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The Galaxy, June 1877

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Title: The Galaxy, June 1877

Author: Various


        
Release date: April 21, 2010 [eBook #32075]
                Most recently updated: January 6, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GALAXY, JUNE 1877 ***




Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net






THE GALAXY.


VOL. XXIII.--JUNE, 1877.--No. 6.



SPRING LONGING.

What art thou doing here, O Imagination? Go away, I entreat thee by the
gods, as thou didst come, for I want thee not. But thou art come
according to thy old fashion. I am not angry with thee--only go
away.--_Marcus Antoninus._

    Lilac hazes veil the skies.
            Languid sighs
    Breathes the mild, caressing air.
    Pink as coral's branching sprays,
            Orchard ways
    With the blossomed peach are fair.

    Sunshine, cordial as a kiss,
            Poureth bliss
    In this craving soul of mine,
    And my heart her flower-cup
            Lifteth up,
    Thirsting for the draught divine.

    Swift the liquid golden flame
            Through my frame
    Sets my throbbing veins afire.
    Bright, alluring dreams arise,
            Brim mine eyes
    With the tears of strong desire.

    All familiar scenes anear
            Disappear--
    Homestead, orchard, field, and wold.
    Moorish spires and turrets fair
            Cleave the air,
    Arabesqued on skies of gold.

    Lo, my spirit, this May morn,
            Outward borne,
    Over seas hath taken wing:
    Where the mediæval town,
            Like a crown,
    Wears the garland of the Spring.

    Light and sound and odors sweet
            Fill the street;
    Gypsy girls are selling flowers.
    Lean hidalgos turn aside,
            Amorous-eyed,
    'Neath the grim cathedral towers.

    Oh, to be in Spain to-day,
            Where the May
    Recks no whit of good or evil,
    Love and only love breathes she!
            Oh, to be
    'Midst the olive-rows of Seville!

    Or on such a day to glide
            With the tide
    Of the berylline lagoon,
    Through the streets that mirror heaven,
            Crystal paven,
    In the warm Venetian noon.

    At the prow the gondolier
            May not hear,
    May not see our furtive kiss;
    But he lends with cadenced strain
            The refrain
    To our ripe and silent bliss.

    Golden shadows, silver light,
            Burnish bright
    Air and water, domes and skies;
    As in some ambrosial dream,
            On the stream
    Floats our bark in magic wise.

    Oh, to float day long just so!
            Naught to know
    Of the trouble, toil, and fret!
    This is love, and this is May:
            Yesterday
    And to-morrow to forget!

    Whither hast thou, Fancy free,
            Guided me,
    Wild Bohemian sister dear?
    All thy gypsy soul is stirred
            Since yon bird
    Warbled that the Spring was here.

    Tempt no more! I may not follow,
            Like the swallow,
    Gayly on the track of Spring.
    Bounden by an iron fate,
            I must wait,
    Dream and wonder, yearn and sing.

EMMA LAZARUS.


Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by SHELDON &
CO. in the office of Librarian of Congress, at Washington.




A PROGRESSIVE BABY.


LETTER III.

18 STANFIELD GARDENS, }
SOUTH KENSINGTON,     }
May 28, 1875.         }

                     *      *      *      *      *

And there you have us down to date, my Susie. The sunshine and the
crisp breezes, the innocent early teas with cresses and prawns, the
grand long nights full of sleep, have put us all right with the world
again; but after all Brighton's only a bit of West End moved off down
by the sea, and if one must live in London at all, why, it's at its
best for three or four weeks to come. And we're to get off early to
Switzerland this year, for fear that it mayn't be so easy next summer.
For Ronayne's father is clearing away to make him stand for that dreary
territory of hovels and bogs in which the paternal mansion is situate.
Fancy Ronayne an M.P.! And an Irish M.P.! I fight against it--under
cover. The dream of my heart is an _appartement avec tenasse_ in Paris,
and in summer to turn vagrants and tramps as now. It's so unlucky
Ronayne should have been the eldest son: duty, respectability, and the
proprieties have such a much stronger gripe upon him, and we're born
vagabonds, both.

But, what must be, must. Meanwhile I console myself with my
window-gardening. And you should see the house-front!--the balcony that
will be a perfect bower presently. My window-boxes, the gayest mosaics of
color, and the vestibule lined with callas, acacias, and heath--against a
background of ferns and ivy. We were never so magnificent before, and it
was Ronayne's surprise for me when we came back from the sea--he having
given our florist _carte-blanche_; whereas I, bearing a conscience, have
bargained with him always, and carefully counted my pots.

Mrs. Malise's disciplinary Johanna brought her charge for a little
visit to my nursery yesterday. And my heart aches so for that baby!
He's a great child, well made, and with his mother's wonderful
eyes--but so heavy, listless--"Meek as a work'us' child brought up on
skilly," Ronayne renders it--and though he's perfectly clean now, and
comfortably clad, nobody would dream he was a young mother's first
baby, so ornamentless and sombre-hued are his little garments.

Nurse brings back indignant accounts of the way he's left to amuse
himself, or cry his fill, when out for an airing in Kensington Gardens.
"Hours, ma'am, she keep that poor thing a-frettin' or a-sleepin' in his
perambulator, the east wind a-cuttin' about him as draughty as
draughty, while she sits on a bench a-makin' her foolish lace or
talkin' to some of them German bandmen. He never gets taken out, nor
played with, nor has any playthings. It's just cruelty to
animals--that's what it is!" finishes my nursery dragon, who is as
soft-hearted as she is grim of exterior and grammatically independent
in speech.

Mrs. Malise has been absent at suffrage meetings in Scotland and
Ireland for a month past, Miss Hedges told me when dining here just
after our return. Mrs. Stainton, the porcelain widow, was invited also,
and a curious and wonderfully interesting person we find her: the
daintiest small creature--complexion like an ivory painting, deep-set,
seeress eyes, and looking fairly spirit-like for fragility, in her long
black dress and white lace shawl. Nothing could well be more piquant
than to hear this filmy little thing, in a voice that would have fitted
Queen Mab, recount her experiences in the most widely separated circles
of life and thought, or quietly give utterance to quaint, audacious
speculations, as to mysteries that perplex so many of us concerning
this existence and the eternity it preludes. "If there be a hereafter!"
I heard some one answer to a remark of hers. "Ah, that was never a
doubt to me save for a very brief space," she replied. "I am like the
Curé de Ars--'I know some one who would be finely taken in if there
were no Paradise!'" Her exquisiteness of look, the fascinating talk,
the soft, helpless manner are so appealing that one is disposed to
treat her as some wandered denizen of the air and skies, though she
hangs effortless, her whole weight upon one, and there is scarce a
limit to her fine-lady and delicate-organization requirements.

The daughter of a Low Church dean, she became, in her husband's time,
first broad church, then rationalist; after his death, because of
extraordinary, extra natural occurrences that befell her, a
spiritualist, and now she seems to be turning toward Catholicism,
though Miss Hedges, who is a Catholic, shakes her head, and says she
always feels very hopeless of people essentially given to all manner of
vague interpretations, fanciful twistings of simple doctrine, and
æsthetic sentimental mysticism.

"Obedience is in the order of existence," says the little lady. "I long
for authority; I long for a voice I shall not question, to whose
decision I can submit all the questions that torture me."

"I tried to stay my soul with ritualism," she said, talking to Miss H.
and myself when we were alone after dinner, "and at first I thought I
was going to get some comfort out of it. I made my father furious by
entering one of Miss ----'s famous sisterhoods. But it wouldn't do.
Ritualism of course was not more illogical then than now, but the
actors weren't as well up in their parts, and how queer some of our
performances at ---- were! I remember a retreat I made there, in which
I was put into a cell bare of everything save a table and chair, and a
Testament upon the table, and there I was left alone the whole day,
seeing no creature save a Sister who, speechless, thrust my dinner and
tea in at me! You may imagine the imbecile condition in which night
found me.

"And as a punishment for some fault I was ordered to go to communion
for four months without going to confession! Miss ----, our Reverend
Mother, behaved exactly as if she had taken her notions of the external
character and dignities of her office from some swelling, stern, ridiculous
Lady Abbess in a no-popery novel! We undertook everything--teaching,
the care of hospitals, training of servants, district work, Magdalen
houses, and to these active employments we joined the contemplative,
strictly cloistered life! We had no special training for either one of
our labors; we had no completed constitutions or rule, and one was
liable, at any moment, to be whisked from one's quiet cell and sent
alone at night, across the kingdom, to some duty for which one was no
more fitted than a baby or a savage.

"I was set, in the beginning, to clean lamps, and black-lead the
grates, but failed in this business so completely that I was given a
district in East London to afflict with visitations and instructions.
Trying one day to convey some idea of the Real Presence to a voluble
old woman who was one of the sisterhood's most devoted _protégées_, I
said, 'Then, Sally, since you know _who_ is in the church, I hope you
never go in or out without showing proper respect.' 'Oh, yessum,
yessum!' she assured me. 'Indeed, 'm, I allays bobs to the eagle!' (the
brass eagle of the lectern!). With all Sally's bobbings to the eagle
and to us sisters, she was a dreadful old harpy, and made me think
always of two old women my father overheard talking one day at
Cirencester. There is a fund there which was long ago bequeathed by
some pious person for the furnishing small stipends to such aged poor
people as should daily devoutly hear mass. Of course since the revenues
have lapsed into Anglican hands this sum is used now for those who
attend the early service. And this was what my father heard:

"First old crone, _loquitur_: 'These be hard times, Betty. How d'ye
think of getting a livelihood this winter?'

"Second old crone: 'They _be_ hard, for shore, Anne, and I'm a-thinking
of taking to yorly priors (early prayers) for a quarter!'

"One of my droll, dreadful district visitor experiences I shall never
forget. In the process of my visitations I stumbled, one day, into the
room of a woman very haggard and very yellow, but as the woman was
dressed and moving actively about, I had no idea of her having any
special ailment, save dirt. But as soon as she knew who I was, a
visiting Sister, she began to tell me how ill she was--ill of a disease
that not another person in the whole kingdom had--the doctor said
so--spotted leprosy. And how physicians came constantly to see her, and
brought, each one, other physicians--how, in short of a horrible long,
she was a sort of gruesome doctor's pet!

"The woman's husband--for she was married, had eleven children, and
another baby coming soon--was working away at a cobbler's bench in the
room's only window, and she constantly appealed to him: 'Dr. So-and-So
said there wasn't another case like mine in this country, didn't he,
Jim? And he didn't see how it was it hadn't killed me off long ago--you
remember, Jim? And that young Scotch doctor that was so astonished to
see what a family I had--you haven't forgotten him, have you, Jim?' And
the man corroborated all her statements with a pride in having a wife
so uniquely afflicted impossible to describe! Then she insisted I must
see and dress the awful sores that made her shoulders and one breast a
great wound, telling me, as I half fainted over the task, that I didn't
do it half so well as any of the doctors, and begging me, when I had
finished, to stop long enough for her to give me a cup of tea in that
place, insufferable at best with the dirty cobbler and five or six of
the wretched babies, but become, after my _mauvais quart d'heure_ with
the terrible woman, a chamber of horrors in which to delay one further
instant would, I felt, make me daft, or shudderingly sea-sick, for
life!

"I stopped a year and a half in the sisterhood, trying, as I said, to make it
do; but either I'm too logical, or have too keen a sense of the ridiculous,
for the farce of our active-uncloistered-severely-contemplative-enclosed
life, a religious order without a constitution, frowned on by all the
bishops, carrying on its dearest devotional practices in hiding from
all proper ecclesiastical authority, became intolerable to me; and
when, one fine day, there came from 'Reverend Mother' an order to go
and nurse a man ill with typhus--an agricultural laborer living alone
in his cottage--and to my remonstrances that I knew nothing of the
disease, my plea for a companion less ignorant or at least clear
instructions for my own guidance, no answer was vouchsafed save an
oracular assurance that if I did my part of obedience, light would be
given me, I revolted, sent a contumacious message that though I
believed the age of miracles by no means past, I had never seen any
wrought in our order, and could not risk the poor man's life upon so
vague a prospect, and presently bid farewell to my Anglican convent and
to ritualism. Several Sisters have returned to the world since, and
four of these have gone over to Rome. Two of these have married. One,
whom I loved most dearly, is a Poor Clare in Ireland, and the other has
used her fortune to open a crèche, where she works harder than any of
her nurses, and carries, I should say, the lightest heart in London.

"I have no doubt there is more system, more decorum--I use the word in
its literal sense--in the Anglican sisterhoods now. I'm quite amazed
sometimes at the closeness of the imitation of the real thing when I go
to Margaret street, or to St. Alban's--the altars, the lights, the
confessionals, the stations, the black-cassocked figures gliding about,
removing their berettas and dropping on one knee as they pass the
altar--all the furniture; but a dreadful feeling of emptiness--as if the
house's owner had moved away! Do you ever look at the pictures and the
titles of books in the windows of the High Church bookshops? What would
have been thought of them five years ago even? And at ----'s in Oxford
street, a High Church friend tells me, they have a room into which you
may be ushered by inquiring for the 'Penitential Department,' if the card
bearing the name of a clerical voucher, which you must present, be
satisfactory, and where you may purchase disciplines--nail-studded
armlets, waist-belts--perhaps hair shirts, though I don't remember that
they figured in my friend's list.

"And, two years ago, I think it was, I witnessed a little scene that
was as extraordinary as it was absurd. I was coming up from Cromer, and
our train had halted for the usual time in the station at Norwich. It's
a large station, trains constantly rolling in and out, and crowds of
passengers, guards, porters flying about. While we waited, above the
din suddenly was heard a singular and regular thud! thud! coming down
the platform. Thud! thud! on it came, and the noise, and the queer,
sudden hush of most of the other racket made us all look eagerly out to
see what it could be. _It_ was a progression--a procession--a man in
soutane, barefooted, I believe, preceded by some sort of a servitor
carrying a monstrous book--breviary, 'Livre des Heures'--I know not
what, and a tall wooden crosier, whose foot it was that made the thud!
thud! At a little distance behind the man in the soutane, whom I
recognized directly as Mr. Lyne--the famous Father Ignatius, a self
constituted Benedictine Abbot--followed two Anglican Sisters. The
servitor and Father Ignatius betook themselves into a first-class
carriage, the Sisters remaining outside, and presently the crosier head
was thrust out of the window, and Father Ignatius appeared behind it
with hand outstretched to bless the Sisters, who knelt devoutly on the
platform to receive the benediction. Up to this point everybody had
behaved with wonderful restraint; but the last stroke was too much, and
it was amid a perfect scream of laughter from passengers, officials,
cabmen, and _gamins_, that the train steamed out of the station,
bearing the Benedictine Abbot away, but surely not leaving the lambs of
the flock comfortless."

And so she goes on for as long as you like. She has been everywhere.
She has known quantities of out-of-the-way people. She is ready at
every turn with a fresh story, an apposite bit of experience, and darts
in an instant from the perfect mimicry of a popular vicar we know, who
preaches in lavender kids, and leaving his cure of souls for a month's
holiday, pathetically from the pulpit entreats our Lord to look after
his charge until its proper shepherd returns, to some speculation
concerning personal accountability, an annunciation of the
reasonableness of purgatory, and wondering as to its various forms of
discipline for individual souls, or to dwell on minute phases of the
preservation of identity, distinctive and original character after
death, etc., and manifests altogether such an at-homeness with the
unseen world that, listening to her, I half expect phantom eyes will
look into mine if I glance back over either shoulder, bodiless
somethings start forward from dusky corners, the very sweep of my own
drawing-room curtains gets eerie, a what-not or a tabouret becomes a
tripod, my unsubstantial small guest is a priestess--and I'm glad when
Ronayne's voice breaks in, "All in the dark, the fire at its last coal,
no tea or coffee. Mrs. Stainton, you're a syren!"

Her own little sitting-room in the associate house is as heterogeneous
as herself--the room lined with soft comforts, the air heavy with the
fragrance of a profusion of flowers, the room's mistress nearly lost in
the capaciousness of a most luxurious lounging chair, her table piled
with ascetic literature; and in this chamber I encountered the other
day the very oddest of all the peculiar people to whom my friendship
for "little Malaise" has introduced me--a Miss Beauclerc, a short,
stout, dark, coarse-skinned woman of fifty odd, hair cropped close, and
an obstinate, honest, horse face.

She was exhibiting her own "spirit drawings"--mad scaramouches, things
like designs for eastern embroidery, accurate representations of
various portions of the kingdom of heaven, she assured me, and a
quantity of utterly purposeless collections of strokes and dots, to
which she gave names that would have been blasphemous in any but a
lunatic's mouth. How she explained them! How fondly she looked at them!
and what anguish she told me she endured lest they should be injured,
or perish in some unworthy way. This woman believes herself to be the
spirit bride of ----! Can you fancy it? one of the most fervent,
poetic, spiritual, gifted of all Anglican divines. She says that since
his death he has been constantly near her. She sees him often, leads
the life he prescribes, making and shunning acquaintances at his
direction, going from place to place, crossing the ocean twice even at
his pleasure. Finally she showed a photograph--the faithfulest possible
presentment of her own unideal face and person, with, floating above,
arms extended in protecting angel guise, a mistily outlined, veiled
figure surmounted by the refined, beautiful face known to everybody in
the later editions of his poems, and in the windows of church
bookshops--the poor clergyman who is allowed to rest neither in his
grave nor in any unknown country beyond. It is hard for him, hard for
Mrs. ----, were she to hear of this post-mortem masquerading and
"affinity," hard for the deluded woman who wanders about the world
alone with her crazy fancies, repudiated by her kindred, and plundered
by the brigandish among her co-believers.

Here, too, I met again the tall, thin young lady, heroine of the device
for frightening small bores--the Plymouth Sister's daughter. We talked
of a good many things, but chiefly of marriage, and the position of
unmarried women in England. The girl was as simply frank as a child.
Matrimony, and matrimony alone, offered any career to women in England.
And upon Mrs. Stainton's saying that despite her own perfect
marriage--a marriage for love, and the union so entire that there
lurked no shadowy region in her soul of which she could not make her
husband as free as herself to enter--yet all that she had seen of life
made her feel sure that, beyond a few rare exceptions, it mattered not,
ten years after marriage, whether the match had been for love solely,
or arranged, or a _mariage de convenance_, the girl assented; somewhat
bitterly remarked that ideals were very well for a heroic life, but
terrible drawbacks in the world of to-day, and that any woman would do
better for herself to accept any reasonably suitable offer than to
cling to an impossible dream, or insist upon a great amount of
sentiment. "It ought to be enough," said this girl of the period, "for
a woman to be able to decently respect a man who has the means of
placing her in such conditions as she thinks will suit her. And men do
very well without sentiment. They have their professions, their
business, their friends, their clubs. It is quite enough for them if
their wives are fairly good housekeepers and mothers, presentable at
head of their tables, pleasant hostesses in their drawing-rooms. It
sounds very mean, but what is a girl to do? We may be most of us clever
enough and tolerably well educated, but there are not among us many
brilliant geniuses who can find all comfort and happiness in a life
devoted, wholly to art or literature. What is one of the mediocre mass
to do? It's not genteel to do this, it's unfeminine to do that; one
can't stir in any direction that would have in it some spirit, some
earnest, something worth while.

"You can always do good, they tell us. I dare say; so can men; but how
many among them would like to be recommended, as life occupation, to go
making impertinent raids into poor people's houses to tell them they're
untidy, when a family has but one room to live in, and there's but one
water tap in the court, and two or three flights of stairs over which
to carry every drop; or that they're ill-smelling, and will have fever,
when an open drain and the dust bin are lodged just under the window,
and somebody's great high wall cuts off every ray of sunshine; or that
they don't know how to manage because they fare ill, when a half dozen
people must keep life in them and some covering on them on fifteen
shillings a week? Oh, I'm sick of it all! Look at mamma! She _lives_ in
jails, up alleys, in soup kitchens and dispensaries, and we girls cut
out and make up flannels, and knew about relief tickets before we could
speak, and it's all just pouring water into a sieve! Mamma's always
in agonies about some _protégée_ she's placed somewhere, who has
absconded with the family plate and wardrobe. Her people are always
getting drunk, fighting, or cheating her in some monstrous way. Her
nicest girls run off with a strolling theatre company, or to dance in
the ballet. There's no end to her miseries, and the people she spends
her whole time, strength, and all the money she can spare and beg upon
are not really much better off in the end. But even if they were? Mamma
is mamma, and I am myself, and we're differing stars. No, I stick to my
text. To be only a commonly contented married woman, with the shelter
and freedom of a wife's position, with a house to keep, children and
servants to look after, and with a certain amount of social influence,
is better than to subside into a grim or fidgetty old maid in lodgings,
with a dog and three-volume novels to get through the days and years
with; to be snubbed and sneered at by men; to have, when one's hair is
white as time can make it, the privilege of walking meekly out to
dinner behind one's grand niece, a silly chit of eighteen, married a
twelvemonth--and nobody to care whether one lives or dies, unless
perhaps a Bath chair man.

