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The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 05

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Title: The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 05

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Other: Andrew Lang


        
Release date: December 23, 2009 [eBook #30744]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON - SWANSTON EDITION, VOL. 05 ***




Produced by Marius Masi, Jonathan Ingram and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









       THE WORKS OF
  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

     SWANSTON EDITION

         VOLUME V


  _Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five
  Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS
  STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies
  have been printed, of which only Two Thousand
  Copies are for sale._

  _This is No._ ........


[Illustration: 8 HOWARD PLACE, EDINBURGH, BIRTHPLACE OF R. L. S. IN 1850]




  THE WORKS OF
  ROBERT LOUIS
  STEVENSON

  VOLUME FIVE


  LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND
  WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL
  AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM
  HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN
  AND COMPANY       MDCCCCXI


  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




CONTENTS


  MORE NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS


  THE DYNAMITER


                                                 PAGE
    PROLOGUE OF THE CIGAR DIVAN                     7


  CHALLONER'S ADVENTURE

    THE SQUIRE OF DAMES                            15

    STORY OF THE DESTROYING ANGEL                  24

    THE SQUIRE OF DAMES (_concluded_)              57


  SOMERSET'S ADVENTURE

    THE SUPERFLUOUS MANSION                        73

    NARRATIVE OF THE SPIRITED OLD LADY             78

    THE SUPERFLUOUS MANSION (_continued_)         104

    ZERO'S TALE OF THE EXPLOSIVE BOMB             130

    THE SUPERFLUOUS MANSION (_continued_)         139


  DESBOROUGH'S ADVENTURE

    THE BROWN BOX                                 149

    STORY OF THE FAIR CUBAN                       155

    THE BROWN BOX (_concluded_)                   190

    THE SUPERFLUOUS MANSION (_concluded_)         202

    EPILOGUE OF THE CIGAR DIVAN                   212


  STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

    STORY OF THE DOOR                             227

    SEARCH FOR MR. HYDE                           234

    DR. JEKYLL WAS QUITE AT EASE                  243

    THE CAREW MURDER CASE                         246

    INCIDENT OF THE LETTER                        251

    REMARKABLE INCIDENT OF DR. LANYON             256

    INCIDENT AT THE WINDOW                        261

    THE LAST NIGHT                                263

    DR. LANYON'S NARRATIVE                        276

    HENRY JEKYLL'S FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE     284


  THRAWN JANET                                    305




MORE NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS

THE DYNAMITER

WRITTEN IN COLLABORATION WITH MRS. STEVENSON




  _TO
  MESSRS. COLE AND COX_

  _POLICE OFFICERS_

_Gentlemen,_

_In the volume now in your hands, the authors have touched upon that
ugly devil of crime, with which it is your glory to have contended. It
were a waste of ink to do so in a serious spirit. Let us dedicate our
horror to acts of a more mingled strain, where crime preserves some
features of nobility, and where reason and humanity can still relish the
temptation. Horror, in this case, is due to Mr. Parnell: he sits before
posterity silent, Mr. Forster's appeal echoing down the ages. Horror is
due to ourselves, in that we have so long coquetted with political
crime; not seriously weighing, not acutely following it from cause to
consequence; but with a generous, unfounded heat of sentiment, like the
schoolboy with the penny tale, applauding what was specious. When it
touched ourselves (truly in a vile shape), we proved false to these
imaginations; discovered, in a clap, that crime was no less cruel and no
less ugly under sounding names; and recoiled from our false deities._

_But seriousness comes most in place when we are to speak of our
defenders. Whoever be in the right in this great and confused war of
politics; whatever elements of greed, whatever traits of the bully,
dishonour both parties in this inhuman contest;--your side, your part,
is at least pure of doubt. Yours is the side of the child, of the
breeding woman, of individual pity and public trust. If our society were
the mere kingdom of the devil (as indeed it wears some of his colours),
it yet embraces many precious elements and many innocent persons whom
it_ _is a glory to defend. Courage and devotion, so common in the ranks
of the police, so little recognised, so meagrely rewarded, have at
length found their commemoration in an historical act. History, which
will represent Mr. Parnell sitting silent under the appeal of Mr.
Forster, and Gordon setting forth upon his tragic enterprise, will not
forget Mr. Cole carrying the dynamite in his defenceless hands, nor Mr.
Cox coming coolly to his aid._

     _ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
     FANNY VAN DE GRIFT STEVENSON._




_A NOTE FOR THE READER_


_It is within the bounds of possibility that you may take up this
volume, and yet be unacquainted with its predecessor: the first series
of_ NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS. _The loss is yours--and mine; or, to be more
exact, my publishers'. But if you are thus unlucky, the least I can do
is to pass you a hint. When you shall find a reference in the following
pages to one Theophilus Godall of the Bohemian Cigar Divan in Rupert
Street, Soho, you must be prepared to recognise under his features no
less a person than Prince Florizel of Bohemia, formerly one of the
magnates of Europe, now dethroned, exiled, impoverished, and embarked in
the tobacco trade._

     _R. L. S._




MORE NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS

THE DYNAMITER




PROLOGUE OF THE CIGAR DIVAN


In the city of encounters, the Bagdad of the West, and, to be more
precise, on the broad northern pavement of Leicester Square, two young
men of five- or six-and-twenty met after years of separation. The first,
who was of a very smooth address, and clothed in the best fashion,
hesitated to recognise the pinched and shabby air of his companion.

"What!" he cried, "Paul Somerset!"

"I am indeed Paul Somerset," returned the other, "or what remains of him
after a well-deserved experience of poverty and law. But in you,
Challoner, I can perceive no change; and time may be said, without
hyperbole, to write no wrinkle on your azure brow."

"All," replied Challoner, "is not gold that glitters. But we are here in
an ill posture for confidences, and interrupt the movement of these
ladies. Let us, if you please, find a more private corner."

"If you will allow me to guide you," replied Somerset, "I will offer you
the best cigar in London."

And taking the arm of his companion, he led him in silence and at a
brisk pace to the door of a quiet establishment in Rupert Street, Soho.
The entrance was adorned with one of those gigantic Highlanders of wood
which have almost risen to the standing of antiquities; and across the
window-glass, which sheltered the usual display of pipes, tobacco, and
cigars, there ran the gilded legend: "Bohemian Cigar Divan, by T.
Godall." The interior of the shop was small, but commodious and ornate;
the salesman grave, smiling, and urbane; and the two young men, each
puffing a select regalia, had soon taken their places on a sofa of
mouse-coloured plush, and proceeded to exchange their stories.

"I am now," said Somerset, "a barrister; but Providence and the
attorneys have hitherto denied me the opportunity to shine. A select
society at the Cheshire Cheese engaged my evenings; my afternoons, as
Mr. Godall could testify, have been generally passed in this divan; and
my mornings, I have taken the precaution to abbreviate by not rising
before twelve. At this rate, my little patrimony was very rapidly and, I
am proud to remember, most agreeably expended. Since then a gentleman,
who has really nothing else to recommend him beyond the fact of being my
maternal uncle, deals me the small sum of ten shillings a week; and if
you behold me once more revisiting the glimpses of the street lamps in
my favourite quarter, you will readily divine that I have come into a
fortune."

"I should not have supposed so," replied Challoner. "But doubtless I met
you on the way to your tailors."

"It is a visit that I purpose to delay," returned Somerset, with a
smile. "My fortune has definite limits. It consists, or rather this
morning it consisted, of one hundred pounds."

"That is certainly odd," said Challoner; "yes, certainly the coincidence
is strange. I am myself reduced to the same margin."

"You!" cried Somerset. "And yet Solomon in all his glory----"

"Such is the fact. I am, dear boy, on my last legs," said Challoner.
"Besides the clothes in which you see me, I have scarcely a decent
trouser in my wardrobe; and if I knew how, I would this instant set
about some sort of work or commerce. With a hundred pounds for capital,
a man should push his way."

"It may be," returned Somerset; "but what to do with mine is more than I
can fancy.--Mr. Godall," he added, addressing the salesman, "you are a
man who knows the world: what can a young fellow of reasonable education
do with a hundred pounds?"

"It depends," replied the salesman, withdrawing his cheroot. "The power
of money is an article of faith in which I profess myself a sceptic. A
hundred pounds will with difficulty support you for a year; with
somewhat more difficulty you may spend it in a night; and without any
difficulty at all you may lose it in five minutes on the Stock Exchange.
If you are of that stamp of man that rises, a penny would be as useful;
if you belong to those that fall, a penny would be no more useless. When
I was myself thrown unexpectedly upon the world, it was my fortune to
possess an art: I knew a good cigar. Do you know nothing, Mr. Somerset?"

"Not even law," was the reply.

"The answer is worthy of a sage," returned Mr. Godall.--"And you, sir,"
he continued, turning to Challoner, "as the friend of Mr. Somerset, may
I be allowed to address you the same question?"

"Well," replied Challoner, "I play a fair hand at whist."

"How many persons are there in London," returned the salesman, "who have
two-and-thirty teeth? Believe me, young gentleman, there are more still
who play a fair hand at whist. Whist, sir, is wide as the world; 'tis an
accomplishment like breathing. I once knew a youth who announced that he
was studying to be Chancellor of England; the design was certainly
ambitious; but I find it less excessive than that of the man who aspires
to make a livelihood by whist."

"Dear me," said Challoner, "I am afraid I shall have to fall to be a
working man."

"Fall to be a working man?" echoed Mr. Godall. "Suppose a rural dean to
be unfrocked, does he fall to be a major? suppose a captain were
cashiered, would he fall to be a puisne judge? The ignorance of your
middle class surprises me. Outside itself, it thinks the world to lie
quite ignorant and equal, sunk in a common degradation; but to the eye
of the observer, all ranks are seen to stand in ordered hierarchies, and
each adorned with its particular aptitudes and knowledge. By the defects
of your education you are more disqualified to be a working man than to
be the ruler of an empire. The gulf, sir, is below; and the true learned
arts--those which alone are safe from the competition of insurgent
laymen--are those which give his title to the artisan."

"This is a very pompous fellow," said Challoner in the ear of his
companion.

"He is immense," said Somerset.

Just then the door of the divan was opened, and a third young fellow
made his appearance, and rather bashfully requested some tobacco. He was
younger than the others; and, in a somewhat meaningless and altogether
English way, he was a handsome lad. When he had been served, and had
lighted his pipe and taken his place upon the sofa, he recalled himself
to Challoner by the name of Desborough.

"Desborough, to be sure," cried Challoner. "Well, Desborough, and what
do you do?"

"The fact is," said Desborough, "that I am doing nothing."

"A private fortune, possibly?" inquired the other.

"Well, no," replied Desborough, rather sulkily. "The fact is that I am
waiting for something to turn up."

"All in the same boat!" cried Somerset. "And have you, too, one hundred
pounds?"

"Worse luck," said Mr. Desborough.

"This is a very pathetic sight, Mr. Godall," said Somerset: "three
futiles."

"A character of this crowded age," returned the salesman.

"Sir," said Somerset, "I deny that the age is crowded; I will admit one
fact, and one fact only: that I am futile, that he is futile, and that
we are all three as futile as the devil. What am I? I have smattered
law, smattered letters, smattered geography, smattered mathematics; I
have even a working knowledge of judicial astrology; and here I stand,
all London roaring by at the street's end, as impotent as any baby. I
have a prodigious contempt for my maternal uncle; but without him, it is
idle to deny it, I should simply resolve into my elements like an
unstable mixture. I begin to perceive that it is necessary to know some
one thing to the bottom--were it only literature. And yet, sir, the man
of the world is a great feature of this age; he is possessed of an
extraordinary mass and variety of knowledge; he is everywhere at home;
he has seen life in all its phases; and it is impossible but that this
great habit of existence should bear fruit. I count myself a man of the
world, accomplished, _cap-à-pie_. So do you, Challoner. And you, Mr.
Desborough?"

"Oh yes," returned the young man.

"Well, then, Mr. Godall, here we stand, three men of the world, without
a trade to cover us, but planted at the strategic centre of the universe
(for so you will allow me to call Rupert Street), in the midst of the
chief mass of people, and within earshot of the most continuous chink of
money on the surface of the globe. Sir, as civilised men, what do we do?
I will show you. You take in a paper?"

"I take," said Mr. Godall solemnly, "the best paper in the world, the
_Standard_."

"Good," resumed Somerset. "I now hold it in my hand, the voice of the
world, a telephone repeating all men's wants. I open it, and where my
eye first falls--well, no, not Morrison's Pills--but here, sure enough,
and but a little above, I find the joint that I was seeking; here is the
weak spot in the armour of society. Here is a want, a plaint, an offer
of substantial gratitude: '_Two Hundred Pounds Reward_.--The above
reward will be paid to any person giving information as to the identity
and whereabouts of a man observed yesterday in the neighbourhood of the
Green Park. He was over six feet in height, with shoulders
disproportionately broad, close shaved, with black moustaches, and
wearing a sealskin great-coat.' There, gentlemen, our fortune, if not
made, is founded."

"Do you then propose, dear boy, that we should turn detectives?"
inquired Challoner.

"Do I propose it? No, sir," cried Somerset. "It is reason, destiny, the
plain face of the world, that commands and imposes it. Here all our
merits tell; our manners, habit of the world, powers of conversation,
vast stores of unconnected knowledge, all that we are and have builds up
the character of the complete detective. It is, in short, the only
profession for a gentleman."

"The proposition is perhaps excessive," replied Challoner; "for hitherto
I own I have regarded it as of all dirty, sneaking, and ungentlemanly
trades, the least and lowest."

"To defend society?" asked Somerset; "to stake one's life for others? to
deracinate occult and powerful evil? I appeal to Mr. Godall. He, at
least, as a philosophic looker-on at life, will spit upon such
philistine opinions. He knows that the policeman, as he is called upon
continually to face greater odds, and that both worse equipped and for a
better cause, is in form and essence a more noble hero than the soldier.
Do you, by any chance, deceive yourself into supposing that a general
would either ask or expect, from the best army ever marshalled, and on
the most momentous battlefield, the conduct of a common constable at
Peckham Rye?"[1]

"I did not understand we were to join the force," said Challoner.

"Nor shall we. These are the hands; but here--here, sir, is the head,"
cried Somerset. "Enough; it is decreed. We shall hunt down this
miscreant in the sealskin coat."

"Suppose that we agreed," retorted Challoner, "you have no plan, no
knowledge; you know not where to seek for a beginning."

"Challoner!" cried Somerset, "is it possible that you hold the doctrine
of Free Will? And are you devoid of any tincture of philosophy, that you
should harp on such exploded fallacies? Chance, the blind Madonna of the
Pagan, rules this terrestrial bustle; and in Chance I place my sole
reliance. Chance has brought us three together; when we next separate
and go forth our several ways, Chance will continually drag before our
careless eyes a thousand eloquent clues, not to this mystery only, but
to the countless mysteries by which we live surrounded. Then comes the
part of the man of the world, of the detective born and bred. This clue,
which the whole town beholds without comprehension, swift as a cat, he
leaps upon it, makes it his, follows it with craft and passion, and from
one trifling circumstance divines a world."

"Just so," said Challoner; "and I am delighted that you should recognise
these virtues in yourself. But in the meanwhile, dear boy, I own myself
incapable of joining. I was neither born nor bred as a detective, but as
a placable and very thirsty gentleman; and, for my part, I begin to
weary for a drink. As for clues and adventures, the only adventure that
is ever likely to occur to me will be an adventure with a bailiff."

"Now there is the fallacy," cried Somerset. "There I catch the secret of
your futility in life. The world teems and bubbles with adventure; it
besieges you along the streets; hands waving out of windows, swindlers
coming up and swearing they knew you when you were abroad, affable and
doubtful people of all sorts and conditions begging and truckling for
your notice. But not you: you turn away, you walk your seedy mill round,
you must go the dullest way. Now here, I beg of you, the next adventure
that offers itself, embrace it in with both your arms; whatever it
looks, grimy or romantic, grasp it. I will do the like; the devil is in
it, but at least we shall have fun; and each in turn we shall narrate
the story of our fortunes to my philosophic friend of the divan, the
great Godall, now hearing me with inward joy. Come, is it a bargain?
Will you, indeed, both promise to welcome every chance that offers, to
plunge boldly into every opening, and, keeping the eye wary and the head
composed, to study and piece together all that happens? Come, promise:
let me open to you the doors of the great profession of intrigue."

"It is not much in my way," said Challoner, "but, since you make a point
of it, amen."

"I don't mind promising," said Desborough, "but nothing will happen to
me."

"O faithless ones!" cried Somerset. "But at least I have your promises;
and Godall, I perceive, is transported with delight."

"I promise myself at least much pleasure from your various narratives,"
said the salesman, with the customary calm polish of his manner.

"And now, gentlemen," concluded Somerset, "let us separate. I hasten to
put myself in fortune's way. Hark how, in this quiet corner, London
roars like the noise of battle; four million destinies are here
concentred; and in the strong panoply of one hundred pounds, payable to
the bearer, I am about to plunge into that web."


FOOTNOTE:

  [1] Hereupon the Arabian author enters on one of his digressions.
    Fearing, apparently, that the somewhat eccentric views of Mr.
    Somerset should throw discredit on a part of truth, he calls upon
    the English people to remember with more gratitude the services of
    the police; to what unobserved and solitary acts of heroism they are
    called; against what odds of numbers and of arms, and for how small
    a reward, either in fame or money: matter, it has appeared to the
    translators, too serious for this place.




CHALLONER'S ADVENTURE:

THE SQUIRE OF DAMES


Mr. Edward Challoner had set up lodgings in the suburb of Putney, where
he enjoyed a parlour and bedroom and the sincere esteem of the people of
the house. To this remote home he found himself, at a very early hour in
the morning of the next day, condemned to set forth on foot. He was a
young man of a portly habit; no lover of the exercises of the body;
bland, sedentary, patient of delay, a prop of omnibuses. In happier days
he would have chartered a cab; but these luxuries were now denied him;
and with what courage he could muster he addressed himself to walk.

It was then the height of the season and the summer; the weather was
serene and cloudless; and as he paced under the blinded houses and along
the vacant streets, the chill of the dawn had fled, and some of the
warmth and all the brightness of the July day already shone upon the
city. He walked at first in a profound abstraction, bitterly reviewing
and repenting his performances at whist; but as he advanced into the
labyrinth of the south-west, his ear was gradually mastered by the
silence. Street after street looked down upon his solitary figure, house
after house echoed upon his passage with a ghostly jar, shop after shop
displayed its shuttered front and its commercial legend; and meanwhile
he steered his course, under day's effulgent dome and through this
encampment of diurnal sleepers, lonely as a ship.

"Here," he reflected, "if I were like my scatter-brained companion, here
were indeed the scene where I might look for an adventure. Here, in
broad day, the streets are secret as in the blackest night of January,
and in the midst of some four million sleepers, solitary as the woods
of Yucatan. If I but raise my voice I could summon up the number of an
army, and yet the grave is not more silent than this city of sleep."

He was still following these quaint and serious musings when he came
into a street of more mingled ingredients than was common in the
quarter. Here, on the one hand, framed in walls and the green tops of
trees, were several of those discreet, _bijou_ residences on which
propriety is apt to look askance. Here, too, were many of the
brick-fronted barracks of the poor; a plaster cow, perhaps, serving as
ensign to a dairy, or a ticket announcing the business of the mangler.
Before one such house, that stood a little separate among walled
gardens, a cat was playing with a straw, and Challoner paused a moment,
looking on this sleek and solitary creature, who seemed an emblem of the
neighbouring peace. With the cessation of the sound of his own steps the
silence fell dead; the house stood smokeless; the blinds down, the whole
machinery of life arrested; and it seemed to Challoner that he should
hear the breathing of the sleepers.

As he so stood, he was startled by a dull and jarring detonation from
within. This was followed by a monstrous hissing and simmering as from a
kettle of the bigness of St. Paul's; and at the same time from every
chink of door and window spurted an ill-smelling vapour. The cat
disappeared with a cry. Within the lodging-house feet pounded on the
stairs; the door flew back, emitting clouds of smoke; and two men and an
elegantly dressed young lady tumbled forth into the street and fled
without a word. The hissing had already ceased, the smoke was melting in
the air, the whole event had come and gone as in a dream, and still
Challoner was rooted to the spot. At last his reason and his fear awoke
together, and with the most unwonted energy he fell to running.

