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THE PRICE OF BLOOD

 
Ab irâ et odio, et omni malâ voluntate,
Libera nos, Domine.
A fulgure et tempestate,
Libera nos, Domine.
A morte perpetuâ,
Libera nos, Domine.
 

So rang forth the supplication, echoing from rock and fell, as the people of Claudiodunum streamed forth in the May sunshine to invoke a blessing on the cornlands, olives, and vineyards that won vantage-ground on the terraces carefully kept up on the slopes of the wonderful needle-shaped hills of Auvergne.

Very recently had the Church of Gaul commenced the custom of going forth, on the days preceding the Ascension feast, to chant Litanies, calling down the Divine protection on field and fold, corn and wine, basket and store.  It had been begun in a time of deadly peril from famine and earthquake, wild beast and wilder foes, and it had been adopted in the neighbouring dioceses as a regular habit, as indeed it continued throughout the Western Church during the fourteen subsequent centuries.

One great procession was formed by different bands.  The children were in two troops, a motley collection of all shades; the deep olive and the rolling black eye betraying Ethiopian or Moorish slave ancestry, the soft dark complexion and deep brown eye showing the Roman, and the rufous hair and freckled skin the lower grade of Cymric Kelt, while a few had the more stately pose, violet eye, and black hair of the Gael.  The boys were marshalled with extreme difficulty by two or three young monks; their sisters walked far more orderly, under the care of some consecrated virgin of mature age.  The men formed another troop, the hardy mountaineers still wearing the Gallic trousers and plaid, though the artisans and mechanics from the town were clad in the tunic and cloak that were the later Roman dress, and such as could claim the right folded over them the white, purple-edged scarf to which the toga had dwindled.

Among the women there was the same scale of decreasing nationality of costume according to rank, though the culmination was in resemblance to the graceful classic robe of Rome instead of the last Parisian mode.  The poorer women wore bright, dark crimson, or blue in gown or wrapping veil; the ladies were mostly in white or black, as were also the clergy, excepting such as had officiated at the previous Eucharist, and who wore their brilliant priestly vestments, heavy with gold and embroidery.

Beautiful alike to eye and ear was the procession, above all from a distance, now filing round a delicate young green wheatfield, now lost behind a rising hill, now glancing through a vineyard, or contrasting with the gray tints of the olive, all that was incongruous or disorderly unseen, and all that was discordant unheard, as only the harmonious cadence of the united response was wafted fitfully on the breeze to the two elderly men who, unable to scale the wild mountain paths in the procession, had, after the previous service in the basilica and the blessing of the nearer lands, returned to the villa, where they sat watching its progress.

It was as entirely a Roman villa as the form of the ground and the need of security would permit.  Lying on the slope of a steep hill, which ran up above into a fantastic column or needle piercing the sky, the courts of the villa were necessarily a succession of terraces, levelled and paved with steps of stone or marble leading from one to the other.  A strong stone wall enclosed the whole, cloistered, as a protection from sun and storm.  The lowest court had a gateway strongly protected, and thence a broad walk with box-trees on either side, trimmed into fantastic shapes, led through a lawn laid out in regular flower-beds to the second court, which was paved with polished marble, and had a fountain in the midst, with vases of flowers, and seats around.  Above was another broad flight of stone steps, leading to a portico running along the whole front of the house, with the principal chambers opening into it.  Behind lay another court, serving as stables for the horses and mules, as farmyard, and with the quarters of the slaves around it, and higher up there stretched a dense pine forest protecting the whole establishment from avalanches and torrents of stones from the mountain peak above.

Under the portico, whose pillars were cut from the richly-coloured native marbles, reposed the two friends on low couches.

One was a fine-looking man, with a grand bald forehead, encircled with a wreath of oak, showing that in his time he had rescued a Roman’s life.  He also wore a richly-embroidered purple toga, the token of high civic rank, for he had put on his full insignia as a senator and of consular rank to do honour to the ceremonial.  Indeed he would not have abstained from accompanying the procession, but that his guest, though no more aged than himself, was manifestly unequal to the rugged expedition, begun fasting in the morning chill and concluded, likewise fasting, in the noonday heat.  Still, it would scarcely have distressed those sturdy limbs, well developed and preserved by Roman training, never permitted by him to degenerate into effeminacy.  And as his fine countenance and well-knit frame testified, Marcus Æmilius Victorinus inherited no small share of genuine Roman blood.  His noble name might be derived through clientela, and his lineage had a Gallic intermixture; but the true Quirite predominated in his character and temperament.  The citizenship of his family dated back beyond the first establishment of the colony, and rank, property, and personal qualities alike rendered him the first man in the district, its chief magistrate, and protector from the Visigoths, who claimed it as part of their kingdom of Aquitania.