"Matrimony's the only career for women in England, but we ought to be
trained for it on Gradgrind principles. As it is, we're far too
æsthetic and sentimental for the mates we must have--if any. Poetry and
the stories of fine, gracious, self-sacrificing lives ought to be
suppressed; they're ruinous reading for this nineteenth century." And
so on and on.

"There's reason for that poor girl's bitterness," said Mrs. Stainton
when we were again alone. "A dozen years ago, in her first and second
seasons out, a more charming creature it would have been hard to
find--ingenuous, sunny tempered, a dashing, sparkling blonde beauty,
full of Irish quickness and fun, and a favorite wherever she went.
Unluckily she met Ward Cotterell--now one of the editors of 'The
Phare'--then a radiant, double first, handsome, chivalric, but as poor
and debt-laden as he was clever, and the pair fell desperately in love.
Mrs. Dixon wouldn't let them call themselves engaged. She had crippled
her own fortune, and Kate had sacrificed a great part of her own
portion, to clear a spendthrift eldest son and brother of his
difficulties, and start him afresh in Ceylon, so that aid on their part
was impossible, and Cotterell, after a year or so's trying vainly in
this and that direction, for an income, gave up the struggle, married
an heiress, who paid his debts, brought him £40,000 then, and has
inherited since £60,000, and within six months after his marriage had
his place on the 'Phare' offered him, with a salary of £1,200 a year.
'What would I not have given a year ago for any sort of hard work that
would have made me sure of £500 a year?' he said to some friend who
knew the little story.

"Poor Kate kept up pretty well. 'What else _could_ he do?' she always
says. 'He had no income, and mine would have barely given us shelter.'
But she refused offer after offer for years. Now, when she finds
admiration less freely forthcoming, and is utterly weary of everything
she has tried, or believes is in store for her, I dare say she fancies
she regrets the lost chances, but she's too genuine to make a _mariage
de convenance_, let her talk as cynically as she will.

"As for Cotterell, he hasn't a money anxiety in the world, and is
reckoned one of the most brilliant leader writers in London; but his
wife is the most commonplace woman alive--no more a companion to him
than a housemaid would be; and Cotterell's not one of the clever men
who like women to be pillows, and pillows only. He has given up
society, save that of men, almost entirely; lives in his study and his
room in the 'Phare' building, and his talk, when one meets him, is a
mixture of fatalism and wormwood, depressing to the last degree. No
hero he, and yet his fate has plenty of compensations that Kate's
lacks--power, work, and two or three children that have inherited his
wit as well as his handsome looks.

"Oh, what a world it is!--a world of infinite pettinesses. I'm
dreadfully poor and cowardly myself, but I've always had the greatest
reverence for the gift of immortality, and I used to think if I could
have chosen, I would have been born and then have died directly. But
now that I believe unbaptized babies and people whose goodness, however
perfect, is only natural, will have, in another existence, but natural
beatitude, and as such a state wouldn't at all satisfy me for an
eternity, I should have to tarry long enough to be baptized, and after
that one can't wish to run away directly from the foes one has just
promised to war against. A soul _not_ such a responsibility, and is
always thrusting in to complicate and confuse matters!

"But, do you know, I think so often what an admirable, harmonious,
earthly preface to eternal bliss in the natural order would Anglicanism
be--Anglicanism of the moderate type, a little quickened with the
evangelical element, but neither high nor low. The life, as I remember
it in the close at ----, was so pleasant, so decorous, so amiable, so
full of good, comfortable, luxurious things, so ladylike and
gentlemanly, so reputable. One kept the commandments mainly; one was
never anything but high-bred and high-toned; one did one's duty
too--taught a little in the schools; looked after the rheumatic old
bodies in cottages delightfully picturesque to sketch, but dark and
damp as graves to live in; handed buns and tea at the school treats;
one wasn't always thinking about delicate matters of conscience, about
renunciation, self-abnegation, and what it must mean to be a soldier
under a captain who neither lived delicately, nor slept softly, nor was
used to stately shelter--a crucified head whose arms are the
instruments of the Passion--and how well off one's body was!"

And I've been--no, I've been bidden to the Dialectical Society. You
don't know what that is, my barbaric New Zealander? And I didn't know
either when Mr. Malise sent me tickets for one evening, specially
urging my attendance, as there would be something well worth hearing--a
paper on "Celibacy" read by its author, a gifted young girl of only
twenty-two!

I took my tickets to my liege. "Ronayne, fount of wisdom and light,
whatever may the Dialectical Society be?"

"The Dialectical Society, madam, is a body of men and women who meet to
rake up, turn over, and discuss to all their verges subjects which the
weaker mass of mortals think upon only on compulsion, with fear and
trembling, and in mental sackcloth and ashes. And pray, what have you
to do with Dialecticals, Eve? We are _not_ going there, if that's what
those tickets mean!"

"Oh, Adam! And why not? Because I'm, unluckily, married, am I to stop
trying to improve myself, and not care to know what grand heights
happier, unhampered women are scaling? And, Adam, only see, here's to
be a paper read by a young lady only twenty-two, Mr. Malise says, and
there couldn't be anything so very dreadful to hear in the little
composition of an innocent young creature like that!"

"'Subject, Celibacy, by Eliza Stella Greatheart, M.D.,'" read Ronayne.
"Humph! charming young creature! Well, madam Lil, you'll have to
imagine what the medical young lady will say on the state she's proved
to such ripeness of years, for you're not likely to hear, and Mr.
Malise has wasted his tickets. And as if you cared what anybody could
say about single blessedness--a woman with an angel in the nursery
crib, and a husband who breathes but to serve her! Go away this
minute!" And I left monseigneur to his _moutons_, a little huffed, no
doubt, at being interrupted in the fine middle of a working
morning--always "The Growth of Language"; and you should see the pile
of MSS. I used to copy for him, but lately it has taken so much time to
sketch my baby! Every new attitude is prettier than the last, and every
day adds a charm. You need not laugh; I never had a baby before. Just
wait until you know for yourself! I've painted the darling twice, once
for Ronayne's father, though a little against the grain, for the old
gentleman thinks it dreadfully _infra dig._ that I, a lady born, and I
most especially a lady wed, should ever have been publicly catalogued
as an artist in exhibition lists and newspaper notices, and have sold
the labor of my hands, eyes, and brain in the marketplace. What would
happen if he caught sudden sight of a memento that always goes with me
in one of my boxes--a little tin sign, my first one; and how proud I
was of it!

FRAULEIN LILIAN MACFARLANE.


I don't like, for the family's sake, to imagine. When Ronayne gave him
the picture on his birthday, our joint offering, my work set in the
loveliest frame Ronayne could find, he couldn't help being pleased, and
he couldn't help knowing it was baby's very self; but if the picture
had been the work of a paid artist, I know he would have been
wonderfully soothed. The picture was on exhibition for some days in the
morning room, and being one day in the conservatory with Ronayne, I
heard his father expatiating upon the striking likeness that had been
happily caught, to a lady visitor. Presently I heard her read the
signature, "Lil. De Vere, del., 1873." "Why, it is your
daughter-in-law's work! How charming for a mother to be able to paint
such an admirable portrait of her child. That must double the picture's
value to you!"

And the _beau père_ hemmed and hawed, and made the general inarticulate
noises of an Englishman embarrassed, or wishful to make an impressive
speech, and finally got out:

"Aw, yes, yes--of course! A nice and amateur talent has Mrs. De Vere."

"Nice amateur talent!" I was fit to fly at him, and only the
brutal--yes, the brutal--grasp of my husband kept me from rushing into
the room and proclaiming "Mrs. De Vere's" antecedents--her artistic
career sketched in a few bold touches.

The world would have ended then and there. But how delightful to have
seen, first, his looks of blank horror at the idea of a daughter-in-law
who had been used to rough it, and to make her little money go a
fabulously long way.

"This is the daughter of Prof. Macfarlane!" he introduces me proudly
sometimes. I wonder if he thinks a poor scientific man like papa could
send all his young ravens about first-class, or keep a maid and a
governess with one in various continental cities where she chose, as an
eccentric whim, to abide and study art? What would he have said to my
gloves in those earlier days when I earned nothing, and most of my
allowance, beyond board and lodging, went for paints, and four pairs of
dark, carefully chosen gloves had to go through the year? What to my
lodgings at the tailor's--a poor cobbler-tailor, in Dresden? What to my
lunches of _Wurst_ beer and black bread? What to the concerts, where,
in smoke and a three-penny seat, I heard music as good as plenty which
costs me ten shillings to a guinea in London? What to all the
cheek-by-jowl encounters with the peasants in our cheap, rapturously
happy sketching tours? Bah! the poor Irishman! As if he could guess
anything about it! Why should I think twice of his "amateur talent" and
other little pin-pricks when the stiff, starved man never had, in his
whole life, one such happy day of honest work, utter freedom, and
simplest, blissfullest pleasures as have been mine by scores? Be easy,
Ronayne. Not for the Bohemian daughter-in-law shall apoplexy smite the
sovereign of Castle _Starched-stiff-O_!--which sacrilegious parody
shall be my only revenge.

And if I portray my baby in every week of her life, her father turns
her to account no less. She is beginning to chatter like a wren, and
Ronayne has a notebook devoted to her earliest attempts at speech--the
sounds, as she is progressively able to make them--the easily-conquered
ones, the impregnable rock-fortresses, the turns, substituted letters.
Sometimes I get quite furious over this anatomical process. My darling
says something with the dearest, sweetest, small voice:

"Oh, Ronayne!" I cry. "Did you hear? Three words together--'Pease,
papa, tugar!'" And I smother her in ecstasy.

"Yes, love," says Ronayne. "And do you notice how she can manage s
before a, and not before u? This morning I shook her, and nurse asked
her, 'What does papa do?' 'S-ake a baby,' she answered--but she never
says sugar. And there's the same----"

"Oh, you vivisecter," I broke in; "I'll have you to know, sir, that
_my_ baby's pretty lispings are not to be treated like the rudimental
language of a philologist's offspring! Put up that abominable book this
instant! Did a cruel father, my lammie, spear his own child with a
wicked pin, and stick her up in a case?"

I _am_ a happy woman, Susie. Too happy; I'm frightened at it. You, may
be, don't see where this comes in. If you don't, never mind. My heart
_does_ run over nowadays for all sorts of reasons, and no-reasons.

                     *      *      *      *      *

Later on Ronayne told me, apropos of the Dialectical, that his
objection was like the Frenchman's to the fox-hunt--"he'd been," if you
please--went with Dr. Thunder and the Truth-Seeker just before our trip
to Brighton. Then the subject under discussion was marriage, and Lady
----'s son read the paper--a long argument against monogamic marriage:
In the light of experience and human reason it was monstrous to make
the promises required at the altar; monogamic marriage fettered man,
made his best capabilities impossible, made women hypocrites and
slaves, made love commercial, was physiologically a cruelty and a
mistake, and so on, and so on. "You don't love Lady ----'s son. You
would love him less had you heard the things he found it possible to
say before the fifty or sixty ladies who found it possible to listen to
him, and to take some active part in the discussion that succeeded.

"They called loudly upon Dr. Thunder to speak; but he refused to rise,
preferring, I suppose, to hear how well his disciples could acquit
themselves; for he is the author of a work upon physiology which is
nick-named the 'Social Science Bible'--a book I believe to be one of
the most mischievous that has appeared within recent years--materialistic
to the last degree, degrading man, disorganizing society.

"Over a glass of wine afterward, Mr. Feldwick--I beg your pardon, the
Truth-Seeker--told me a pleasant little history of Lady ----'s son. He
says the man had, as a child and youth, a thoroughly good nature,
frank, placable, extraordinarily loving and generous, and that then he
bade fair to achieve great things as a naturalist.

"But Lady ----, who had had a hard experience of matrimony, with a
husband whose only merit was his early death, lost, when this son was
sixteen, her only other child, a boy of twelve--not an imbecile, but a
slow, feeble-minded, gentle, and very beautiful child to whom mother
and brother were passionately devoted.

"Lady ---- was nearly frantic at this loss: would see no one; retired
for a year or so to a desolate Scotch place they have, and then
suddenly went abroad. There she flew restlessly from Algeria to St.
Petersburg and Norway for awhile, seen everywhere, but nowhere long;
then followed several quieter years when she spent her time chiefly at
Berlin, Geneva, and Paris, forming in these places a large circle of
acquaintances among the most revolutionary spirits of Europe. By and by
they, mother and son, came back to London, but so changed--she in
thought and speech, he in all things--that their old friends and
kindred scarce knew how, comfortably, to maintain any intercourse with
them, and the son, at least, seemed to desire that all old ties should
be snapped asunder. The mother was for ever declaiming vague,
inconsequent tirades against all things that are; the son was cynical,
rough, disagreeable to an insufferable extent, and in their
drawing-rooms a quiet, _borné_ old friend was sure to encounter a
tremendous procession of the emancipated--the reddest of reds, unwashed
agitators of all tongues and hues, aggressive free-thinkers, poets
screaming mad indecencies and blasphemies to vindicate the office of
art; women whose mission it was, by nude dancing, posing, acting, to
educate humanity and lift it to that plane whereon to the pure all
things are pure; men of science standing on dreary pedestals of comely
things they have shattered--a procession, in short, no one of whose
members the humdrum old acquaintance would care to face a second time.

"More discouraging than all was a story that began to be whispered
among the people who had known the family most intimately in the
earlier days--the story of a young girl, a distant connection of Lady
----'s husband, who had been left an orphan when only a child, almost
friendless and quite penniless, and had been, thanks to Lady ----, most
carefully trained abroad to fill the position of musical governess, the
girl having extraordinary aptitude for music. Her studies over, she
accompanied Lady ---- during a year or two of her later wanderings on
the continent, and returned with her to London, where she soon obtained
several good teaching engagements, and sang with great success at
concerts during one season. A very pretty, winning creature she was,
Mr. Feldwick said: a dark, rich-tinted face, where every emotion
mirrored itself, and a manner as joyous, impulsive, frank as a child's,
joined to the caressing coquetry of a Frenchwoman. She spoke three or
four languages as well as English; her dancing was a thing to see in
this awkward island; and the child was altogether so fresh and sweet
that no one wondered that Lady ---- insisted that her _protégée_ must
not think of finding shelter save with her.

"But young ---- was not less sensible than his mother to the girl's
charm, and it presently became evident that he had the child's whole
heart in return. And now began difficulties. For years Lady ---- had
declaimed against the bondage, the hideous wrongs and wretchednesses of
marriage, and had never tired in depicting a glorious earth-life in the
future when the free man and woman should love each other because they
loved--but be held to no duty of loving, no responsibility--free as the
air to come and go; and young ----, fed on such food, companioned as he
had always been, was far more vehement than his mother upon the
subject, and had sworn by all his gods that civilized marriage should
never count him among its victims.

"He told the girl he loved her, but that she knew he could not marry
her; that the fetters of marriage would kill love in him; and he would
rather assume them for any woman in the world than herself. The girl
would have married him at a word; on her part there was the utter
surrender of an adoring affection; but what would it be to have Herbert
without his love?

"And she had not been so intimately a member of that household without
coming to share its opinions and sentiments, so she declared that
Herbert should give her his love, make no sacrifice for her, sully the
ethereal nature of their relation with no worldly care. They were to be
that grand pair, the coming man and woman, prophesied by Lady ---- and
her philosophers. But, most astonishingly to the young people, here
Lady ---- failed them. The coming man and woman were all very
fine--some ages hence--but to have them appear in conventional,
censorious London, in the century we live in, and in the bosom of her
family, was too much for her heroism--'Her hereditary instincts,
cowardice, and training,' her son said. Herbert might marry Mimi at any
moment; no one could ask of the Fates a more lovable wife and
daughter-in-law; but it was nonsense--worse, it was wickedness--to
dream of living after or up to their convictions in society as now
constituted. Did Herbert think for a moment what would befall Mimi if
she acted as her generosity and all their ideas would prompt her? It
would be destruction--simple destruction to the child, and if her son
could not sacrifice his principles to his love, then he was bound in
honor and pity, living in this unhappy time, to sacrifice his heart. At
any rate Mimi must be protected.

"But the young man could not deny his principles, and would not deny
his selfishness; so Lady ---- sent Mimi from her, obtaining her a good
position in one of the best schools at Brighton, begging the lady
principal, an old friend of her own, to keep upon the young girl a
watch that might almost be called a guard. She remained there a few
months, and then, one fine morning, was suddenly missing, and Lady ----
received a note from her, posted in London, to say that it was useless
to struggle longer; Herbert was bitterly unhappy and disappointed in
her, reflected on her want of love and courage, and that she, Mimi, had
chosen her part, and meant to see if one could not honestly live one's
frank life in the London of to-day.

"Lady ----'s expostulations with her son were useless. 'I like what you
have taught me, mother, and my conscience is in the matter.'

"And the same delicate conscience prevented him from supporting Mimi
pecuniarily. He said, and she confirmed, that there should be no tie
between them but love--that no other gift was fitting from one to the
other. The woman of the future would have no need of protection, or to
barter herself for care and a home; she would love out of a sphere of
fine, grand independence, self-reliance--so would and should Mimi. Poor
girl! her sphere of independence has been anything but grand and fine:
a life in shifting, third-rate lodgings, under an alias, for, keeping
her maiden style, it was simply impossible with her means to secure
anywhere a reputable shelter, singing in concerts to support herself,
and getting now and then a few lessons to give where people don't
inquire too closely if they can secure good teaching cheaply, but
bereft of all friends save a few pitying ones who now and then come to
her relief, with no young brightness in her life, separated from her
children, for she has three or four who are inexpensively taken care of
at a farm in Cumberland, at a distance too great for her to see them
save for a short autumn holiday; seeing Herbert sometimes only at very
long intervals, for he goes abroad frequently for long absences, and
leaves her with scanter ceremony than most men bestow upon a faithful
dog--the mean-spirited good-for-naught!--shabbily clad, and living,
like a rock hermit, on bread, fruit, and a salad, to make the money
cover as far as may her own and her children's simplest needs. One
can't wonder that Lady ----'s beautiful hair has turned from lustrous
brown to snowy white in these few years, or that she should be
tormented, as Mr. Feldwick says she is, with remorse lest she be to
blame for the miserable warping of her son, and the catastrophe of
Mimi's existence. She would be glad to come to Mimi's aid and that of
her grandchildren, but that Mimi never permits unless she is in
_extremis_, having, as she says, taken her lot with full warning from
Lady ----; and Mimi has a helper who asks nothing more than to succor
her from his own very moderate store--a fellow singer who met and loved
her in the days when she was free, and in these, her days of ignominy,
loves her honorably and hopelessly still, and devotes himself to any
service in her and her children's behalf that she will permit; a poor,
little, unknown, unsung Bayard, whose earthly happiness may be added to
those sadder wrecks of lives ruined by the theorizings of Lady ---- and
her co-vagrants."

What do you think of all this, Susie? Would you exchange love in the
bush for love among these "leaders of thought" in London? How, after
these wicked, cynic, dreary histories and encounters, I nestle into my
home and am so humbly grateful for its every little self-abnegation,
every straitness of bond, no less than for the unspeakable riches it
holds--that of being loved and beloving to one's heart's highest-heaped
and deepest-down-pressed measure.

Love from Ronayne and self to my dearest woman. All kindest regards to
the head of the house, and tender wishes that the new home in that
topsy-turvy region of the world may be as happy and, some day, as noisy
as that whence this journeys to you from

Lil.