Little by little this first dash relaxed, and presently he had resumed
his sober gait and begun to piece together, out of the confused report
of his senses, some theory of the occurrence. But the occasion of the
sounds and stench that had so suddenly assailed him, and the strange
conjunction of fugitives whom he had seen to issue from the house, were
mysteries beyond his plummet. With an obscure awe he considered them in
his mind, continuing, meanwhile, to thread the web of streets, and once
more alone in morning sunshine.

In his first retreat he had entirely wandered; and now, steering vaguely
west, it was his luck to light upon an unpretending street, which
presently widened so as to admit a strip of gardens in the midst. Here
was quite a stir of birds; even at that hour, the shadow of the leaves
was grateful; instead of the burnt atmosphere of cities, there was
something brisk and rural in the air; and Challoner paced forward, his
eyes upon the pavement and his mind running upon distant scenes, till he
was recalled, upon a sudden, by a wall that blocked his further
progress. This street, whose name I have forgotten, is no thoroughfare.

He was not the first who had wandered there that morning; for, as he
raised his eyes with an agreeable deliberation, they alighted on the
figure of a girl, in whom he was struck to recognise the third of the
incongruous fugitives. She had run there, seemingly, blindfold; the wall
had checked her career; and being entirely wearied, she had sunk upon
the ground beside the garden railings, soiling her dress among the
summer dust. Each saw the other in the same instant of time; and she,
with one wild look, sprang to her feet and began to hurry from the
scene.

Challoner was doubly startled to meet once more the heroine of his
adventure and to observe the fear with which she shunned him. Pity and
alarm, in nearly equal forces, contested the possession of his mind; and
yet, in spite of both, he saw himself condemned to follow in the lady's
wake. He did so gingerly, as fearing to increase her terrors; but, tread
as lightly as he might, his footfalls eloquently echoed in the empty
street. Their sound appeared to strike in her some strong emotion; for
scarce had he begun to follow ere she paused. A second time she
addressed herself to flight; and a second time she paused. Then she
turned about, and, with doubtful steps and the most attractive
appearance of timidity, drew near to the young man. He on his side
continued to advance with similar signals of distress and bashfulness.
At length, when they were but some steps apart, he saw her eyes brim
over, and she reached out both her hands in eloquent appeal.

"Are you an English gentleman?" she cried.

The unhappy Challoner regarded her with consternation. He was the spirit
of fine courtesy, and would have blushed to fail in his devoirs to any
lady; but, in the other scale, he was a man averse from amorous
adventures. He looked east and west; but the houses that looked down
upon this interview remained inexorably shut; and he saw himself, though
in the full glare of the day's eye, cut off from any human intervention.
His looks returned at last upon the suppliant. He remarked with
irritation that she was charming both in face and figure, elegantly
dressed and gloved: a lady undeniable; the picture of distress and
innocence; weeping and lost in the city of diurnal sleep.

"Madam," he said, "I protest you have no cause to fear intrusion; and if
I have appeared to follow you, the fault is in this street, which has
deceived us both."

An unmistakable relief appeared upon the lady's face. "I might have
guessed it!" she exclaimed. "Thank you a thousand times! But at this
hour, in this appalling silence, and among all these staring windows, I
am lost in terrors--oh, lost in them!" she cried, her face blanching at
the words. "I beg you to lend me your arm," she added with the
loveliest, suppliant inflection. "I dare not go alone; my nerve is
gone--I had a shock, O what a shock! I beg of you to be my escort."

"My dear madam," responded Challoner heavily, "my arm is at your
service."

She took it and clung to it for a moment, struggling with her sobs; and
the next, with feverish hurry, began to lead him in the direction of the
city. One thing was plain, among so much that was obscure: it was plain
her fears were genuine. Still, as she went, she spied around as if for
dangers; and now she would shiver like a person in a chill, and now
clutch his arm in hers. To Challoner her terror was at once repugnant
and infectious; it gained and mastered, while it still offended him; and
he wailed in spirit and longed for release.

"Madam," he said at last, "I am, of course, charmed to be of use to any
lady; but I confess I was bound in a direction opposite to that you
follow, and a word of explanation----"

"Hush!" she sobbed, "not here--not here!"

The blood of Challoner ran cold. He might have thought the lady mad; but
his memory was charged with more perilous stuff; and in view of the
detonation, the smoke, and the flight of the ill-assorted trio, his mind
was lost among mysteries. So they continued to thread the maze of
streets in silence, with the speed of a guilty flight, and both
thrilling with incommunicable terrors. In time, however, and above all
by their quick pace of walking, the pair began to rise to firmer
spirits; the lady ceased to peer about the corners; and Challoner,
emboldened by the resonant tread and distant figure of a constable,
returned to the charge with more of spirit and directness.

"I thought," he said, in the tone of conversation, "that I had
indistinctly perceived you leaving a villa in the company of two
gentlemen."

"Oh!" she said, "you need not fear to wound me by the truth. You saw me
flee from a common lodging-house, and my companions were not gentlemen.
In such a case, the best of compliments is to be frank."

"I thought," resumed Challoner, encouraged as much as he was surprised
by the spirit of her reply, "to have perceived, besides, a certain
odour. A noise, too--I do not know to what I should compare it----"

"Silence!" she cried. "You do not know the danger you invoke. Wait, only
wait; and as soon as we have left those streets and got beyond the reach
of listeners, all shall be explained. Meanwhile, avoid the topic. What a
sight is this sleeping city!" she exclaimed; and then, with a most
thrilling voice, "'Dear God,'" she quoted, "'the very houses seem
asleep, and all that mighty heart is lying still.'"

"I perceive, madam," said he, "you are a reader."

"I am more than that," she answered, with a sigh. "I am a girl condemned
to thoughts beyond her age; and so untoward is my fate, that this walk
upon the arm of a stranger is like an interlude of peace."

They had come by this time to the neighbourhood of the Victoria Station;
and here, at a street corner, the young lady paused, withdrew her arm
from Challoner's, and looked up and down as though in pain or
indecision. Then, with a lovely change of countenance, and laying her
gloved hand upon his arm:

"What you already think of me," she said, "I tremble to conceive; yet I
must here condemn myself still further. Here I must leave you, and here
I beseech you to wait for my return. Do not attempt to follow me or spy
upon my actions. Suspend yet awhile your judgment of a girl as innocent
as your own sister; and do not, above all, desert me. Stranger as you
are, I have none else to look to. You see me in sorrow and great fear;
you are a gentleman, courteous and kind; and when I beg for a few
minutes' patience, I make sure beforehand you will not deny me."

Challoner grudgingly promised; and the young lady, with a grateful
eye-shot, vanished round the corner. But the force of her appeal had
been a little blunted; for the young man was not only destitute of
sisters, but of any female relative nearer than a great-aunt in Wales.
Now he was alone, besides, the spell that he had hitherto obeyed began
to weaken; he considered his behaviour with a sneer; and plucking up the
spirit of revolt, he started in pursuit. The reader, if he has ever
plied the fascinating trade of the noctambulist, will not be unaware
that, in the neighbourhood of the great railway centres, certain early
taverns inaugurate the business of the day. It was into one of these
that Challoner, coming round the corner of the block, beheld his
charming companion disappear. To say he was surprised were inexact, for
he had long since left that sentiment behind him. Acute disgust and
disappointment seized upon his soul; and with silent oaths he damned
this commonplace enchantress. She had scarce been gone a second ere the
swing-doors reopened, and she appeared again in company with a young man
of mean and slouching attire. For some five or six exchanges they
conversed together with an animated air; then the fellow shouldered
again into the tap; and the young lady, with something swifter than a
walk, retraced her steps towards Challoner. He saw her coming, a miracle
of grace; her ankle, as she hurried, flashing from her dress; her
movements eloquent of speed and youth; and though he still entertained
some thoughts of flight, they grew miserably fainter as the distance
lessened. Against mere beauty he was proof: it was her unmistakable
gentility that now robbed him of the courage of his cowardice. With a
proved adventuress he had acted strictly on his right; with one whom, in
spite of all, he could not quite deny to be a lady, he found himself
disarmed. At the very corner from whence he had spied upon her
interview, she came upon him, still transfixed, and--"Ah!" she cried,
with a bright flush of colour. "Ah! Ungenerous!"

The sharpness of the attack somewhat restored the Squire of Dames to the
possession of himself.

"Madam," he returned, with a fair show of stoutness, "I do not think
that hitherto you can complain of any lack of generosity; I have
suffered myself to be led over a considerable portion of the metropolis;
and if I now request you to discharge me of my office of protector, you
have friends at hand who will be glad of the succession."

She stood a moment dumb.

"It is well," she said. "Go! go, and may God help me! You have seen
me--me, an innocent girl! fleeing from a dire catastrophe and haunted by
sinister men; and neither pity, curiosity, nor honour move you to await
my explanation or to help in my distress. Go!" she repeated. "I am lost
indeed." And with a passionate gesture she turned and fled along the
street.

Challoner observed her retreat and disappear, an almost intolerable
sense of guilt contending with the profound sense that he was being
gulled. She was no sooner gone than the first of these feelings took the
upper hand; he felt, if he had done her less than justice, that his
conduct was a perfect model of the ungracious; the cultured tone of her
voice, her choice of language, and the elegant decorum of her movements,
cried out aloud against a harsh construction; and between penitence and
curiosity he began slowly to follow in her wake. At the corner he had
her once more full in view. Her speed was failing like a stricken
bird's. Even as he looked, she threw her arm out gropingly, and fell and
leaned against the wall. At the spectacle, Challoner's fortitude gave
way. In a few strides he overtook her, and, for the first time removing
his hat, assured her in the most moving terms of his entire respect and
firm desire to help her. He spoke at first unheeded; but gradually it
appeared that she began to comprehend his words; she moved a little, and
drew herself upright; and finally, as with a sudden movement of
forgiveness, turned on the young man a countenance in which reproach and
gratitude were mingled. "Ah, madam," he cried, "use me as you will!" And
once more, but now with a great air of deference, he offered her the
conduct of his arm. She took it with a sigh that struck him to the
heart; and they began once more to trace the deserted streets. But now
her steps, as though exhausted by emotion, began to linger on the way;
she leaned the more heavily upon his arm; and he, like the parent bird,
stooped fondly above his drooping convoy. Her physical distress was not
accompanied by any failing of her spirits; and hearing her strike so
soon into a playful and charming vein of talk, Challoner could not
sufficiently admire the elasticity of his companion's nature. "Let me
forget," she had said, "for one half-hour, let me forget"; and sure
enough, with the very word, her sorrows appeared to be forgotten. Before
every house she paused, invented a name for the proprietor, and sketched
his character: here lived the old general whom she was to marry on the
fifth of the next month, there was the mansion of the rich widow who had
set her heart on Challoner; and though she still hung wearily on the
young man's arm, her laughter sounded low and pleasant in his ears.
"Ah," she sighed, by way of commentary, "in such a life as mine I must
seize tight hold of any happiness that I can find."

When they arrived, in this leisurely manner, at the head of Grosvenor
Place, the gates of the park were opening, and the bedraggled company of
night-walkers were being at last admitted into that paradise of lawns.
Challoner and his companion followed the movement, and walked for awhile
in silence in that tatterdemalion crowd; but as one after another, weary
with the night's patrolling of the city pavement, sank upon the benches
or wandered into separate paths, the vast extent of the park had soon
utterly swallowed up the last of these intruders; and the pair proceeded
on their way alone in the grateful quiet of the morning.

Presently they came in sight of a bench, standing very open on a mound
of turf. The young lady looked about her with relief.

"Here," she said, "here at last we are secure from listeners. Here,
then, you shall learn and judge my history. I could not bear that we
should part, and that you should still suppose your kindness squandered
upon one who was unworthy."

Thereupon she sat down upon the bench, and motioning Challoner to take a
place immediately beside her, began in the following words, and with the
greatest appearance of enjoyment, to narrate the story of her life.




STORY OF THE DESTROYING ANGEL


My father was a native of England, son of a cadet of a great ancient but
untitled family; and by some event, fault, or misfortune he was driven
to flee from the land of his birth and to lay aside the name of his
ancestors. He sought the States; and instead of lingering in effeminate
cities, pushed at once into the Far West with an exploring party of
frontiersmen. He was no ordinary traveller; for he was not only brave
and impetuous by character, but learned in many sciences, and above all
in botany, which he particularly loved. Thus it fell that, before many
months, Fremont himself, the nominal leader of the troop, courted and
bowed to his opinion.

They had pushed, as I have said, into the still unknown regions of the
West. For some time they followed the track of Mormon caravans, guiding
themselves in that vast and melancholy desert by the skeletons of men
and animals. Then they inclined their route a little to the north, and,
losing even these dire memorials, came into a country of forbidding
stillness. I have often heard my father dwell upon the features of that
ride: rock, cliff, and barren moor alternated; the streams were very far
between; and neither beast nor bird disturbed the solitude. On the
fortieth day they had already run so short of food that it was judged
advisable to call a halt and scatter upon all sides to hunt. A great
fire was built, that its smoke might serve to rally them; and each man
of the party mounted and struck off at a venture into the surrounding
desert.

My father rode for many hours with a steep range of cliffs upon the one
hand, very black and horrible; and upon the other an unwatered vale
dotted with boulders like the site of some subverted city. At length he
found the slot of a great animal, and from the claw-marks and the hair
among the brush, judged that he was on the track of a cinnamon bear of
most unusual size. He quickened the pace of his steed, and, still
following the quarry, came at last to the division of two watersheds. On
the far side the country was exceeding intricate and difficult, heaped
with boulders, and dotted here and there with a few pines, which seemed
to indicate the neighbourhood of water. Here, then, he picketed his
horse, and, relying on his trusty rifle, advanced alone into that
wilderness.

Presently, in the great silence that reigned, he was aware of the sound
of running water to his right; and leaning in that direction, was
rewarded by a scene of natural wonder and human pathos strangely
intermixed. The stream ran at the bottom of a narrow and winding
passage, whose wall-like sides of rock were sometimes for miles together
unscalable by man. The water, when the stream was swelled with rains,
must have filled it from side to side; the sun's rays only plumbed it in
the hour of noon; the wind, in that narrow and damp funnel, blew
tempestuously. And yet, in the bottom of this den, immediately below my
father's eyes as he leaned over the margin of the cliff, a party of some
half a hundred men, women, and children lay scattered uneasily among the
rocks. They lay, some upon their backs, some prone, and not one
stirring; their upturned faces seemed all of an extraordinary paleness
and emaciation; and from time to time, above the washing of the stream,
a faint sound of moaning mounted to my father's ears.

While he thus looked, an old man got staggering to his feet, unwound his
blanket, and laid it, with great gentleness, on a young girl who sat
hard by propped against a rock. The girl did not seem to be conscious of
the act; and the old man, after having looked upon her with the most
engaging pity, returned to his former bed and lay down again uncovered
on the turf. But the scene had not passed without observation even in
that starving camp. From the very outskirts of the party, a man with a
white beard and seemingly of venerable years, rose up on his knees and
came crawling stealthily among the sleepers towards the girl; and judge
of my father's indignation, when he beheld this cowardly miscreant strip
from her both the coverings and return with them to his original
position. Here he lay down for a while below his spoils, and, as my
father imagined, feigned to be asleep; but presently he had raised
himself again upon one elbow, looked with sharp scrutiny at his
companions, and then swiftly carried his hand into his bosom and thence
to his mouth. By the movement of his jaws he must be eating; in that
camp of famine he had reserved a store of nourishment; and, while his
companions lay in the stupor of approaching death, secretly restored his
powers.

My father was so incensed at what he saw that he raised his rifle; and
but for an accident, he has often declared, he would have shot the
fellow dead upon the spot. How different would then have been my
history! But it was not to be: even as he raised the barrel, his eye
lighted on the bear, as it crawled along a ledge some way below him; and
ceding to the hunter's instinct, it was at the brute, not at the man,
that he discharged his piece. The bear leaped and fell into a pool of
the river; the cañon re-echoed the report; and in a moment the camp was
afoot. With cries that were scarce human, stumbling, falling, and
throwing each other down, these starving people rushed upon the quarry;
and before my father, climbing down by the ledge, had time to reach the
level of the stream, many were already satisfying their hunger on the
raw flesh, and a fire was being built by the more dainty.

His arrival was for some time unremarked. He stood in the midst of these
tottering and clay-faced marionettes; he was surrounded by their cries;
but their whole soul was fixed on the dead carcase; even those who were
too weak to move, lay, half-turned over, with their eyes riveted upon
the bear; and my father, seeing himself stand as though invisible in the
thick of this dreary hubbub, was seized with a desire to weep. A touch
upon the arm restrained him. Turning about, he found himself face to
face with the old man he had so nearly killed; and yet, at the second
glance, recognised him for no old man at all, but one in the full
strength of his years, and of a strong, speaking, and intellectual
countenance stigmatised by weariness and famine. He beckoned my father
near the cliff, and there, in the most private whisper, begged for
brandy. My father looked at him with scorn: "You remind me," he said,
"of a neglected duty. Here is my flask; it contains enough, I trust, to
revive the women of your party; and I will begin with her whom I saw you
robbing of her blankets." And with that, not heeding his appeals, my
father turned his back upon the egoist.

The girl still lay reclined against the rock; she lay too far sunk in
the first stage of death to have observed the bustle round her couch;
but when my father had raised her head, put the flask to her lips, and
forced or aided her to swallow some drops of the restorative, she opened
her languid eyes and smiled upon him faintly. Never was there a smile of
a more touching sweetness; never were eyes more deeply violet, more
honestly eloquent of the soul! I speak with knowledge, for these were
the same eyes that smiled upon me in the cradle. From her who was to be
his wife, my father, still jealously watched and followed by the man
with the grey beard, carried his attentions to all the women of the
party, and gave the last drainings of his flask to those among the men
who seemed in the most need.

"Is there none left? not a drop for me?" said the man with the beard.

"Not one drop," replied my father; "and if you find yourself in want,
let me counsel you to put your hand into the pocket of your coat."

"Ah!" cried the other, "you misjudge me. You think me one who clings to
life for selfish and commonplace considerations. But let me tell you,
that were all this caravan to perish, the world would but be lightened
of a weight. These are but human insects, pullulating, thick as
may-flies, in the slums of European cities, whom I myself have plucked
from degradation and misery, from the dung-heap and gin-palace door. And
you compare their lives with mine!"

"You are then a Mormon missionary?" asked my father.

"Oh!" cried the man, with a strange smile, "a Mormon missionary if you
will! I value not the title. Were I no more than that, I could have died
without a murmur. But with my life as a physician is bound up the
knowledge of great secrets and the future of man. This it was, when we
missed the caravan, tried for a short cut and wandered to this desolate
ravine, that ate into my soul and, in five days, has changed my beard
from ebony to silver."

"And you are a physician," mused my father, looking on his face, "bound
by oath to succour man in his distresses."

"Sir," returned the Mormon, "my name is Grierson: you will hear that
name again; and you will then understand that my duty was not to this
caravan of paupers, but to mankind at large."

My father turned to the remainder of the party, who were now
sufficiently revived to hear; told them that he would set off at once to
bring help from his own party; "and," he added, "if you be again reduced
to such extremities, look round you, and you will see the earth strewn
with assistance. Here, for instance, growing on the underside of
fissures in this cliff, you will perceive a yellow moss. Trust me, it is
both edible and excellent."

"Ha!" said Dr. Grierson, "you know botany!"

"Not I alone," returned my father, lowering his voice; "for see where
these have been scraped away. Am I right? Was that your secret store?"

My father's comrades, he found, when he returned to the signal-fire, had
made a good day's hunting. They were thus the more easily persuaded to
extend assistance to the Mormon caravan; and the next day beheld both
parties on the march for the frontiers of Utah. The distance to be
traversed was not great; but the nature of the country and the
difficulty of procuring food extended the time to nearly three weeks;
and my father had thus ample leisure to know and appreciate the girl
whom he had succoured. I will call my mother Lucy. Her family name I am
not at liberty to mention; it is one you would know well. By what series
of undeserved calamities this innocent flower of maidenhood, lovely,
refined by education, ennobled by the finest taste, was thus cast among
the horrors of a Mormon caravan, I must not stay to tell you. Let it
suffice, that even in these untoward circumstances, she found a heart
worthy of her own. The ardour of attachment which united my father and
mother was perhaps partly due to the strange manner of their meeting; it
knew, at least, no bounds, either divine or human; my father, for her
sake, determined to renounce his ambition and abjure his faith; and a
week had not passed upon the march before he had resigned from his
party, accepted the Mormon doctrine, and received the promise of my
mother's hand on the arrival of the party at Salt Lake.

