew that with such men words are of little avail. The
disease was entrenched too strongly in the very centre of the man's
being. It seemed at moments as if all his strange adventures and
hairbreadth escapes had been sent to do him harm, and not good; to
pamper and harden his self-confidence, not to crush it. Therefore
Campbell seldom argued with him: but he prayed for him often; for he had
begun, as all did who saw much of Tom Thurnall, to admire and respect
him, in spite of all his faults.

And now, turning through a woodland path, they descend toward the river,
till they can hear voices below them; Scoutbush laughing quietly,
Trebooze laying down the law at the top of his voice.

"How noisy the fellow is, and how he is hopping about!" says Campbell.

"No wonder: he has been soaking, I hear, for the last fortnight, with
some worthy compeers, by way of keeping off cholera. I must have my eye
on him to-day."

Scrambling down through the brushwood, they found themselves in such a
scene as Creswick alone knows how to paint: though one element of
beauty, which Creswick uses full well, was wanting; and the whole place
was seen, not by slant sun-rays, gleaming through the boughs, and
dappling all the pebbles with a lacework of leaf shadows, but in the
uniform and sober grey of dawn.

A broad bed of shingle, looking just now more like an ill-made turnpike
road than the bed of Alva stream; above it, a long shallow pool, which
showed every stone through the transparent water; on the right, a craggy
bank, bedded with deep wood sedge and orange-tipped king ferns,
clustering beneath sallow and maple bushes already tinged with gold; on
the left, a long bar of gravel, covered with giant "butter-bur" leaves;
in and out of which the hounds are brushing--beautiful black-and-tan
dogs, of which poor Trebooze may be pardonably proud; while round the
burleaf-bed dances a rough white Irish terrier, seeming, by his frantic
self-importance, to consider himself the master of the hounds.

Scoutbush is standing with Trebooze beyond the bar, upon a little lawn
set thick with alders. Trebooze is fussing and fidgetting about, wiping
his forehead perpetually; telling everybody to get out of the way, and
not to interfere; then catching hold of Scoutbush's button to chatter in
his face; then, starting aside to put some part of his dress to rights.
His usual lazy drawl is exchanged for foolish excitement. Two or three
more gentlemen, tired of Trebooze's absurdities, are scrambling over the
rocks above, in search of spraints. Old Tardrew waddles stooping along
the line where grass and shingle meet, his bulldog visage bent to his
very knees.

"Tardrew out hunting?" says Campbell. "Why, it is but a week since his
daughter was buried!"

"And why not? I like him better for it. Would he bring her back again by
throwing away a good day's sport? Better turn out, as he has done, and
forget his feelings, if he has any."

"He has feelings enough, don't doubt. But you are right. There is
something very characteristic in the way in which the English countryman
never shows grief, never lets it interfere with business, even with
pleasure."

"Hillo! Mr. Trebooze!" says the old fellow, looking up. "Here it is!"

"Spraint?--Spraint?--Spraint?--Where? Eh--what?" cries Trebooze.

"No; but what's as good: here on this alder stump, not an hour old. I
thought they beauties starns weren't flemishing for nowt."

"Here! Here! Here! Here! Musical, Musical! Sweetlips! Get out of the
way!"--and Trebooze runs down.

Musical examines, throws her nose into the air, and answers by the rich
bell-like note of the true otter hound; and all the woodlands ring as
the pack dashes down the shingle to her call.

"Over!" shouts Tom. "Here's the fresh spraint our side!"

Through the water splash squire, viscount, steward, and hounds, to the
horror of a shoal of par, the only visible tenants of a pool, which,
after a shower of rain, would be alive with trout. Where those trout are
in the meanwhile is a mystery yet unsolved.

Over dances the little terrier, yapping furiously, and expending his
superfluous energy by snapping right and left at the par.

"Hark to Musical! hark to Sweetlips! Down the stream?--No! the old girl
has it; right up the bank!"