18 STANFIELD GARDENS, }
March 12, 1876.       }

And do I never, in these days, see anything of my coöperative friends?
Yes, something, but less since Miss Hedges went to Düsseldorf. Mrs.
Stainton came to us a good deal early in the winter, but a month ago
she was ordered off to Bournemouth for an obstinate cough, and the long
letters I get from her are fuller of personal and spiritual matters
than of references to her late co-associates. For she's done at last
what we had all been looking for--gone over to Rome--and one hears from
her now nothing but the Church: the Church's wisdom and peace,
allusions to the saints, speculations upon states of prayer, enthusiasm
for the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, and fervent wishes that
all puzzled wayfarers may find what she has found--absolute conviction
and rest--though she owns that the new religion is fuller, far, of
struggles and crosses than the old. "What does our father, the Dean,
say?" I asked lately. "That this 'is at least a respectable vagary,'"
she wrote back, "'which one could hardly say for most of my dreams and
experiments!' Fancy papa's feeling himself authorized to speak of the
spiritual life of anything above a crayfish!--a dear old country
gentleman who is too entirely well satisfied with this world and his
lot in it ever to think of heaven except in an official way, and whose
strongest vocations are matrimony, and the writing mildly learned
antiquarian papers for the West of England Archæological Society.

"But you like stories. Here is papa's latest: One of his High Church
confreres had been diligently expounding to a navvy the doctrine of the
Trinity, and was boasting to papa of the intelligence of his neophyte.
Papa, who holds very old-fashioned, inhumanitarian ideas as to the good
or possibility of education for the masses, was scornfully incredulous
as to the navvy's getting even an idea of the mystery upon which his
friend had been instructing him. 'Will you go with me to see him, and
convince yourself?' asked the clergyman. 'Delighted,' said papa, and
off they set to find the navvy. After a little talk papa said to the
man, 'This gentleman here tells me he has been talking to you about the
Holy Trinity. Can you give me the names of the Three Persons?' 'Why,
sir,' answered the navvy, 'there's God the Father and God the Son, but,
to tell the truth, sir, I disremember the name of the other gentleman
entirely!' Now I maintain that papa's in the wrong about the navvy, and
that the ritualist clergyman had no reason to be so utterly
disconcerted, as papa declares he was, at this naïve answer. Am I
wicked, I wonder, to be repeating these stories? But you know I don't
mean the least irreverence, and I can't help seeing they're droll!
Somebody has said nobody is so irreverent as religious people, but I
always reckoned that a sour-tempered saying, judging after the sense
and not after the spirit. We have some distant Quaker connections where
I visit sometimes, and in that household if one mentions our Lord in
familiar conversation, as if He had a connection with the humble little
events of the daily life, there is always a shocked hush, as if
possibly it might not be unsacrilegious to speak of our Creator save on
meeting days, and with formal removal of all lay business and speech. I
am sure they never heard of St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the
birds. What would they have said to it?

"You hope that Mr. Feldwick's experience will not be mine, and intimate
that if the Church fails me, nothing remains for me but the unbelief of
our friends in the coöperative house. Yes, I've long felt that between
Rome and rationalism there's no logical ground on which to rest. But I
have no fears.

"Mr. Feldwick told me once that having, while a Catholic, read
somewhere that St. Philip of Neri was so distressed at ecstasies that
befell him in public that he tried the reading, before saying mass, of
books on other than spiritual subjects, to divert the usual current of
his thoughts and love, he, Mr. Feldwick, conceived this to be an
authorization for him to read romances, speculative books, what not, by
way of preparing himself to receive Holy Communion--after which history
I never wondered that he had wandered out of the Father's House after
the husks of spiritism. But it is very difficult to conceive him
responsible. If reading qualified for heaven, how high up would he not
be! But he seems rather born to accumulate all manner of heterogeneous
information, and to echo the last 'Times' leader, the last clever paper
in the 'Contemporary' or 'Fortnightly,' than to live a man's life of
independent impression, expression, and will. I always hope that
invincible ignorance and invincible prejudice may cover so much!"

Anna Hedges and the porcelain widow being gone from London, I should
see little of the remaining confederates were it not for "little
Malaise." His mother, I am sure, has given me up as a possible
disciple. I have never been able to get beyond one suffrage meeting; I
couldn't somehow sign my name to a petition that women be eligible
pupils for the study of law, and I horrified her greatly by
enthusiastic support of a proposition that garroters, wife-beaters, and
committers of ruffianly assaults upon women and children be publicly
punished with the cat. "So inhumane!" she said. "Such an education of
the brutal instincts in the spectators! Surely I did not think what
such a sight would be for the young, how much more it would inculcate
in them revenge than the gentler virtues. And society was responsible
for these criminals. They were what her neglect and their conditions
had made them. They should not be punished for what was a misfortune
rather than a fault. Our business was to train, develop these people
instead of behaving to them as they did to their unfortunate victims."
I admitted a trembling hope that something might be done for the
humanizing of the next generation of our lowest-down people, but
persisted that fear and shame seemed to me the likeliest means to stop
the sickening record of cowardly savagery that week after week comes to
us from all over England--the crimes of adults past all restraints save
forcible ones. One week I kept a list, gathered from two provincial
papers and the "Telegraph." Besides a dozen or so of the ordinary cases
where a man beats and kicks his wife, and policemen and no onlookers
interfere _because_ she's the man's wife, one costermonger had flung
his wife under a loaded van; one navvy had gouged out one of his wife's
eyes, and threatened, in the police court, "to do for her yet"; another
had pounded his wife to a horrible jelly with a flat-iron; another held
his by force upon a red-hot stove; and the last on the list, a collier,
nearly tore his wife in pieces, with the help of a bull-dog, "because
she aggerewated him by giving him a leg of veal for his dinner when
he'd made up his mind to a pair o' boiled fowls!"

But Ronayne says maliciously that Mrs. Malise has resigned me to
obscurity and the fossil period; not because it was hopeless--the
winning me--but because, after all, it didn't seem worth while. True I
had broken from the ranks, set up in business for myself, and earned my
bread for a while--but then how dreadfully ignorant I am. It was bad
enough when I didn't know who Margaret Fuller was, and had never read
Mill on "Liberty"; but the day I owned to a pocket dictionary, and my
unaided helplessness as to double consonants and such vicious words as
_separate_, _niece_, _ascension_, and so on, finished the business.

And no wonder. What do you suppose my Mabel will say, grown tall and
wise like her father, to a mother who knows more about King Arthur and
the Knights of the Round Table than about the real kings and bygone
personages of her own or any other country--a mother puzzled always as
to whether it was Alfred the Great or Sir Humphrey Davy who burnt the
cakes; a mother loving Glastonbury better than almost any spot of
English ground, and believing devoutly that there Joseph of Arimathea
planted his staff that became the winter thorn, blossoming at
Christmas, "mindful of our Lord"; that there in the church-yard of the
first hurdle-built church he and King Arthur and Queen Guinevere all
mouldered away to dust; a mother who knew no more than sufficed to
wield crayon and brush indifferently, and to love what she loves with
her whole heart?

And I'm writing her life, her little life, with all its tiny
unfoldings--a story of her being and doings, illustrated profusely with
sketches and photographs--writing it for the Mabel of by and by. Will
she forget the tenderness that's in every line and stroke when she
comes upon such a sinful juxtaposition as this which Ronayne laughed at
the other day. "Flanel peticoat?" Yes, "flanel peticoat"; it _does_
look rather queer, but that's only because we're used to the wicked
lavishness of the common fashion--and double consonants are only so
much crinoline. When I worry sometimes as to what baby'll think of her
mother being such a goose, Ronayne says the spelling and all the other
stupidities are only piquant, and that he asks of heaven nothing better
than a daughter only half as much to his taste as his wife is, which
would be very dear of him to think and tell me if he had not rather
upset it by admitting that if he had a son who persisted in spelling
warm after his mother's eccentric fashion--wharm--he, my husband, would
certainly "wharm" that boy--my boy.

And I'd sooner Mabel should laugh even unkindly at her mother's
ignorance than ever see her turning over the leaves of a set of books
wherein her mother's hand had carefully cut away every allusion to
Christian belief, every repetition of God's name--such a set as I saw
Mrs. Malise scissoring when I called upon her last.

"These are books that are accumulating for Mill," she
explained--"presents from one and another--and I'm cutting out every
word that can suggest to him the idea of any life or any world than the
only one of which he can gain a certainty through his senses; childish
impressions are so tenacious, and I mean him to be utterly free from
influence or superstition; open to believe or disbelieve in immortality
when his faculties are trained, and he can judge evidence fairly. The
Christian scheme seems to me to rest on a mass of unworthy fables; but
he is not to be taught in the sense of my conclusion. I shall guard him
from my atheism as carefully as from accepted forms of faith. Surely no
more can be exacted from a mother than to rear a child unbiassed, and
let him make his own experiences, shape his own belief. I believe there
are text-books in which no reference to any possible personal Creator
of the universe is to be found, and we hope such are in use at the
Genevan kindergarten, and Mr. Malise means, in some of his leisure
time, to write a series of stories for children in which there shall be
no hint of the supernatural; stories that shall deal only with this
living, breathing world we know; with no pretty fiction concerning a
life and personages generations of men have invented details for"--and
I--

    I seemed to move among a world of ghosts,
    And feel myself the shadow of a dream.

But Geneva and these dreary story-books are two or three years off, let
us hope. Meanwhile baby and I are grown very fond of the patient,
lonely little man, and I have him here as often as Johanna is pleased
to bring him. Great comfort, I see and hear, he has in Mabel's large,
sunny day nursery, gay with birds and pictures, well stocked with
playthings, and possessing an extraordinary wooden construction which
our little guest beholds with the eye of faith, naming it rapturously
gee-gee, and worshipping it as the king of beasts. When we are alone at
dinner I have the mites down for a few minutes at dessert, and it is
really pathetic to watch little Malaise's shy delight at getting a
little fruit and an innocent sweet or two.


THE LABURNUMS,    }
HENLEY-ON-THAMES, }
July 16, 1876.    }

Changed quarters, you see, my Susie. It was so cold all June I thought
we should be able to hold out until the end of the session at No. 18;
but July came in flaming; so more for Mabel's sake than our own we've
taken a pretty villa here at pretty Henley, for six weeks, and then
we're off for Biarritz, where we mean to settle ourselves comfortably,
and thence explore, at our leisure, all the lovely yet almost unknown
near-by country. The grandpapa paternal has written begging that we'll
leave Mabel, whom he calls "Tramp No. 3, and too small for the work,"
at Castle Starched-stiff-O; but Tramps 1 and 2 think they couldn't
possibly fare on comfortably without that small golden head bobbing
along beside them, up the hills and down the dales. Nurse is even more
gypsyish than her master and mistress, and Mabel has spent the greater
part of all her waking hours since she was two months old out of doors;
so I think we shall always have in her the hardiest of small comrades.

Miss Hedges goes with us, and we mean, she and I, to bring back between
us the entire Basque country in our portfolios.

"I'm thankful we're going to a region of picturesque men," says
Ronayne, "for I think my lot in life likely to be a little less
afflictive than it was last year. I don't much mind leading contrary
minded horses up and down by the hour, coaxing suspicious or aggressive
goats; I might even put another bull as savage as that fellow at
Twickenham through his paces; but as to posing myself, in any possible
fashion, even as a snoring shepherd, please to consider, ladies, that
it's not down in our summer programme.

"Talk of the miseries of a man with a literary wife! What are they, I
should like to be told, beside those of the unlucky mortal who's
married a 'fair artist,' and can never so much as yawn in peace again,
without being perpetuated in the act?"

"I had an eye to business when I married you, sir!" I retort. "You see
you're a fine, tall, well-made animal, and since I own you, why should
I go pay away my money for some other model who wouldn't be half so
good-looking, and whom I couldn't frighten so well into minding me? Not
pose indeed! Perhaps you would even choose to be bow-legged if so you
could escape doing your duty? And I think you're maliciously trying to
get stout. In our rides lately, I notice you puff a good deal if we
have a bit of a race, and you're really getting a quite perceptible
little bulge!"

And Ronayne, who knows very well that he's a capital figure, and whom I
accuse of keeping the lowest button of his coat fastened in order to
display his slender waist, gives an alarmed glance down at himself, and
I see, to my great amusement, that no Bass is uncorked at luncheon, my
lord consenting himself with a glass of sherry instead--a needless
self-denial, I hasten to add, for he's really no more bulging than a
greyhound! But he deserves the little scare for his attempt at
rebellion. Fancy my husband having any will of his own about stopping
in any attitude I choose him to take, and for as long as I choose! I
knew such a queer artist in London, a rather coarse, wholly uneducated
woman, but with a streak of real genius. She married the commonest,
stupidest man, a pink-and-white young idiot of a tailor, grown now to
be the "heavy father"--red, fat, lazy, letting his wife earn all the
money. Somebody scolded about him to the poor, over-worked wife. "Yes,
I know I have to keep the pot boiling," she answered, "but then Dave
saves a model, he's the kindest father to the children, and he does all
the sewing!" _He_ doesn't object to pose, not he! And how proud he is
of his wife! I found him alone in her studio one day. I looked over
some engravings after Titian while waiting, and the man said, "Them
engravings o' Titian's, now, ma'am, they're out o' drawing! But here's
a picture o' my wife's that's more the real thing," putting on the
easel, with affectionate pride, a painting in which two or three of
their children were grouped--a trashy, tawdry, grinning thing, and yet
with unmistakable touches of power. And this is a tale my husband has
reason to know by heart, I'm sure! Not pose! I wish he had Miss Hedges
for a wife! Anything like that girl's utter devotion to her work I've
never seen in a woman. Rain or shine, cold or heat, are all one to her;
she never has spiritually gray days when the grasshopper's a burden,
and Capua itself wouldn't have unnerved her arm and purpose. Work!
work! And everything turned to account.

Last summer when she was with us I fainted at some horrible tale or
other. She came into the room where I lay stretched flat upon the
floor, too miserable to speak, but conscious again. I must do her the
justice to say she had heard there was no serious cause for my
condition; but her first exclamation was,

"Oh, Lilian, what a color you are! Blue-white, ghastly, your face all
drawn, pinched--magnificent! Let me see your hands and nails. Ah,
capital! Capital! Poor little Lilian! But if you must faint, what a
chance for me! I couldn't think how I was to get the right tint for my
dying soldier. I never saw any one dead or wounded, and I am much too
stolid ever to faint myself. Crossing the channel I took my hand-mirror
and studied my face when I was desperately sick--but it was all green
and pathos--no good! But your color's the very thing--only you get pink
so fast! Oh, Lilian, if ever you faint again, have me called the very
instant you feel yourself going off!"

This may be called devotion to one's work? But grand work she's going
to do. She's full of genius, and has only to get over the
niminy-piminy-izing of the South Kensington School, and work abroad a
few years, to have a far more justly grounded fame than Rosa Bonheur's.

Already a few first great drops of her shower are falling. She's a
picture in the Academy, her first, and _on the line_--a picture to
which the hanging committee themselves took off their hats, and gave a
cheer for the artist; and a regular ovation she had on the private view
day--nobility and clergy, fellow artists and journalists, army and
navy--such a day as she says can never come again for her, let the
future have what success in store for her it may.

She has sold the picture for a thousand guineas, and her sketch in the
Black and White Exhibition has appeared in one of the illustrated
papers, the same paper offering her _carte-blanche_ for illustrations.
How I feel like swinging her in triumph before the faces of Mesdames
Malise and her friends!--a simple, frank, good girl, who never in her
life thought of crying out about a career, and a smoothing of her way,
or declared her right to devote herself to art, and to such an
unwomanly branch of it as the drawing of horses and soldiers, but set
herself obscurely at work, and toiled as faithfully as if she hadn't a
spark of genius in her--to win what she has already done, and yet will
do!

Mrs. Malise. That reminds me of that household. Our latest news from
it, through Mr. Feldwick, who belongs to a "Sordello" club, for which
my liege had a hankering, only they made him an Irish member, and so
he'd no time (you wonder what a Sordello club may be? A society of
ladies and gentlemen, dear, who read Sordello with a key, and try to
find out whatever it's all about!), and Mr. Feldwick is good enough to
keep him _au courant_ of their discoveries and interpretations, and
gossips with me about the Domestic Club. About this Mr. Feldwick is
concerned. In losing Mrs. Stainton and Miss Hedges, the house lost much
in his eyes, and there have been other changes, and all so much for the
worse, that Mr. F. is seriously debating whether the place can long
continue sufficiently respectable to be honored by the presence of
himself and Smut--his pug dog. The people whom Lady ---- brings about
the place get queerer and queerer, and the ideas and schemes they
broach are----"I'm a man of the world, and something of a philosopher
myself," says Mr. F., "and I know human nature has plenty of shady
corners; but, aw, really, aw, you know there must be _some_ limit!"--which
I was glad to hear from the Truth-Seeker. Young ----'s gone off to see
if the Fiji islanders or some other outlandish creatures haven't more
morality and tenderness and general virtues than the men and women of
civilization; and when I tell you he sailed just after the death by
diphtheria of three of poor Mimi's children, leaving her to bear that,
as all things, unhelped by him, you'll wish with me, that some coppery,
tough old savage'll eat him for his investigating pains! If anything
can cure her infatuation, one would think this last stroke of barbarity
might, and perhaps then there would be some hope for the singer lover,
who has taken care of her, shared her grief--borne all the burden that
the miserable new Rousseau refused.

The food-reforming trio are gone from the associate household. "The
Food-Regenerator" has not the circulation it deserves. Its editor threw
up a secretaryship that was profitable, but cramping to a soaring,
unmercenary spirit. So the emoluments of the journal were insufficient
for the club life, and they've retired to a poor lodging where that
weary white cat, I suppose, is trying to keep the heroic little man and
all her hungry progeny--ravens, I of course meant to say, only I'd
called their mother a cat!--on broad beans and porridge and next to
nothing a week, and do the work of an office-boy besides!

The third member of the trio, the young girl who told me she was to be
a "healer," has had a sad fate. She had, it seems, some liabilities to
lung disease which she determined to starve out; so the great rations
of bran bread and prunes, which distressed Ronayne at the dinner-party,
dwindled, months ago, to two or three ounces of bread daily, and a
little fruit--the quantity becoming so small that her mother piteously
declared they could not understand how she lived at all.

Reducing her food day by day, she went, in June, to Aberystwith for
some weeks. While there, she fell asleep while reading one afternoon in
a cave on the coast, and when she wakened it was night, the rain
falling heavily, the tide risen so that all egress from the cave was
cut off, and she a prisoner. At that season of the year there was no
danger beyond that of fright and exposure to damp and chill so many
hours; for the water only rises high in the cave during great storms;
but even if she had been told this, who remembers or reasons clearly in
such sudden, awful moments? But she came out so soon as morning and the
ebbing water released her, walked the two or three miles back to her
lodging, told her story with apparent calmness, and before night was a
raving maniac, so wild and uncontrollable that her family were obliged
to place her in a lunatic asylum, and as yet there is nothing favorable
to report in her case.

Mrs. Stainton still at Bournemouth, but writing often either to Miss
Hedges or to me. In one of her last notes she says, "Do you remember
that little story I told you of Ste. Colette, the Saint who was walled
up? I think of her so often, so anxiously; I think, I almost think, it
will come to that--walling up, I'm afraid not the sanctity?--with me.
What a harbor it looks--the cloistered life! And there never seemed to
be any place for me in the world. Everything has turned to ashes in my
grasp and on my lips. Perhaps it was that the religious life was always
calling me. I repeat Père La Cordaire's saying over and over to myself,
'When we Frenchmen become religious, we do it meaning to be religious
up to the neck.'

"I should not enter an active order. I have not the strength. But the
contemplative ones draw me, draw me. Pray for me!"

Mrs. Stainton, Sybarite of Sybarites, a Carmelite, a poor Clare
sleeping on a plank, washing herself with cold water and sand, living
on begged bits, bad herrings, and limp cabbages! Shall we indeed see
that?


20th July.

Susie! Susie! what an ending I must give my letter. Little Malaise is
dead!

"Have you read the papers to-day, Lil?" Ronayne asked me as he was
dressing for dinner two days ago.

"No, they're so stupid these days; nothing but Wimbledon and padding.
Why? Is there anything to-day?"