The marriage took place, and I was its only offspring. My father
prospered exceedingly in his affairs, remained faithful to my mother;
and, though you may wonder to hear it, I believe there were few happier
homes in any country than that in which I saw the light and grew to
girlhood. We were, indeed, and in spite of all our wealth, avoided as
heretics and half-believers by the more precise and pious of the
faithful: Young himself, that formidable tyrant, was known to look
askance upon my father's riches; but of this I had no guess. I dwelt,
indeed, under the Mormon system, with perfect innocence and faith. Some
of our friends had many wives; but such was the custom; and why should
it surprise me more than marriage itself? From time to time one of our
rich acquaintances would disappear, his family be broken up, his wives
and houses shared among the elders of the church, and his memory only
recalled with bated breath and dreadful head-shakings. When I had been
very still, and my presence perhaps was forgotten, some such topic would
arise among my elders by the evening fire; I would see them draw the
closer together and look behind them with scared eyes; and I might
gather from their whisperings how some one, rich, honoured, healthy, and
in the prime of his days, some one, perhaps, who had taken me on his
knees a week before, had in one hour been spirited from home and family,
and vanished like an image from a mirror, leaving not a print behind. It
was terrible, indeed; but so was death, the universal law. And even if
the talk should wax still bolder, full of ominous silences and nods, and
I should hear named in a whisper the Destroying Angels, how was a child
to understand these mysteries? I heard of a Destroying Angel as some
more happy child might hear in England of a bishop or a rural dean, with
vague respect and without the wish for further information. Life
anywhere, in society as in nature, rests upon dread foundations; I
beheld safe roads, a garden blooming in the desert, pious people
crowding to worship; I was aware of my parents' tenderness and all the
harmless luxuries of my existence; and why should I pry beneath this
honest seeming surface for the mysteries on which it stood?

We dwelt originally in the city; but at an early date we moved to a
beautiful house in a green dingle, musical with splashing water, and
surrounded on almost every side by twenty miles of poisonous and rocky
desert. The city was thirty miles away; there was but one road, which
went no farther than my father's door; the rest were bridle-tracks
impassable in winter; and we thus dwelt in a solitude inconceivable to
the European. Our only neighbour was Dr. Grierson. To my young eyes,
after the hair-oiled, chin-bearded elders of the city, and the
ill-favoured and mentally stunted women of their harems, there was
something agreeable in the correct manner, the fine bearing, the thin
white hair and beard, and the piercing looks of the old doctor. Yet,
though he was almost our only visitor, I never wholly overcame a sense
of fear in his presence; and this disquietude was rather fed by the
awful solitude in which he lived and the obscurity that hung about his
occupations. His house was but a mile or two from ours, but very
differently placed. It stood overlooking the road on the summit of a
steep slope, and planted close against a range of overhanging bluffs.
Nature, you would say, had here desired to imitate the works of man; for
the slope was even, like the glacis of a fort, and the cliffs of a
constant height, like the ramparts of a city. Not even spring could
change one feature of that desolate scene; and the windows looked down
across a plain, snowy with alkali, to ranges of cold stone sierras on
the north. Twice or thrice I remember passing within view of this
forbidding residence; and seeing it always shuttered, smokeless, and
deserted, I remarked to my parents that some day it would certainly be
robbed.

"Ah, no," said my father, "never robbed"; and I observed a strange
conviction in his tone.

At last, and not long before the blow fell on my unhappy family, I
chanced to see the doctor's house in a new light. My father was ill; my
mother confined to his bedside; and I was suffered to go, under the
charge of our driver, to the lonely house some twenty miles away, where
our packages were left for us. The horse cast a shoe; night overtook us
half-way home; and it was well on for three in the morning when the
driver and I, alone in a light waggon, came to that part of the road
which ran below the doctor's house. The moon swam clear; the cliffs and
mountains in this strong light lay utterly deserted; but the house, from
its station on the top of the long slope and close under the bluff, not
only shone abroad from every window like a place of festival, but from
the great chimney at the west end poured forth a coil of smoke so thick
and so voluminous, that it hung for miles along the windless night-air,
and its shadow lay far abroad in the moonlight upon the glittering
alkali. As we continued to draw near, besides, a regular and panting
throb began to divide the silence. First it seemed to me like the
beating of a heart; and next it put into my mind the thought of some
giant, smothered under mountains, and still, with incalculable effort,
fetching breath. I had heard of the railway, though I had not seen it,
and I turned to ask the driver if this resembled it. But some look in
his eye, some pallor, whether of fear or moonlight on his face, caused
the words to die upon my lips. We continued, therefore, to advance in
silence, till we were close below the lighted house; when suddenly,
without premonitory rustle, there burst forth a report of such a bigness
that it shook the earth and set the echoes of the mountains thundering
from cliff to cliff. A pillar of amber flame leaped from the chimney-top
and fell in multitudes of sparks; and at the same time the lights in the
windows turned for one instant ruby red and then expired. The driver had
checked his horse instinctively, and the echoes were still rumbling
farther off among the mountains, when there broke from the now darkened
interior a series of yells--whether of man or woman it was impossible to
guess--the door flew open, and there ran forth into the moonlight, at
the top of the long slope, a figure clad in white, which began to dance
and leap and throw itself down, and roll as if in agony, before the
house. I could no more restrain my cries; the driver laid his lash about
the horse's flank, and we fled up the rough track at the peril of our
lives; and did not draw rein till, turning the corner of the mountain,
we beheld my father's ranch and deep, green groves and gardens, sleeping
in the tranquil light.

This was the one adventure of my life, until my father had climbed to
the very topmost point of material prosperity, and I myself had reached
the age of seventeen. I was still innocent and merry like a child;
tended my garden or ran upon the hills in glad simplicity; gave not a
thought to coquetry or to material cares; and if my eye rested on my own
image in a mirror or some sylvan spring, it was to seek and recognise
the features of my parents. But the fears which had long pressed on
others were now to be laid on my youth. I had thrown myself, one sultry,
cloudy afternoon, on a divan; the windows stood open on the verandah,
where my mother sat with her embroidery; and when my father joined her
from the garden, their conversation, clearly audible to me, was of so
startling a nature that it held me enthralled where I lay.

"The blow has come," my father said, after a long pause.

I could hear my mother start and turn, but in words she made no reply.

"Yes," continued my father, "I have received to-day a list of all that I
possess; of all, I say; of what I have lent privately to men whose lips
are sealed with terror; of what I have buried with my own hand on the
bare mountain, when there was not a bird in heaven. Does the air, then,
carry secrets? Are the hills of glass? Do the stones we tread upon
preserve the footprint to betray us? Oh, Lucy, Lucy, that we should have
come to such a country!"

"But this," returned my mother, "is no very new or very threatening
event. You are accused of some concealment. You will pay more taxes in
the future, and be mulcted in a fine. It is disquieting, indeed, to find
our acts so spied upon, and the most private known. But is this new?
Have we not long feared and suspected every blade of grass?"

"Ay, and our shadows!" cried my father. "But all this is nothing. Here
is the letter that accompanied the list."

I heard my mother turn the pages; and she was some time silent.

"I see," she said at last; and then, with the tone of one reading;
"'From a believer so largely blessed by Providence with this world's
goods,'" she continued, "'the Church awaits in confidence some signal
mark of piety.' There lies the sting. Am I not right? These are the
words you fear?"

"These are the words," replied my father. "Lucy, you remember Priestley?
Two days before he disappeared, he carried me to the summit of an
isolated butte; we could see around us for ten miles; sure, if in any
quarter of this land a man were safe from spies, it were in such a
station; but it was in the very ague-fit of terror that he told me, and
that I heard, his story. He had received a letter such as this; and he
submitted to my approval an answer in which he offered to resign a third
of his possessions. I conjured him, as he valued life, to raise his
offering; and, before we parted, he had doubled the amount. Well, two
days later he was gone--gone from the chief street of the city in the
hour of noon--and gone for ever. O God!" cried my father, "by what art
do they thus spirit out of life the solid body? What death do they
command that leaves no traces? that this material structure, these
strong arms, this skeleton that can resist the grave for centuries,
should be thus reft in a moment from the world of sense? A horror dwells
in that thought more awful than mere death."

"Is there no hope in Grierson?" asked my mother.

"Dismiss the thought," replied my father. "He now knows all that I can
teach, and will do naught to save me. His power, besides, is small, his
own danger not improbably more imminent than mine; for he, too, lives
apart; he leaves his wives neglected and unwatched; he is openly cited
for an unbeliever; and unless he buys security at a more awful
price--but no; I will not believe it: I have no love for him, but I will
not believe it."

"Believe what?" asked my mother; and then, with a change of note, "But
oh, what matters it?" she cried. "Abimelech, there is but one way open:
we must fly!"

"It is in vain," returned my father. "I should but involve you in my
fate. To leave this land is hopeless: we are closed in it as men are
closed in life; and there is no issue but the grave."

"We can but die then," replied my mother. "Let us at least die together.
Let not Asenath[2] and myself survive you. Think to what a fate we
should be doomed!"

My father was unable to resist her tender violence; and though I could
see he nourished not one spark of hope, he consented to desert his whole
estate, beyond some hundreds of dollars that he had by him at the
moment, and to flee that night, which promised to be dark and cloudy. As
soon as the servants were asleep, he was to load two mules with
provisions; two others were to carry my mother and myself; and, striking
through the mountains by an unfrequented trail, we were to make a fair
stroke for liberty and life. As soon as they had thus decided, I showed
myself at the window, and, owning that I had heard all, assured them
that they could rely on my prudence and devotion. I had no fear, indeed,
but to show myself unworthy of my birth; I held my life in my hand
without alarm; and when my father, weeping upon my neck, had blessed
Heaven for the courage of his child, it was with a sentiment of pride
and some of the joy that warriors take in war, that I began to look
forward to the perils of our flight.

Before midnight, under an obscure and starless heaven, we had left far
behind us the plantations of the valley, and were mounting a certain
cañon in the hills, narrow, encumbered with great rocks, and echoing
with the roar of a tumultuous torrent. Cascade after cascade thundered
and hung up its flag of whiteness in the night, or fanned our faces with
the wet wind of its descent. The trail was break-neck, and led to
famine-guarded deserts; it had been long since deserted for more
practicable routes; and it was now a part of the world untrod from year
to year by human footing. Judge of our dismay when, turning suddenly an
angle of the cliffs, we found a bright bonfire blazing by itself under
an impending rock; and on the face of the rock, drawn very rudely with
charred wood, the great Open Eye which is the emblem of the Mormon
faith. We looked upon each other in the firelight; my mother broke into
a passion of tears; but not a word was said. The mules were turned
about; and leaving that great eye to guard the lonely cañon, we
retraced our steps in silence. Day had not yet broken ere we were once
more at home, condemned beyond reprieve.

What answer my father sent I was not told; but two days later, a little
before sundown, I saw a plain, honest-looking man ride slowly up the
road in a great pother of dust. He was clad in homespun, with a broad
straw hat; wore a patriarchal beard; and had an air of a simple rustic
farmer, that was, in my eyes, very reassuring. He was, indeed, a very
honest man and pious Mormon; with no liking for his errand, though
neither he nor any one in Utah dared to disobey; and it was with every
mark of diffidence that he had had himself announced as Mr. Aspinwall,
and entered the room where our unhappy family was gathered. My mother
and me he awkwardly enough dismissed; and as soon as he was alone with
my father laid before him a blank signature of President Young's, and
offered him a choice of services: either to set out as a missionary to
the tribes about the White Sea, or to join the next day, with a party of
Destroying Angels, in the massacre of sixty German immigrants. The last,
of course, my father could not entertain, and the first he regarded as a
pretext: even if he could consent to leave his wife defenceless, and to
collect fresh victims for the tyranny under which he was himself
oppressed, he felt sure he would never be suffered to return. He refused
both; and Aspinwall, he said, betrayed sincere emotion, part religious,
as the spectacle of such disobedience, but part human, in pity for my
father and his family. He besought him to reconsider his decision; and
at length, finding he could not prevail, gave him till the moon rose to
settle his affairs, and say farewell to wife and daughter. "For," said
he, "then, at the latest, you must ride with me."

I dare not dwell upon the hours that followed: they fled all too fast;
and presently the moon out-topped the eastern range, and my father and
Mr. Aspinwall set forth, side by side, on their nocturnal journey. My
mother, though still bearing an heroic countenance, had hastened to
shut herself in her apartment, thenceforward solitary; and I, alone in
the dark house, and consumed by grief and apprehension, made haste to
saddle my Indian pony, to ride up to the corner of the mountain, and to
enjoy one farewell sight of my departing father. The two men had set
forth at a deliberate pace; nor was I long behind them, when I reached
the point of view. I was the more amazed to see no moving creature in
the landscape. The moon, as the saying is, shone bright as day; and
nowhere, under the whole arch of night, was there a growing tree, a
bush, a farm, a patch of tillage, or any evidence of man, but one. From
the corner where I stood, a rugged bastion of the line of bluffs
concealed the doctor's house; and across the top of that projection the
soft night wind carried and unwound about the hills a coil of sable
smoke. What fuel could produce a vapour so sluggish to dissipate in that
dry air, or what furnace pour it forth so copiously, I was unable to
conceive; but I knew well enough that it came from the doctor's chimney;
I saw well enough that my father had already disappeared; and in despite
of reason, I connected in my mind the loss of that dear protector with
the ribbon of foul smoke that trailed along the mountains.

Days passed, and still my mother and I waited in vain for news; a week
went by, a second followed, but we heard no word of the father and
husband. As smoke dissipates, as the image glides from the mirror, so in
the ten or twenty minutes that I had spent in getting my horse and
following upon his trail, had that strong and brave man vanished out of
life. Hope, if any hope we had, fled with every hour; the worst was now
certain for my father, the worst was to be dreaded for his defenceless
family. Without weakness, with a desperate calm at which I marvel when I
look back upon it, the widow and the orphan awaited the event. On the
last day of the third week we rose in the morning to find ourselves
alone in the house, alone, so far as we searched, on the estate; all our
attendants, with one accord, had fled, and as we knew them to be
gratefully devoted, we drew the darkest intimations from their flight.
The day passed, indeed, without event; but in the fall of the evening we
were called at last into the verandah by the approaching clink of
horse's hoofs.

The doctor, mounted on an Indian pony, rode into the garden, dismounted,
and saluted us. He seemed much more bent, and his hair more silvery than
ever; but his demeanour was composed, serious, and not unkind.

"Madam," said he, "I am come upon a weighty errand; and I would have you
recognise it as an effect of kindness in the President, that he should
send as his ambassador your only neighbour and your husband's oldest
friend in Utah."

"Sir," said my mother, "I have but one concern, one thought. You know
well what it is. Speak: my husband?"

"Madam," returned the doctor, taking a chair on the verandah, "if you
were a silly child my position would now be painfully embarrassing. You
are, on the other hand, a woman of great intelligence and fortitude: you
have, by my forethought, been allowed three weeks to draw your own
conclusions and to accept the inevitable. Further words from me are, I
conceive, superfluous."

My mother was as pale as death, and trembled like a reed; I gave her my
hand, and she kept it in the folds of her dress and wrung it till I
could have cried aloud. "Then, sir," said she at last, "you speak to
deaf ears. If this be indeed so, what have I to do with errands? what do
I ask of Heaven but to die?"

"Come," said the doctor, "command yourself. I bid you dismiss all
thoughts of your late husband, and bring a clear mind to bear upon your
own future and the fate of that young girl."

"You bid me dismiss----" began my mother. "Then you know!" she cried.

"I know," replied the doctor.

"You know?" broke out the poor woman. "Then it was you who did the deed!
I tear off the mask, and with dread and loathing see you as you
are--you, whom the poor fugitive beholds in nightmares, and awakes
raving--you, the Destroying Angel!"

"Well, madam, and what then?" returned the doctor. "Have not my fate and
yours been similar? Are we not both immured in this strong prison of
Utah? Have you not tried to flee, and did not the Open Eye confront you
in the cañon? Who can escape the watch of that unsleeping eye of Utah?
Not I, at least. Horrible tasks have, indeed, been laid upon me; and the
most ungrateful was the last; but had I refused my offices, would that
have spared your husband? You know well it would not. I, too, had
perished along with him; nor would I have been able to alleviate his
last moments, nor could I to-day have stood between his family and the
hand of Brigham Young."

"Ah!" cried I, "and could you purchase life by such concessions?"

"Young lady," answered the doctor, "I both could and did; and you will
live to thank me for that baseness. You have a spirit, Asenath, that it
pleases me to recognise. But we waste time. Mr. Fonblanque's estate
reverts, as you doubtless imagine, to the church; but some part of it
has been reserved for him who is to marry the family; and that person, I
should perhaps tell you without more delay, is no other than myself."

At this odious proposal my mother and I cried out aloud, and clung
together like lost souls.

"It is as I supposed," resumed the doctor, with the same measured
utterance. "You recoil from this arrangement. Do you expect me to
convince you? You know very well that I have never held the Mormon view
of women. Absorbed in the most arduous studies, I have left the
slatterns whom they call my wives to scratch and quarrel among
themselves; of me, they have had nothing but my purse; such was not the
union I desired, even if I had the leisure to pursue it. No, you need
not, madam, and my old friend--" and here the doctor rose and bowed with
something of gallantry--"you need not apprehend my importunities. On the
contrary, I am rejoiced to read in you a Roman spirit; and if I am
obliged to bid you follow me at once, and that in the name, not of my
wish, but of my orders, I hope it will be found that we are of a common
mind."

So, bidding us dress for the road, he took a lamp (for the night had now
fallen) and set off to the stable to prepare our horses.

"What does it mean?--what will become of us?" I cried.

"Not that, at least," replied my mother, shuddering. "So far we can
trust him. I seem to read among his words a certain tragic promise.
Asenath, if I leave you, if I die, you will not forget your miserable
parents?"

Thereupon we fell to cross-purposes: I beseeching her to explain her
words; she putting me by, and continuing to recommend the doctor for a
friend. "The doctor!" I cried at last; "the man who killed my father?"

"Nay," said she, "let us be just. I do believe, before Heaven, he played
the friendliest part. And he alone, Asenath, can protect you in this
land of death."

At this the doctor returned, leading our two horses; and when we were
all in the saddle, he bade me ride on before, as he had matter to
discuss with Mrs. Fonblanque. They came at a foot's-pace, eagerly
conversing in a whisper; and presently after the moon rose and showed
them looking eagerly into each other's faces as they went, my mother
laying her hand upon the doctor's arm, and the doctor himself, against
his usual custom, making vigorous gestures of protest or asseveration.

At the foot of the track which ascended the talus of the mountain to his
door, the doctor overtook me at a trot.

"Here," he said, "we shall dismount; and as your mother prefers to be
alone, you and I shall walk together to my house."

"Shall I see her again?" I asked.

"I give you my word," he said, and helped me to alight. "We leave the
horses here," he added. "There are no thieves in this stone wilderness."

The track mounted gradually, keeping the house in view. The windows were
once more bright; the chimney once more vomited smoke; but the most
absolute silence reigned, and, but for the figure of my mother very
slowly following in our wake, I felt convinced there was no human soul
within a range of miles. At the thought, I looked upon the doctor,
gravely walking by my side, with his bowed shoulders and white hair, and
then once more at his house, lit up and pouring smoke like some
industrious factory. And then my curiosity broke forth. "In Heaven's
name," I cried, "what do you make in this inhuman desert?"

He looked at me with a peculiar smile, and answered with an evasion:

"This is not the first time," said he, "that you have seen my furnaces
alight. One morning, in the small hours, I saw you driving past; a
delicate experiment miscarried; and I cannot acquit myself of having
startled either your driver or the horse that drew you."

"What!" cried I, beholding again in fancy the antics of the figure,
"could that be you?"

"It was I," he replied; "but do not fancy that I was mad. I was in
agony. I had been scalded cruelly."

We were now near the house, which, unlike the ordinary houses of the
country, was built of hewn stone and very solid. Stone, too, was its
foundation, stone its background. Not a blade of grass sprouted among
the broken mineral about the walls, not a flower adorned the windows.
Over the door, by way of sole adornment, the Mormon Eye was rudely
sculptured; I had been brought up to view that emblem from my
childhood; but since the night of our escape, it had acquired a new
significance, and set me shrinking. The smoke rolled voluminously from
the chimney-top, its edges ruddy with the fire; and from the far corner
of the building, near the ground, angry puffs of steam shone snow-white
in the moon and vanished.