"How do, Doctor? How do, Major Campbell? Forward!--Forward!--Forward!"
shouts Trebooze, glad to escape a longer parley, as with his spear in
his left hand, he clutches at the overhanging boughs with his right, and
swings himself up, with Peter, the huntsman, after him. Tom follows him;
and why?

Because he does not like his looks. That bull-eye is red, and almost
bursting; his cheeks are flushed, his lips blue, his hand shakes; and
Tom's quick eye has already remarked, from a distance, over and above
his new fussiness, a sudden shudder, a quick half-frightened glance
behind him; and perceived, too, that the moment Musical gave tongue, he
put the spirit-flask to his mouth.

Away go the hounds at score through tangled cover, their merry peal
ringing from brake and brier, clashing against the rocks, moaning
musically away through distant glens aloft.

Scoutbush and Tardrew "take down" the riverbed, followed by Campbell. It
is in his way home; and though the Major has stuck many a pig, shot many
a gaur, rhinoceros, and elephant, he disdains not, like a true
sportsman, the less dangerous but more scientific excitement of an
otter-hunt.

"Hark to the merry merry Christchurch bells! She's up by this time;--
that don't sound like a drag now!" cries Tom, bursting desperately, with
elbow-guarded visage, through the tangled scrub.

"What's the matter, Trebooze? No, thanks! 'Modest quenchers' won't
improve the wind just now."

For Trebooze has halted, panting and bathed in perspiration; has been at
the brandy flask again; and now offers Tom a "quencher," as he calls it.

"As you like," says Trebooze, sulkily, having meant it as a token of
reconciliation, and pushes on.

They are now upon a little open meadow, girdled by green walls of wood;
and along the river-bank the hounds are fairly racing. Tom and Peter
hold on; Trebooze slackens.

"Your master don't look right this morning, Peter."

Peter lifts his hand to his mouth, to signify the habit of drinking; and
then shakes it in a melancholy fashion, to signify that the said habit
has reached a lamentable and desperate point.

Tom looks back. Trebooze has pulled up, and is walking, wiping still at
his face. The hounds have overrun the scent, and are back again,
flemishing about the plashed fence on the river brink.

"Over! over! over!" shouts Peter, tumbling over the fence into the
stream, and staggering across.

Trebooze comes up to it, tries to scramble over, mutters something, and
sits down astride of a bough.

"You are not well, Squire?"

"Well as ever I was in my life! only a little sick--have been several
times lately; couldn't sleep either--haven't slept an hour this week.--
Don't know what it is."

"What ducks of hounds those are!" says Tom, trying, for ulterior
purposes, to ingratiate himself. "How they are working there all by
themselves, like so many human beings. Perfect!"

"Yes--don't want us--may as well sit here a minute. Awfully hot, eh?
What a splendid creature that Miss St. Just is! I say, Peter!"

"Yes, sir," shouts Peter, from the other side.

"Those hounds ain't right!" with an oath.

"Not right, sir?"

"Didn't I tell you?--five couple and a half--no, five couple--no, six.
Hang it! I can't see, I think! How many hounds did I tell you to bring
out?"

"Five couple, sir."

"Then ... why did you bring out that other?"

"Which other?" shouts Peter, while Thurnall eyes Trebooze keenly.

"Why that! He's none o' mine! Nasty black cur, how did he get here?"

"Where? There's never no cur here!"

"You lie, you oaf--no--why--Doctor--How many hounds are there here?"

"I can't see," says Tom, "among those bushes."

"Can't see, eh? Why don't those brutes hit it off?" says Trebooze,
drawling, as if he had forgotten the matter, and lounging over the
fence, drops into the stream, followed by Tom, and wades across.

The hounds are all round him, and he is couraging them on, fussing again
more than ever; but without success.

"Gone to hole somewhere here," says Peter.

"....!" cries Trebooze, looking round, with a sudden shudder, and face
of terror. "There's that black brute again! there, behind me! Hang it,
he'll bite me next!" and he caught up his leg, and struck behind him
with his spear.

There was no dog there.

Peter was about to speak; but Tom silenced him by a look, and shouted,--

"Here we are! Gone to holt in this alder root!"