So much of the spirit of Vercingetorix survived among the remnant of his tribe that Arvernia had never been overrun and conquered, but had held out until actually ceded by one of the degenerate Augusti at Ravenna, and then favourable terms had been negotiated, partly by Æmilius the Senator, as he was commonly called, and partly by the honoured friend who sat beside him, another relic of the good old times when Southern Gaul enjoyed perfect peace as a favoured province of the Empire.  This guest was a man of less personal beauty than the Senator, and more bowed and aged, but with care and ill-health more than years, for the two had been comrades in school, fellow-soldiers and magistrates, working simultaneously, and with firm, mutual trust all their days.

The dress of the visitor was shaped like that of the senator, but of somewhat richer and finer texture.  He too wore the toga prætextata, but he had a large gold cross hanging on his breast and an episcopal ring on his finger; and instead of the wreath of bay he might have worn, and which encircled his bust in the Capitol, the scanty hair on his finely-moulded head showed the marks of the tonsure.  His brow was a grand and expansive one; his gray eyes were full of varied expression, keen humour, and sagacity; a lofty devotion sometimes changing his countenance in a wonderful manner, even in the present wreck of his former self, when the cheeks showed furrows worn by care and suffering, and the once flexible and resolute mouth had fallen in from loss of teeth.  For this was the scholar, soldier, poet, gentleman, letter-writer, statesman, Sidonius Apollinaris, who had stood on the steps of the Imperial throne of the West, had been crowned as an orator in the Capitol, and then had been called by the exigences of his country to give up his learned ease and become the protector of the Arvernii as a patriot Bishop, where he had well and nobly served his God and his country, and had won the respect, not only of the Catholic Gauls but of the Arian Goths.  Jealousy and evil tongues had, however, prevailed to cause his banishment from his beloved hills, and when he repaired to the court of King Euric to solicit permission to return, he was long detained there, and had only just obtained license to go back to his See.  He had arrived only a day or two previously at the villa, exhausted by his journey, and though declaring that his dear mountain breezes must needs restore him, and that it was a joy to inhale them, yet, as he heard of the oppressions that were coming on his people, the mountain gales could only ‘a momentary bliss bestow,’ and Æmilius justly feared that the decay of his health had gone too far for even the breezes and baths of Arvernia to reinvigorate him.

His own mountain estate, where dwelt his son, was of difficult access early in the year, and Æmilius hoped to persuade him to rest in the villa till after Pentecost, and then to bless the nuptials of Columba Æmilia, the last unwedded daughter of the house, with Titus Julius Verronax, a young Arvernian chief of the lineage of Vercingetorix, highly educated in all Latin and Greek culture, and a Roman citizen much as a Highland chieftain is an Englishman.  His home was on an almost inaccessible peak, or puy, which the Senator pointed out to the Bishop, saying—

“I would fain secure such a refuge for my family in case the tyranny of the barbarians should increase.”

“Are there any within the city?” asked the Bishop.  “I rejoice to see that thou art free from the indignity of having any quartered upon thee.”

“For which I thank Heaven,” responded the Senator.  “The nearest are on the farm of Deodatus, in the valley.  There is a stout old warrior named Meinhard who calls himself of the King’s Trust; not a bad old fellow in himself to deal with, but with endless sons, followers, and guests, whom poor Deodatus and Julitta have to keep supplied with whatever they choose to call for, being forced to witness their riotous orgies night after night.”

“Even so, we are far better off than our countrymen who have the heathen Franks for their lords.”

“That Heaven forbid!” said Æmilius.  “These Goths are at least Christians, though heretics, yet I shall be heartily glad when the circuit of Deodatus’s fields is over.  The good man would not have them left unblest, but the heretical barbarians make it a point of honour not to hear the Blessed Name invoked without mockery, such as our youths may hardly brook.”

“They are unarmed,” said the Bishop.