The doctor opened the door and paused upon the threshold. "You ask me
what I make here," he observed: "Two things: Life and Death." And he
motioned me to enter.

"I shall await my mother," said I.

"Child," he replied, "look at me: am I not old and broken? Of us two,
which is the stronger, the young maiden or the withered man?"

I bowed and, passing by him, entered a vestibule or kitchen, lit by a
good fire and a shaded reading-lamp. It was furnished only with a
dresser, a rude table, and some wooden benches; and on one of these the
doctor motioned me to take a seat; and passing by another door into the
interior of the house, he left me to myself. Presently I heard the jar
of iron from the far end of the building; and this was followed by the
same throbbing noise that had startled me in the valley, but now so near
at hand as to be menacing by loudness, and even to shake the house with
every recurrence of the stroke. I had scarce time to master my alarm
when the doctor returned, and almost in the same moment my mother
appeared upon the threshold. But how am I to describe to you the peace
and ravishment of that face? Years seemed to have passed over her head
during that brief ride, and left her younger and fairer; her eyes shone,
her smile went to my heart; she seemed no more a woman, but the angel of
ecstatic tenderness. I ran to her in a kind of terror; but she shrank a
little back and laid her finger on her lips, with something arch and yet
unearthly. To the doctor, on the contrary, she reached out her hand as
to a friend and helper; and so strange was the scene that I forgot to be
offended.

"Lucy," said the doctor, "all is prepared. Will you go alone, or shall
your daughter follow us?"

"Let Asenath come," she answered, "dear Asenath! At this hour when I am
purified of fear and sorrow, and already survive myself and my
affections, it is for your sake, and not for mine, that I desire her
presence. Were she shut out, dear friend, it is to be feared she might
misjudge your kindness."

"Mother," I cried wildly, "mother, what is this?"

But my mother, with her radiant smile, said only "Hush!" as though I
were a child again, and tossing in some fever-fit; and the doctor bade
me be silent and trouble her no more. "You have made a choice," he
continued, addressing my mother, "that has often strangely tempted me.
The two extremes: all, or else nothing; never, or this very hour upon
the clock--these have been my incongruous desires. But to accept the
middle term, to be content with a half-gift, to flicker awhile and to
burn out--never for an hour, never since I was born, has satisfied the
appetite of my ambition." He looked upon my mother fixedly, much of
admiration and some touch of envy in his eyes; then, with a profound
sigh, he led the way into the inner room.

It was very long. From end to end it was lit up by many lamps, which by
the changeful colour of their light, and by the incessant snapping
sounds with which they burned, I have since divined to be electric. At
the extreme end an open door gave us a glimpse into what must have been
a lean-to shed beside the chimney; and this, in strong contrast to the
room, was painted with a red reverberation as from furnace-doors. The
walls were lined with books and glazed cases, the tables crowded with
the implements of chemical research; great glass accumulators glittered
in the light; and through a hole in the gable near the shed door a heavy
driving-belt entered the apartment and ran overhead upon steel pulleys,
with clumsy activity and many ghostly and fluttering sounds. In one
corner I perceived a chair resting upon crystal feet, and curiously
wreathed with wire. To this my mother advanced with a decisive
swiftness.

"Is this it?" she asked.

The doctor bowed in silence.

"Asenath," said my mother, "in this sad end of my life I have found one
helper. Look upon him: it is Doctor Grierson. Be not, O my daughter, be
not ungrateful to that friend!"

She sat upon the chair, and took in her hands the globes that terminated
the arms.

"Am I right?" she asked, and looked upon the doctor with such a radiancy
of face that I trembled for her reason. Once more the doctor bowed, but
this time leaning hard against the wall. He must have touched a spring.
The least shock agitated my mother where she sat; the least passing jar
appeared to cross her features; and she sank back in the chair like one
resigned to weariness. I was at her knees that moment; but her hands
fell loosely in my grasp; her face, still beatified with the same
touching smile, sank forward on her bosom: her spirit had for ever fled.

I do not know how long may have elapsed before, raising for a moment my
tearful face, I met the doctor's eyes. They rested upon mine with such a
depth of scrutiny, pity, and interest, that even from the freshness of
my sorrow I was startled into attention.

"Enough," he said, "to lamentation. Your mother went to death as to a
bridal, dying where her husband died. It is time, Asenath, to think of
the survivors. Follow me to the next room."

I followed him, like a person in a dream; he made me sit by the fire, he
gave me wine to drink; and then, pacing the stone floor, he thus began
to address me:

"You are now, my child, alone in the world, and under the immediate
watch of Brigham Young. It would be your lot, in ordinary circumstances,
to become the fiftieth bride of some ignoble elder, or by particular
fortune, as fortune is counted in this land, to find favour in the eyes
of the President himself. Such a fate for a girl like you were worse
than death; better to die as your mother died than to sink daily deeper
in the mire of this pit of woman's degradation. But is escape
conceivable? Your father tried; and you beheld yourself with what
security his jailers acted, and how a dumb drawing on a rock was counted
a sufficient sentry over the avenues of freedom. Where your father
failed, will you be wiser or more fortunate? or are you, too, helpless
in the toils?"

I had followed his words with changing emotion, but now I believed I
understood.

"I see," I cried; "you judge me rightly. I must follow where my parents
led; and oh! I am not only willing, I am eager!"

"No," replied the doctor, "not death for you. The flawed vessel we may
break, but not the perfect. No, your mother cherished a different hope,
and so do I. I see," he cried, "the girl develop to the completed woman,
the plan reach fulfilment, the promise--ay, outdone! I could not bear to
arrest so lively, so comely a process. It was your mother's thought," he
added, with a change of tone, "that I should marry you myself." I fear I
must have shown a perfect horror of aversion from this fate, for he made
haste to quiet me. "Reassure yourself, Asenath," he resumed. "Old as I
am, I have not forgotten the tumultuous fancies of youth. I have passed
my days, indeed, in laboratories; but in all my vigils I have not
forgotten the tune of a young pulse. Age asks with timidity to be spared
intolerable pain; youth, taking fortune by the beard, demands joy like a
right. These things I have not forgotten; none, rather, has more keenly
felt, none more jealously considered them; I have but postponed them to
their day. See, then: you stand without support; the only friend left to
you, this old investigator, old in cunning, young in sympathy. Answer me
but one question: Are you free from the entanglement of what the world
calls love? Do you still command your heart and purposes? or are you
fallen in some bond-slavery of the eye and ear?"

I answered him in broken words; my heart, I think I must have told him,
lay with my dead parents.

"It is enough," he said. "It has been my fate to be called on often, too
often, for those services of which we spoke to-night; none in Utah could
carry them so well to a conclusion; hence there has fallen into my hands
a certain share of influence which I now lay at your service, partly for
the sake of my dead friends, your parents; partly for the interest I
bear you in your own right. I shall send you to England, to the great
city of London, there to await the bridegroom I have selected. He shall
be a son of mine, a young man suitable in age, and not grossly deficient
in that quality of beauty that your years demand. Since your heart is
free, you may well pledge me the sole promise that I ask in return for
much expense and still more danger: to await the arrival of that
bridegroom with the delicacy of a wife."

I sat awhile stunned. The doctor's marriages, I remembered to have
heard, had been unfruitful; and this added perplexity to my distress.
But I was alone, as he had said, alone in that dark land; the thought of
escape, of any equal marriage, was already enough to revive in me some
dawn of hope; and, in what words I know not, I accepted the proposal.

He seemed more moved by my consent than I could reasonably have looked
for. "You shall see," he cried; "you shall judge for yourself." And
hurrying to the next room he returned with a small portrait somewhat
coarsely done in oils. It showed a man in the dress of nearly forty
years before, young indeed, but still recognisable to be the doctor. "Do
you like it?" he asked. "That is myself when I was young. My--my boy
will be like that, like, but nobler; with such health as angels might
condescend to envy; and a man of mind, Asenath, of commanding mind. That
should be a man, I think; that should be one among ten thousand. A man
like that--one to combine the passions of youth with the restraint, the
force, the dignity of age--one to fill all the parts and faculties, one
to be man's epitome--say, will that not satisfy the needs of an
ambitious girl? Say, is not that enough?" And as he held the picture
close before my eyes, his hand shook.

I told him briefly I would ask no better, for I was transpierced with
this display of fatherly emotion; but even as I said the words, the most
insolent revolt surged through my arteries. I held him in horror, him,
his portrait, and his son; and had there been any choice but death or a
Mormon marriage, I declare before Heaven I had embraced it.

"It is well," he replied, "and I had rightly counted on your spirit.
Eat, then, for you have far to go." So saying, he set meat before me;
and while I was endeavouring to obey, he left the room and returned with
an armful of coarse raiment. "There," said he, "is your disguise. I
leave you to your toilet."

The clothes had probably belonged to a somewhat lubberly boy of fifteen;
and they hung about me like a sack, and cruelly hampered my movements.
But what filled me with uncontrollable shudderings was the problem of
their origin and the fate of the lad to whom they had belonged. I had
scarcely effected the exchange when the doctor returned, opened a back
window, helped me out into the narrow space between the house and the
overhanging bluffs, and showed me a ladder of iron foot-holds mortised
in the rock. "Mount," he said, "swiftly. When you are at the summit,
walk, so far as you are able, in the shadow of the smoke. The smoke will
bring you, sooner or later, to a cañon; follow that down, and you will
find a man with two horses. Him you will implicitly obey. And remember,
silence! That machinery which I now put in motion for your service may
by one word be turned against you. Go; Heaven prosper you!"

The ascent was easy. Arrived at the top of the cliff, I saw before me
on the other side a vast and gradual declivity of stone, lying bare to
the moon and the surrounding mountains. Nowhere was any vantage or
concealment; and knowing how these deserts were beset with spies, I made
haste to veil my movements under the blowing trail of smoke. Sometimes
it swam high, rising on the night wind, and I had no more substantial
curtain than its moon-thrown shadow; sometimes again it crawled upon the
earth, and I would walk in it, no higher than to my shoulders, like some
mountain fog. But, one way or another, the smoke of that ill-omened
furnace protected the first steps of my escape, and led me unobserved to
the cañon.

There, sure enough, I found a taciturn and sombre man beside a pair of
saddle-horses; and thenceforward, all night long, we wandered in silence
by the most occult and dangerous paths among the mountains. A little
before the dayspring we took refuge in a wet and gusty cavern at the
bottom of a gorge; lay there all day concealed; and the next night,
before the glow had faded out of the west, resumed our wanderings. About
noon we stopped again, in a lawn upon a little river, where was a screen
of bushes; and here my guide, handing me a bundle from his pack, bade me
change my dress once more. The bundle contained clothing of my own,
taken from our house, with such necessaries as a comb and soap. I made
my toilet by the mirror of a quiet pool; and as I was so doing and
smiling with some complacency to see myself restored to my own image,
the mountains rang with a scream of far more than human piercingness;
and where I still stood astonished, there sprang up and swiftly
increased a storm of the most awful and earth-rending sounds. Shall I
own to you that I fell upon my face and shrieked? And yet this was but
the overland train winding among the near mountains: the very means of
my salvation: the strong wings that were to carry me from Utah!

When I was dressed the guide gave me a bag, which contained, he said,
both money and papers; and, telling me that I was already over the
borders in the territory of Wyoming, bade me follow the stream until I
reached the railway station, half a mile below. "Here," he added, "is
your ticket as far as Council Bluffs. The East express will pass in a
few hours." With that, he took both horses and, without further words or
any salutation, rode off by the way that we had come.

Three hours afterwards, I was seated on the end platform of the train as
it swept eastward through the gorges and thundered in tunnels of the
mountains. The change of scene, the sense of escape, the still throbbing
terror of pursuit--above all the astounding magic of my new conveyance,
kept me from any logical or melancholy thought. I had gone to the
doctor's house two nights before prepared to die, prepared for worse
than death; what had passed, terrible although it was, looked almost
bright compared to my anticipations; and it was not till I had slept a
full night in the flying palace car that I awoke to the sense of my
irreparable loss and to some reasonable alarm about the future. In this
mood I examined the contents of the bag. It was well supplied with gold;
it contained tickets and complete directions for my journey as far as
Liverpool, and a long letter from the doctor, supplying me with a
fictitious name and story, recommending the most guarded silence, and
bidding me to await faithfully the coming of his son. All then had been
arranged beforehand: he had counted upon my consent, and, what was
tenfold worse, upon my mother's voluntary death. My horror of my only
friend, my aversion for this son who was to marry me, my revolt against
the whole current and conditions of my life, were now complete. I was
sitting stupefied by my distress and helplessness, when, to my joy, a
very pleasant lady offered me her conversation. I clutched at the
relief; and I was soon glibly telling her the story in the doctor's
letter: how I was a Miss Gould, of Nevada City, going to England to an
uncle, what money I had, what family, my age, and so forth, until I had
exhausted my instructions, and, as the lady still continued to ply me
with questions, began to embroider on my own account. This soon carried
one of my inexperience beyond her depth; and I had already remarked a
shadow on the lady's face, when a gentleman drew near and very civilly
addressed me:

"Miss Gould, I believe?" said he; and then, excusing himself to the lady
by the authority of my guardian, drew me to the fore platform of the
Pullman car. "Miss Gould," he said in my ear, "is it possible that you
suppose yourself in safety? Let me completely undeceive you. One more
such indiscretion and you return to Utah. And, in the meanwhile, if this
woman should again address you, you are to reply with these words:
'Madam, I do not like you, and I will be obliged if you will suffer me
to choose my own associates.'"

Alas, I had to do as I was bid; this lady, to whom I already felt myself
drawn with the strongest cords of sympathy, I dismissed with insult; and
thenceforward, through all that day I sat in silence, gazing on the bare
plains and swallowing my tears. Let that suffice: it was the pattern of
my journey. Whether on the train, at the hotels, or on board the ocean
steamer, I never exchanged a friendly word with any fellow-traveller but
I was certain to be interrupted. In every place, on every side, the most
unlikely persons, man or woman, rich or poor, became protectors to
forward me upon my journey or spies to observe and regulate my conduct.
Thus I crossed the States, thus passed the ocean, the Mormon Eye still
following my movements; and when at length a cab had set me down before
that London lodging-house from which you saw me flee this morning, I had
already ceased to struggle and ceased to hope.

The landlady, like every one else through all that journey, was
expecting my arrival. A fire was lighted in my room, which looked upon
the garden; there were books on the table, clothes in the drawers; and
there (I had almost said with contentment, and certainly with
resignation) I saw month follow month over my head. At times my landlady
took me for a walk or an excursion, but she would never suffer me to
leave the house alone; and I, seeing that she also lived under the
shadow of that widespread Mormon terror, felt too much pity to resist.
To the child born on Mormon soil, as to the man who accepts the
engagements of a secret order, no escape is possible; so I had clearly
read, and I was thankful even for this respite. Meanwhile, I tried
honestly to prepare my mind for my approaching nuptials. The day drew
near when my bridegroom was to visit me, and gratitude and fear alike
obliged me to consent. A son of Dr. Grierson's be he what he pleased,
must still be young, and it was even probable he should be handsome; on
more than that I felt I dared not reckon; and in moulding my mind
towards consent I dwelt the more carefully on these physical attractions
which I felt I might expect, and averted my eyes from moral or
intellectual considerations. We have a great power upon our spirits; and
as time passed I worked myself into a frame of acquiescence, nay, and I
began to grow impatient for the hour. At night sleep forsook me; I sat
all day by the fire, absorbed in dreams, conjuring up the features of my
husband, and anticipating in fancy the touch of his hand and the sound
of his voice. In the dead level and solitude of my existence, this was
the one eastern window and the one door of hope. At last I had so
cultivated and prepared my will, that I began to be besieged with fears
upon the other side. How if it was I that did not please? How if this
unseen lover should turn from me with disaffection? And now I spent
hours before the glass, studying and judging my attractions, and was
never weary of changing my dress or ordering my hair.

When the day came I was long about my toilet; but at last, with a sort
of hopeful desperation, I had to own that I could do no more, and must
now stand or fall by nature. My occupation ended, I fell a prey to the
most sickening impatience, mingled with alarms; giving ear to the
swelling rumour of the streets, and at each change of sound or silence,
starting, shrinking, and colouring to the brow. Love is not to be
prepared, I know, without some knowledge of the object; and yet, when
the cab at last rattled to the door, and I heard my visitor mount the
stairs, such was the tumult of hopes in my poor bosom that love itself
might have been proud to own their parentage. The door opened, and it
was Dr. Grierson that appeared. I believe I must have screamed aloud,
and I know, at least, that I fell fainting to the floor.

When I came to myself he was standing over me, counting my pulse. "I
have startled you," he said. "A difficulty unforeseen--the impossibility
of obtaining a certain drug in its full purity--has forced me to resort
to London unprepared. I regret that I should have shown myself once more
without those poor attractions which are much, perhaps, to you, but to
me are no more considerable than rain that falls into the sea. Youth is
but a state, as passing as that syncope from which you are but just
awakened, and, if there be truth in science, as easy to recall; for I
find, Asenath, that I must now take you for my confidant. Since my first
years I have devoted every hour and act of life to one ambitious task;
and the time of my success is at hand. In these new countries, where I
was so long content to stay, I collected indispensable ingredients; I
have fortified myself on every side from the possibility of error; what
was a dream now takes the substance of reality; and when I offered you a
son of mine I did so in a figure. That son--that husband, Asenath, is
myself--not as you now behold me, but restored to the first energy of
youth. You think me mad? It is the customary attitude of ignorance. I
will not argue; I will leave facts to speak. When you behold me
purified, invigorated, renewed, restamped in the original image--when
you recognise in me (what I shall be) the first perfect expression of
the powers of mankind--I shall be able to laugh with a better grace at
your passing and natural incredulity. To what can you aspire--fame,
riches, power, the charm of youth, the dear-bought wisdom of age--that I
shall not be able to afford you in perfection? Do not deceive yourself.
I already excel you in every human gift but one: when that gift also has
been restored to me you will recognise your master."

Hereupon, consulting his watch, he told me he must now leave me to
myself; and bidding me consult reason, and not girlish fancies, he
withdrew. I had not the courage to move; the night fell, and found me
still where he had laid me during my faint, my face buried in my hands,
my soul drowned in the darkest apprehensions. Late in the evening he
returned, carrying a candle, and, with a certain irritable tremor, bade
me rise and sup. "Is it possible," he added, "that I have been deceived
in your courage? A cowardly girl is no fit mate for me."

I flung myself before him on my knees, and with floods of tears besought
him to release me from this engagement, assuring him that my cowardice
was abject, and that in every point of intellect and character I was his
hopeless and derisible inferior.

"Why, certainly," he replied. "I know you better than yourself; and I am
well enough acquainted with human nature to understand this scene. It is
addressed to me," he added with a smile, "in my character of the still
untransformed. But do not alarm yourself about the future. Let me but
attain my end, and not you only, Asenath, but every woman on the face of
the earth becomes my willing slave."

Thereupon he obliged me to rise and eat; sat down with me to table;
helped and entertained me with the attentions of a fashionable host; and
it was not till a late hour that, bidding me courteously good-night, he
once more left me alone to my misery.

In all this talk of an elixir and the restoration of his youth, I
scarce knew from which hypothesis I should the more eagerly recoil. If
his hopes reposed on any base of fact, if, indeed, by some abhorrent
miracle, he should discard his age, death were my only refuge from that
most unnatural, that most ungodly union. If, on the other hand, these
dreams were merely lunatic, the madness of a life waxed suddenly acute,
my pity would become a load almost as heavy to bear as my revolt against
the marriage. So passed the night, in alternations of rebellion and
despair, of hate and pity; and with the next morning I was only to
comprehend more fully my enslaved position. For though he appeared with
a very tranquil countenance, he had no sooner observed the marks of
grief upon my brow than an answering darkness gathered on his own.
"Asenath," he said, "you owe me much already; with one finger I still
hold you suspended over death; my life is full of labour and anxiety;
and I choose," said he, with a remarkable accent of command, "that you
shall greet me with a pleasant face." He never needed to repeat the
recommendation: from that day forward I was always ready to receive him
with apparent cheerfulness; and he rewarded me with a good deal of his
company, and almost more than I could bear of his confidence. He had set
up a laboratory in the back part of the house, where he toiled day and
night at his elixir, and he would come thence to visit me in my parlour:
now with passing humours of discouragement; now, and far more often,
radiant with hope. It was impossible to see so much of him, and not to
recognise that the sands of his life were running low; and yet all the
time he would be laying out vast fields of future, and planning, with
all the confidence of youth, the most unbounded schemes of pleasure and
ambition. How I replied I know not; but I found a voice and words to
answer, even while I wept and raged to hear him.