"Now then, little Carlingford! Out of the way, puppies!" cries Trebooze,
righted again for the moment by the excitement, and thrusting the hounds
right and left, he stoops down to put in the little terrier.

Suddenly he springs up, with something like a scream, and then bursts
out on Peter with a volley of oaths.

"Didn't I tell you to drive that cur away?"

"Which cur, sir?" cries Peter, trembling, and utterly confounded.

"That cur!... Can't I believe my own eyes? Will you tell me that the
beggar didn't bolt between my legs this moment, and went into the hole
before the terrier?"

Neither answered. Peter with utter astonishment; Tom because he saw what
was the matter.

"Don't stoop, Squire. You'll make the blood fly to your head. Let me--"

But Trebooze thrust him back with curses.

"I'll have the brute out, and send the spear through him!" and flinging
himself on his knees again, Trebooze began tearing madly at the roots
and stones, shouting to the half-buried terrier to tear the intruder.

Peter looked at Tom, and then wrung his hands in despair.

"Dirty work--beastly work!" muttered Trebooze. "Nothing but slugs and
evats!--Toads, too,--hang the toads! What a plague brings all this
vermin? Curse it!" shrieked he, springing back, "there's an adder! and
he's gone up my sleeve! Help me! Doctor! Thurnall! or I'm a dead man!"

Tom caught the arm, thrust his hand up the sleeve, and seemed to snatch
out the snake, and hurl it back into the river.

"All right now!--a near chance, though!"

Peter stood open mouthed.

"I never saw no snake!" cried he.

Tom caught him a buffet which sent him reeling. "Look after your hounds,
you blind ass! How are you now, Trebooze?" And he caught the squire
round the waist, for he was reeling.

"The world! The world upside down! rocking and swinging! Who's put me
feet upwards, like a fly on a ceiling? I'm falling, falling off, into
the clouds--into hell-fire--hold me!--Toads and adders! and wasps--to go
to holt in a wasp's nest! Drive 'em away,--get me a green bough! I shall
be stung to death!"

And tearing off a green bough, the wretched man rushed into the river,
beating wildly right and left at his fancied tormentors.

"What is it?" cry Campbell and Scoutbush, who have run up breathless.

"Delirium tremens. Campbell, get home as fast as you can, and send me up
a bottle of morphine. Peter, take the hounds home. I must go after him."

"I'll go home with Campbell, and send the bottle up by a man and horse,"
cries Scoutbush; and away the two trot at a gallant pace, for a
cross-country run home.

"Mr. Tardrew, come with me, there's a good man!--I shall want help."

Tardrew made no reply, but dashed through the river at his heels.

Trebooze had already climbed the plashed fence, and was running wildly
across the meadow. Tom dragged Tardrew up it after him.

"Thank 'ee, sir," but nothing more. The two had not met since the
cholera.

Trebooze fell, and lay rolling, trying in vain to shield his face from
the phantom wasps.

They lifted him up, and spoke gently to him.

"Better get home to Mrs. Trebooze, sir," said Tardrew, with as much
tenderness as his gruff voice could convey.

"Yes, home! home to Molly! My Molly's always kind. She won't let me be
eaten up alive. Molly, Molly!"

And shrieking for his wife, the wretched man started to run again.

"Molly, I'm in hell! Only help me! you're always right! only forgive me!
and I'll never, never again--"

And then came out hideous confessions; then fresh hideous delusions.

       *       *       *       *       *

Three weary up-hill miles lay between them and the house: but home they
got at last.

Trebooze dashed at the house-door, tore it open; slammed and bolted it
behind him, to shut out the pursuing fiends.

"Quick, round by the back-door!" said Tom, who had not opposed him for
fear of making him furious, but dreaded some tragedy if he were left
alone.

But his fear was needless. Trebooze looked into the breakfast-room. It
was empty; she was not out of bed yet. He rushed upstairs into her
bed-room, shrieking her name; she leaped up to meet him; and the poor
wretch buried his head in that faithful bosom, screaming to her to save
him from he knew not what.