"No, no; nothing," he answered, and though I thought his manner a
little odd, I had forgotten all about it later when Archdeacon Ryder,
who was dining with us, suddenly asked:

"Did you notice the account of that painful accident in Westbourne
Grove in this morning's 'News'? Those terrible perambulators! I wish
they could be abolished. Maid servants' arms were stouter in my day.
This stupid German nurse seems to have got dazed, or was staring
everywhere but where her business lay. An only child, the paper stated,
an editor's, but I don't remember the name. It was not one familiar to
me. Did you know it?"

"I've heard it," Ronayne answered, and would have changed the subject,
but I broke in:

"Oh, Ronayne, a German nurse! Can anything have happened to Mrs.
Malise's baby? You needn't be silent. Oh, I'm sure it's he!"

And then it all came out--the fact that the child was killed while his
nurse was trying to wheel him across the road in Westbourne Grove--but
Ronayne wouldn't have any details told me.

The poor little man! My own baby's age, and such a sweet-tempered,
patient little fellow! What a life! To come where he had but grudging
welcome, to have no real mother, no warm little places of fond
sunshine, and to go away from all this world's possibilities in that
sudden cruelty! It wrung my heart, the hardness of it all. But could I
really grieve, remembering how chill was the brief life, and
remembering, above all, the scheme that was to make of him, so helpless
and undefended, a spiritual outcast and foundling?

And since I saw his mother--I went yesterday, having first sacked
Henley of white flowers, heliotrope, and fragrant leaves--and found her
unshaken in composure, untouched by any sense of duty missed--since
then I think I have been only glad that the little soul has taken
flight.

Very white and peaceful he looked lying in his crib, and I heaped my
flowers all about him.

"How much you loved him!" Mrs. Malise said, as she stood beside me
looking at him.

"And how pretty and happy he looks! I wonder if he is happy--if he
_is_ anywhere?"

"Well, some time we shall know! And perhaps it is better for him as it
is. Often and often his father and I were perplexed as to what we ought
to do for him by and by. At any rate he's past our marring! And I hope
we shall have no more children to deal with--be responsible for."

Ronayne says I ought to add what I have only told him under my breath,
that it completes my sketch of this "advanced" woman, a mother despite
herself.

On leaving I said to her something as to where the boy would be buried.

"It is not quite settled," she replied, "but Kensal Green, I suppose.
We are both strong advocates of cremation, and wish so much that it
were a present possibility. If it were, and even a difficult one, we
should certainly bear our practical testimony to the more sanitary way
of disposing of our dead. But----"

"Heaven help you!" I interrupted; "and farewell!"

We dare not tell this to nurse, who, though she was the little fellow's
fast friend, cried out at the first news of his death:

"Oh, I am glad he is gone, the poor dear! But he was too good for them,
and I'm glad he didn't live to have his heart quite broken."

                     *      *      *      *      *

And so ends my going forth after new lights. I'm the richer for my
foray in two friends, and the certainty that, Bohemian as I am, I am
but a fossil too, and that nature fitted me exactly to my place in
making me only the contentedly obscure wife of an Irish member and your

Loving Lil.

S. F. HOPKINS.




MISS MISANTHROPE.

BY JUSTIN MCCARTHY.




CHAPTER XVI.

CHASTELARD.


"So you are really going to be an heiress, my dearest?" Mary Blanchet
said to Minola, when our heroine was settled at home again. "I knew you
ought to be, and would be if right were done; but right so often isn't
done. My brother will be so glad to hear it! but not as other people
might be glad, you know." For Mary began to be afraid that by a hasty
word she might be filling the heart of her friend with suspicion of her
brother.

"I don't know, Mary. Mr. Money, and others, I suppose, say so. I wish
it were not true; I am all right as things are, and I hate the idea of
gaining by this poor woman's death. I think I should not feel so if we
had been friends, and if I could think that it was like a kindly gift
from her, and that she wished me to have it. But it is all so
different. And then what do I want of it?"

"One can do so much good with money," said little Mary sighing. She was
thinking of her brother.

"Yes, that is true," Minola said, thinking of Mary herself and of what
she might perhaps do for her. "But don't tell any one about this,
Mary--not even your brother--if you can well help it," Minola added,
knowing what little chance there would be of Mary's keeping such a
thing secret from her brother. "It is all uncertain and only talk as
yet, you know."

"These things are never secret, dearest," Mary said with a wise shake
of the head. "Men always get to know of them. I think the birds of the
air carry the news abroad that a woman has money, or that she has not,"
and Mary sighed again gently.

"Do you see much of an alteration in the ways of men toward me already,
Mary? Do they hang around me in adoring groups? Do they lean enraptured
over me as I sweep the chords of the harp? Do they who whispered that I
sang like the crow before, now loudly declare that my voice puts the
nightingale out of conceit with his own minstrelsy?"

"Now you are only talking nonsense, dear; for we know so few men--and
then you don't play the harp, and you never sing in company. But, if
you ask me, I think I do see some difference."

"Already, Mary?"

"Well, yes, I think so; in one instance at least. Not surely that you
were not likely to have attentions enough paid to you in any case, if
you cared about them or encouraged them, and that, even if you hadn't a
sixpence in the world--but still----"

"But still it does enhance one's charms, you think? Come, Mary, tell me
the name of this mercenary admirer. Depend upon it, all his arts shall
fail."

"You are only laughing at me still, dearest, but there is something in
it I can tell you for all that. It is not my idea alone, I can assure
you. What do you think of a Duke's brother for an admirer, Minola?"

Little Mary Blanchet was a crafty little personage. She thought she
could not too soon begin working for her brother's cause by trying to
throw discredit on the motives of all other possible wooers. She had
observed when going now and then to the house of the Moneys, during the
last few days, that the returned cadet of the one great ducal house
whereof she had any knowledge was there every day, and that he was very
attentive to Minola. The same remark had been made by Mr. Money, and
had called forth an indignant objection from Lucy, who protested
against the thought of her Nola having a broken-down outcast like that
for a lover. But Mary, who was almost terrified at the idea of sitting
down in the same room with any member of the great family who owned the
mausoleum at Keeton, was not certain how far the name of a family like
that might not go with any girl, even Minola, and believed it not an
unwise precaution to begin as soon as possible throwing discredit on
his purposes.

Minola tried not to seem vexed. She had liked to talk to Mr. St. Paul
when he came, as he did every day of her stay in Victoria street. She
had liked it because it gave her no trouble in thinking, and it saved
her from having to talk to others with whom she might have felt more
embarrassed, and because it turned away attention from what might
perhaps have otherwise been observed--as she feared at least--by too
keen eyes. If Mary must suspect anything, it was a relief to find that
she only suspected this, and Minola tried to make merry with her about
her absurdity. But in her secret heart she sickened at such talk, and
such thoughts, and felt as if the very shadow of the fortune which was
expected for her, falling already on her path, was making it one of new
pain and of still less accustomed shame.

"Poverty parts good company, used to be said," Minola thought; "a
little money seems much more likely to part good company in my case."

Yet that there are advantages in a command of money was soon made very
clear to Minola. When she returned from a walk a day or two after she
found a specimen copy of Herbert Blanchet's poems awaiting her, with a
note from Victor Heron. The letter was somewhat awkward and rueful. Mr.
Heron explained that, by her express instructions, he had allowed
Blanchet to have it all his own way in the arrangement of the style of
his appearance in paper and print; and that the cost had become
something far greater than he had anticipated.

"You should never have been troubled about this," Victor went on to
say, "but that you made me promise that you alone should pay for this
thing; I wish I hadn't made any such promise, or consented that
Blanchet should have his way in the business. To think of a grown man,
who has seen the world, leaving a matter of money and business in the
hands of a girl and a poet! Blanchet has been going it."

Minola in all her trouble found room for wonder, delight, and something
like alarm in looking at the superb edition in which the poems of Mr.
Blanchet were to go before a world scarcely prepared for so much
artistic gorgeousness. All that vellum paper, rare typography, costly
and fantastic binding, and lavish illustration could do for poetry, had
been done without stint on behalf of Herbert Blanchet. The leaves were
as thick as parchment and as soft as satin. Only a very few lines of
verse appeared on each broad luxurious page. Every initial letter of a
sentence was a fantastic design. The whole school of Blanchet's
artistic friends had rushed into combination to enrich the pages, the
margins, and the covers, with fanciful illustration. If they only had
been great, or even successful and popular artists, the book might have
been worth its weight in gold. Unfortunately Mr. Blanchet's artistic
friends were not yet great or famous. The outer world--the world which,
in the opinion of the school, was wholly composed of dullards and
Philistines--knew as yet nothing about these artists, and neither
blamed them nor praised them. The volume was as large in its
superficial extent as an ordinary atlas, and some of the poems which
occupied a whole page were not more than four lines in length. The
whole thing seemed truly, in the words of a poet whom Mr. Blanchet
especially despised, "all a wonder and a wild desire."

Thinking of herself as the patroness and in some sort the parent of
such a volume, Minola felt some such mixture of pride and timidity as a
modest girl might own who has suddenly been made a princess, and is not
quite certain whether she will be able to support her position with
becoming nerve and dignity.

There came a little letter too from the poet himself. It ran in this
fashion:

    "DEAR PATRONESS AND QUEEN: The poet has not dared to send in
    unfitting casket the offering which your approval has made
    precious. The poems which are addressed to you must at least
    offer themselves in form not unworthy to be touched by your
    hand.

    "In all devotion yours,

    "HERBERT BLANCHET."

Nor did the volume want a poetical dedication. The second leaf
contained the following:

    UNTO MY LADY PATRONESS AND QUEEN.

      Upon my darkness may there well be fall
        Light of all darkness, darkness of all light;
    Starfire of amber, dew of deathlike sheen;
      Waters that burn, pale fires that sicken all,
    And shadows all aglow with saffron light;
      But comes my lady who is Glory's queen,
        And all the bright is dark, and pallid dark the bright.

Minola read this dedication again and again, puzzled, amused, angry,
hardly knowing whether to laugh or to cry. "Am I glory's queen?" she
asked of her own soul. "And if I am, am I letting light or darkness in
upon my poor poet? Am I depriving him of the amber, the dew, and the
saffron light, or not? Is it praise or blame, this dedication? I
suppose it must be praise, but I don't think anybody could tell from
its words. Oh, my dear little Mary Blanchet, why must you have a
brother--and why must that brother be a poet?"

There was one consolation--the dedication did not set forth her name,
and nobody could know who the lady patroness of the poet might be.
Minola felt inclined to be offended that she should be in any way
brought into this folly, but she was not certain whether remonstrance
or complaint might not be more ridiculous than utter silence. After all
nobody knew anything about her or cared, she said. If she were to
complain in any way, it would only grieve poor Mary, whom the thought
that her brother could have offended her friend and leader would drive
well-nigh distracted. "What does it matter if I am made a little
ridiculous in my own eyes?" she asked herself. "It is only in my own
eyes, I suppose. Mary will look on it all as delightful; her brother of
course means it for the best, and thinks it superb poetry; and there is
no one else likely to care either way. It is not much to be a little
more ridiculous in my own eyes than I have already made myself."

Perhaps--perhaps--let it be said with hesitation and much
caution--there was something not wholly unwelcome to our heroine in the
idea that she could be glory's queen and all the rest of it, to any
human creature, not to say any poet, just now. She felt humbled and
deeply depressed. In her own eyes she was lowered by what she knew of
her own heart. Her pride had received a terrible wound, almost a death
wound. The little world she had made so proudly for herself had all
crumbled into dust. It is not wonderful if at such a time there should
be, in spite of her sense of the ridiculous and her senses generally, a
certain soothing influence in the fact that there still was some one in
whose eyes she appeared a person of account and even of dignity. At all
events, let it be frankly said, that when the first shock and stir of
the ridiculous were passed, Minola was not inclined to think more
harshly than before of the poor poet who called her his patroness and
his queen. As to the expense of the publication, she was a little
startled at first, but that sensation very quickly passed away. She was
not enough of a woman of business yet to care about the cost of
anything so long as she had the money to pay. It would run her hard in
her first year of independent life, to pay this much, but then she
could pay it and live somehow, and it would only be a case for strict
economy in the future for some time. Besides, it seemed that whether
she would or not, she was likely to have much more money than she
wanted or could use for any purposes of her own. Then she was further
stimulated to carelessness by Mr. Heron's letter.

"If he thinks I care about money, or the cost of serving a friend, he
is mistaken," she said. "His caution and his protestations are thrown
away on me."

For she was much inclined to be unjust and harsh in her mind toward
Heron now. He had committed, all unconsciously, a terrible offence. He
had, without knowing it, made her fall in love with him. So she made
the best of the whole affair, cost, dedication, glory's queen, and all;
and when Mary Blanchet came to look at the precious volume, and to go
into raptures over it, Minola did her very best to seem contented, and
not even to suggest a criticism, or to ask what this or that meant. She
reminded herself that the late Lord Lytton had written contemptuously
of the "fools on fools" who "still ask what Hamlet means."

"This may be as far off from me as Hamlet from other people," she told
herself. "Why confess myself a fool by asking what anything means? And
in any case Mary Blanchet would not know any better than I."

By this resolve she made one woman happy.

But it was not only a woman on whom she had conferred happiness.
Herbert Blanchet was as happy as even his sister could have wished him
to be. The head of the poet swam in delight. He had never before been
so proud and blest. He hung over his volume for hours; he could hardly
get away from it. When he left it for a moment and tried to escape from
its fascinations, he found himself drawn back again into its presence.
He touched fondly its soft, satiny leaves as though they were the cheek
of beauty; he pressed his own cheek against them; he committed all the
follies which we understand and admire in the immemorial raptures of
the young lover or the father of the first born.

"They must see this," he cried aloud. "They can't overlook a volume
like this." "They" being, of course, that public whose opinion he had
always despised--those critics whose praise he had always declared to
be the worst censure to a man of true genius.

To do our poet justice, it must be owned that there was in his breast
for the first time a deep, strong feeling of gratitude. That emotion
came there with a strange, overwhelming force, like that of
intoxication to a man always rigidly sober before. If Minola had had
him crowned a king, she could hardly have done any greater thing for
him. Few men on earth can ever have had their dearest ambition so
sweetly gratified as it was the lot of Herbert, the poet, to find his
ambition gratified now. To have his poems so set before the world would
have been a glory and a rapture, no matter though the patron's hand had
been that of a withered old man or some fat frump of a dowager; but to
be thus lifted to his longed-for pedestal by the hand of a young and
beautiful woman was something which he had never dreamed of asleep, and
seldom allowed even into the dreams of his wild, vain waking hours. The
emotion called up by experience was as new as the experience itself.
Mr. Blanchet felt profoundly grateful. In that moment of excitement he
would probably, if need were, have laid down his life for Minola.

If Minola knew what strange effect had been wrought in the breast of
her poet, she would assuredly have thought her money well laid out,
even although she had wanted it far more than she did. "To making a man
happy, ten pounds," is the peculiar entry on which a famous essay in
the "Spectator" was founded. To make a man grateful for the first time
is surely a nobler piece of work than to make him merely happy, and it
ought fairly to cost a good deal more. Minola had made a man for the
first time both grateful and happy. The work was a little expensive in
this case, but what miser will say that the money was thrown away?

It is not likely, however, that Minola would have been quite so much
delighted if she could have known all the feelings that her generous,
improvident patronage had awakened in the poet's breast. For Mr.
Blanchet knew women well, he thought; and he did not believe that mere
kindness alone could have impelled Minola to such an act of bounty.
Nor, making every needful allowance for the friendship between Miss
Grey and his sister, did he find in that a sufficing explanation of
Minola's liberality. He set himself to think over the whole matter
coolly and impartially, and he could come to no other conclusion than
that Miss Grey admired him. He was a handsome fellow, as he knew very
well, and tall, and romantic in appearance: what could be more natural
than that a poetic young woman should fall in love with him? He felt
sure that he had fallen in deepest love with her, but it is doubtful
whether he was yet in a condition to analyze his own excited feelings
very clearly. It is certain that he was madly in love with his poems,
with their gorgeous first edition, with the pride and the prospect of
the whole affair; and of course likewise in love with the patroness to
whom he was indebted for so much of a strange delight. But how much was
love of himself and how much of Minola, he did not take time to
consider.

There was an artistic and literary association to which Blanchet
belonged, and amid which he passed most of his nights. It was not
exactly a club, for it had neither definite rules nor even a distinct
habitation. It was a little sect rather than a club. It was an
association of men who believed each in himself, and all, at least for
the present, in each other. Their essential condition of existence was
scorn of the world's ways, politics, and theories of art. They held
that man himself was a poor creature, unworthy of the artist's serious
consideration. All that related to the well-being of that wretched
animal in the way of political government they looked down upon with
mere contempt. The science which professed to concern itself about his
health, the social philosophy which would take any account of his moral
improvement, were alike ridiculous in the eyes of this æsthetic school.
If, however, any uninitiated person should imagine that in setting up
art as the only serious business of life they were likely to accept any
common definition of art, he would find himself as open to their scorn
as if he had tried to improve a bad law or subscribed to the funds of
some religious organization. Art with them was their own art. The
enlightened parson, Thwackum, in "Tom Jones," observes that "When I
mention religion I mean of course the Christian religion, and when I
speak of the Protestant religion I mean the religion of the Church of
England." It was in this spirit that the confraternity to which Mr.
Blanchet belonged defined art. They only meant their own particular
sect; out of that there was no salvation. Art, it is said, hath no
enemy but the ignorant. These artists, however, were the enemies of all
art but their own.

At the present these genial brothers regularly met of nights in the
lodgings of one of them, who happened to have a large studio in the
west central region of London, where so much of this unfashionable
story happens to be cast. Victor Heron had many times been told of the
genius that burned by night in that favored haunt, and had expressed a
modest wish to be allowed to pass for an hour within its light. Mr.
Blanchet was glad of the opportunity of introducing such a friend; for
it somehow seemed as if the consideration of any member of the
fraternity was enhanced among his brothers not a little by the fact
that he could introduce into their midst some distinguished personage
from the despised outer world. With them Victor Heron might very well
pass for a distinguished public man, as in fact he already did, with no
design of his own that way, in the eyes of Herbert Blanchet. To Victor
the school was all composed of gifted and rising men, whom it was a
pride to know or even to meet. To the school, on the other hand, Victor
was a remarkable public man, a tremendous "swell," who had done some
wondrous things in some far-off countries, and who, for all they knew
at the time, might be regarded by the world as the prospective Prime
Minister of England.

There was a peculiar principle of reciprocity tacitly recognized among
these brothers in art. No one of them would admit that there was
anything which his brother knew and he did not know. If one of them
read an author for the first time, and came to meet his fellows proud
of his freshly-acquired knowledge, he found no man among them who would
admit that he had not from his birth upward been equally familiar with
the author in question. It would be easy, surely, some one may say, to
expose such pretension. Just so; of course it would. But when one
brother had shown tonight that his friends had never read Schopenhauer,
and in point of fact could not read him if they tried, who should
guarantee that same brother against a similar exposure of his own
harmless little false pretences to-morrow when he professed to know all
about Euripides? It was not found convenient in this little circle to
examine too closely into the pretensions of each other. Live and let
live was the motto of the school so far as their esoteric professors
were concerned.

There was indeed a legend that some malign person acquainted with the
peculiarities of the school had once compelled them to invent a patron
poet. It was done in this fashion: the malign person talked confidently
and fluently to one of the order concerning a French poet, whom he
described as a gifted apostle of a kindred school, and whom he was
pleased to name De Patroque. The youth thus talked to was not to be
outdone, or even to be instructed. He gave out that he had long had his
eyes fixed reverently on the genius of the gifted De Patroque. He
talked largely, not to say bouncingly, of the great De Patroque among
his friends, who, not to be outdone in their turn, talked to him and to
others of the new apostle. The fame of De Patroque grew and grew, until
at last ill-natured persons affirmed that several essays on his genius,
and fraternal hymns of honor, were composed for him by the admirers of
his mythical career.

To this select circle Mr. Blanchet had for some time proposed to
introduce his friend Victor Heron. On the very day when the first
copies of the gorgeous poems were submitted to privileged eyes, Mr.
Blanchet called on his friend. He found the friend a little put out by
the unexpected lavishness of the manner in which the poetic enterprise
had been carried on.