A week ago the doctor entered my room with the marks of great
exhilaration contending with pitiful bodily weakness. "Asenath," said
he, "I have now obtained the last ingredient. In one week from now the
perilous moment of the last projection will draw nigh. You have once
before assisted, although unconsciously, at the failure of a similar
experiment. It was the elixir which so terribly exploded one night when
you were passing my house; and it is idle to deny that the conduct of so
delicate a process, among the million jars and trepidations of so great
a city, presents a certain element of danger. From this point of view, I
cannot but regret the perfect stillness of my house among the deserts;
but, on the other hand, I have succeeded in proving that the singularly
unstable equilibrium of the elixir, at the moment of projection, is due
rather to the impurity than to the nature of the ingredients; and as all
are now of an equal and exquisite nicety, I have little fear for the
result. In a week then from to-day, my dear Asenath, this period of
trial will be ended." And he smiled upon me in a manner unusually
paternal.

I smiled back with my lips, but at my heart there raged the blackest and
most unbridled terror. What if he failed? And oh, tenfold worse! what if
he succeeded? What detested and unnatural changeling would appear before
me to claim my hand? And could there, I asked myself with a dreadful
sinking, be any truth in his boasts of an assured victory over my
reluctance? I knew him, indeed, to be masterful, to lead my life at a
sign. Suppose, then, this experiment to succeed; suppose him to return
to me, hideously restored, like a vampire in a legend; and suppose that,
by some devilish fascination.... My head turned; all former fears
deserted me; and I felt I could embrace the worst in preference to this.

My mind was instantly made up. The doctor's presence in London was
justified by the affairs of the Mormon polity. Often, in our
conversation, he would gloat over the details of that great
organisation, which he feared even while yet he wielded it; and would
remind me that, even in the humming labyrinth of London, we were still
visible to that unsleeping eye in Utah. His visitors, indeed, who were
of every sort, from the missionary to the destroying angel, and seemed
to belong to every rank of life, had, up to that moment, filled me with
unmixed repulsion and alarm. I knew that if my secret were to reach the
ear of any leader my fate were sealed beyond redemption; and yet in my
present pass of horror and despair, it was to these very men that I
turned for help. I waylaid upon the stair one of the Mormon
missionaries, a man of a low class, but not inaccessible to pity; told
him I scarce remember what elaborate fable to explain my application;
and by his intermediacy entered into correspondence with my father's
family. They recognised my claim for help, and on this very day I was to
begin my escape.

Last night I sat up fully dressed, awaiting the result of the doctor's
labours, and prepared against the worst. The nights at this season and
in this northern latitude are short; and I had soon the company of the
returning daylight. The silence in and around the house was only broken
by the movements of the doctor in the laboratory; to these I listened,
watch in hand, awaiting the hour of my escape, and yet consumed by
anxiety about the strange experiment that was going forward overhead.
Indeed, now that I was conscious of some protection for myself, my
sympathies had turned more directly to the doctor's side; I caught
myself even praying for his success; and when some hours ago a low,
peculiar cry reached my ears from the laboratory, I could no longer
control my impatience, but mounted the stairs and opened the door.

The doctor was standing in the middle of the room; in his hand a large,
round-bellied, crystal flask, some three parts full of a bright
amber-coloured liquid; on his face a rapture of gratitude and joy
unspeakable. As he saw me he raised the flask at arm's-length.
"Victory!" he cried. "Victory, Asenath!" And then--whether the flask
escaped his trembling fingers, or whether the explosion was spontaneous,
I cannot tell--enough that we were thrown, I against the door-post, the
doctor into the corner of the room; enough that we were shaken to the
soul by the same explosion that must have startled you upon the street;
and that, in the brief space of an indistinguishable instant, there
remained nothing of the labours of the doctor's lifetime but a few
shards of broken crystal and those voluminous and ill-smelling vapours
that pursued me in my flight.


FOOTNOTE:

  [2] In this name the accent falls upon the _e_; the _s_ is sibilant.




THE SQUIRE OF DAMES (_concluded_)


What with the lady's animated manner and dramatic conduct of her voice,
Challoner had thrilled to every incident with genuine emotion. His
fancy, which was not perhaps of a very lively character, applauded both
the matter and the style; but the more judicial functions of his mind
refused assent. It was an excellent story; and it might be true, but he
believed it was not. Miss Fonblanque was a lady, and it was doubtless
possible for a lady to wander from the truth; but how was a gentleman to
tell her so? His spirits for some time had been sinking, but they now
fell to zero; and long after her voice had died away he still sat with a
troubled and averted countenance, and could find no form of words to
thank her for her narrative. His mind, indeed, was empty of everything
beyond a dull longing for escape. From this pause, which grew the more
embarrassing with every second, he was roused by the sudden laughter of
the lady. His vanity was alarmed; he turned and faced her; their eyes
met; and he caught from hers a spark of such frank merriment as put him
instantly at ease.

"You certainly," he said, "appear to bear your calamities with excellent
spirit."

"Do I not?" she cried, and fell once more into delicious laughter. But
from this access she more speedily recovered. "This is all very well,"
said she, nodding at him gravely, "but I am still in a most distressing
situation, from which, if you deny me your help, I shall find it
difficult indeed to free myself."

At this mention of help Challoner fell back to his original gloom.

"My sympathies are much engaged with you," he said, "and I should be
delighted, I am sure. But our position is most unusual; and
circumstances over which I have, I can assure you, no control, deprive
me of the power--the pleasure----Unless, indeed," he added, somewhat
brightening at the thought, "I were to recommend you to the care of the
police?"

She laid her hand upon his arm and looked hard into his eyes; and he saw
with wonder that, for the first time since the moment of their meeting,
every trace of colour had faded from her cheek.

"Do so," she said, "and--weigh my words well--you kill me as certainly
as with a knife."

"God bless me!" exclaimed Challoner.

"Oh," she cried, "I can see you disbelieve my story, and make light of
the perils that surround me; but who are you to judge? My family share
my apprehensions; they help me in secret; and you saw yourself by what
an emissary, and in what a place, they have chosen to supply me with the
funds for my escape. I admit that you are brave and clever, and have
impressed me most favourably; but how are you to prefer your opinion
before that of my uncle, an ex-minister of State, a man with the ear of
the Queen, and of a long political experience? If I am mad, is he? And
you must allow me, besides, a special claim upon your help. Strange as
you may think my story, you know that much of it is true; and if you who
heard the explosion, and saw the Mormon at Victoria, refuse to credit
and assist me, to whom am I to turn?"

"He gave you money then?" asked Challoner, who had been dwelling singly
on that fact.

"I begin to interest you," she cried. "But, frankly, you are condemned
to help me. If the service I had to ask of you were serious, were
suspicious, were even unusual, I should say no more. But what is it? To
take a pleasure trip (for which, if you will suffer me, I propose to
pay) and to carry from one lady to another a sum of money! What can be
more simple?"

"Is the sum," asked Challoner, "considerable?"

She produced a packet from her bosom; and observing that she had not yet
found time to make the count, tore open the cover and spread upon her
knees a considerable number of Bank of England notes. It took some time
to make the reckoning, for the notes were of every degree of value; but
at last, and counting a few loose sovereigns, she made out the sum to be
a little under £710 sterling. The sight of so much money worked an
immediate revolution in the mind of Challoner.

"And you propose, madam," he cried, "to intrust that money to a perfect
stranger?"

"Ah!" said she, with a charming smile, "but I no longer regard you as a
stranger."

"Madam," said Challoner, "I perceive I must make you a confession.
Although of a very good family--through my mother, indeed, a lineal
descendant of the patriot Bruce--I dare not conceal from you that my
affairs are deeply, very deeply, involved. I am in debt; my pockets are
practically empty; and, in short, I am fallen to that state when a
considerable sum of money would prove to many men an irresistible
temptation."

"Do you not see," returned the young lady, "that by these words you have
removed my last hesitation? Take them." And she thrust the notes into
the young man's hand.

He sat so long, holding them, like a baby at the font, that Miss
Fonblanque once more bubbled into laughter.

"Pray," she said, "hesitate no further; put them in your pocket; and to
relieve our position of any shadow of embarrassment, tell me by what
name I am to address my knight-errant, for I find myself reduced to the
awkwardness of the pronoun."

Had borrowing been in question, the wisdom of our ancestors had come
lightly to the young man's aid; but upon what pretext could he refuse so
generous a trust? Upon none, he saw, that was not unpardonably wounding;
and the bright eyes and the high spirits of his companion had already
made a breach in the rampart of Challoner's caution. The whole thing, he
reasoned, might be a mere mystification, which it were the height of
solemn folly to resent. On the other hand, the explosion, the interview
at the public-house, and the very money in his hands, seemed to prove
beyond denial the existence of some serious danger; and if that were so,
could he desert her? There was a choice of risks: the risk of behaving
with extraordinary incivility and unhandsomeness to a lady, and the risk
of going on a fool's errand. The story seemed false; but then the money
was undeniable. The whole circumstances were questionable and obscure;
but the lady was charming, and had the speech and manners of society.
While he still hung in the wind, a recollection returned upon his mind
with some of the dignity of prophecy. Had he not promised Somerset to
break with the traditions of the commonplace, and to accept the first
adventure offered? Well, here was the adventure.

He thrust the money into his pocket.

"My name is Challoner," said he.

"Mr. Challoner," she replied, "you have come very generously to my aid
when all was against me. Though I am myself a very humble person, my
family commands great interest; and I do not think you will repent this
handsome action."

Challoner flushed with pleasure.

"I imagine that, perhaps, a consulship," she added, her eyes dwelling on
him with a judicial admiration, "a consulship in some great town or
capital--or else----But we waste time; let us set about the work of my
delivery."

She took his arm with a frank confidence that went to his heart; and
once more laying by all serious thoughts, she entertained him, as they
crossed the park, with her agreeable gaiety of mind. Near the Marble
Arch they found a hansom, which rapidly conveyed them to the terminus at
Euston Square; and here, in the hotel, they sat down to an excellent
breakfast. The young lady's first step was to call for writing
materials, and write, upon one corner of the table, a hasty note; still,
as she did so, glancing with smiles at her companion. "Here," said she,
"here is the letter which will introduce you to my cousin." She began to
fold the paper. "My cousin, although I have never seen her, has the
character of a very charming woman and a recognised beauty; of that I
know nothing, but at least she has been very kind to me; so has my lord
her father; so have you--kinder than all--kinder than I can bear to
think of." She said this with unusual emotion; and, at the same time,
sealed the envelope. "Ah!" she cried, "I have shut my letter! It is not
quite courteous; and yet, as between friends, it is perhaps better so. I
introduce you, after all, into a family secret; and though you and I are
already old comrades, you are still unknown to my uncle. You go, then,
to this address, Richard Street, Glasgow; go, please, as soon as you
arrive; and give this letter with your own hands into those of Miss
Fonblanque, for that is the name by which she is to pass. When we next
meet, you will tell me what you think of her," she added, with a touch
of the provocative.

"Ah," said Challoner, almost tenderly, "she can be nothing to me."

"You do not know," replied the young lady, with a sigh. "By the by, I
had forgotten--it is very childish, and I am almost ashamed to mention
it--but when you see Miss Fonblanque, you will have to make yourself a
little ridiculous; and I am sure the part in no way suits you. We had
agreed upon a watchword. You will have to address an earl's daughter in
these words: '_Nigger_, _nigger, never die_'; but reassure yourself,"
she added, laughing, "for the fair patrician will at once finish the
quotation. Come now, say your lesson."

"'Nigger, nigger, never die,'" repeated Challoner, with undisguised
reluctance.

Miss Fonblanque went into fits of laughter. "Excellent," said she, "it
will be the most humorous scene!" And she laughed again.

"And what will be the counterword?" asked Challoner stiffly.

"I will not tell you till the last moment," said she; "for I perceive
you are growing too imperious."

Breakfast over, she accompanied the young man to the platform, bought
him the _Graphic_, the _Athenæum_, and a paper-cutter, and stood on the
step conversing till the whistle sounded. Then she put her head into the
carriage. "_Black face and shining eye!_" she whispered, and instantly
leaped down upon the platform, with a trill of gay and musical laughter.
As the train steamed out of the great arch of glass, the sound of that
laughter still rang in the young man's ears.

Challoner's position was too unusual to be long welcome to his mind. He
found himself projected the whole length of England, on a mission beset
with obscure and ridiculous circumstances, and yet, by the trust he had
accepted, irrevocably bound to persevere. How easy it appeared, in the
retrospect, to have refused the whole proposal, returned the money, and
gone forth again upon his own affairs, a free and happy man! And it was
now impossible: the enchantress who had held him with her eye had now
disappeared, taking his honour in pledge; and as she had failed to leave
him an address, he was denied even the inglorious safety of retreat. To
use the paper-knife, or even to read the periodicals with which she had
presented him, was to renew the bitterness of his remorse; and as he was
alone in the compartment, he passed the day staring at the landscape in
impotent repentance, and long before he was landed on the platform of
St. Enoch's, had fallen to the lowest and coldest zones of
self-contempt.

As he was hungry, and elegant in his habits, he would have preferred to
dine and to remove the stains of travel; but the words of the young
lady, and his own impatient eagerness, would suffer no delay. In the
late, luminous, and lamp-starred dusk of the summer evening he
accordingly set forward with brisk steps.

The street to which he was directed had first seen the day in the
character of a row of small suburban villas on a hillside; but the
extension of the city had, long since and on every hand, surrounded it
with miles of streets. From the top of the hill a range of very tall
buildings, densely inhabited by the poorest classes of the population
and variegated by drying-poles from every second window, overplumbed the
villas and their little gardens like a sea-board cliff. But still, under
the grime of years of city smoke, these antiquated cottages, with their
venetian blinds and rural porticoes, retained a somewhat melancholy
savour of the past.

The street, when Challoner entered it, was perfectly deserted. From hard
by, indeed, the sound of a thousand footfalls filled the ear; but in
Richard Street itself there was neither light nor sound of human
habitation. The appearance of the neighbourhood weighed heavily on the
mind of the young man; once more, as in the streets of London, he was
impressed by the sense of city deserts; and as he approached the number
indicated, and somewhat falteringly rang the bell, his heart sank within
him.

The bell was ancient, like the house; it had a thin and garrulous note;
and it was some time before it ceased to sound from the rear quarters of
the building. Following upon this an inner door was stealthily opened,
and careful and catlike steps drew near along the hall. Challoner,
supposing he was to be instantly admitted, produced his letter and, as
well as he was able, prepared a smiling face. To his indescribable
surprise, however, the footsteps ceased, and then, after a pause and
with the like stealthiness, withdrew once more, and died away in the
interior of the house. A second time the young man rang violently at the
bell; a second time, to his keen hearkening, a certain bustle of
discreet footing moved upon the hollow boards of the old villa; and
again the faint-hearted garrison only drew near to retreat. The cup of
the visitor's endurance was now full to overflowing; and, committing the
whole family of Fonblanque to every mood and shade of condemnation, he
turned upon his heel and redescended the steps. Perhaps the mover in the
house was watching from a window, and plucked up courage at the sight of
this desistance; or perhaps, where he lurked trembling in the back parts
of the villa, reason in its own right had conquered his alarms.
Challoner, at least, had scarce set foot upon the pavement when he was
arrested by the sound of the withdrawal of an inner bolt; one followed
another, rattling in their sockets; the key turned harshly in the lock;
the door opened; and there appeared upon the threshold a man of a very
stalwart figure in his shirt sleeves. He was a person neither of great
manly beauty nor of a refined exterior; he was not the man, in ordinary
moods, to attract the eyes of the observer; but as he now stood in the
doorway he was marked so legibly with the extreme passion of terror that
Challoner stood wonder-struck. For a fraction of a minute they gazed
upon each other in silence; and then the man of the house, with ashen
lips and gasping voice, inquired the business of his visitor. Challoner
replied, in tones from which he strove to banish his surprise, that he
was the bearer of a letter to a certain Miss Fonblanque. At this name,
as at a talisman, the man fell back and impatiently invited him to
enter; and no sooner had the adventurer crossed the threshold than the
door was closed behind him and his retreat cut off.

It was already long past eight at night; and though the late twilight of
the north still lingered in the streets, in the passage it was already
groping dark. The man led Challoner directly to a parlour looking on
the garden to the back. Here he had apparently been supping; for by the
light of a tallow dip, the table was seen to be covered with a napkin,
and set out with a quart of bottled ale and the heel of a Gouda cheese.
The room, on the other hand, was furnished with faded solidity, and the
walls were lined with scholarly and costly volumes in glazed cases. The
house must have been taken furnished; for it had no congruity with this
man of the shirt sleeves and the mean supper. As for the earl's
daughter, the earl and the visionary consulships in foreign cities, they
had long ago begun to fade in Challoner's imagination. Like Dr. Grierson
and the Mormon angels, they were plainly woven of the stuff of dreams.
Not an illusion remained to the knight-errant; not a hope was left him
but to be speedily relieved from this disreputable business.

The man had continued to regard his visitor with undisguised anxiety,
and began once more to press him for his errand.

"I am here," said Challoner, "simply to do a service between two ladies;
and I must ask you, without further delay, to summon Miss Fonblanque,
into whose hands alone I am authorised to deliver the letter that I
bear."

A growing wonder began to mingle on the man's face with the lines of
solicitude. "I am Miss Fonblanque," he said; and then, perceiving the
effect of this communication, "Good God!" he cried, "what are you
staring at? I tell you I am Miss Fonblanque."

Seeing the speaker wore a chin-beard of considerable length, and the
remainder of his face was blue with shaving, Challoner could only
suppose himself the subject of a jest. He was no longer under the spell
of the young lady's presence; and with men, and above all with his
inferiors, he was capable of some display of spirit.

"Sir," said he, pretty roundly, "I have put myself to great
inconvenience for persons of whom I know too little, and I begin to be
weary of the business. Either you shall immediately summon Miss
Fonblanque, or I leave this house and put myself under the direction of
the police."

"This is horrible!" exclaimed the man. "I declare before Heaven I am the
person meant, but how shall I convince you? It must have been Clara, I
perceive, that sent you on this errand--a madwoman, who jests with the
most deadly interests; and here we are, incapable, perhaps, of an
agreement, and Heaven knows what may depend on our delay!"

He spoke with a really startling earnestness; and at the same time there
flashed upon the mind of Challoner the ridiculous jingle which was to
serve as password. "This may, perhaps, assist you," he said; and then,
with some embarrassment: "'Nigger, nigger, never die.'"

A light of relief broke upon the troubled countenance of the man with
the chin-beard. "'Black face and shining eye'--give me the letter," he
panted, in one gasp.

"Well," said Challoner, though still with some reluctance, "I suppose I
must regard you as the proper recipient; and though I may justly
complain of the spirit in which I have been treated, I am only too glad
to be done with all responsibility. Here it is," and he produced the
envelope.

The man leaped upon it like a beast, and with hands that trembled in a
manner painful to behold, tore it open and unfolded the letter. As he
read, terror seemed to mount upon him to the pitch of nightmare. He
struck one hand upon his brow, while with the other, as if
unconsciously, he crumpled the paper to a ball. "My gracious powers!" he
cried; and then, dashing to the window, which stood open on the garden,
he clapped forth his head and shoulders and whistled long and shrill.
Challoner fell back into a corner, and resolutely grasping his staff,
prepared for the most desperate events; but the thoughts of the man with
the chin-beard were far removed from violence. Turning again into the
room, and once more beholding his visitor, whom he appeared to have
forgotten, he fairly danced with trepidation. "Impossible!" he cried.
"Oh, quite impossible! O Lord, I have lost my head." And then, once
more striking his hand upon his brow, "The money!" he exclaimed. "Give
me the money."

"My good friend," replied Challoner, "this is a very painful exhibition;
and until I see you reasonably master of yourself, I decline to proceed
with any business."

"You are quite right," said the man. "I am of a very nervous habit; a
long course of the dumb ague has undermined my constitution. But I know
you have money; it may be still the saving of me; and oh, dear young
gentleman, in pity's name be expeditious!"

Challoner, sincerely uneasy as he was, could scarce refrain from
laughter; but he was himself in a hurry to be gone, and without more
delay produced the money. "You will find the sum, I trust, correct," he
observed; "and let me ask you to give me a receipt."