She put her arms round him, soothed him, wept over him sacred tears. "My
William! my own William! Yes, I will take care of you! Nothing shall
hurt you,--my own, own!"

Vain, drunken, brutal, unfaithful. Yes: but her husband still.

There was a knock at the door.

"Who is that?" she cried, with her usual fierceness, terrified for his
character, not terrified for herself.

"Mr. Thurnall, madam. Have you any laudanum in the house?"

"Yes, here! Oh, come in! Thank God you are come! What is to be done?"

Tom looked for the laudanum bottle, and poured out a heavy dose.

"Make him take that, madam, and put him to bed. I will wait downstairs
awhile!"

"Thurnall, Thurnall!" calls Trebooze, "don't leave me, old fellow! you
are a good fellow. I say, forgive and forget. Don't leave me! Only don't
leave me, for the room is as full of devils as--"

       *       *       *       *       *

An hour after, Tom and Tardrew were walking home together.

"He is quite quiet now, and fast asleep."

"Will he mend, sir?" asks Tardrew.

"Of course, he will: and perhaps in more ways than one. Best thing that
could have happened--will bring him to his senses, and he'll start
fresh."

"We'll hope so,--he's been mad, I think, ever since he heard of that
cholera."

"So have others: but not with brandy," thought Tom: but he said nothing.

"I say, sir," quoth Tardrew, after a while, "how's Parson Headley?"

"Getting well, I'm happy to say."

"Glad to hear it, sir. He's a good man, after all; though we did have
our differences. But he's a good man, and worked like one."

"He did."

Silence again.

"Never heard such beautiful prayers in all my life, as he made over my
poor maid."

"I don't doubt it," said Tom. "He understands his business at heart,
though he may have his fancies."

"And so do some others," said Tardrew in a gruff tone, as if half to
himself, "who have no fancies.... Tell you what it is, sir: you was
right this time; and that's plain truth. I'm sorry to hear talk of your
going."

"My good sir," quoth Tom, "I shall be very sorry to go. I have found
place and people here as pleasant as man could wish: but go I must."

"Glad you're satisfied, sir; wish you was going to stay," says Tardrew.
"Seen Miss Harvey this last day or two, sir?"

"Yes. You know she's to keep her school?"

"I know it. Nursed my girl like an angel."

"Like what she is," said Tom.

"You said one true word once: that she was too good for us."

"For this world," said Tom; and fell into a great musing.

By those curt and surly utterances did Tardrew, in true British bulldog
fashion, express a repentance too deep for words; too deep for all
confessionals, penances, and emotions or acts of contrition; the
repentance not of the excitable and theatric southern, unstable as
water, even in his most violent remorse: but of the still, deep-hearted
northern, whose pride breaks slowly and silently, but breaks once for
all; who tells to God what he will never tell to man; and having told
it, is a new creature from that day forth for ever.




CHAPTER XIX.

BEDDGELERT.


The pleasant summer voyage is over. The Waterwitch is lounging off Port
Madoc, waiting for her crew. The said crow are busy on shore drinking
the ladies' healths, with a couple of sovereigns which Valencia has
given them, in her sister's name and her own. The ladies, under the care
of Elsley, and the far more practical care of Mr. Bowie, are rattling
along among children, maids, and boxes, over the sandy flats of the
Traeth Mawr, beside the long reaches of the lazy stream, with the blue
surges of the hills in front, and the silver sea behind. Soon they begin
to pass wooded knolls, islets of rock in the alluvial plain. The higher
peaks of Snowdon sink down behind the lower spurs in front; the plain
narrows; closes in, walled round with woodlands clinging to the steep
hill-sides; and, at last, they enter the narrow gorge of
Pont-Aberglaslyn,--pretty enough no doubt, but much over-praised; for there
are in Devon alone a dozen passes far grander, both for form and size.