"This will be an awfully expensive business, I'm afraid," Heron said,
in an embarrassed tone, for he felt that it was a sort of profanation
to talk of money matters with a young poet. "I wish you had let me do
this thing myself, Blanchet. I'd not have minded so far as I'm
concerned. But I don't know about her, you see--she may not have much
money. Then young ladies are generally so enthusiastic; she may not
have thought of what the thing would cost."

"You need not think about that," Herbert said loftily. "Miss Grey will
be a rich woman one of these days----"

"But I don't see that that much alters the matter, although I am
decidedly glad to hear it for her own sake, if it will make her any
happier than she is now--which I take it is not by any means certain.
But I don't see throwing away her money without her knowing all about
it any the more."

"Throwing away her money?" Herbert asked, in tones of lofty protest.

"Well, I don't mean that of course," the good-natured Heron hastened to
explain in all sincerity. "You know very well, my dear Blanchet, what I
think of your merits and your poems, and of all true poets. I know that
it is an honor for any one, whether man or woman, to be allowed to help
a poet to come out before the world and make a success. I only wish I
had had a chance of doing such a thing for you; but this young lady,
you know--I don't feel quite certain whether I ought to have spent her
money so freely."

"I can reassure you, I think," the poet said, with chilling dignity. "I
should never have allowed any one to do anything for me without having
satisfied myself that it was done in the unstinting spirit of
friendship, and by some one whom such kindness would not hurt."

"All right; I am glad to hear you say so, of course, but you won't
wonder at my scruples, perhaps----"

"Your scruples, my dear fellow, do you infinite honor," Mr. Blanchet
said, with a slight dash of irony in his tone, which Heron did not at
the moment perceive, being in truth engrossed by some other thoughts.
"But you may accept my assurance that there is no further occasion for
them, and we will, if you please, change the subject."

Victor did not feel by any means well satisfied that there was no
occasion for scruple, nor did he at all like his poetic friend's way of
looking at the matter. But he reflected that Blanchet might after all
have good warrant for what he had said, and that it was not for him to
cavil at the generosity of a rich girl--if she were rich--toward a poor
poet.

So they went along, the poet and his distinguished political friend, to
the scene of the artistic and literary gathering, which the latter was
so proud to see, and the former so proud to show.

We have all read in story about the effect of some little magic word,
which once spoken makes that which was lovely before seem but loathly,
and what was kindly wisdom sound like fatuous malignity. Was there some
such ill-omened charm working all that night on Victor Heron? Nothing
seemed to him like what he had expected. He was not impressed as he had
felt sure he would be by the poets and other sons of genius. They did
not seem to constitute an assembly of noble minds in whose midst he was
to feel such reverence as the rude Gauls of history or legend felt in
the presence of the Roman senators. The thoughts that he heard did not
strike him as celestial in their origin. There was a good deal of
disparagement and denunciation of absent authors and artists, which if
the talkers had not been men of genius, Victor would certainly have
thought ill-natured and spiteful. There seemed, at least, to his
untutored mind, to be little more than a technical relish of art in all
they said. It was not art they cared for, but only a clique and its
tricks. A group of discontented spinsters girding at their younger
sisters who were married could hardly have shown themselves more
narrow-minded and malign. The effect on Victor was profoundly
depressing. It was like that which might be wrought upon a youth, who
after gazing in rapture on the performance of some queen of classic
tragedy, is at his earnest desire taken to see her in her private life,
and finds her slatternly of dress, mean of speech, wholly uninspired by
her art, and only taking a genuine pleasure in disparagement or slander
of her rivals.

If Victor had known the world better, he would have known that much,
very much, of all this was but the mere affectation and nonsense of
youth. These young men were as yet among the "odious race of the
unappreciated." Yet a little, and some of them will make a success, and
will have the credit of the world for what they do, and they will turn
out good fellows, kindly, true, and even modest. Nothing makes some
young men so insufferably conceited and aggressive as the idea that
they are not successful, and that people know it. There are many of us
mortals with whom prosperity only agrees. On the other hand, some of
these youths will fail early, completely, and wholesomely in their
artistic attempts, and will find out the fact for good, and will retire
from the field altogether, and settle down to something else, and make
a success, or at least a decent living, in some other way of life, and
will forget all the worser teaching of their earlier days; and will
look back without bitterness on the time when they tried to impress a
dull world, and have no feeling of hatred for those who have done
better, but will marry and bring up children, and be Philistines and
happy. Youth has only one season--luckily for a good many of us, who
are decent fellows enough as long as we are content to be ourselves,
and can do without affectation.


CHAPTER XVII.

"UNDER BONNYBELL'S WINDOW-PANES."


But there was something more in Victor Heron's feeling of depression
that night than came from the mere fact that he had found a few young
artists not quite such heroic spirits as he thought they ought to be.
It was the demeanor of Herbert Blanchet that especially spoiled the
evening for him. In truth the head of the poet was not a strong one,
and was very easily turned by any little stimulant of whatever kind.
His volume of poems this night affected all his being. He felt sure
that he was at last about to force himself upon the recognition of the
world, and he made up his mind that Miss Grey was in love with him. He
conveyed hints of his approaching good fortune to his companions; and
he received at first with benign courtesy their compliments on the
success that seemed to await him in life and love. But when some too
forward person suggested that he could possibly guess at the name of
the heiress whose heart and hand were to bless the lucky poet, then
Blanchet became gravely and even severely dignified.

"You will excuse me, Mellifont," he said grandly, the brandy and soda
having, as was the wont of any such liquor taken by our poor poet, gone
straight upward to his head--"you will excuse me, I am sure, if I say
this is not exactly a subject for jocularity; or even, permit me to
add, for general conversation, although among friends. My distinguished
friend, Mr. Heron, will, I am sure, exactly appreciate what I say.
Things may not be so completely settled as to make it proper that they
should be spoken of as if--as if in short they were settled; you will
excuse me, Mellifont, my dear fellow--you will excuse me."

Victor Heron thought it time for him to go, and rose accordingly, and
Mr. Blanchet insisted on accompanying him down the stairs and to the
door of the house.

"I thought it right, you know," the over-dignified poet said, "to put a
stop to that sort of thing. Men have no right to make such inferences.
I should have no right myself to assume that things were settled in
that sort of way. It is not just to others--to another at least. You
appreciate my motives I am sure, Heron, my dear friend?"

"I don't know that I even quite understand what your friend was talking
about," said Heron coldly. "But if it was about any lady, I should
think such conjecturing highly improper and impertinent; and I should
be rather inclined to put a stop to it even more quickly."

"Quite my idea--I am glad you entirely concur with me, and approve of
the course I have taken. But of course you would do so. I knew I could
count on your approval. By the way, you know Mellifont?"

"The man you talked to just now?"

"Yes, Mellifont--a very good fellow, though a little too fond of
talking--I have had to reprove him more than once, I can tell you. But
a very good fellow for all that, and one of the only true artists now
alive. He is a composer--you must hear him play some bits from his
opera. He is at work on an opera, you know--or perhaps you have not
heard?"

"I have not heard--no. I am rather out of the way of such things, I
fear," said Victor, beginning to feel, in spite of himself, a certain
awe of a man who could compose an opera, and thinking that, after all,
a certain allowance must be made for the genius of one who could do
such things.

"Oh, you must hear some of it soon! We feel satisfied that it will
sound the death knell of all the existing schools of music. They are
all wrong, sir, from the first to the last, from Mozart to Wagner--all
wrong except Mellifont."

Victor was for the moment really staggered by the genius of this great
man.

"What is his opera to be called?" he asked, not venturing to hazard any
compromising observation.

"'The Seven Deadly Sins.' It is to be in seven acts, and each act is to
give an entirely new illustration of a deadly sin--which Mellifont will
show to be the only true virtues of mankind. It will make a revolution,
I can tell you."

Victor thought it could hardly fail to do that if it were at all
successful in the object set out by its author.

"It is to have seven heroines," the poet went on, still at the door,
and refusing to allow Victor to depart. "Lot's daughters--let me
see--Messalina, Locusta; Jezebel I think, Theodora, and I believe, Mrs.
Brownrigg. It will be a splendid thing."

It was not easy for Victor to get away, for the poet had to tell him of
other great works of art that were in the contemplation of members of
the school. At length Blanchet released him, thanking him grandly for
the assistance he had lent to the bringing out of his book, but adding
even more grandly some words that fell painfully on Victor's ear.

"I hope to be independent of publishers and drudgery before long; I
fancy--I rather believe it depends upon myself, and I think I owe it to
my own genius to raise myself above the necessity of drudgery. Then I
could do something worthy of myself, and the few whose praise I value."

Victor escaped at last and walked away. He was in a very discontented
mood, an unusual thing for him. He could not help believing that there
must be, or at least might be, something in the idea which Blanchet so
evidently wished people to receive. He feared that there must be
something more than mere kindly patronage in Miss Grey's generosity
toward Blanchet. The thought was strangely disagreeable to him. He
could not think with patience of such a girl being in love with such a
man. He was now disposed to exaggerate the demerits of the poet, and to
believe anything mean of one who could take a girl's money and give out
as an excuse for taking it that she was in love with him. "If I had a
sister," he thought, "and any fellow were to give such hints about her,
I wonder how I should like it, and I wonder how much of it I should
stand!"

He felt sorry, very sorry, for Minola, and perhaps a little angry with
her too for allowing to any man the chance of suggesting such things.
The more he thought of her and all he had seen of her, the less she
seemed fitted for such a lover as Mr. Blanchet. She had impressed
Victor greatly by her manners, her fresh and frank character, and the
simple, trusting generosity which was her transparent attribute. He
began to look on the poet now as a mere fortune-hunter, who was
fastening upon the girl because of the money which he expected her to
have. He did not know how consuming a passion is the vanity of the
small artistic mind--the mind which has art's ambition only and not
art's inspiration. Mr. Blanchet was not a fortune-hunter in the
ordinary sense. His poems were to him as yet much dearer than any
fortune. He was drawn to Minola not because she had money, but because
having money she was willing to spend some of it in bringing out his
poems in a handsome edition.

Our hero's quixotic temper was thoroughly roused by the thought of some
wrong which he fancied was about to be done to Minola. He was not one
of those lucky beings who can let things alone. He never could let
things alone. Had he had the gift of those who can, he would just then
have been governor of some rising colony, and would have been in a fair
way of promotion. He was tormented by the thought that there was
something he ought to do to save Minola from some vaguely terrible
fate, and by not being able to see what the something was which lay
within his power to do. Before he had walked many yards he had worked
himself into the idea that a plot of some sort was in preparation to
entrap Minola into a marriage with one who, poet or not, was wholly
unworthy of her.

His energetic spirit at length suggested something to be done. It was
not, perhaps, a very practical or useful stroke of policy, but it was
the only thing which occurred to him and the only thing which he did
just then. He started off at full speed to walk under the windows of
the house where Miss Grey was living. It was now fully midnight, and of
course he had not the slightest idea of seeing Minola, and, indeed,
would have been greatly embarrassed if he had seen her. But he started
off, nevertheless, to walk under her windows with as eager a step and
as steady a purpose as if he were really hastening to rescue her from
some imminent danger. It was only a short walk from where he then was
to Minola's lodgings; but Heron was so eager in his purpose that the
way seemed miles, which he was covering with hasty strides.

When he reached the house where Minola lived, the aspect of the place
was just such as, if he had been a lover, he might have expected or
desired to find. The house was all in darkness save for one window.
There was a looking-glass in that window, making it plain to the least
observant of human creatures that it must be the window of a bedroom.
How could a lover doubt that that must be the window of the room which
was hers, and that she then watched the stars of midnight, and that she
thought of love, and that her soul was, as Jean Paul puts it, in the
blue ether? For the moment Victor Heron found himself wishing that he
were a lover--were the lover of whom the lady, fancy-fixed in that one
lighted room, might be thinking. But if it were Minola's room, he
thought, she certainly had not him or any memory of him in her mind. It
was a clear, soft midnight, and the moon that shone on the near roof of
the British Museum seemed as poetic and as sad as though it fell on the
ruins of the Parthenon. No practice in colonial administration can
wholly squeeze the poetic and the romantic out of the breast of a young
man of Heron's time of life. As he stood there his grievance seemed as
far off as the moon herself, but not by any means so poetic and
beautiful. He paced up and down, feeling very young and odd, and unlike
his usual self. He was happy in a queer, boyish way that had a certain
shamefaced sensation about it, as when a youth for the first time
drinks suddenly of some sparkling wine, and feels his brain and senses
all aflame with delicious ecstasy, and is afraid of the feeling
although he delights in it.

It was a natural part of the half fantastic chivalry of his character
that he should have felt a sort of satisfaction in thus for the moment
being near Minola, as if by that means he were in some sort protecting
her against danger. If at that time any softer and warmer feeling than
mere friendship were mingling itself with Heron's sensations, he did
not then know it. He thought of the girl as a sweet friend, new to him,
indeed, but very dear, in whose happiness he felt deeply interested,
and over whom he had taken it into his head that he had a right to
watch. She seemed to be strangely alone in the world of London, and,
indeed, to be at the same time not suited for anything in London but
just such isolation. He never could think of her as mixing in the
ordinary society of the metropolis. He could not think of her as one of
the common crowd, following out mechanically the registered routine of
the season's amusements, listening to the commonplace talk, and
compliments, and cheap cynicism of the drawing-room and the five
o'clock tea. To him she appeared as different from all that, and as
poetically lifted above it, as if she were Hawthorne's Hilda, high up
in her Roman tower, among her doves, and near to the blue sky. Except
in the home of the Moneys, Heron had never seen Minola in anything that
even looked like society; and there was a good deal of the odd and the
fresh in that home which took it out of the range of the commonplace,
and did not interfere with his poetic idealization of Minola. Her
presence and her way of life appeared alike to him a poetic creation.
So quiet, self-sufficing a life, alone in the midst of the crowd, such
simple strength of purpose, such a tranquil choice of the kind of
existence that suited her best, such generosity and such gracious,
loving kindness--all this together made up a picture which had a
natural fascination for a chivalrous young man, who had never before
had time to allow the softer and more romantic elements of his nature
any chance of expression. It may be that for the present Minola was to
him but the first suggestion of an embodiment of all the vague,
floating thoughts and visions of love and womanhood that must now and
then cross the spiritual horizon of every young man, no matter how
closely he may be occupied with colonial affairs and the condition of
the colored races. The hero of a French story, whereof there is not
otherwise over-much good to be said, speaks with a feeling as poetic as
it is true when he says that in the nightingale's song he heard the
story of the love that he ought to have known, but which had not yet
come to him. Perhaps in the eyes and in the voice of Minola Victor
Heron unconsciously found this story told for him.

However that might be, it is certain that Heron found a curious
satisfaction this night in passing again and again before Minola's
door, and making believe to himself as if he were guarding her against
danger. He might have remained on guard in this way, heaven knows how
long--for, as we know, he was not fond of early going to bed--but that
he suddenly "was aware," as the old writers put it, of another watcher
as well as himself. It was unmistakable. Another man came up and passed
slowly once or twice under the same windows, and on the side of the
street where Heron had put himself on guard. Then the new comer,
observing, no doubt, that he was not alone, had crossed to the other
side of the street, and Heron thought he was only a chance passer and
was gone altogether. Presently, however, he crossed the road again, and
stood a short distance away from Heron as if he were watching him. Now,
though Victor Heron was not a lover, he had just as much objection as
any lover could have to being seen by observant eyes when watching
under a girl's window. The mere thought recalled him at once to
chilling commonplace. He was for going away that moment; all the
delight was gone out of his watching. But he was a little curious to
know if the new comer were really only a casual stranger whom his
movements had stirred into idle curiosity. So he went straightway down
the street and passed the unwelcome intruder. He felt sure the face of
the man was known to him, although he could not at first recall to mind
the person's identity. He felt sure, too, by the way in which the man
looked at him and then turned suddenly off, that the new comer had
recognized him as well. This was tormenting for the moment, as he went
on perplexing himself by trying to think who it was that he had seen in
this unexpected and unwished-for way. He walked slowly, and looked back
once or twice. He could not see his disturber any more. The man had
either gone away or was, perhaps, standing in the shadow of a doorway.
Suddenly an idea flashed upon Heron.

"Why, of course," he exclaimed, "it's he! I ought to have known! It's
the man from Keeton--the hated rival."

By "hated rival," however, Heron did not mean a rival in love, but only
in electioneering; for he now knew that it was Mr. Sheppard he had
seen, and he remembered how Mr. Sheppard, when he met him in Minola's
room, had seemed oddly sullen and unwilling to fraternize. This was the
reason why Heron called him the hated rival. His own idea of a rival in
an election contest was that of a person whom one ought to ask to
dinner, and treat with especial courtesy and fair offer of friendship.

Suddenly, however, another idea had occurred to him.

"What on earth can he be doing there," he asked, "under her window? Can
it be possible that he too is a lover?"

He too? Who then was _the_ lover--the other lover? Heron did not
believe, and would not admit, that Blanchet was a genuine lover at all.
The whole theory of Victor's duty to watch under Minola's windows was
based on the assumption that Blanchet was no true lover, but a cunning
hunter of fortune. Why then ask, was Mr. Sheppard too a lover? Heron
did not at the moment stop to ask himself any such question, but after
awhile the absurdity of his words occurred to him, and he was a little
amused and a good deal ashamed of his odd and hasty way of putting the
question.

"Why shouldn't he be there as well as I?" he said. "Why should he be a
lover any more than I?"

Then he began to assure himself that the hated rival must have been
there only by chance; and it is doubtful whether if he had thought much
longer over the question he would not have ended by convincing himself
that nothing but the merest chance had brought him, too, under Minola's
window panes.

It was, indeed, Minola's window under which he had been watching; and
she too was watching, and never dreamed that he was so near. She looked
from her window not long after he had gone, and saw the street all
lonely, and felt lonely herself, and shuddered, thinking that life
would ever be a dreary piece of work for her. It is a melancholy fact
that all that time, and even long after she had gone in shuddering from
the window, poor Sheppard was standing in a doorway at the opposite
side of the street, and that she not only never saw him, but never
thought of him. Her thoughts were of Victor Heron, and of her own folly
and her own love--that love which seemed such folly, which was so
hopeless, which she knew, or at least believed it was a sort of treason
against friendship to indulge, although in absolute secret.

In Uhland's pretty poem called "Departure" a youth is going on his
wanderings, and his comrades escort him a little on his way, and as
they go along they pass beneath the windows of a pretty girl. The lad
looks up, and would fain if he might have a rose from her hand, and yet
tells himself that he would not have it--for to what end to have the
rose when she whom he loved cared nothing for him, and the rose would
only wither with him, and to no purpose? When he has gone the girl
strains her eyes after him in grief, and wonders what the world is to
be to her now that he she loved is going far away, and never knew of
her love. A few timely words might have spared all the heart-ache, no
doubt; but it will be a very different world from that which we have
known when all the words that might have been timely are spoken in
time, or even when the feelings that might prompt the timely words have
learned their own meaning at the right moment to give it breath.


CHAPTER XVIII.

"COUNSEL BETRAYED."


The next morning Heron rose with a distinct purpose of doing something
to put Minola on her guard. His purpose to do something was much more
clear than his knowledge of what he had better do. Anyhow he thought he
would go and see Minola, and say something to her. When he began to
speak he would probably hit upon the thing to say. As he might have put
it himself, Providence would pull him through somehow. The first thing
was to get to speech of Minola. This, at least, ought not to be hard to
compass.

His first idea was simply to go to her house and ask to see her. But
when he was near the scene of his mounting guard the past night he
began to think of the difficulties that would be put in his way if any
one else were present. How, for example, could he possibly say what he
specially wanted to say if Mary Blanchet were present, or were even
coming and going in and out of the room, as she was almost sure to be?
On the other hand, how could he formally ask for a private conversation
with Minola without stirring all manner of absurd curiosity and
conjecture? At the very least, Mary Blanchet would be sure to ask, when
he had gone, what he had come to say; and that would, under the
circumstances, be rather embarrassing for Minola. He gave up,
therefore, the idea of seeing Miss Grey at her own house.