But the man heeded him not. He seized the money, and disregarding the
sovereigns that rolled loose upon the floor, thrust the bundle of notes
into his pocket.

"A receipt," repeated Challoner, with some asperity. "I insist on a
receipt."

"Receipt?" repeated the man, a little wildly. "A receipt? Immediately!
Await me here."

Challoner, in reply, begged the gentleman to lose no unnecessary time,
as he was himself desirous of catching a particular train.

"Ah, by God, and so am I!" exclaimed the man with the chin-beard; and
with that he was gone out of the room, and had rattled upstairs, four at
a time, to the upper story of the villa.

"This is certainly a most amazing business," thought Challoner;
"certainly a most disquieting affair; and I cannot conceal from myself
that I have become mixed up with either lunatics or malefactors. I may
truly thank my stars that I am so nearly and so creditably done with
it." Thus thinking, and perhaps remembering the episode of the whistle,
he turned to the open window. The garden was still faintly clear; he
could distinguish the stairs and terraces with which the small domain
had been adorned by former owners, and the blackened bushes and dead
trees that had once afforded shelter to the country birds; beyond these
he saw the strong retaining wall, some thirty feet in height, which
enclosed the garden to the back; and again above that, the pile of dingy
buildings rearing its frontage high into the night. A peculiar object
lying stretched upon the lawn for some time baffled his eyesight; but at
length he had made it out to be a long ladder, or series of ladders
bound into one; and he was still wondering of what service so great an
instrument could be in such a scant enclosure, when he was recalled to
himself by the noise of some one running violently down the stairs. This
was followed by the sudden, clamorous banging of the house door; and
that again, by rapid and retreating footsteps in the street.

Challoner sprang into the passage. He ran from room to room, upstairs
and downstairs; and in that old dingy and worm-eaten house, he found
himself alone. Only in one apartment looking to the front were there any
traces of the late inhabitant: a bed that had been recently slept in and
not made, a chest of drawers disordered by a hasty search and on the
floor a roll of crumpled paper. This he picked up. The light in this
upper story looking to the front was considerably brighter than in the
parlour; and he was able to make out that the paper bore the mark of the
hotel at Euston, and even, by peering closely, to decipher the following
lines in a very elegant and careful female hand:

   "DEAR M'GUIRE,--It is certain your retreat is known. We have just had
   another failure, clockwork thirty hours too soon, with the usual
   humiliating result. Zero is quite disheartened. We are all scattered,
   and I could find no one but the _solemn ass_ who brings you this and
   the money. I would love to see your meeting.--Ever yours,

     "SHINING EYE."

Challoner was stricken to the heart. He perceived by what facility, by
what unmanly fear of ridicule, he had been brought down to be the gull
of this intriguer; and his wrath flowed forth in almost equal measure
against himself, against the woman, and against Somerset, whose idle
counsels had impelled him to embark on that adventure. At the same time
a great and troubled curiosity, and a certain chill of fear, possessed
his spirits. The conduct of the man with the chin-beard, the terms of
the letter, and the explosion of the early morning, fitted together like
parts in some obscure and mischievous imbroglio. Evil was certainly
afoot; evil, secrecy, terror, and falsehood were the conditions and the
passions of the people among whom he had begun to move, like a blind
puppet; and he who began as a puppet, his experience told him, was often
doomed to perish as a victim.

From the stupor of deep thought into which he had glided with the letter
in his hand, he was awakened by the clatter of the bell. He glanced from
the window; and conceive his horror and surprise when he beheld,
clustered on the steps, in the front garden and on the pavement of the
street, a formidable posse of police! He started to the full possession
of his powers and courage. Escape, and escape at any cost, was the one
idea that possessed him. Swiftly and silently he redescended the
creaking stairs; he was already in the passage when a second and more
imperious summons from the door awoke the echoes of the empty house; nor
had the bell ceased to jangle before he had bestridden the window-sill
of the parlour and was lowering himself into the garden. His coat was
hooked upon the iron flower-basket; for a moment he hung dependent heels
and head below; and then, with the noise of rending cloth and followed
by several pots, he dropped upon the sod. Once more the bell was rung,
and now with furious and repeated peals. The desperate Challoner turned
his eyes on every side. They fell upon the ladder, and he ran to it, and
with strenuous but unavailing effort sought to raise it from the ground.
Suddenly the weight, which was thus resisting his whole strength, began
to lighten in his hands; the ladder, like a thing of life, reared its
bulk from off the sod; and Challoner, leaping back with a cry of almost
superstitious terror, beheld the whole structure mount, foot by foot,
against the face of the retaining-wall. At the same time, two heads were
dimly visible above the parapet, and he was hailed by a guarded whistle.
Something in its modulation recalled, like an echo, the whistle of the
man with the chin-beard.

Had he chanced upon a means of escape prepared beforehand by those very
miscreants, whose messenger and gull he had become? Was this, indeed, a
means of safety, or but the starting-point of further complication and
disaster? He paused not to reflect. Scarce was the ladder reared to its
full length than he had sprung already on the rounds; hand over hand,
swift as an ape, he scaled the tottering stairway. Strong arms received,
embraced, and helped him; he was lifted and set once more upon the
earth; and with the spasm of his alarm yet unsubsided, found himself, in
the company of two rough-looking men, in the paved back-yard of one of
the tall houses that crowned the summit of the hill. Meanwhile, from
below, the note of the bell had been succeeded by the sound of vigorous
and redoubling blows.

"Are you all out?" asked one of his companions; and as soon as he had
babbled an answer in the affirmative, the rope was cut from the top
round, and the ladder thrust roughly back into the garden, where it fell
and broke with clattering reverberations. Its fall was hailed with many
broken cries; for the whole of Richard Street was now in high emotion,
the people crowding to the windows or clambering on the garden walls.
The same man who had already addressed Challoner seized him by the arm;
whisked him through the basement of the house and across the street upon
the other side; and before the unfortunate adventurer had time to
realise his situation, a door was opened, and he was thrust into a low
and dark compartment.

"Bedad," observed his guide, "there was no time to lose. Is M'Guire
gone, or was it you that whistled?"

"M'Guire is gone," said Challoner.

The guide now struck a light. "Ah," said he, "this will never do. You
dare not go upon the streets in such a figure. Wait quietly here and I
will bring you something decent."

With that the man was gone, and Challoner, his attention thus rudely
awakened, began ruefully to consider the havoc that had been worked in
his attire. His hat was gone; his trousers were cruelly ripped; and the
best part of one tail of his very elegant frock-coat had been left
hanging from the iron crockets of the window. He had scarce had time to
measure these disasters when his host re-entered the apartment and
proceeded, without a word, to envelop the refined and urbane Challoner
in a long ulster of the cheapest material and of a pattern so gross and
vulgar that his spirit sickened at the sight. This calumnious disguise
was crowned and completed by a soft felt hat of the Tyrolese design and
several sizes too small. At another moment Challoner would simply have
refused to issue forth upon the world thus travestied; but the desire to
escape from Glasgow was now too strongly and too exclusively impressed
upon his mind. With one haggard glance at the spotted tails of his new
coat, he inquired what was to pay for this accoutrement. The man assured
him that the whole expense was easily met from funds in his possession,
and begged him, instead of wasting time, to make his best speed out of
the neighbourhood.

The young man was not loath to take the hint. True to his usual
courtesy, he thanked the speaker and complimented him upon his taste in
greatcoats; and leaving the man somewhat abashed by these remarks and
the manner of their delivery, he hurried forth into the lamp-lit city.
The last train was gone ere, after many deviations, he had reached the
terminus. Attired as he was he dared not present himself at any
reputable inn; and he felt keenly that the unassuming dignity of his
demeanour would serve to attract attention, perhaps mirth, and possibly
suspicion, in any humbler hostelry. He was thus condemned to pass the
solemn and uneventful hours of a whole night in pacing the streets of
Glasgow; supperless; a figure of fun for all beholders; waiting the
dawn, with hope indeed, but with unconquerable shrinkings; and above all
things, filled with a profound sense of the folly and weakness of his
conduct. It may be conceived with what curses he assailed the memory of
the fair narrator of Hyde Park; her parting laughter rang in his ears
all night with damning mockery and iteration; and when he could spare a
thought from this chief artificer of his confusion, it was to expend his
wrath on Somerset and the career of the amateur detective. With the
coming of the day, he found in a shy milk-shop the means to appease his
hunger. There were still many hours to wait before the departure of the
south express; these he passed wandering with indescribable fatigue in
the obscurer by-streets of the city; and at length slipped quietly into
the station and took his place in the darkest corner of a third-class
carriage. Here, all day long, he jolted on the bare boards, distressed
by heat and continually reawakened from uneasy slumbers. By the half
return ticket in his purse, he was entitled to make the journey on the
easy cushions and with the ample space of the first-class; but alas! in
his absurd attire, he durst not, for decency, commingle with his equals;
and this small annoyance, coming last in such a series of disasters, cut
him to the heart.

That night, when, in his Putney lodging, he reviewed the expense,
anxiety, and weariness of his adventure; when he beheld the ruins of his
last good trousers and his last presentable coat; and above all, when
his eye by any chance alighted on the Tyrolese hat or the degrading
ulster, his heart would overflow with bitterness, and it was only by a
serious call on his philosophy that he maintained the dignity of his
demeanour.




SOMERSET'S ADVENTURE

THE SUPERFLUOUS MANSION


Mr. Paul Somerset was a young gentleman of a lively and fiery
imagination, with very small capacity for action. He was one who lived
exclusively in dreams and in the future: the creature of his own
theories, and an actor in his own romances. From the cigar divan he
proceeded to parade the streets, still heated with the fire of his
eloquence, and scouting upon every side for the offer of some fortunate
adventure. In the continual stream of passers-by, on the sealed fronts
of houses, on the posters that covered the hoardings, and in every
lineament and throb of the great city, he saw a mysterious and hopeful
hieroglyph. But although the elements of adventure were streaming by him
as thick as drops of water in the Thames, it was in vain that, now with
a beseeching, now with something of a braggadocio air, he courted and
provoked the notice of the passengers; in vain that, putting fortune to
the touch, he even thrust himself into the way and came into direct
collision with those of the more promising demeanour. Persons brimful of
secrets, persons pining for affection, persons perishing for lack of
help or counsel, he was sure he could perceive on every side; but by
some contrariety of fortune, each passed upon his way without remarking
the young gentleman, and went farther (surely to fare worse!) in quest
of the confidant, the friend, or the adviser. To thousands he must have
turned an appealing countenance, and yet not one regarded him.

A light dinner, eaten to the accompaniment of his impetuous aspirations,
broke in upon the series of his attempts on fortune; and when he
returned to the task, the lamps were already lighted, and the nocturnal
crowd was dense upon the pavement. Before a certain restaurant, whose
name will readily occur to any student of our Babylon, people were
already packed so closely that passage had grown difficult; and
Somerset, standing in the kennel, watched, with a hope that was
beginning to grow somewhat weary, the faces and the manners of the
crowd. Suddenly he was startled by a gentle touch upon the shoulder, and
facing about, he was aware of a very plain and elegant brougham, drawn
by a pair of powerful horses, and driven by a man in sober livery. There
were no arms upon the panel; the window was open, but the interior was
obscure; the driver yawned behind his palm; and the young man was
already beginning to suppose himself the dupe of his own fancy, when a
hand, no larger than a child's and smoothly gloved in white, appeared in
a corner of the window and privily beckoned him to approach. He did so,
and looked in. The carriage was occupied by a single small and very
dainty figure, swathed head and shoulders in impenetrable folds of white
lace; and a voice, speaking low and silvery, addressed him in these
words:

"Open the door and get in."

"It must be," thought the young man, with an almost unbearable thrill,
"it must be that duchess at last!" Yet, although the moment was one to
which he had long looked forward, it was with a certain share of alarm
that he opened the door, and, mounting into the brougham, took his seat
beside the lady of the lace. Whether or no she had touched a spring, or
given some other signal, the young man had hardly closed the door before
the carriage, with considerable swiftness, and with a very luxurious and
easy movement on its springs, turned and began to drive towards the
west.

Somerset, as I have written, was not unprepared; it had long been his
particular pleasure to rehearse his conduct in the most unlikely
situations; and this, among others, of the patrician ravisher, was one
he had familiarly studied. Strange as it may seem, however, he could
find no apposite remark; and as the lady, on her side, vouchsafed no
further sign, they continued to drive in silence through the streets.
Except for alternate flashes from the passing lamps, the carriage was
plunged in obscurity; and beyond the fact that the fittings were
luxurious, and that the lady was singularly small and slender in person
and, all but one gloved hand, still swathed in her costly veil, the
young man could decipher no detail of an inspiring nature. The suspense
began to grow unbearable. Twice he cleared his throat, and twice the
whole resources of the language failed him. In similar scenes, when he
had forecast them on the theatre of fancy, his presence of mind had
always been complete, his eloquence remarkable; and at this disparity
between the rehearsal and the performance, he began to be seized with a
panic of apprehension. Here, on the very threshold of adventure, suppose
him ignominiously to fail; suppose that after ten, twenty, or sixty
seconds of still uninterrupted silence, the lady should touch the
check-string and re-deposit him, weighed and found wanting, on the
common street! Thousands of persons of no mind at all, he reasoned,
would be found more equal to the part; could, that very instant, by some
decisive step, prove the lady's choice to have been well inspired, and
put a stop to this intolerable silence.

His eye, at this point, lighted on the hand. It was better to fall by
desperate councils than to continue as he was; and with one tremulous
swoop he pounced on the gloved fingers and drew them to himself. One
overt step, it had appeared to him, would dissolve the spell of his
embarrassment; in act, he found it otherwise: he found himself no less
incapable of speech or further progress; and, with the lady's hand in
his, sat helpless. But worse was in store. A peculiar quivering began to
agitate the form of his companion; the hand that lay unresistingly in
Somerset's trembled as with ague; and presently there broke forth, in
the shadow of the carriage, the bubbling and musical sound of laughter,
resisted but triumphant. The young man dropped his prize; had it been
possible, he would have bounded from the carriage. The lady, meanwhile,
lying back upon the cushions, passed on from trill to trill of the most
heartfelt, high-pitched, clear, and fairy-sounding merriment.

"You must not be offended," she said at last, catching an opportunity
between two paroxysms. "If you have been mistaken in the warmth of your
attentions, the fault is solely mine; it does not flow from your
presumption, but from my eccentric manner of recruiting friends; and,
believe me, I am the last person in the world to think the worse of a
young man for showing spirit. As for to-night, it is my intention to
entertain you to a little supper; and if I shall continue to be as much
pleased with your manners as I was taken with your face, I may perhaps
end by making you an advantageous offer."

Somerset sought in vain to find some form of answer, but his
discomfiture had been too recent and complete.

"Come," returned the lady, "we must have no display of temper; that is
for me the one disqualifying fault; and as I perceive we are drawing
near our destination, I shall ask you to descend and offer me your arm."

Indeed, at that very moment the carriage drew up before a stately and
severe mansion in a spacious square; and Somerset, who was possessed of
an excellent temper, with the best grace in the world assisted the lady
to alight. The door was opened by an old woman of a grim appearance, who
ushered the pair into a dining-room somewhat dimly lighted, but already
laid for supper, and occupied by a prodigious company of large and
valuable cats. Here, as soon as they were alone, the lady divested
herself of the lace in which she was enfolded; and Somerset was relieved
to find, that although still bearing the traces of great beauty, and
still distinguished by the fire and colour of her eye, her hair was of
silvery whiteness and her face lined with years.

"And now, _mon preux_," said the old lady, nodding at him with a quaint
gaiety, "you perceive that I am no longer in my first youth. You will
soon find that I am all the better company for that."

As she spoke, the maid re-entered the apartment with a light but
tasteful supper. They sat down, accordingly, to table, the cats with
savage pantomime surrounding the old lady's chair; and what with the
excellence of the meal and the gaiety of his entertainer, Somerset was
soon completely at his ease. When they had well eaten and drunk, the old
lady leaned back in her chair, and taking a cat upon her lap, subjected
her guest to a prolonged but evidently mirthful scrutiny.

"I fear, madam," said Somerset, "that my manners have not risen to the
height of your preconceived opinion."

"My dear young man," she replied, "you were never more mistaken in your
life. I find you charming, and you may very well have lighted on a fairy
godmother. I am not one of those who are given to change their opinions,
and short of substantial demerit, those who have once gained my favour
continue to enjoy it; but I have a singular swiftness of decision, read
my fellow men and women with a glance, and have acted throughout life on
first impressions. Yours, as I tell you, has been favourable; and if, as
I suppose, you are a young fellow of somewhat idle habits, I think it
not improbable that we may strike a bargain."

"Ah, madam," returned Somerset, "you have divined my situation. I am a
man of birth, parts, and breeding; excellent company, or at least so I
find myself; but by a peculiar iniquity of fate, destitute alike of
trade or money. I was, indeed, this evening upon the quest of an
adventure, resolved to close with any offer of interest, emolument, or
pleasure; and your summons, which I profess I am still at some loss to
understand, jumped naturally with the inclination of my mind. Call it,
if you will, impudence; I am here, at least, prepared for any
proposition you can find it in your heart to make, and resolutely
determined to accept."

"You express yourself very well," replied the old lady, "and are
certainly a droll and curious young man. I should not care to affirm
that you were sane, for I have never found any one entirely so besides
myself; but at least the nature of your madness entertains me, and I
will reward you with some description of my character and life."

Thereupon the old lady, still fondling the cat upon her lap, proceeded
to narrate the following particulars.




NARRATIVE OF THE SPIRITED OLD LADY


I was the eldest daughter of the Reverend Bernard Fanshawe, who held a
valuable living in the diocese of Bath and Wells. Our family, a very
large one, was noted for a sprightly and incisive wit, and came of a
good old stock where beauty was an heirloom. In Christian grace of
character we were unhappily deficient. From my earliest years I saw and
deplored the defects of those relatives whose age and position should
have enabled them to conquer my esteem; and while I was yet a child, my
father married a second wife, in whom (strange to say) the Fanshawe
failings were exaggerated to a monstrous and almost laughable degree.
Whatever may be said against me, it cannot be denied I was a pattern
daughter; but it was in vain that, with the most touching patience, I
submitted to my stepmother's demands; and from the hour she entered my
father's house, I may say that I met with nothing but injustice and
ingratitude.

I stood not alone, however, in the sweetness of my disposition; for one
other of the family besides myself was free from any violence of
character. Before I had reached the age of sixteen, this cousin, John by
name, had conceived for me a sincere but silent passion; and although
the poor lad was too timid to hint at the nature of his feelings, I had
soon divined and begun to share them. For some days I pondered on the
odd situation created for me by the bashfulness of my admirer; and at
length, perceiving that he begun, in his distress, rather to avoid than
seek my company, I determined to take the matter into my own hands.
Finding him alone in a retired part of the rectory garden, I told him
that I had divined his amiable secret; that I knew with what disfavour
our union was sure to be regarded; and that, under the circumstances, I
was prepared to flee with him at once. Poor John was literally paralysed
with joy; such was the force of his emotions, that he could find no
words in which to thank me; and that I, seeing him thus helpless, was
obliged to arrange, myself, the details of our flight, and of the stolen
marriage which was immediately to crown it. John had been at that time
projecting a visit to the metropolis. In this I bade him persevere, and
promised on the following day to join him at the Tavistock Hotel.

True, on my side, to every detail of our arrangement, I arose, on the
day in question, before the servants, packed a few necessaries in a bag,
took with me the little money I possessed, and bade farewell for ever to
the rectory. I walked with good spirits to a town some thirty miles from
home; and was set down the next morning in this great city of London. As
I walked from the coach-office to the hotel, I could not help exulting
in the pleasant change that had befallen me; beholding, meanwhile, with
innocent delight, the traffic of the streets, and depicting, in all the
colours of fancy, the reception that awaited me from John. But alas!
when I inquired for Mr. Fanshawe, the porter assured me there was no
such gentleman among the guests. By what channel our secret had leaked
out, or what pressure had been brought to bear on the too facile John, I
could never fathom. Enough that my family had triumphed; that I found
myself alone in London, tender in years, smarting under the most
sensible mortification, and by every sentiment of pride and self-respect
debarred for ever from my father's house.