Soon they emerge again on flat meadows, mountain-cradled; and the grave
of the mythic greyhound, and the fair old church, shrouded in tall
trees; and last, but not least, at the famous Leek Hotel, where ruleth
Mrs. Lewis, great and wise, over the four months' Babylon of guides,
cars, chambermaids, tourists, artists, and reading-parties, camp-stools,
telescopes, poetry-books, blue uglies, red petticoats, and parasols of
every hue.

There they settle down in the best rooms in the house, and all goes as
merrily as it can, while the horrors which they have left behind them
hang, like a black background, to all their thoughts. However, both
Scoutbush and Campbell send as cheerful reports as they honestly can;
and gradually the exceeding beauty of the scenery, and the amusing
bustle of the village, make them forget, perhaps, a good deal which they
ought to have remembered.

As for poor Lucia, no one will complain of her for being happy; for
feeling that she has got a holiday, the first for now four years, and
trying to enjoy it to the utmost. She has no household cares. Mr. Bowie
manages everything, and does so, in order to keep up the honour of the
family, on a somewhat magnificent scale. The children, in that bracing
air, are better than she has ever seen them. She has Valencia all to
herself; and Elsley, in spite of the dark fancies over which he has been
brooding, is better behaved, on the whole, than usual.

He has escaped--so he considers--escaped from Campbell, above all from
Thurnall. From himself, indeed, he has not escaped; but the company of
self is, on the whole, more pleasant to him than otherwise just now. For
though he may turn up his nose at tourists and reading-parties, and long
for contemplative solitude, yet there is a certain pleasure to some
people, and often strongest in those who pretend most shyness, in the
"digito monstrari, et diceri, hic est:" in taking for granted that
everybody has read his poems; that everybody is saying in their hearts,
"There goes Mr. Vavasour the distinguished poet. I wonder what he is
writing now? I wonder where he has been to-day, and what he has been
thinking of."

So Elsley went up Hebog, and looked over the glorious vista of the vale,
over the twin lakes, and the rich sheets of woodland, with Aran and Moel
Meirch guarding them right and left, and the greystone glaciers of the
Glyder walling up the valley miles above. And they went up Snowdon, too,
and saw little beside fifty fog-blinded tourists, five-and-twenty
dripping ponies, and five hundred empty porter-bottles; wherefrom they
returned, as do many, disgusted, and with great colds in their heads.
But most they loved to scramble up the crags of Dinas Emrys, and muse
over the ruins of the old tower, "where Merlin taught Vortigern the
courses of the stars;" till the stars set and rose as they had done for
Merlin and his pupil, behind the four great peaks of Aran, Siabod,
Cnicht, and Hebog, which point to the four quarters of the heavens: or
to lie by the side of the boggy spring, which once was the magic well of
the magic castle, till they saw in fancy the white dragon and the red
rise from its depths once more, and fight high in air the battle which
foretold the fall of the Cymry before the Sassenach invader.

One thing, indeed, troubled Elsley,--that Claude was his only companion;
for Valencia avoided carefully any more _tête-à-tête_ walks with him.
She had found out her mistake, and devoted herself now to Lucia. She had
a fair excuse enough, for Lucia was not just then in a state for rambles
and scrambles; and of that Elsley certainly had no right to complain; so
that he was forced to leave them both at home, with as good grace as he
could muster, and to wander by himself, scribbling his fancies, while
they lounged and worked in the pleasant garden of the hotel, with Bowie
fetching and carrying for them all day long, and intimating pretty
roundly to Miss Clara his "opeeenion," that he "was very proud and
thankful of the office: but he did think that he had to do a great many
things for Mrs. Vavasour every day which would come with a much better
grace from Mr. Vavasour himself: and that, when he married, he should
not leave his wife to be nursed by other men." Which last words were
spoken with an ulterior object, well understood by the hearer; for
between Clara and Bowie there was one of those patient and honourable
attachments so common between worthy servants. They had both "kept
company," though only by letter, for the most part, for now five years;
they had both saved a fair sum of money; and Clara might have married
Bowie when she chose, had she not thought it her duty to take care of
her mistress; while Bowie considered himself equally indispensable to
the welfare of that "pui

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