Another plan at once occurred to him. He knew how often Minola walked
in Regent's Park--he would go and walk there about the time which she
usually chose, and he would go again and again until he met her. So he
started off for the Park, greatly relieved in mind to be doing
anything. All the time there was a good deal of work on his account
which he might and, if he were at all a sensible young man, would have
been doing. The time that he was spending in trying to ward off from
Minola a supposed danger might, if properly used, have procured him an
interview with a Cabinet Minister, or paved the way for easy success at
the future election for Keeton. There were twenty things which Mr.
Money had often told him he must do if he would have the faintest hope
of any success in anything; and all these things he was utterly
neglecting because he chose to think that he was called on to give some
advice to a girl who perhaps would repay him with but little thanks for
his officious attempt at interference.

He walked slowly through the park, along the paths which he knew that
she loved, and made for the canal. It was a soft, gray day, with no sky
seen. The air was surcharged with moisture; but it was not raining, and
the grass was only as if a heavy dew had settled on it. The soft breath
that floated over the fields was warm and languid. Only three colors
were to be seen all across the park: the green of the grass, the gray
of the clouds, or of the one cloud rather, and the dull black of the
tree-trunks. These colors indeed were softened, and shaded away, and
blended into each other, with indefinable varieties of tone and
delicate interchanges of effect. It was just the day to make a certain
class of observer curse the stupid and foggy monotony of the English
climate. It was the day, too, to gladden the heart of a certain refined
class of artist with whom delicate effects of tone and shade are
precious and familiar. Certainly it might be called a day of poetic
atmosphere. To Victor, who had long been used to the unwinking
steadiness of a tropical sun, there was something specially refreshing
and delightful in the grass, the trees, and the cloud. He found himself
yearning in heart for a life which would leave him more time and
thought for the skies, the trees, and the air.

Suddenly the scene vanished from his eyes, and he only saw Minola Grey.
He was now approaching the canal, and he saw her leaning over the
bridge and looking into the water. It was early in the day--too early
for the nursemaids and the children, and the ordinary walkers, and
there was no one but Minola now in Heron's sight.

The girl, as she leaned on the railing of the bridge and looked into
the water, might have been adopted by any artist as a model-figure of
melancholy. If Victor had been less in a hurry with everything--if he
had remained where he then was and looked at her unperceived for a few
moments, Heaven knows what inspiration of ideas, what revealings about
himself and her might have come into his mind. But Victor waited for
nothing--seldom in life gave himself much time to think, and, in any
case, would have had an instinctive objection to even a moment's
unperceived watching of a meditating girl. He was so rejoiced at the
readiness with which his desire to meet her had been gratified, that he
thought he could hardly seize his chance too soon. In his eagerness he
even forgot that the task he had undertaken was rather embarrassing,
and that he had not yet made up his mind as to what he was going to
say. He was by Minola's side in a moment.

She was so much surprised and startled that Victor was quite ashamed of
having come upon her in such a sudden way. He had forgotten that all
women have nerves, and get startled in ways unknown to men. At least,
he assumed it must be for some reason of this kind that Minola seemed
so much disturbed when he came up, but he certainly had not supposed
that girls so clever and healthy as Miss Grey were usually troubled
with nerves.

Minola recovered herself very soon, however, and got rid of all
appearance of mere nervous embarrassment, although there was for a
while a certain constraint in her manner.

"Have you been long here?" he asked.

"Not very long; at least it did not seem long. I like to be here at
this time; there are so few people."

"Yes; I knew you were likely to be here about this time if you were
coming at all to-day," he said; an awkward remark, as it suggested that
he had come expressly to meet her.

"I come here at all manner of times," she said; "but I think I like
this time the best."

"You are not going any further, I suppose?"

"No; I thought of turning back now, and going home."

"I'll walk a little way with you if you will allow me?"

Of course she had no objection to make. They had walked in that place
often before, and it was a matter of certainty that as they did meet
they would walk together. He need hardly have asked her if she would
allow him to walk with her now.

So they turned and walked a little off the beaten track, and under the
trees. When they had walked a certain distance in one direction Victor
turned round and she turned with him, as if she were merely obeying his
signal of command. It has already been said more than once that Mr.
Heron always went on as if he were ever so much older than she, and
belonging indeed to a different stage of life. He bore himself as a man
of forty or thereabout might do with a young woman of Minola's age.

"How do you like Blanchet's book?" he asked abruptly.

"It is very beautiful, I suppose. It's a little too ornamental and
fantastic perhaps for my taste; but I suppose that is in keeping with
the style of the poems; and _he_ is delighted with the book."

"It has cost a great deal of money--much more than it ought to have
cost. I don't like the thing at all."

"But think of the joy given to the poet. It is surely not very dearly
bought at the price. I never knew of a man so happy."

"Yes, yes; that is all very well for him----"

"It is very well for me too, Mr. Heron--to be able to do a kindness for
any human creature. I dare say it has given me as much pleasure as it
has given him, and made me quite as proud too--and is not that
something to gain?"

"Still I can't help feeling uneasy about this thing. It has cost a heap
of money--much more than I ever supposed it would--and I seem as if I
had brought you into all the expense."

"How could that be, Mr. Heron? I expressly wished Mr. Blanchet to do as
he pleased; and he understood me exactly as I wished him to do. You had
nothing to do with it."

"Oh, yes! I had something to do with it; and then--excuse me--you are
rather young perhaps----"

"Perhaps I can't be expected to know my own mind; or ought not to be
trusted with the spending of my own money?"

"No, I didn't mean that; but you might not have known exactly what you
were being let in for; and it is a good deal of money for a girl to
pay."

"And in fact you don't think a girl ought to be allowed to spend her
money without some wise person of the superior sex to guide her hand?
Thank you very much, Mr. Heron, but I think I may have my own way in
this at least. I have often told you that I left Keeton because I could
not stand the control of wiser and better persons than myself. I am not
at all a good girl, Mr. Heron; I never said I was. The counsels of the
wise are sadly thrown away on me, I fear."

She spoke in a hard and ungenial tone, which he had not heard her use
before. He could not help looking at her with an expression of wonder.
She saw the expression and understood it.

"You are shocked at my want of sweet, feminine docility? I ought not to
have any ideas of my own, I suppose?"

"No, I am not shocked, and I am not at all such a ridiculous person as
you would seem to suppose, and I have none of the ideas you set down to
me; but you don't seem quite like yourself, and you speak as if you
were offended with me for something."

"Offended? Oh, no. How could I possibly be offended? I am very much
obliged, on the contrary, for the trouble you take for one who seems to
you quite unable to take care of herself."

Victor did not like her tone. There was something aggressive in it. He
was not experienced enough in the ways of society to cry content to
that which grieved his heart, and his thoughts therefore showed
themselves pretty clearly in his face.

"I don't like Blanchet's taking all this money," he said, after a
moment of silence. "I don't think a man ought to take such a helping
hand as that from--well, from----"

"From a woman, you were going to say? Why not from a woman, Mr. Heron?
Are we never to do a kind thing, we unfortunate creatures, because we
are women and are young?"

"No, I don't say that; but there are things it may become a woman to
do, and which it doesn't quite so well become a man to profit by. I
don't think Blanchet----"

"Mr. Blanchet seems to have a higher idea of what a woman's friendship
may be than you have, Mr. Heron. He does not see any degradation in
allowing a woman to hold him out a helping hand when he wants one. I
like his ideas better than yours. You say you would have done this
little service for him if you had been allowed. Why should there be any
greater degradation to him in having it done by me? At all events you
can't wonder if I don't see it all at once."

"Of course if you are satisfied and pleased, there is nothing more to
be said in the matter."

"I am satisfied and pleased. Why should I not be? I asked a friend to
let me do something to help him, and he answered me just in the spirit
in which I spoke. Of course I am glad to find that there is even one
man who could take a friendly offer in a friendly way. There are not
many such men, I suppose?"

Victor could not help smiling at her emphatic way of expressing her
scorn of men.

"I do believe you have really turned yourself misanthropical by reading
'Le Misanthrope,'" he said.

"Well, why should there not be a woman Alceste? although I never knew
any woman in real life more worthy to be classed with him than the men
we meet in real life are. Miss Alceste, I think, would sound very
prettily. I wish I could think myself entitled to bear such a name?"

"Or Miss Misanthrope," he suggested. "How would that do for a young
lady's name?"

"Admirably, I think. That would get over all the difficulty too, and
save foolish persons from thinking that one was setting up for another
Alceste. I should like very much to be called Miss Misanthrope."

"If you go on as you are doing, you will soon be entitled to bear the
name," said Victor gravely. "At the present moment I don't know that I
should much object to that."

"No! I am glad that anything I am likely to do has a chance of pleasing
you. But why should you not object just at present? Why not now as well
as at any other time?"

"Because I should like you to be a little misanthropical just now, and
a little distrustful--of men, that is to say, Miss Grey."

She colored slightly, although she had no idea of his meaning yet.

"I always thought you were full of trust in the whole human race, Mr.
Heron; I thought you liked everybody and believed in everybody. Now you
tell me to distrust all mankind."

"I didn't say that."

"No? Some particular person, then?"

"Some particular person, perhaps. At least I don't mean exactly that,"
Heron hastened to explain, his conscience smiting him at the thought
that perhaps after all he might be suggesting unjust suspicions of an
absent man who was a sort of friend. "I only mean that you are very
generous and unselfish, and that there might be persons who might try
to make use of your good nature, and whom perhaps you might not quite
understand. I don't know whether I ought to speak about this at all."

"Nor I, Mr. Heron, I am sure; for I really don't know what you are
speaking of or what mysterious danger is hanging over me. But I hope
there is something of the kind, for I should so like to resemble a
heroine of romance."

"There is not anything very romantic in prospect so far as I know," he
said, now almost wishing he had said nothing, and yet feeling in his
heart a serious fear that Minola might be led to put too much faith in
Blanchet. "But if I might speak out freely, and without any fear of
your misunderstanding me or being offended, there is something, Miss
Grey, that I should very much like to say." He spoke in an uneasy and
constrained way, forcing himself on to an ungracious task.

"You have been preaching distrust to me, Mr. Heron, and you have been
finding fault generally with all women who trust anybody. To show you
how your lessons are thrown away on me, I shall certainly trust you as
much as you like, and I shall not misunderstand anything you say nor be
offended by it." There was something of her old sweet frankness in her
manner as she spoke these words, and Heron was warmed by it.

"Well," he said at last, "you are a girl, and young, and living almost
alone, and people tell me you are going to have money. You have
promised to excuse my blunt way of talking out, haven't you? I almost
wish for your sake, as you like to live this kind of life, that you had
just enough of money to live upon and no more; but I hear that that is
not the case, or at all events is not to be. Well, the only thing is
that people who I think are not true, and are not honest, and who are
not worthy of you in any way whatever, may try to make you think that
they are true, and sincere, and all the rest of it."

"Well, Mr. Heron, what if they do?"

"You may perhaps be persuaded to believe them."

"And even if I am, what matter is that? I had much rather be deceived
in such things than know the truth, if the truth is to mean that people
are all deceitful."

"I don't think you want to understand me," he said.

"Indeed I do; I only want to understand you; but I fail as yet. Why not
speak out, Mr. Heron, like a man and a brother? If there is anything
you want me to know, do please make me to know it in the clearest way."

She was growing impatient.

"You will have lovers," he said, driven to despair when it seemed as if
she could not understand a mere hint of any kind; "of course you must
know that you are attractive and all that--and if you come to have
money, you will be besieged with fellows--with admirers I mean. Do be a
little distrustful--of one at least; I don't like him and I wish you
didn't--and I can't very well tell you why, only that he does not seem
to me to be manly or even honest."

She colored a little, but she also smiled faintly, for she still did
not understand him.

"I suppose I must know the man you mean, Mr. Heron; for I think he is
the only man I ever heard you say anything against, and I have not
forgotten. But what can have made you think that I needed any lecture
about him? I don't suppose he ever thought about me in that way in his
life, or would marry one of my birth and my bringing up even if I asked
him. And in any case, Mr. Heron, I would not marry him even if he asked
me. But what a shame it seems to arrange in advance for the refusing of
a man who never showed the faintest intention of making an offer."

At first Heron did not quite understand her. Then he suddenly caught
her meaning.

"Oh, that fellow? I didn't mean him. I never could have supposed that
you were likely to be taken in by him."

"To do him justice, Mr. Heron, he never seems to have any thought of
taking any one in. Such as he is he always shows himself, I think."

"Oh, I don't care about him----"

"Nor I, Mr. Heron, I assure you. But whom then do you care about--in
that sense?"

"I distrust a man who takes a woman's money in a reckless and selfish
way," Heron said impetuously. "That is a man I would not trust. Don't
trust him, Miss Grey; believe me, he is a cad--I mean a selfish and
deceitful fellow. I can't bear the thought of a girl like you being
sacrificed--or sacrificing yourself as you might do perhaps--and I tell
you that he is just the sort of man----"

"Are you speaking of Mr. Blanchet now, Mr. Heron?" Her tone was cold
and clear. She was evidently hurt, but determined now to have the whole
question out.

"Yes, I am speaking of Blanchet, of course--of whom else could I be
speaking in such a way?"

"Mr. Blanchet is my friend, Mr. Heron; I thought he was a friend of
yours as well."

"Well, I thought he was a manly, honest sort of fellow--I don't think
so now," Victor went on impetuously, warming himself as he went into
increasing strength of conviction. "I know you will hate me for telling
you this, but I can't help that. I am as much interested in your
happiness as if--as if you were my sister--and if you were my sister, I
would just do the same."

It would indeed be idle to attempt to describe the course of the
feelings that ran through Minola's breast as she listened to the words
of this kind which he continued to pour out. But out of all that swept
through her--out of shame, surprise, anger, grief, the one thought came
uppermost, and survived, and guided her--the thought that she had only
to leave Heron's appeal unanswered, and her secret was safe for ever.

She made up her mind, and was self-contained and composed to all
appearance again.

"Let us not say any more about this, Mr. Heron; I am sure you mean it
as a friend; and I never could allow myself to feel offended by
anything said in friendship. I am sorry you have such an opinion of Mr.
Blanchet; I have a much better opinion of him; I like him better than I
like most men; but you know we have just agreed that I ought to be
called 'Miss Misanthrope,' and I assure you I mean to do my very best
to deserve the name. No--please don't say any more--I had rather not
hear it indeed; and if you know anything of women, Mr. Heron, you must
know that we never take advice on these matters. No; trust to my
earning my name of Miss Misanthrope; but don't tell me of the demerits
of this or that particular man. I had rather hate men in the general
than in all the particular cases--and how long we must have talked
about this nonsense, for here is the gate of the park; and Mary
Blanchet will be thinking that I am lost!"

They almost always parted at this park gate. This time he felt that he
must not attempt to go any further with her. She smiled and nodded to
him with a manner of constrained friendliness, and went her way, and
Heron's heart was deeply moved, for he feared that he had lost his
friend.


CHAPTER XIX.

MR. ST. PAUL'S MYSTERY.


Two events occurring almost together affected a good deal some of the
people of this story. The first was the death of Mrs. Saulsbury.

Miss Grey was at once invited by the lawyers who had the charge of her
father's affairs to visit Keeton, in order to become fully acquainted
with the new disposition of things in which she had so much interest.
Thereupon Mr. Money announced that, as Miss Grey had no very close
friend to look after her interests, he was resolved to put himself in
the place of a parent or some near relation, and go with her and see
that all her interests were properly cared for. Minola was unwilling to
put him to so much trouble and loss of time, well knowing how absorbed
in business he was; but he set all her remonstrances aside with blunt,
good-humored kindness.

"Lucy is coming with us," he said, "if you don't think her in the way;
it might be pleasant for you to have a companion."

"I should so much like to go with Nola," pleaded Lucy.

"Oh, I shall be delighted if Lucy will go," Minola said, not well
knowing how to put into words her sense of all their kindness. It was
really a great relief to her to have Lucy's companionship in such a
visit. Mary Blanchet did not like to go back even for a few days to
Keeton. The poetess objected to seeing ever again the place where she
considered that art and she had been degraded by her servitude in the
court-house. So the conditions of the visit were all settled.

But there arose suddenly some new conditions which Minola had never
expected. The long looked-for vacancy at length occurred in the
representation of Keeton. The sitting member announced his
determination to resign his seat as soon as the necessary arrangements
for such a step could be put into effect. It was imperative that Victor
Heron should lose no time in throwing himself upon the vacant borough.
Mr. Money and Lucy rattled up to Minola's door one breathless morning
with the news. Lucy's eyes were positively dancing with excitement and
delight.

"It seems to me that there's going to be a regular invasion of your
borough, Miss Grey," Mr. Money said. "We're all going to be there. You
see that you are under no manner of compliment to me. I must have gone
down to Keeton in any case; it's one of the lucky things that don't
often befall a busy man like me to be able to kill the two birds with
the one stone. I must take care of our friend Heron as well as of you.
He would be doing some ridiculous thing if there were no elder to look
after him. He is as innocent of the dodges of an English election as
you are of the ways of English lawyers. So we'll be all together; that
will be very pleasant. Of course we'll not interfere with you. You
shall be just as quiet as you like while we are doing our
electioneering."

What could Minola say against all this arrangement, which seemed so
satisfactory and so delightful to her friends? It was not pleasant for
her to be brought thus into a sort of companionship with Victor Heron.
But it would be far less pleasant, it would indeed be intolerable and
not to be thought of, that she should in any way raise an objection or
make a difficulty which might hint of the feelings that possessed her.

"After all, what does it matter?" she asked herself as Mr. Money was
speaking. "I shall have to suffer this kind of thing in some way for
half my life, I suppose. It is no one's fault but my own. Why should I
disturb the arrangements of these kind people because of any weaknesses
of mine? If women will be fools, at least they ought to try to hide
their folly. This is as good practice for me as I could have."

So she told Mr. Money and Lucy that any arrangement that suited them
would suit her, and that she would be ready to go the moment he gave
the word. Then Mr. Money hastened away to look after other things, and
Lucy remained behind "to help Nola with her preparations," as she
insisted on putting it, but partly, as Minola felt only too sure, to
talk with her about Victor Heron.

Since Heron had offered her his advice in the park, and she had put it
aside, Minola and he had only met once or twice. Then he had attempted,
the first time of their meeting, to renew his apologies, and she had
put them lightly away, as she already had done the advice, and had
given him to understand that she wished to hear no more of the matter.
She had hoped that by assuming a manner of indifference she might lead
him to forget the whole affair. But he did not understand her, and
really believed that he had lost her friendship for ever by the manner
in which he had spoken against Herbert Blanchet. He was troubled for
her much more than for himself, believing, or at least fearing, that
she had set her heart on a man unworthy of her. He kept away from her
therefore, assuming that his society was no longer welcome, and
resolute not to intrude on her.

Minola had hoped that the worst was over, and that he and she were
likely to settle gradually and unnoticed by others into a condition of
ordinary acquaintanceship. This melancholy hope, to her a cruel
necessity in itself, but yet the best hope she could see now left for
her, was likely to be disturbed for a while by this ill-omened visit to
Keeton.

Minola was busy making her preparations for going to Keeton, and with a
very heavy heart. Everything about the visit was now distressing to
her. The occasion was mournful; she dreaded long talks and discussions
with Mr. Saulsbury; she dreaded meeting old acquaintances in Keeton;
she shrank from the responsibilities of various kinds that seemed to be
thrust upon her. When she left Keeton she thought she had done with it
for ever. Where was the free life she had arranged for herself? Nothing
seemed to turn out as she had expected.

Meanwhile Mary Blanchet and Lucy Money were both delighted, and in
their different ways, at the prospect of Minola's visit to Keeton. Mary
saw her leader and patroness come back rich, and ready to be
distinguished and to confer distinction. Lucy Money had the prospect of
variety, of a holiday with Minola, whom she loved, and of being very
often in the society of Victor Heron. Minola was, if anything, made
additionally sad by the thought that it was not in her power to share
their feelings, and the fear that she might seem a wet blanket
sometimes on their happiness.

Lucy had been with her all the morning, helping her with Mary to make
preparations for the journey. Minola was glad when it was found that
some things were wanting, and Lucy and Mary offered to go out and buy
them in Oxford street.