I rose under the blow, and found lodgings in the neighbourhood of Euston
Road, where, for the first time in my life, I tasted the joys of
independence. Three days afterwards, an advertisement in _The Times_
directed me to the office of a solicitor whom I knew to be in my
father's confidence. There I was given the promise of a very moderate
allowance, and a distinct intimation that I must never look to be
received at home. I could not but resent so cruel a desertion, and I
told the lawyer it was a meeting I desired as little as themselves. He
smiled at my courageous spirit, paid me the first quarter of my income,
and gave me the remainder of my personal effects, which had been sent to
me, under his care, in a couple of rather ponderous boxes. With these I
returned in triumph to my lodgings, more content with my position than I
should have thought possible a week before, and fully determined to make
the best of the future.

All went well for several months; and, indeed, it was my own fault alone
that ended this pleasant and secluded episode of life. I have, I must
confess, the fatal trick of spoiling my inferiors. My landlady, to whom
I had as usual been overkind, impertinently called me in fault for some
particular too small to mention; and I, annoyed that I had allowed her
the freedom upon which she thus presumed, ordered her to leave my
presence. She stood a moment dumb, and then, recalling her
self-possession, "Your bill," said she, "shall be ready this evening,
and to-morrow, madam, you shall leave my house. See," she added, "that
you are able to pay what you owe me; for If I do not receive the
uttermost farthing, no box of yours shall pass my threshold."

I was confounded at her audacity, but, as a whole quarter's income was
due to me, not otherwise affected by the threat. That afternoon, as I
left the solicitor's door, carrying in one hand, and done up in a paper
parcel, the whole amount of my fortune, there befell me one of those
decisive incidents that sometimes shape a life. The lawyer's office was
situated in a street that opened at the upper end upon the Strand and
was closed at the lower, at the time of which I speak, by a row of iron
railings looking on the Thames. Down this street, then, I beheld my
stepmother advancing to meet me, and doubtless bound to the very house
I had just left. She was attended by a maid whose face was new to me;
but her own was too clearly printed on my memory; and the sight of it,
even from a distance, filled me with generous indignation. Flight was
impossible. There was nothing left but to retreat against the railing,
and with my back turned to the street, pretend to be admiring the barges
on the river or the chimneys of transpontine London.

I was still so standing, and had not yet fully mastered the turbulence
of my emotions, when a voice at my elbow addressed me with a trivial
question. It was the maid whom my stepmother, with characteristic
hardness, had left to await her on the street, while she transacted her
business with the family solicitor. The girl did not know who I was; the
opportunity was too golden to be lost; and I was soon hearing the latest
news of my father's rectory and parish. It did not surprise me to find
that she detested her employers; and yet the terms in which she spoke of
them were hard to bear, hard to let pass unchallenged. I heard them,
however, without dissent, for my self-command is wonderful; and we might
have parted as we met, had she not proceeded, in an evil hour, to
criticise the rector's missing daughter, and with the most shocking
perversions to narrate the story of her flight. My nature is so
essentially generous that I can never pause to reason. I flung up my
hand sharply, by way, as well as I remember, of indignant protest; and,
in the act, the packet slipped from my fingers, glanced between the
railings, and fell and sunk in the river. I stood a moment petrified,
and then, struck by the drollery of the incident, gave way to peals of
laughter. I was still laughing when my stepmother reappeared, and the
maid, who doubtless considered me insane, ran off to join her; nor had I
yet recovered my gravity when I presented myself before the lawyer to
solicit a fresh advance. His answer made me serious enough, for it was a
flat refusal; and it was not until I had besought him even with tears,
that he consented to lend me ten pounds from his own pocket. "I am a
poor man," said he, "and you must look for nothing further at my hands."

The landlady met me at the door. "Here, madam," said she, with a curtsey
insolently low, "here is my bill. Would it inconvenience you to settle
it at once?"

"You shall be paid, madam," said I, "in the morning, in the proper
course." And I took the paper with a very high air, but inwardly
quaking.

I had no sooner looked at it than I perceived myself to be lost. I had
been short of money and had allowed my debt to mount; and it had now
reached the sum, which I shall never forget, of twelve pounds thirteen
and fourpence halfpenny. All evening I sat by the fire considering my
situation. I could not pay the bill; my landlady would not suffer me to
remove my boxes; and without either baggage or money, how was I to find
another lodging? For three months, unless I could invent some remedy, I
was condemned to be without a roof and without a penny. It can surprise
no one that I decided on immediate flight; but even here I was
confronted by a difficulty, for I had no sooner packed my boxes than I
found I was not strong enough to move, far less to carry them.

In this strait I did not hesitate a moment, but throwing on a shawl and
bonnet, and covering my face with a thick veil, I betook myself to that
great bazaar of dangerous and smiling chances, the pavement of the city.
It was already late at night, and the weather being wet and windy, there
were few abroad besides policemen. These, on my present mission, I had
wit enough to know for enemies; and wherever I perceived their moving
lanterns, I made haste to turn aside and choose another thoroughfare. A
few miserable women still walked the pavement; here and there were young
fellows returning drunk, or ruffians of the lowest class lurking in the
mouths of alleys; but of any one to whom I might appeal in my distress,
I began almost to despair.

At last, at the corner of a street, I ran into the arms of one who was
evidently a gentleman, and who, in all his appointments, from his furred
greatcoat to the fine cigar which he was smoking, comfortably breathed
of wealth. Much as my face has changed from its original beauty, I still
retain (or so I tell myself) some traces of the youthful lightness of my
figure. Even veiled as I then was, I could perceive the gentleman was
struck by my appearance; and this emboldened me for my adventure.

"Sir," said I, with a quickly beating heart, "sir, are you one in whom a
lady can confide?"

"Why, my dear," said he, removing his cigar, "that depends on
circumstances. If you will raise your veil--"

"Sir," I interrupted, "let there be no mistake. I ask you, as a
gentleman, to serve me, but I offer no reward."

"That is frank," said he; "but hardly tempting. And what, may I inquire,
is the nature of the service?"

But I knew well enough it was not my interest to tell him on so short an
interview. "If you will accompany me," said I, "to a house not far from
here, you can see for yourself."

He looked at me awhile with hesitating eyes; and then, tossing away his
cigar, which was not yet a quarter smoked, "Here goes!" said he, and
with perfect politeness offered me his arm. I was wise enough to take
it; to prolong our walk as far as possible, by more than one excursion
from the shortest line; and to beguile the way with that sort of
conversation which should prove to him indubitably from what station in
society I sprang. By the time we reached the door of my lodging, I felt
sure I had confirmed his interest, and might venture, before I turned
the pass-key, to beseech him to moderate his voice and to tread softly.
He promised to obey me; and I admitted him into the passage, and thence
into my sitting-room, which was fortunately next the door.

"And now," said he, when with trembling fingers I had lighted a candle,
"what is the meaning of all this?"

"I wish you," said I, speaking with great difficulty, "to help me out
with these boxes--and I wish nobody to know."

He took up the candle. "And I wish to see your face," said he.

I turned back my veil without a word, and looked at him with every
appearance of resolve that I could summon up. For some time he gazed
into my face, still holding up the candle. "Well," said he at last, "and
where do you wish them taken?"

I knew that I had gained my point; and it was with a tremor in my voice
that I replied. "I had thought we might carry them between us to the
corner of Euston Road," said I, "where, even at this late hour, we may
still find a cab."

"Very good," was his reply; and he immediately hoisted the heavier of my
trunks upon his shoulder, and taking one handle of the second, signed to
me to help him at the other end. In this order we made good our retreat
from the house, and without the least adventure, drew pretty near to the
corner of Euston Road. Before a house, where there was a light still
burning, my companion paused. "Let us here," said he, "set down our
boxes, while we go forward to the end of the street in quest of a cab.
By doing so, we can still keep an eye upon their safety; and we avoid
the very extraordinary figure we should otherwise present--a young man,
a young lady, and a mass of baggage, standing castaway at midnight on
the streets of London." So it was done, and the event proved him to be
wise; for long before there was any word of a cab, a policeman appeared
upon the scene, turned upon us the full glare of his lantern, and hung
suspiciously behind us in a doorway.

"There seem to be no cabs about, policeman," said my champion, with
affected cheerfulness. But the constable's answer was ungracious; and as
for the offer of a cigar, with which this rebuff was most unwisely
followed up, he refused it point-blank, and without the least civility.
The young gentleman looked at me with a warning grimace, and there we
continued to stand, on the edge of the pavement, in the beating rain,
and with the policeman still silently watching our movements from the
doorway.

At last, and after a delay that seemed interminable, a four-wheeler
appeared lumbering along in the mud, and was instantly hailed by my
companion. "Just pull up here, will you?" he cried. "We have some
baggage up the street."

And now came the hitch of our adventure; for when the policeman, still
closely following us, beheld my two boxes lying in the rain, he arose
from mere suspicion to a kind of certitude of something evil. The light
in the house had been extinguished; the whole frontage of the street was
dark; there was nothing to explain the presence of these unguarded
trunks; and no two innocent people were ever, I believe, detected in
such questionable circumstances.

"Where have these things come from?" asked the policeman, flashing his
light full into my champion's face.

"Why, from that house of course," replied the young gentleman, hastily
shouldering a trunk.

The policeman whistled and turned to look at the dark windows; he then
took a step towards the door, as though to knock, a course which had
infallibly proved our ruin; but seeing us already hurrying down the
street under our double burthen, thought better or worse of it, and
followed in our wake.

"For God's sake," whispered my companion, "tell me where to drive to."

"Anywhere," I replied, with anguish. "I have no idea. Anywhere you
like."

Thus it fell that, when the boxes had been stowed and I had already
entered the cab, my deliverer called out in clear tones the address of
the house in which we are now seated. The policeman, I could see, was
staggered. This neighbourhood, so retired, so aristocratic, was far from
what he had expected. For all that, he took the number of the cab, and
spoke for a few seconds and with a decided manner, in the cabman's ear.

"What can he have said?" I gasped, as soon as the cab had rolled away.

"I can very well imagine," replied my champion; "and I can assure you
that you are now condemned to go where I have said; for, should we
attempt to change our destination by the way, the jarvey will drive us
straight to a police-office. Let me compliment you on your nerves," he
added. "I have had, I believe, the most horrible fright of my
existence."

But my nerves, which he so much misjudged, were in so strange a disarray
that speech was now become impossible; and we made the drive
thenceforward in unbroken silence. When we arrived before the door of
our destination, the young gentleman alighted, opened it with a pass-key
like one who was at home, bade the driver carry the trunks into the
hall, and dismissed him with a handsome fee. He then led me into this
dining-room, looking nearly as you behold it, but with certain marks of
bachelor occupancy, and hastened to pour out a glass of wine, which he
insisted on my drinking. As soon as I could find my voice, "In God's
name," I cried, "where am I?"

He told me I was in his house, where I was very welcome, and had no more
urgent business than to rest myself and recover my spirits. As he spoke
he offered me another glass of wine, of which, indeed, I stood in great
want, for I was faint, and inclined to be hysterical. Then he sat down
beside the fire, lit another cigar, and for some time observed me
curiously in silence.

"And now," said he, "that you have somewhat restored yourself, will you
be kind enough to tell me in what sort of crime I have become a partner?
Are you murderer, smuggler, thief, or only the harmless and domestic
moonlight flitter?"

I had been already shocked by his lighting a cigar without permission,
for I had not forgotten the one he threw away on our first meeting; and
now, at these explicit insults, I resolved at once to reconquer his
esteem. The judgment of the world I have consistently despised, but I
had already begun to set a certain value on the good opinion of my
entertainer. Beginning with a note of pathos, but soon brightening into
my habitual vivacity and humour, I rapidly narrated the circumstances of
my birth, my flight, and subsequent misfortunes. He heard me to an end
in silence, gravely smoking. "Miss Fanshawe," said he, when I had done,
"you are a very comical and most enchanting creature; and I can see
nothing for it but that I should return to-morrow morning and satisfy
your landlady's demands."

"You strangely misinterpret my confidence," was my reply; "and if you
had at all appreciated my character, you would understand that I can
take no money at your hands."

"Your landlady will doubtless not be so particular," he returned; "nor
do I at all despair of persuading even your unconquerable self. I desire
you to examine me with critical indulgence. My name is Henry Luxmore,
Lord Southwark's second son. I possess nine thousand a year, the house
in which we are now sitting and seven others in the best neighbourhoods
in town. I do not believe I am repulsive to the eye, and as for my
character, you have seen me under trial. I think you simply the most
original of created things; I need not tell you what you know very well,
that you are ravishingly pretty; and I have nothing more to add, except
that foolish as it may appear, I am already head over heels in love with
you."

"Sir," said I, "I am prepared to be misjudged; but while I continue to
accept your hospitality, that fact alone should be enough to protect me
from insult."

"Pardon me," said he: "I offer you marriage." And leaning back in his
chair he replaced his cigar between his lips.

I own I was confounded by an offer, not only so unprepared, but couched
in terms so singular. But he knew very well how to obtain his purposes,
for he was not only handsome in person, but his very coolness had a
charm; and to make a long story short, a fortnight later I became the
wife of the Honourable Henry Luxmore.

For nearly twenty years I now led a life of almost perfect quiet. My
Henry had his weaknesses; I was twice driven to flee from his roof, but
not for long; for though he was easily over-excited, his nature was
placable below the surface, and, with all his faults, I loved him
tenderly. At last he was taken from me; and such is the power of
self-deception, and so strange are the whims of the dying, he actually
assured me, with his latest breath, that he forgave the violence of my
temper!

There was but one pledge of the marriage, my daughter Clara. She had,
indeed, inherited a shadow of her father's failing; but in all things
else, unless my partial eyes deceived me, she derived her qualities from
me, and might be called my moral image. On my side, whatever else I may
have done amiss, as a mother I was above reproach. Here, then, was
surely every promise for the future; here, at last, was a relation in
which I might hope to taste repose. But it was not to be. You will
hardly credit me when I inform you that she ran away from home; yet such
was the case. Some whim about oppressed nationalities--Ireland, Poland,
and the like--has turned her brain; and if you should anywhere encounter
a young lady (I must say of remarkable attractions) answering to the
name of Luxmore, Lake, or Fonblanque (for I am told she uses these
indifferently, as well as many others), tell her, from me, that I
forgive her cruelty, and though I will never more behold her face, I am
at any time prepared to make her a liberal allowance.

On the death of Mr. Luxmore I sought oblivion in the details of
business. I believe I have mentioned that seven mansions, besides this,
formed part of Mr. Luxmore's property: I have found them seven white
elephants. The greed of tenants, the dishonesty of solicitors, and the
incapacity that sits upon the bench, have combined together to make
these houses the burthen of my life. I had no sooner, indeed, begun to
look into these matters for myself, than I discovered so many injustices
and met with so much studied incivility, that I was plunged into a long
series of lawsuits, some of which are pending to this day. You must have
heard my name already; I am the Mrs. Luxmore of the Law Reports: a
strange destiny, indeed, for one born with an almost cowardly desire for
peace! But I am of the stamp of those who, when they have once begun a
task, will rather die than leave their duty unfulfilled. I have met with
every obstacle: insolence and ingratitude from my own lawyers; in my
adversaries, that fault of obstinacy which is to me perhaps the most
distasteful in the calendar; from the bench, civility indeed--always, I
must allow, civility--but never a spark of independence, never that
knowledge of the law and love of justice which we have a right to look
for in a judge, the most august of human officers. And still, against
all these odds, I have undissuadably persevered.

It was after the loss of one of my innumerable cases (a subject on which
I will not dwell) that it occurred to me to make a melancholy pilgrimage
to my various houses. Four were at that time tenantless and closed, like
pillars of salt, commemorating the corruption of the age and the decline
of private virtue. Three were occupied by persons who had wearied me by
every conceivable unjust demand and legal subterfuge--persons whom, at
that very hour, I was moving heaven and earth to turn into the streets.
This was perhaps the sadder spectacle of the two; and my heart grew hot
within me to behold them occupying, in my very teeth, and with an
insolent ostentation, these handsome structures which were as much mine
as the flesh upon my body.

One more house remained for me to visit, that in which we now are. I had
let it (for at that period I lodged in a hotel, the life that I have
always preferred) to a Colonel Geraldine, a gentleman attached to Prince
Florizel of Bohemia, whom you must certainly have heard of; and I had
supposed, from the character and position of my tenant, that here, at
least, I was safe against annoyance. What was my surprise to find this
house also shuttered and apparently deserted! I will not deny that I was
offended; I conceived that a house, like a yacht, was better to be kept
in commission; and I promised myself to bring the matter before my
solicitor the following morning. Meanwhile the sight recalled my fancy
naturally to the past; and, yielding to the tender influence of
sentiment, I sat down opposite the door upon the garden parapet. It was
August and a sultry afternoon, but that spot is sheltered, as you may
observe by daylight, under the branches of a spreading chestnut; the
square, too, was deserted; there was a sound of distant music in the
air; and all combined to plunge me into that most agreeable of states,
which is neither happiness nor sorrow, but shares the poignancy of both.

From this I was recalled by the arrival of a large van, very handsomely
appointed, drawn by valuable horses, mounted by several men of an
appearance more than decent, and bearing on its panels, instead of a
trader's name, a coat of arms too modest to be deciphered from where I
sat. It drew up before my house, the door of which was immediately
opened by one of the men. His companions--I counted seven of them in
all--proceeded, with disciplined activity, to take from the van and
carry into the house a variety of hampers, bottle-baskets, and boxes,
such as are designed for plate and napery. The windows of the
dining-room were thrown widely open, as though to air it; and I saw some
of those within laying the table for a meal. Plainly, I concluded, my
tenant was about to return; and while still determined to submit to no
aggression on my rights, I was gratified by the number and discipline of
his attendants, and the quiet profusion that appeared to reign in his
establishment. I was still so thinking when, to my extreme surprise, the
windows and shutters of the dining-room were once more closed; the men
began to reappear from the interior and resume their stations on the
van; the last closed the door behind his exit; the van drove away; and
the house was once more left to itself, looking blindly on the square
with shuttered windows, as though the whole affair had been a vision.

It was no vision, however; for, as I rose to my feet and thus brought my
eyes a little nearer to the level of the fanlight over the door, I saw
that, though the day had still some hours to run, the hall lamps had
been lighted and left burning. Plainly, then, guests were expected, and
were not expected before night. For whom, I asked myself with
indignation, were such secret preparations likely to be made? Although
no prude, I am a woman of decided views upon morality; if my house, to
which my husband had brought me, was to serve in the character of a
_petite maison_, I saw myself forced, however unwillingly, into a new
course of litigation; and, determined to return and know the worst, I
hastened to my hotel for dinner.

I was at my post by ten. The night was clear and quiet; the moon rode
very high and put the lamps to shame; and the shadow below the chestnut
was black as ink. Here, then, I ensconced myself on the low parapet,
with my back against the railings, face to face with the moonlit front
of my old home, and ruminating gently on the past. Time fled; eleven
struck on all the city clocks; and presently after I was aware of the
approach of a gentleman of stately and agreeable demeanour. He was
smoking as he walked; his light paletot, which was open, did not conceal
his evening clothes; and he bore himself with a serious grace that
immediately awakened my attention. Before the door of this house he took
a pass-key from his pocket, quietly admitted himself, and disappeared
into the lamp-lit hall.

He was scarcely gone when I observed another and a much younger man
approaching hastily from the opposite side of the square. Considering
the season of the year and the genial mildness of the night, he was
somewhat closely muffled up; and as he came, for all his hurry, he kept
looking nervously behind him. Arrived before my door, he halted and set
one foot upon the step, as though about to enter; then, with a sudden
change, he turned and began to hurry away; halted a second time, as if
in painful indecision; and lastly, with a violent gesture, wheeled
about, returned straight to the door, and rapped upon the knocker. He
was almost immediately admitted by the first arrival.

My curiosity was now broad awake. I made myself as small as I could in
the very densest of the shadow, and waited for the sequel. Nor had I
long to wait. From the same side of the square a second young man made
his appearance, walking slowly and softly, and like the first, muffled
to the nose. Before the house he paused; looked all about him with a
swift and comprehensive glance; and seeing the square lie empty in the
moon and lamp-light, leaned far across the area railings and appeared to
listen to what was passing in the house. From the dining-room there came
the report of a champagne cork, and following upon that, the sound of
rich and manly laughter. The listener took heart of grace, produced a
key, unlocked the area gate, shut it noiselessly behind him, and
descended the stair. Just when his head had reached the level of the
pavement, he turned half round and once more raked the square with a
suspicious eyeshot. The mufflings had fallen lower round his neck; the
moon shone full upon him; and I was startled to observe the pallor and
passionate agitation of his face.