Minola was enjoying the sense of being alone, and was, at the same
time, secretly accusing herself of want of friendship because she
enjoyed it, when a card was brought to her, and she was told that the
gentleman said he wanted to speak to her, if she pleased, "rather
particular." The card was that of Mr. St. Paul. He had never visited
Minola before, nor was she even aware that he knew where she lived. She
was surprised, but she did not know of any reason why she might not see
him. She hastened down to her sitting-room, and there she found Mr. St.
Paul, as she had found Mr. Blanchet once before. Mr. St. Paul looked
even a stranger figure in her room than Mr. Blanchet had done, she
thought. He seemed far too tall for the place, and had a heedless,
lounging, half-swaggering way, which appeared as if it were compounded
of the old manner of the cavalry man and the newer habits of the
western hunter. Nothing, however, could have been more easy, confident,
and self-possessed than the way in which he came forward to greet
Minola. If he had been visiting her every day for a month before, he
could not have been more friendly and at his ease.

"How d'ye do, Miss Grey? Just in time to see you, I suppose, before you
go? I've been down to Keeton already. I'm going down again--I mean to
make my mark there somehow."

Minola thought, with a certain half-amused, half-abashed feeling, of
the remarks she had heard concerning herself and Mr. St. Paul; but she
did not show any embarrassment in her manner. Indeed, Mr. St. Paul was
not a person to allow any one to feel much embarrassed in his presence.
He was entirely easy, self-satisfied, and unaffected, and he had a way
of pouring out his confidences as though he had known Minola from her
birth upward.

"I hope you found a pleasant reception there?"

"Yes, well enough for that matter. I find my brother and his wife are
not anything like so popular as I was given to understand that they
were. I saw my brother in London--didn't I tell you?--before I went
down to Keeton, you know."

"No, I did not know that you had seen him; I hope he was glad to see
you, Mr. St. Paul?"

"Not he; I dare say he was very sorry I hadn't been wiped out by the
Indians. Do you know what being wiped out means?"

"Yes, I think I could guess that much. I suppose it means being
killed?"

"Of course. I mean to teach you all the slang of the West; I think a
nice girl never looks so nice as when she is talking good expressive
slang. Our British slang is all unmeaning stuff, you know; only
consists in calling a thing by some short vulgar word--or some long and
pompous word, the fun being in the pompousness; but the western slang
is a sort of picture-writing, don't you know?--a kind of compressed
metaphor, answering the purposes of an intellectual pemmican or
charqui. Do you know what these things are, Miss Grey?"

"Oh, yes; compressed meats of some kind, I suppose. But I don't think I
care about slang very much."

"You may be sure you will when you get over the defects of your Keeton
bringing up. But what was I going to tell you? Let me see. Oh, yes,
about my brother and his wife. The honest Keeton folks seem to have
forgotten them. But I was speaking, too, about my going to see my
brother in town. Oh, yes, I went to see him; he didn't want me, and he
made no bones about letting me know it. He thinks I have disgraced the
family; it was quite like the scene in the play--whose play is it?--I
am sure I don't remember--where Lord Foppington's brother goes to see
him, and is taken so coolly. I haven't read the play for more years
than you have lived in the world, I dare say, but it all came back upon
me in a moment. I felt like saying, 'Good-by, Foppington,' only that he
would never have understood the allusion, and would think I meant to
say he was a 'fop,' which he is not, bless him."

"Then your visit did not bring you any nearer to a reconciliation with
your brother?"

"Not a bit of it--pushed us further asunder, I think. The odd thing was
that I told him I wanted nothing from him, and that I had made money
enough for myself in the West. You would have thought that would have
fetched him, wouldn't you? Not the least in life, I give you my word."
And Mr. St. Paul laughed good-humoredly at the idea.

"I am sorry to hear it," said Minola. "I think there are quarrels and
spites enough in the world, without brothers joining in with all the
rest."

"Bad form, isn't it--don't you think? But I don't suppose in real life
brothers and sisters ever do care much for each other--do you think
they do? I haven't known any such cases--have you?"

Minola could not contribute much from her own family history to
demonstrate the affection and devotion of brothers, but she had no idea
of agreeing in the truth of Mr. St. Paul's philosophic reflections for
all that.

"I believe what you say is true enough as regards the brothers, but I
can't admit it of the sisters."

"Come now, you don't really believe that nonsense, I know."

"Believe what nonsense? That sisters may be fond of their brothers
sometimes?"

"No, I don't mean that; but that there is any real difference between
men and women in these ways--that men are all bad and women all good,
and that sort of thing. One's as bad as the other, Miss Grey. When you
have lived as long in the world as I have you'll find it, I tell you.
But I don't find much fault with either lot. I think they are both
right enough all things considered, don't you know?"

"I am sure Mary Blanchet is devoted to her brother," Miss Grey said
warmly.

"That little old maid? Well, now, do you know, I shouldn't wonder.
That's just the sort of woman to be devoted to a brother, and, of
course, he doesn't care twopence about her."

"Oh, for shame!" said Minola, not, however, feeling quite satisfied
about the strength of Herbert Blanchet's affection for his sister, even
while she felt bound, for Mary's sake, to utter her protest against his
being set down as wholly undeserving.

"But, I say," Mr. St. Paul observed, "what a fool he is! I don't think
I ever saw a more conceited cad and idiot."

"He is a very particular friend of mine, Mr. St. Paul," Miss Grey
began. "At least, his sister is one of my oldest friends."

"Yes, yes; just so. The good old spinster is a friend of yours, and you
try to like the cad brother on her account. All quite right, of course.
I should say he was just the sort of fellow to borrow the poor old
girl's money, if she had any."

"Oh, Mary has no money, and I am sure if she had she would be only too
glad to give it to him."

"Very likely; anyhow he would be only too glad to take it, you may be
sure. But I don't want to say anything against your friends, Miss Grey,
if you don't like it. Only women generally do like it, you know--and
then you may say anything you please, in your turn, against any of my
friends or relatives. I shan't be offended one bit, I can assure you."

Minola had nothing to say, and therefore said nothing. Her new
acquaintance did not allow any silence to spring up.

"Talking of friends," he said, "there is one of your friends who
politely declines any helping hand of mine in the election business at
Keeton, although I think I could do him a good turn with some of the
fellows who are out of humor with my brother. Our quixotic young friend
will have none of the help of brothers who quarrel with brothers, it
seems. Easy to see that he never had a brother."

"Mr. Heron is a man of very sensitive nature, I believe," Minola said;
"he will not do anything that he does not think exactly right, Mr.
Money says."

"Yes, so I hear. Odd, is it not? Heron always was a confounded young
fool, you know. He got into all his difficulties by bothering about
things that oughtn't to have concerned him one red cent. Well, he won't
have my disinterested assistance. There again he is a fool, for I could
have done something for him, and Money knows it--it was partly on
Money's account that I thought of taking up Heron's side of the affair,
because, so far as I am concerned, anybody else would do me just as
well so long as he opposed my brother's man."

"I can quite understand that Mr. Heron would not allow himself to be
made a mere instrument to work out your quarrel with your brother. I
think he was quite right."

The good-humored St. Paul laughed.

"All very fine, Miss Grey, and it does for a lady uncommonly well, no
doubt; but if you want to get into Parliament, it won't do to be quite
so squeamish. I am sure I should be only too happy to get the help of
Cain against Abel or Abel against Cain if I could in such a case."

"Most men would, I dare say," Minola answered, with as much severity as
she could assume under the possible penalty of Mr. St. Paul's laughter.
"But I am glad that there are some men, or that there is one man, at
least, who thinks there is some object in life higher than that of
getting into Parliament."

"Oh, as far as that goes, I quite agree with you, Miss Grey; I
shouldn't care twopence myself about a seat in Parliament--a confounded
bore, I think. But if you go in for playing a game, why, you ought to
play it, you know."

"But are there not rules in every game? Are there not such things as
fair and unfair?"

"Of course, yes; but I fancy the strong players generally make the
rules to suit their own ideas in the end. Anyhow, I never heard of any
one playing at electioneering who would have hesitated for a moment
about accepting the hand I offered to our quixotic young friend."

"I am glad he is quixotic," Minola said eagerly. "I like to think of a
man who ventures to be a Quixote."

"Very sorry to hear it, Miss Grey, for I am afraid you won't like much
to think about me. Yet, do you know, I came here to make a sort of
quixotic offer about this very election."

"I am glad to hear it; the more quixotic it is the more I shall like
it. To whom is the offer to be made? To Mr. Heron?"

"Oh, no, by Jove!--excuse me, Miss Grey--nothing of the sort. The offer
is to be made to you."

"To me?" Minola was a little surprised, but she did not color or show
any surprise. She knew very well that it was not an offer of himself
Mr. St. Paul was about to make, but it amused her to think of the
interpretation Mary Blanchet, if she could have been present, would at
once have put on his words.

"Yes, indeed, Miss Grey, to you. I have it in my power to make you
returning officer for Keeton. Do you understand what that means?"

"I know in a sort of way what a returning officer is; but I don't at
all understand how I can do his office."

"I'll show you. You shall have the fate of Keeton as much in your hands
as if you owned the whole concern--a deuced deal more, in fact, than if
you owned the whole concern, in days of ballot like these. I believe
you do own a good many of the houses there now, don't you?"

"I hardly know; but I know that if I do, I wish I didn't."

"Very well; just you try what you can get out of your influence over
your tenants--that's all."

"Then how am I to become returning officer for Keeton?"

"That's quite another thing. That depends on me."

"On you, Mr. St. Paul?"

"On me. Just listen." St. Paul had been seated in his favorite attitude
of careless indolence in a very low chair, so low that his long legs
seemed as if they stretched half way across the room. His position,
joined with an expression of self-satisfied lawlessness in his face,
might have whimsically suggested a sort of resemblance to Milton's arch
fiend "stretched out huge at length," in one of his less malign humors.
He now jumped up and stood on the hearth-rug, with his back to the
fireplace, his slightly stooping shoulders only seeming to make him
look taller than otherwise, because they might set people wondering as
to the height he would have reached if he had only stood erect and made
the most of his inches. His blue eyes had quite a sparkle of excited
interest in them, and his prematurely bald forehead looked oddly
infantine over these eyes and that keen, fearless mouth.

"Look here, Miss Grey, it's all in your hands. You know both these
fellows, don't you?"

"Both what fellows?"

"These fellows who want to get in for Keeton. You know them both. Now
which of them do you want to win?"

"What can it matter which way my wishes go--if they went any way?"

"How like a woman! How very like a woman!" and he laughed.

"What is like a woman? I know when a man says anything is like a woman,
he means to say that it is ridiculous."

"Well, that's true enough; that is about what we do mean in most cases.
What I meant in this case was only that you would not answer my
question. I put a plain direct question, to which you must have some
answer to give, and you only asked me a question in return which had
nothing to do with mine."

"Perhaps I have no answer to give. I may have the answer in my own
mind, and yet not have it to give to any one else."

"Oh, but you may really give it to me! In strictest confidence I assure
you; no living soul shall ever know from me. Come, Miss Grey, let me
know the truth. It can't possibly do you any harm--or anybody harm for
that matter, except the wrong man for I take it for granted that the
man you don't favor must be the wrong man."

"But I don't know that I ought to have anything to do with such a
matter----"

"Never mind these scruples; it's nothing; there's to be no treason in
the business, nor any unfair play. It's only this; I couldn't get in
for the borough myself, even if I tried my best, but I can send in the
one of the two whom I prefer--or, in this case, whom you prefer. I can
do this as certainly as anything in this uncertain world can be
certain."

"But how could that be?"

"_That_ it would not suit me to tell you just at present. I know a safe
way, that's all. In the teeth of the ballot I can promise you that.
Now, Miss Grey, who is to have the seat?"

"Are you really serious in this, Mr. St. Paul?"

"As serious as I ever was in my life about anything--a good deal more
serious, I dare say, than I often was about graver things and more
important men. Now then, Miss Grey, which of these two fellows is to
sit for Keeton?"

"But why do you make this offer to me?" she asked, with some
hesitation. "What have I to do with it?" There was something alarming
to her in his odd proposition, about which he was evidently quite
serious now.

"Why do I make the offer to you? Well, because I should like to please
you, because you are a sort of woman I like--a regular good girl, I
think, without any nonsense or affectation about you. Now that's the
whole reason why I offer this to you. I don't care much myself either
way, except to annoy my brother, and that can be done in fifty other
ways without half the trouble to me. I was inclined to draw out of the
whole affair, until I remembered that you knew both the fellows, and I
thought you might have a wish for one of them to go in in preference to
the other--they can't both go in, you see--and so I made up my mind to
give you the chance of saying which it should be. Now then, Miss Grey,
name your man."

He put his hands into his pockets, and coolly waited for an answer. He
had not the appearance of being in the least amused at her perplexity.
He took the whole affair in a calm, matter-of-fact way, as if it were
the most natural thing in the world.

Minola was perplexed. She did not see what right he could have to
control the coming contest in any way, and still less, what right she
could have to influence him in doing so. The dilemma was one in which
no previous experience could well guide her. She much wished she had
Mr. Money at hand to give her a word of counsel.

"Come, Miss Grey, make up your mind--or rather tell me what you have
already made up your mind to, for I am sure you have not been waiting
until now to form an opinion. Which of these two men do you want to see
in Parliament?"

There did not seem any particular reason why Minola or any girl might
not say in plain words which of two candidates she would rather see
successful.

Mr. St. Paul appeared to understand her difficulty, for he said in an
encouraging way--

"After all, you know, if you had women's rights and all that sort of
thing, you would have to give your vote for one or other of these
fellows, and I dare say you would be expected to take the stump for
your favorite candidate. So there really can't be any very serious
objection to your telling me in confidence which of the two you want to
win."

Minola could not see how there could be any objection on any moral
principle she could think of just then--being in truth a little
confused and puzzled--to her giving a voice to the wish she had formed
about the election.

"It's not the speaking out of my wish that gives me any doubt," she
said; "it is the condition under which you want me to speak. I seem to
be doing something that I have no right to do--that is, Mr. St. Paul,
if you are serious."

"I remember reading, long ago," he said, "some Arabian Nights' story,
or something of the kind, about a king, I think it was, who was brought
at night to some mysterious place and told to cut a rope there, and
that something or other would happen, he did not know what or when. The
thing seemed very simple, and yet he didn't quite like to do it without
knowing why, and how, and all about it. It strikes me that you seem to
be in the same sort of fix."

"So I am; just the same. Why can't you tell me what you are going to
do?"

"I like that! That is my secret for the present."

"And your king--the king in your story--did he cut the rope at last?"

"I am afraid I have forgotten that; but I have no doubt he did, for he
was a reasonable sort of creature, being a man, and I know that
everything came right with him in the end."

"Very well; I accept the omen of your king, and I too will cut the rope
without asking why. Of course I wish that Mr. Heron should be elected.
He is a Liberal in politics. Why do you laugh when I say that, Mr. St.
Paul?"

"Well, I didn't know that you cared much for that sort of thing, and
women are generally supposed to be reactionaries all the world over,
are they not? Well, anyhow, that's one reason, his being a Liberal.
What next?"

"I don't know that any next is wanting. But of course I think Mr. Heron
is a much cleverer man, and is likely to be much better able to get on
in the House of Commons; and then he has his complaint to make against
the government----"

"Yes; and then?"

"Then he is very much liked by people whom I like--and I like him very
much myself." Minola spoke out with perfect frankness, believing that
that was the best thing she could do, and not showing the least sign of
embarrassment.

Mr. St. Paul laughed.

"You don't like the other fellow so well?" he said.

"I am sure he is a very good man----"

"That's enough; you need not say another word. We all can tell what a
critic means when he speaks of some actor as a careful and painstaking
performer. It's just the same when a woman says a man is very good.
Then you pronounce for Heron?"

"I pronounce for Mr. Heron decidedly, if you call saying what I should
like to happen pronouncing for any one."

"In this case it is of more effect than many other pronunciamentos. You
have elected Heron, Miss Grey, if I am not much more out in my calculations
than I have been this some time. All right, I am satisfied. If you have
money to throw away, just back what's-his-name?--Sheppard--heavily, and
you are sure to get rid of it."

"And you won't tell me what all this means?"

"Not I indeed: not likely. Good day, Miss Grey. You have elected your
friend Heron, I can tell you. Odd, isn't it, that he should come to be
elected after all by me?"

He bade her good day again, and strode and shambled out of the room and
down stairs, leaving Minola much perplexed, and not quite pleased, and
yet full of a secret wonder and pride at the possibility of her having
helped to do Mr. Heron a service.

"I wonder what he would say if he knew of it?" she asked herself, and
she could hardly think that he would be greatly delighted with the
promise of such influence.


CHAPTER XX.

LOVE AND ELECTIONEERING.


The soul of Keeton, as a local orator expressed it, was stirred to its
depths by the events which succeeded. The three estates of the town,
whereof we have already spoken, were alike concerned in the election.
Had it never occurred, there would have been enough in the death of
Mrs. Saulsbury and the rearrangement of Mr. Grey's property to keep
conversation up among the middle grade of Keeton folks. But business
like that would not interest the park, and of course it had no interest
for the working class of the town. The election, on the contrary, was
of equal concern to park, semi-detached villa, and cottage, or even
garret. A contest in Keeton was an absolute novelty, so far as the
memory of living man could go back.

It may perhaps be said that the opinion of the class who alone
concerned themselves about her affairs had been, on the whole,
decidedly unfavorable to Minola. She had gone as a sort of rebel
against legitimate authority out of Keeton, and had flung herself into
the giddy vortex of London life. No one well knew what had become of
her; and that with Keeton folks was another way of saying that she must
have rushed upon destruction. Some persons held that she must have gone
upon the stage. This idea became almost a certainty when a Keeton man,
being in London on business, brought back with him from town a
play-bill announcing a new opera bouffe in which one of the minor
performers was named "Miss Mattie Grey." If the good Keeton man had
only looked in a few other play-bills, he would have no doubt found
Greys in abundance--Matties, Minnies, Nellies, and such like, Grey
being rather a favorite name with young ladies in the profession. But
he made no such investigation, and it was at once assumed that Mattie
Grey was Minola Grey in disguise--a disguise as subtle as that of the
famous knight, Sir Tristam, who, when he wanted to conceal his identity
from all observers and place himself beyond all possibility of
detection, called himself Sir Tramtrist.

When, however, it was found that Minola was to have her father's
property after all, a certain change took place in the opinion of most
persons who concerned themselves about the matter. It was assumed
generally that Mr. Grey was far too good and Christian a man to have
left his property to a girl who could be capable of acting in an opera
bouffe. Then, when Miss Grey in person came to the town in the company
of so distinguished a man as Mr. Money, even gossip started repentant
at the sound itself had made, and began to deny that it had ever made
any sound at all. Mr. Money was a sort of hero among the middle class
everywhere. He was known to have fought his way up in life, and to be
now very rich; and when Miss Grey came into the town in the company of
Mr. Money and his daughter, the report went about forthwith that Minola
Grey had got into the very best society in London, and that she was
going to marry the eldest son of Mr. Money, and to be presented at
court.

Mr. Money had taken a couple of floors of the best hotel to begin with.
He had brought his carriage with him--a carriage in which he was hardly
ever known to take a seat when in town. He had brought a sort of
retinue of servants. He went deliberately about making what Mr. St.
Paul would have called "a splurge." Mr. Money knew his Pappenheimers.
He knew that he was well known to have sprung from nothing, but he also
knew that the middle and lower classes of Keeton would have given him
little thanks if he had tried to please them by exhibiting there a
modesty becoming of his modest origin. He knew well enough that the
more he put on display the more they would think of him and of his
clients. Therefore he put on display like a garment--a garment to which
he was little used, and in which he took no manner of delight. There
was generally a little group of persons round the hotel doors at all
hours of the day waiting to see Mr. Money and his friends go out or
come in. At first Minola positively declined to go out at all, except
at night; and the recent death of her father's widow gave her a fair
excuse for remaining quietly indoors. Lucy delighted in the whole
affair, and often declared that she felt as if she had been turned into
a princess. When Mr. Heron came down he too seemed rather to enjoy it.
At least he took it all as a matter of course. The experiences of
colonial days, when the ruler of a colony, however small it may be, is
a person of majestic proportions in his own sphere, enabled him to take
Mr. Money's pomp quite seriously.