I could remain no longer passive. Persuaded that something deadly was
afoot, I crossed the roadway and drew near the area railings. There was
no one below; the man must therefore have entered the house, with what
purpose I dreaded to imagine. I have at no part of my career lacked
courage; and now, finding the area gate was merely laid-to, I pushed it
gently open and descended the stairs. The kitchen door of the house,
like the area gate, was closed but not fastened. It flashed upon me
that the criminal was thus preparing his escape; and the thought, as it
confirmed the worst of my suspicions, lent me new resolve. I entered the
house; and being now quite reckless of my life, I shut and locked the
door.

From the dining-room above I could hear the pleasant tones of a voice in
easy conversation. On the ground floor all was not only profoundly
silent, but the darkness seemed to weigh upon my eyes. Here, then, I
stood for some time, having thrust myself uncalled into the utmost
peril, and being destitute of any power to help or interfere. Nor will I
deny that fear had begun already to assail me, when I became aware, all
at once and as though by some immediate but silent incandescence, of a
certain glimmering of light upon the passage floor. Towards this I
groped my way with infinite precaution; and having come at length as far
as the angle of the corridor, beheld the door of the butler's pantry
standing just ajar and a narrow thread of brightness falling from the
chink. Creeping still closer, I put my eye to the aperture. The man sat
within upon a chair, listening, I could see, with the most rapt
attention. On a table before him he had laid a watch, a pair of steel
revolvers, and a bull's-eye lantern. For one second many contradictory
theories and projects whirled together in my head; the next, I had
slammed the door and turned the key upon the malefactor. Surprised at my
own decision, I stood and panted, leaning on the wall. From within the
pantry not a sound was to be heard; the man, whatever he was, had
accepted his fate without a struggle, and now, as I hugged myself to
fancy, sat frozen with terror and looking for the worst to follow. I
promised myself that he should not be disappointed; and the better to
complete my task, I turned to ascend the stairs.

The situation, as I groped my way to the first floor, appealed to me
suddenly by my strong sense of humour. Here was I, the owner of the
house, burglariously present in its walls; and there, in the
dining-room, were two gentlemen, unknown to me, seated complacently at
supper, and only saved by my promptitude from some surprising or deadly
interruption. It were strange if I could not manage to extract the
matter of amusement from so unusual a situation.

Behind this dining-room there is a small apartment intended for a
library. It was to this that I cautiously groped my way; and you will
see how fortune had exactly served me. The weather, I have said, was
sultry: in order to ventilate the dining-room and yet preserve the
uninhabited appearance of the mansion to the front, the window of the
library had been widely opened and the door of communication between the
two apartments left ajar. To this interval I now applied my eye.

Wax tapers, set in silver candlesticks, shed their chastened brightness
on the damask of the tablecloth and the remains of a cold collation of
the rarest delicacy. The two gentlemen had finished supper, and were now
trifling with cigars and maraschino; while in a silver spirit-lamp,
coffee of the most captivating fragrance was preparing in the fashion of
the East. The elder of the two, he who had first arrived, was placed
directly facing me; the other was set on his left hand. Both, like the
man in the butler's pantry, seemed to be intently listening; and on the
face of the second I thought I could perceive the marks of fear. Oddly
enough, however, when they came to speak, the parts were found to be
reversed.

"I assure you," said the elder gentleman, "I not only heard the slamming
of a door, but the sound of very guarded footsteps."

"Your highness was certainly deceived," replied the other. "I am endowed
with the acutest hearing, and I can swear that not a mouse has rustled."
Yet the pallor and contraction of his features were in total discord
with the tenor of his words.

His highness (whom, of course, I readily divined to be Prince Florizel)
looked at his companion for the least fraction of a second; and though
nothing shook the easy quiet of his attitude, I could see that he was
far from being duped. "It is well," said he: "let us dismiss the topic.
And now, sir, that I have very freely explained the sentiments by which
I am directed, let me ask you, according to your promise, to imitate my
frankness."

"I have heard you," replied the other, "with great interest."

"With singular patience," said the prince politely.

"Ay, your highness, and with unlooked-for sympathy," returned the young
man. "I know not how to tell the change that has befallen me. You have,
I must suppose, a charm, to which even your enemies are subject." He
looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and visibly blanched. "So late!"
he cried. "Your highness--God knows I am now speaking from the
heart--before it be too late, leave this house!"

The prince glanced once more at his companion, and then very
deliberately shook the ash from his cigar. "That is a strange remark,"
said he; "and _à propos de bottes_, I never continue a cigar when once
the ash is fallen; the spell breaks, the soul of the flavour flies away,
and there remains but the dead body of tobacco; and I make it a rule to
throw away that husk and choose another." He suited the action to the
words.

"Do not trifle with my appeal," resumed the young man, in tones that
trembled with emotion. "It is made at the price of my honour and to the
peril of my life. Go--go now! lose not a moment; and if you have any
kindness for a young man, miserably deceived indeed, but not devoid of
better sentiments, look not behind you as you leave."

"Sir," said the prince, "I am here upon your honour; I assure you upon
mine that I shall continue to rely upon that safeguard. The coffee is
ready; I must again trouble you, I fear." And with a courteous movement
of the hand, he seemed to invite his companion to pour out the coffee.

The unhappy young man rose from his seat. "I appeal to you," he cried,
"by every holy sentiment, in mercy to me, if not in pity to yourself,
begone before it is too late."

"Sir," replied the prince, "I am not readily accessible to fear; and if
there is one defect to which I must plead guilty, it is that of a
curious disposition. You go the wrong way about to make me leave this
house, in which I play the part of your entertainer; and, suffer me to
add, young man, if any peril threaten us, it was of your contriving, not
of mine."

"Alas, you do not know to what you condemn me," cried the other. "But I
at least will have no hand in it." With these words he carried his hand
to his pocket, hastily swallowed the contents of a phial, and, with the
very act, reeled back and fell across his chair upon the floor. The
prince left his place and came and stood above him, where he lay
convulsed upon the carpet. "Poor moth!" I heard his highness murmur.
"Alas, poor moth! must we again inquire which is the more
fatal--weakness or wickedness? And can a sympathy with ideas, surely not
ignoble in themselves, conduct a man to this dishonourable death?"

By this time I had pushed the door open and walked into the room. "Your
highness," said I, "this is no time for moralising; with a little
promptness we may save this creature's life; and as for the other, he
need cause you no concern, for I have him safely under lock and key."

The prince had turned about upon my entrance, and regarded me certainly
with no alarm, but with a profundity of wonder which almost robbed me of
my self-possession. "My dear madam," he cried at last, "and who the
devil are you?"

I was already on the floor beside the dying man. I had, of course, no
idea with what drug he had attempted his life, and I was forced to try
him with a variety of antidotes. Here were both oil and vinegar, for the
prince had done the young man the honour of compounding for him one of
his celebrated salads; and of each of these I administered from a
quarter to half a pint, with no apparent efficacy. I next plied him
with the hot coffee, of which there may have been near upon a quart.

"Have you no milk?" I inquired.

"I fear, madam, that milk has been omitted," returned the prince.

"Salt, then," said I; "salt is a revulsive. Pass the salt."

"And possibly the mustard?" asked his highness, as he offered me the
contents of the various salt-cellars poured together on a plate.

"Ah," cried I, "the thought is excellent! Mix me about half a pint of
mustard, drinkably dilute."

Whether it was the salt or the mustard, or the mere combination of so
many subversive agents, as soon as the last had been poured over his
throat, the young sufferer obtained relief.

"There!" I exclaimed, with natural triumph, "I have saved a life!"

"And yet, madam," returned the prince, "your mercy may be cruelly
disguised. Where the honour is lost, it is, at least, superfluous to
prolong the life."

"If you had led a life as changeable as mine, your highness," I replied,
"you would hold a very different opinion. For my part, and after
whatever extremity of misfortune or disgrace, I should still count
to-morrow worth a trial."

"You speak as a lady, madam," said the prince; "and for such you speak
the truth. But to men there is permitted such a field of licence, and
the good behaviour asked of them is at once so easy and so little, that
to fail in that is to fall beyond the reach of pardon. But will you
suffer me to repeat a question, put to you at first, I am afraid, with
some defect of courtesy; and to ask you once more, who you are and how I
have the honour of your company?"

"I am the proprietor of the house in which we stand," said I.

"And still I am at fault," returned the prince.

But at that moment the timepiece on the mantelshelf began to strike the
hour of twelve; and the young man, raising himself upon one elbow, with
an expression of despair and horror that I have never seen excelled,
cried lamentably: "Midnight? oh, just God!" We stood frozen to our
places, while the tingling hammer of the timepiece measured the
remaining strokes; nor had we yet stirred, so tragic had been the tones
of the young man, when the various bells of London began in turn to
declare the hour. The timepiece was inaudible beyond the walls of the
chamber where we stood; but the second pulsation of Big Ben had scarcely
throbbed into the night, before a sharp detonation rang about the house.
The prince sprang for the door by which I had entered; but quick as he
was, I yet contrived to intercept him.

"Are you armed?" I cried.

"No, madam," replied he. "You remind me appositely; I will take the
poker."

"The man below," said I, "has two revolvers. Would you confront him at
such odds?"

He paused, as though staggered in his purpose. "And yet, madam," said
he, "we cannot continue to remain in ignorance of what has passed."

"No!" cried I. "And who proposes it? I am as curious as yourself, but
let us rather send for the police; or, if your highness dreads a
scandal, for some of your own servants."

"Nay, madam," he replied, smiling, "for so brave a lady, you surprise
me. Would you have me, then, send others where I fear to go myself."

"You are perfectly right," said I, "and I was entirely wrong. Go, in
God's name, and I will hold the candle!"

Together, therefore, we descended to the lower story, he carrying the
poker, I the light; and together we approached and opened the door of
the butler's pantry. In some sort, I believe, I was prepared for the
spectacle that met our eyes; I was prepared, that is, to find the
villain dead, but the rude details of such a violent suicide I was
unable to endure. The prince, unshaken by horror as he had remained
unshaken by alarm, assisted me with the most respectful gallantry to
regain the dining-room.

There we found our patient, still, indeed, deadly pale, but vastly
recovered and already seated on a chair. He held out both his hands with
a most pitiful gesture of interrogation.

"He is dead," said the prince.

"Alas!" cried the young man, "and it should be I! What do I do, thus
lingering on the stage I have disgraced, while he, my sure comrade,
blameworthy indeed for much, but yet the soul of fidelity, has judged
and slain himself for an involuntary fault? Ah, sir," said he, "and you
too, madam, without whose cruel help I should be now beyond the reach of
my accusing conscience, you behold in me the victim equally of my own
faults and virtues. I was born a hater of injustice; from my most tender
years my blood boiled against Heaven when I beheld the sick, and against
men when I witnessed the sorrows of the poor; the pauper's crust stuck
in my throat when I sat down to eat my dainties, and the cripple child
has set me weeping. What was there in that but what was noble? and yet
observe to what a fall these thoughts have led me! Year after year this
passion for the lost besieged me closer. What hope was there in kings?
what hope in these well-feathered classes that now roll in money? I had
observed the course of history; I knew the burgess, our ruler of to-day,
to be base, cowardly, and dull; I saw him, in every age, combine to pull
down that which was immediately above and to prey upon those that were
below; his dulness, I knew, would ultimately bring about his ruin; I
knew his days were numbered, and yet how was I to wait? how was I to let
the poor child shiver in the rain? The better days, indeed, were coming,
but the child would die before that. Alas, your highness, in surely no
ungenerous impatience I enrolled myself among the enemies of this unjust
and doomed society; in surely no unnatural desire to keep the fires of
my philanthropy alight, I bound myself by an irrevocable oath.

"That oath is all my history. To give freedom to posterity, I had
forsworn my own. I must attend upon every signal; and soon my father
complained of my irregular hours and turned me from his house. I was
engaged in betrothal to an honest girl; from her also I had to part, for
she was too shrewd to credit my inventions and too innocent to be
intrusted with the truth. Behold me, then, alone with conspirators!
Alas! as the years went on, my illusions left me. Surrounded as I was by
the fervent disciples and apologists of revolution, I beheld them daily
advance in confidence and desperation; I beheld myself, upon the other
hand, and with an almost equal regularity, decline in faith. I had
sacrificed all to further that cause in which I still believed; and
daily I began to grow in doubts if we were advancing it indeed. Horrible
was the society with which we warred, but our own means were not less
horrible.

"I will not dwell upon my sufferings; I will not pause to tell you how,
when I beheld young men still free and happy, married, fathers of
children, cheerfully toiling at their work, my heart reproached me with
the greatness and vanity of my unhappy sacrifice. I will not describe to
you how, worn by poverty, poor lodging, scanty food, and an unquiet
conscience, my health began to fail, and in the long nights, as I
wandered bedless in the rainy streets, the most cruel sufferings of the
body were added to the tortures of my mind. These things are not
personal to me; they are common to all unfortunates in my position. An
oath, so light a thing to swear, so grave a thing to break: an oath,
taken in the heat of youth, repented with what sobbings of the heart,
but yet in vain repented, as the years go on: an oath, that was once the
very utterance of the truth of God, but that falls to be the symbol of a
meaningless and empty slavery; such is the yoke that many young men
joyfully assume, and under whose dead weight they live to suffer worse
than death.

"It is not that I was patient. I have begged to be released; but I knew
too much, and I was still refused. I have fled; ay, and for the time
successfully. I reached Paris. I found a lodging in the Rue St. Jacques,
almost opposite the Val de Grâce. My room was mean and bare, but the sun
looked into it towards evening; it commanded a peep of a green garden; a
bird hung by a neighbour's window and made the morning beautiful; and I,
who was sick, might lie in bed and rest myself: I, who was in full
revolt against the principles that I had served, was now no longer at
the beck of the council, and was no longer charged with shameful and
revolting tasks. Oh! what an interval of peace was that! I still dream,
at times, that I can hear the note of my neighbour's bird.

"My money was running out, and it became necessary that I should find
employment. Scarcely had I been three days upon the search, ere I
thought that I was being followed. I made certain of the features of the
man, which were quite strange to me, and turned into a small café, where
I whiled away an hour, pretending to read the papers, but inwardly
convulsed with terror. When I came forth again into the street, it was
quite empty, and I breathed again; but alas, I had not turned three
corners, when I once more observed the human hound pursuing me. Not an
hour was to be lost; timely submission might yet preserve a life which
otherwise was forfeit and dishonoured; and I fled, with what speed you
may conceive, to the Paris agency of the society I served.

"My submission was accepted. I took up once more the hated burthen of
that life; once more I was at the call of men whom I despised and hated,
while yet I envied and admired them. They at least were whole-hearted in
the things they purposed; but I, who had once been such as they, had
fallen from the brightness of my faith, and now laboured, like a
hireling, for the wages of a loathed existence. Ay, sir, to that I was
condemned; I obeyed to continue to live, and lived but to obey.

"The last charge that was laid upon me was the one which has to-night so
tragically ended. Boldly telling who I was, I was to request from your
highness, on behalf of my society, a private audience, where it was
designed to murder you. If one thing remained to me of my old
convictions, it was the hate of kings; and when this task was offered
me, I took it gladly. Alas, sir, you triumphed. As we supped, you gained
upon my heart. Your character, your talents, your designs for our
unhappy country, all had been misrepresented. I began to forget you were
a prince; I began, all too feelingly, to remember that you were a man.
As I saw the hour approach, I suffered agonies untold; and when, at
last, we heard the slamming of the door which announced in my unwilling
ears the arrival of the partner of my crime, you will bear me out with
what instancy I besought you to depart. You would not, alas! and what
could I? Kill you, I could not; my heart revolted, my hand turned back
from such a deed. Yet it was impossible that I should suffer you to
stay; for when the hour struck and my companion came, true to his
appointment, and he, at least, true to our design, I could neither
suffer you to be killed nor yet him to be arrested. From such a tragic
passage, death, and death alone, could save me; and it is no fault of
mine if I continue to exist.

"But you, madam," continued the young man, addressing himself more
directly to myself, "were doubtless born to save the prince and to
confound our purposes. My life you have prolonged; and by turning the
key on my companion, you have made me the author of his death. He heard
the hour strike; he was impotent to help; and thinking himself forfeit
to honour, thinking that I should fall alone upon his highness and
perish for lack of his support, he has turned his pistol on himself."

"You are right," said Prince Florizel: "it was in no ungenerous spirit
that you brought these burthens on yourself; and when I see you so nobly
to blame, so tragically punished, I stand like one reproved. For is it
not strange, madam, that you and I, by practising accepted and
inconsiderable virtues, and commonplace but still unpardonable faults,
should stand here, in the sight of God, with what we call clean hands
and quiet consciences; while this poor youth, for an error that I could
almost envy him, should be sunk beyond the reach of hope?

"Sir," resumed the prince, turning to the young man, "I cannot help you;
my help would but unchain the thunderbolt that overhangs you; and I can
but leave you free."

"And, sir," said I, "as this house belongs to me, I will ask you to have
the kindness to remove the body. You and your conspirators, it appears
to me, can hardly in civility do less."

"It shall be done," said the young man, with a dismal accent.

"And you, dear madam," said the prince, "you, to whom I owe my life, how
can I serve you?"

"Your highness," I said, "to be very plain, this is my favourite house,
being not only a valuable property, but endeared to me by various
associations. I have endless troubles with tenants of the ordinary
class; and at first applauded my good fortune when I found one of the
station of your Master of the Horse. I now begin to think otherwise;
dangers set a siege about great personages; and I do not wish my
tenement to share these risks. Procure me the resiliation of the lease,
and I shall feel myself your debtor."

"I must tell you, madam," replied his highness, "that Colonel Geraldine
is but a cloak for myself; and I should be sorry indeed to think myself
so unacceptable a tenant."

"Your highness," said I, "I have conceived a sincere admiration for your
character; but on the subject of house property I cannot allow the
interference of my feelings. I will, however, to prove to you that there
is nothing personal in my request, here solemnly engage my word that I
will never put another tenant in this house."

"Madam," said Florizel, "you plead your cause too charmingly to be
refused."

Thereupon we all three withdrew. The young man, still reeling in his
walk, departed by himself to seek the assistance of his
fellow-conspirators; and the prince, with the most attentive gallantry,
lent me his escort to the door of my hotel. The next day the lease was
cancelled; nor from that hour to this, though sometimes regretting my
engagement, have I suffered a tenant in this house.




THE SUPERFLUOUS MANSION (_continued_)


As soon as the old lady had finished her relation, Somerset made haste
to offer her his compliments.

"Madam," said he, "your story is not only entertaining but instructive;
and you have told it with infinite vivacity. I was much affected towards
the end, as I held at one time very liberal opinions, and should
certainly have joined a secret society if I had been able to find one.
But the whole tale came home to me; and I was the better able to feel
for you in your various perplexities, as I am myself of somewhat hasty
temper."

"I do not understand you," said Mrs. Luxmore, with some marks of
irritation. "You must have strangely misinterpreted what I have told
you. You fill me with surprise."

Somerset, alarmed by the old lady's change of tone and manner, hurried
to recant.

"Dear Mrs. Luxmore," said he, "you certainly misconstrue my remark. As a
man of somewhat fiery humour, my conscience repeatedly pricked me when I
heard what you had suffered at the hands of persons similarly
constituted."

"Oh, very well indeed," replied the old lady; "and a very proper spirit.
I regret that I have met with it so rarely."

"But in all this," resumed the young man, "I perceive nothing that
concerns myself."

"I am about to come to that," she returned. "And you have already before
you, in the pledge I gave Prince Florizel, one of the elements of the
affair. I am a woman of the nomadic sort, and when I have no case before
the courts I make it a habit to visit continental spas: not that I have
ever been ill; but then I am no longer young, and I am always happy in a
crowd. Well, to come more shortly to the point, I am now on the wing for
Evian; this incubus of a house, which I must leave behind and dare not
let, hangs heavily upon my hands; and I propose to rid myself of that
concern, and do you a very good turn into the bargain, by lending you
the mansion, with all its fittings, as it stands. The idea was sudden;
it appealed to me as humorous; and I am sure it will cause my relatives,
if they should ever hear of it, the keenest possible chagrin. Here,
then, is the key; and when you return at two to-morrow afternoon, you
will find neither me nor my cats to disturb you in your new possession."

So saying, the old lady arose, as if to dismiss her visitor; but
Somerset, looking somewhat blankly on the key, began to protest.

"Dear Mrs. Luxmore," said he, "this is a most unusual proposal. You know
nothing of me, beyond the fact that I displayed both impudence and
t

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