Meanwhile Mr. Augustus Sheppard had got his committee-rooms and his
displays of various kinds, and was understood to be working hard. The
election contest, so long looked for, had taken every one a little by
surprise when it showed itself so near. It was natural that Mr.
Sheppard and his friends should feel confident of the result. The
retiring representative was now an old man. He had faithfully served
out his time; he had always voted as his patrons wished him to do; he
had never made a speech in the House of Commons; he had never, indeed,
risen to his feet there at all, except once or twice to present a
petition. The delights of a Parliamentary career were, therefore, this
long time beginning to pall upon him. He had been notoriously anxious
to get out of Parliament. He had been sent into the House of Commons by
the late duke to keep the seat warm until the present duke should come
of age. But the present duke succeeded to the peerage before he came of
age, and therefore never had a chance of sitting in the House of
Commons. The man in possession was allowed to remain there through
years and years, until the present duke could be induced to return from
abroad and take some interest in the political and other affairs of
Keeton. His own son was yet too young for Parliament, and as the
sitting member found himself getting too old and begged for release,
there was nothing better to do than to get some safe and docile person
to take on him the representation of the borough for some time to come.
Those who knew Keeton could recommend no one more fitting in every
desirable way than Mr. Augustus Sheppard.

The time was when Mr. Sheppard would only have had to present the
orders of the reigning duke to the constituency of Keeton and to take
his seat in the House of Commons accordingly as if by virtue of a
sovereign patent in ancient days. But times had changed even in sleepy
Keeton. The younger generation had almost forgotten their dukes, it was
so long since a chief of the house had been among them. Even the women
had grown comparatively indifferent to the influence of the name seeing
that it had so long been only a name for them. There had been for many
years no duchesses and their lady daughters to meet at flower-shows and
charitable bazaars, by the delight of whose face, and the sound of
whose feet, and the wind of whose tresses, as the poet has it, they
could be made to feel happy and exalted. There once were brighter days
when the coming and going of the ladies at the castle gave the women of
Keeton a perpetual subject of talk, of thought, of hope, and of
quarrel. Some of the readers of this story may perhaps have spent a
little time in small towns on the banks of foreign--say of
American--rivers which have a habit of freezing up as winter comes, and
becoming useless for navigation; in fact being converted from rivers
into great frozen roads, until spring unlocks the flowers and the
streams again. Such travellers must have noticed what an unfailing
topic of conversation such a river supplies to those who dwell on its
banks. How soon will it freeze this season? On what precise day was it
closed to navigation last year--the year before--the year before that?
In what year did it freeze soonest? Do you remember that particular
year when it froze so very soon, or did not freeze for such an
unprecedented length of time? That was the same year that--no, not that
year; it was the other year, don't you remember? Then follow
contradictions and disputes, and the elders always remember the river
having been regularly in the habit of performing some feat which now it
never cares to repeat. The time of the frost melting and the river
becoming really a river again is a matter just as fruitful of
discussion. The stranger is often tempted to wonder what the people of
that place would have to talk about at all if suddenly the river were
to give up its trick of freezing, and were to remain always as fluent
as our own monotonous Thames. There seems to him some reason to fear
that the tongues of the people would become frozen as the river ceased
to freeze.

Like the freezing and the melting of their river to those who lived on
its bank was the annual visit of the ladies of the ducal family to the
womankind of Keeton in Keeton's brighter days. Girls were growing up
there now who had never seen a duchess. The arrival, the length of
stay, the probable time of departure, the appearances in public whether
more or less frequent than this time last year, the dresses worn by the
gracious ladies, the persons spoken to by them, the persons only bowed
to, the unhappy creatures who got neither speech nor salutation--it is
a fact that there was a generation of women growing up in Keeton with
whom these and such questions had never formed any part of the interest
of their lives. They could not be expected to take much interest all at
once, and as it were by instinct, in the political cause of the ducal
family.

There was therefore a good deal of uncertainty about the conditions of
the problem. The followers of the ducal family were some of them full
of hope. The reappearance of a duke and duchess and their train might
do wonders in restoring the old order of things. In Keeton petticoat
influence counted for a great deal, and in other days those who had the
promises of the wives hardly thought it worth while to go through the
form of asking the husbands. But now there was a new condition of the
political problem even in that respect. The ballot, which had made the
voter independent of the influence of his landlord or his wealthy
customer, had converted the power of the petticoat into a sort of
unknown quantity. There could be little doubt that the moral influence
and the traditional control would still prevail with some; but he must
be a rash electioneering agent who would venture to say how many votes
could thus be counted on. It is a remarkable tribute to the moral
greatness of an aristocracy that the influence thus obtained in old
days over the wives and daughters of Keeton was absolutely unearned by
any overt acts of favor or conciliation. The later dukes and their
families had always been remarkable for never making any advances
toward the townspeople. None of the traders of the town, however
wealthy and respectable, found themselves or their wives invited to any
manner of festivity up at the ducal hall. All that the noble family
ever did for the townspeople was to come at certain seasons to Keeton
and allow themselves to be looked at. This was enough for the time. The
illustrious ladies could be seen, and, as has been said, they did
sometimes speak a word to favored and envied persons. They were loved
for being great personages, not for anything they did to win such
devotion. "Love is enough," says the poet.

All these considerations, however, rendered it hard to calculate the
exact chances of opposition in the borough of Keeton. Of course
revolutionary opinions were growing up, old people found, there as well
as elsewhere. There was a new class of Conservatives springing up whom
steady, old-fashioned politicians found it not easy to distinguish from
the Radicals of their younger days. On the other hand, keen-sighted
persons could not fail to perceive that, whereas in their youth almost
all young men had a tendency to be or to fancy themselves Radicals, it
was now growing rather the fashion for immature politicians to boast
themselves Tories, and to talk of a spirited foreign policy and the
dangers of Cosmopolitanism. It would be hard to say how things might
turn out, knowing people thought, as they shook their heads, and hoped
the expected contest might not come on for some time.

Now the contest was at hand. At least the sitting member had positively
declared that he would sit no longer, and it was announced that the
Duke was coming to Keeton, and that Mr. Augustus Sheppard was to be the
Duke's candidate. No more striking proof could be given of the recent
change in the political condition of Keeton than is found in the fact
that the adoption of Mr. Sheppard as a candidate by the ducal family
did not even to the most devoted and sanguine followers of the great
house make Mr. Sheppard's election seem by any means a matter of
absolute certainty. There was a tolerably strong conviction everywhere,
long before any opposition was announced, that the Duke's candidate
would not be allowed to walk over the course and right into the House
of Commons this time. Nobody in the town would oppose the Duke very
likely, but the man to oppose would come.

Now the man actually had come. Victor Heron had issued his address and
was in Keeton. His address was original; he had positively refused from
the first to make any grand professions of superior statesmanship or
patriotism. He would tell Englishmen, he said, that he was seeking a
seat in Parliament as a way of getting redress for a great wrong done
to him, and through him to some of the principles most dear to the
country. When he had fought his battle in Parliament and won or lost,
he promised that he would then place himself in the hands of his
constituents and resign the seat if they desired. The whole address was
frank, odd, original, and perhaps seemed a little self-conceited. The
author's absorption in his subject was mistaken by many people, as will
happen sometimes, for self-conceit.

Mr. Sheppard's address, on the contrary, talked only of the good old
Conservative principles which had made England the envy and admiration
of all surrounding States; of the local interests of Keeton and the
candidate's acquaintance therewith; and of the many splendid things
done for the town by the noble family who had done it the honor to have
a park there.

"I don't think Heron's address reads half badly," Mr. Money said, one
evening in the absence of Heron, to his two companions; "on the whole,
I shouldn't wonder if it took some people, the women particularly.
Anything personal, anything in the nature of a grievance, is likely to
have a good effect on many people, especially where the injured
personage is young, and good-looking, and plucky. I wish the women had
the votes here just for this once, for I think we should stand to win
if they had."

"Then, papa, do you think we shan't win now?" Lucy asked.

Minola looked up eagerly for his answer.

"Well, Lucelet, I don't like to say; I am not quite charmed with the
look of things. I find there are a good many very strong Radicals grown
up in this place since there was a contest here before; and Heron's
not wild enough for them by half. They are a little of the red-hot
social-revolution sort of thing--the _proletaire_ business, with a dash
of the brabbling atheist--the fellows who think one is not fit to live
if he even admits the possibility of another world. I am afraid these
fellows will hold aloof from us altogether, or even take some whim of
voting against us, and they may be strong enough to turn the scale."

Minola hoped that if her friend Mr. St. Paul had really any charm by
which to extort victory for Heron as he had promised, he would not
forget to use it in good time. But she began to have less faith, and
less, in the possibility of any such feat. She was a little in the
perplexed condition of some one of mediæval times, who has entered into
a bargain for supernatural interference, and is not quite certain
whether to wish that the compact may be really carried out or that it
may prove to have been only the figment of a dream.

"I'm told we ought to have some poems done," Money went on to say. "Not
merely squibs, you know, but appeals about right and justice, and the
cause of oppressed humanity, and all that."

"I'm sure Minola could do some beautifully!" Lucy exclaimed, looking
beseechingly toward her friend.

"Oh, no; I couldn't indeed! My appeals would be dreadfully weak; they
could not rouse the spirits of any mortal creature. Now, if we only had
Mary Blanchet!"

This, it must be owned, was Minola's fun, but it gave an idea to Mr.
Money.

"Tell you what," he said; "we ought to have her brother--the bard you
used to call him, Lucelet."

"Oh, no, papa; indeed I never called him anything of the kind. I never
did, indeed, Nola."

"Well, whatever you called him, Lucelet, we can't do better than to
have him. We'll put Pegasus into harness, by Jove--a capital good use
to make of him too. I'll write to what's-his-name?--Blanchet--at once."

"But I don't think he would like it, papa; I think he would take
offence at the idea of your asking him to do poems for an election. I
don't think he would come."

"Oh, yes, he would come; we would make it worth his while. These young
fellows give themselves airs to make you girls admire them, that they
never think of trying on with men. It would be a rather telling thing
here too if it got about that we had brought a real poet specially down
from London. I'll write at once."

This seemed rather alarming to Minola.

"I doubt whether Mr. Heron would much like it," she pleaded. "I don't
know whether they are such very good friends just now. I am rather
afraid."

"Oh, yes; of course they must be good friends! Heron is not to have it
all his own way in everything anyhow. He must like the idea; he shall.
I'll write without telling him anything about it, and Heron couldn't
help being friendly to any fellow who came under his roof, as one might
say."

No one made any further objection.

"I wish Heron had not been so confoundedly particular about St. Paul,"
Mr. Money went on to say in a discontented tone. "That was absurd. St.
Paul's no worse than lots of other fellows, and in such a thing as this
we can't afford to throw away any offer of support. We have to fight
against the Duke and his lot anyhow, and the help of St. Paul couldn't
have done us any harm in that quarter, and it might have done us some
good in others. I shouldn't wonder if St. Paul had some friends and
admirers here still; and it is as likely as not that his being with us
might conciliate a few of the mad Radicals. They might like him just
because he is against his brother, the Duke."

"But Mr. Heron would not have such help as that," Lucy said, in tones
of pride.

"Oh, by Jove! if you want to carry an election--and now, I suppose, if
St. Paul has any influence at all, it will be given against us."

Minola thought of her unholy compact, and did not venture to say a word
on the subject.




THE "UNIFORMED MILITIA" SERVICE.


I spent seven years of my boyhood at school among the hills of old
Connecticut, about fifteen miles back of Bridgeport, in a region even
now in almost its primitive simplicity and pastoral beauty. It has been
left quiet and untouched between the iron ways of Housatonic and
Danbury, equidistant from both, and sufficiently far away from either
to be free from the impulse and incentive of that practical missionary
of modern progress, the railroad.

City born, but partly country bred, I understand well the sentiment of
the New Englander for his old home, and often live over again the days
in those familiar hills and valleys of Fairfield. I would revel in
enjoyment if it were possible for me to revisit them. It was there my
eyes were open to the delights of a "town muster," and my steps taught
rhythm by fife and drum.

In occasional musings I hear the old music as it used to reach me in
waves of sound, now faint, then loud, as the variable wind would waft
it, or as it escaped from obstructing hills. And I see the tall white
and red plume of the commandant, undulating with his stride, and
dipping salutes to the wind. Reader, if you have never realized the
excitement of a "general training day" in the country, you have missed
the freshest and most genuine pleasure of youth.

In the fall of 1842 occurred the Croton water celebration, a real city
holiday. The procession was long, interesting, and gorgeous, for all of
it except the military portion was profusely decorated with autumn
flowers, odorless but beautiful, rich in color and variety. It might
properly have been called the feast of dahlias.

The old fire department was out in all its glory, and richly arrayed.
It always took part in metropolitan rejoicings, heartily and
generously. But my interest was centred in the soldiers; fired then by
a longing to shoulder a musket. I waited impatiently for the freedom of
manhood and a fitting opportunity. When both came I enlisted in a city
regiment, and continued the connection till after the close of the late
civil war.

Twenty years of service with musket and sabre failed to dull my
enthusiasm. I left it, warned by the heaviness of approaching age and
the demands of business, convinced of the propriety, the usefulness,
and the value of a well regulated militia force.

Aware of how much has been said and written against such service, and
of the misapprehension of those who had never studied its organization,
its possibilities, and necessity, I propose to draw upon the practical
experience of the past twenty-five years for the purpose of correcting
wrong views without and suggesting new measures within. The service has
been charged with costliness, uselessness, and pretentious display;
with vain ambition, absence of organic purpose, and with being inimical
to the morality of the individual member. All the charges have some
foundation for their utterance, though the evils referred to are not
the legitimate results of the organization, but rather the baleful
fruit of irresponsible and ignorant commissions. The service is really
worthy of conscientious labor and the support of the people.

In the present relations of government and society, a disciplined
militia force is an essential part of the body politic, and an organism
with vitality if properly administered. The central idea of the
organization is a military body, directly from the people, for the
conservation of governmental integrity and a protection to the State.
Its collateral uses are an initial school for soldierly training, and
in cities especially a supplementary and occasional aid to the police
forces. In a general way the central idea is accepted, but in
particulars is not carried out in equity between governments and the
people. The theory is that the people are the State, and therefore must
provide their own protection, but under proper authority. The authority
exacts the service, at a great cost to the State, but denies reasonable
compensation and encouragement to the individual member; therefore the
people are not in sympathy with the organization. The service is
brought in conflict with the people, in fact with itself, and the
anomaly is presented of an organism in internal opposition. It is the
duty of legislation and constituted authority to harmonize such an
unnatural condition and change indifference into interest, ignorant
neglect into intelligent support. Only in times of strife, like our
late civil conflict, or the wars of 1812 and 1776, does the service
rise to the dignity of an establishment and a recognized power. In
times of peace it is permitted to exist, mainly in skeleton condition,
without organic discipline, because the people have a false idea of its
use and value. State military departments are not administered with
intelligence, and military codes are subject to yearly legislative
amendments without understanding; conditions of enlistment are altered,
generally to the injury of the enlisted soldier, while recruiting for
the uniformed corps languishes from lack of encouragement.

It is interesting to follow some of the changes of the New York State
code and their inconsistent applications. For instance, when the law
allowing relief from jury duty and the partial remission of assessment,
to continue during life, was amended to cover terms of enlistment only,
the Adjutant General of the State decided the amendments applied to
prior enlistments, thereby breaking a contract between the State and
enlisted men under the old law. But when the term of service was
reduced from seven to five years, enlistments under the former law were
held for the longer term. It is in such a spirit that all amendments
are interpreted in favor of the State and against the individual.
Fortunately the former provision has been reconsidered, and in a spirit
of compromise relief from jury duty is reinstated in the code for life,
but the abatement of assessments covers only terms of service. The
State considers exemption from jury duty for life a relief, the nominal
abatement of assessments during the service a benefit, and both
together ample compensation to the militiamen. They would be in part,
if immediately available, but the compensation is questionable, as the
duty is generally performed too early in life for those legislative
provisions to be of practical application. The abatement of an
assessment is of little benefit to those who, probably, are without
property till after their terms of service are completed, and the
measure fails by limitation. Fortunately the relief from jury duty is a
life provision, for it generally comes later in life, and after the
militia service is performed. One does not, however, repay the cost of
uniforms and other necessary expenses, nor the other compensate for the
time which the service requires.

The New York State code says: "All able-bodied male citizens, between
the ages of eighteen and forty-five, are subject to military duty," but
also says that minors must obtain the written consent of parents or
guardians to legalize an enlistment in a uniformed corps. Why such an
incongruous distinction between uniformed corps and ununiformed
militia? What right has the code to exact military service from a
person who is condemned by the law as incompetent for citizenship, and
is legally recognized by the law only as a child? And why exact
military service from those who are in the decline of life? There are
many who are physically able to do the duty under the age of twenty-one
and over the age of forty, but they should be regarded as exceptional.
Such service should be voluntary by the individual and optional with
the State.

Spiritual, natural, and physical laws have stamped twenty-one the
minimum age of manhood, and forty the culmination. Why should military
law assume the power to control more?

The young absorb the elements of the future, the old dispose of them;
within these life lines is practical manhood.

Patriotism enthusiastic becomes patriotism triumphant; during its
passage the sentiment hardens into use.

Fault has been found by tax-payers with State and city governments for
maintaining militia forces at such an expense. The censure is justified
by the yearly exhibit of military expenditures, which is due in part to
the unnecessary maintenance of skeleton regiments and battalions.

The prejudices of the people against soldiers in time of peace will
never be overcome till they are educated to the necessity of a military
establishment by intelligent administration of its affairs, proper
information, greater proficiency, and a more decided application of its
use. Satisfy the people of the necessity of the service, enlist their
pride in its support by its efficiency, and its maintenance may be
secured without opposition. People never grumble when they can see
their money's worth.

If States have treated their militia forces as an inferior part of
themselves, if military authorities have acted arbitrarily and
ungenerously, militiamen themselves are not blameless. They have
frittered away their opportunities, and belittled their profession, by
vain-glory and personal ambition, and invited censure by inefficient
service. Fortunately there are men and officers, companies and
regiments, who, recognizing their mission, have conscientiously
performed their duty and redeemed the service from greater obloquy.
Their work has acted like leaven to the whole body. All honor to them
for their intelligence, honest pride, and patriotic labor.

The "uniformed militia" system has a foundation of inherent strength
capable of being built upon and extended to a perfectness not at
present thought capable of. With its present incompleteness, its degree
of usefulness is positive, and even under all the adverse circumstances
referred to the condition of ably administered battalions bears upon
the side of success and prosperity. Singular as it may seem, part of
its weakness is from its own elements of apparent strength.

Recruits enlist with a very inadequate idea of its requirements. Many
go through their term of service, sometimes pleased, oftener bored, but
always with a sense of personal importance, and take their discharge
with feelings of relief.

Some members are guilty of license when in uniform that they would not
indulge in as citizens. Officers without capacity accept commissions
and occasionally intrigue for command, from ambition and vanity,
without a sense of their responsibility or a proper knowledge of their
duties. There are also elements of disorder within the lines of duty
which are hard to bear and difficult to control, because they arise
from personal animosities. The judgment of an officer is warped to his
hurt by his selfishness, wounded pride, and ambition, who will hold a
commission to the injury of his company or battalion, even with the
support of part of his command.

Is it to be wondered at that an organization with such elements of
disorder in it should be regarded with disfavor by those ignorant of
its trials, its duties, and its aims? And is it not an argument in its
favor that its discipline is able to control and surmount such
demoralizing tendencies?

It is not pleasant to deprecate a continuation of long services, but
under certain circumstances it may result in injury to a corps.
Officers of merit and distinction, with the personal veneration of
their men, have been known to outlive their usefulness by retention of
command after the freshness, activity, and judgment of their earlier
manhood have departed. The idiosyncrasies of age and confirmed habits
of authority do not readily accept advanced ideas, improvements in
methods, and the inevitable changes of time.

Recruiting for uniformed corps has been and is a process without a
system--a method without a principle; it is simply a necessity. As
conducted at present it is derogatory to the dignity of the service,
and in its practice humiliating and unpleasant to its members. The code
really offers no inducement to militiamen.

Its failure to provide proper encouragement for recruiting is a defect
which should have the serious consideration of military authorities and
legislators at the earliest opportunity. It is a matter of vital
importance to the service, and forces itself upon the attention of all
commandants to their great concern.

It s

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