“True; but, as none knows better than thou dost, dear father and friend, the Arvernian blood has not cooled since the days of Caius Julius Caesar, and offences are frequent among the young men.  So often has our community had to pay ‘wehrgeld,’ as the barbarians call the price they lay upon blood, that I swore at last that I would never pay it again, were my own son the culprit.”

“Such oaths are perilous,” said Sidonius.  “Hast thou never had cause to regret this?”

“My father, thou wouldst have thought it time to take strong measures to check the swaggering of our young men and the foolish provocations that cost more than one life.  One would stick a peacock’s feather in his cap and go strutting along with folded arms and swelling breast, and when the Goths scowled at him and called him by well-deserved names, a challenge would lead to a deadly combat.  Another such fight was caused by no greater offence than the treading on a dog’s tail; but in that it was the Roman, or more truly the Gaul, who was slain, and I must say the ‘wehrgeld’ was honourably paid.  It is time, however, that such groundless conflicts should cease; and, in truth, only a barbarian could be satisfied to let gold atone for life.”

“It is certainly neither Divine law nor human equity,” said the Bishop.  “Yet where no distinction can be made between the deliberate murder and the hasty blow, I have seen cause to be thankful for the means of escaping the utmost penalty.  Has this oath had the desired effect?”

“There has been only one case since it was taken,” replied Æmilius.  “That was a veritable murder.  A vicious, dissolute lad stabbed a wounded Goth in a lonely place, out of vengeful spite.  I readily delivered him up to the kinsfolk for justice, and as this proved me to be in earnest, these wanton outrages have become much more rare.  Unfortunately, however, the fellow was son to one of the widows of the Church—a holy woman, and a favourite of my little Columba, who daily feeds and tends the poor thing, and thinks her old father very cruel.”

“Alas! from the beginning the doom of the guilty has struck the innocent,” said the Bishop.

“In due retribution, as even the heathen knew.”  Perfect familiarity with the great Greek tragedians was still the mark of a gentleman, and then Sidonius quoted from Sophocles—

 
   Compass’d with dazzling light,
   Throned on Olympus’s height,
His front the Eternal God uprears
By toils unwearied, and unaged by years;
   Far back, through ages past,
      Far on, through time to come,
   Hath been, and still must last,
      Sin’s never-changing doom.
 
 
Æmilius capped it from Æschylus—
 
 
But Justice holds her equal scales
   With ever-waking eye;
O’er some her vengeful might prevails
   When their life’s sun is high;
   On some her vigorous judgments light
   In that dread pause ’twixt day and night,
      Life’s closing, twilight hour.
But soon as once the genial plain
Has drunk the life-blood of the slain,
Indelible the spots remain,
      And aye for vengeance call.
 

“Yea,” said the Bishop, “such was the universal law given to Noah ere the parting of the nations—blood for blood!  And yet, where should we be did not Mercy rejoice against Justice, and the Blood of Sprinkling speak better things than the blood of Abel?  Nay, think not that I blame thee, my dear brother.  Thou art the judge of thy people, and well do I know that one act of stern justice often, as in this instance, prevents innumerable deeds of senseless violence.”

“Moreover,” returned the Senator, “it was by the relaxing of the ancient Roman sternness of discipline and resolution that the horrors of the Triumvirate began, and that, later on, spirit decayed and brought us to our present fallen state.”

By this time the procession, which had long since passed from their sight, was beginning to break up and disperse.  A flock of little children first appeared, all of whom went aside to the slaves’ quarters except one, who came running up the path between the box-trees.  He was the eldest grandson and namesake of the Senator, a dark-eyed, brown-haired boy of seven, with the golden bulla hanging round his neck.  Up he came to the old man’s knee, proud to tell how he had scaled every rock, and never needed any help from the pedagogue slave who had watched over him.

“Sawest thou any barbarians, my Victorinus?” asked his grandfather.

“They stood thickly about Deodatus’s door, and Publius said they were going to mock; but we looked so bold and sang so loud that they durst not.  And Verronax is come down, papa, with Celer; and Celer wanted to sing too, but they would not let him, and he was so good that he was silent the moment his master showed him the leash.”

“Then is Celer a hound?” asked the Bishop, amused.

“A hound of the old stock that used to fight battles for Bituitus,” returned the child.  “Oh, papa, I am so hungry.”

He really did say ‘papa,’ the fond domestic name which passed from the patriarch of the household to the Father of the Roman Church.

“Thy mother is watching for thee.  Run to her, and she will give thee a cake—aye, and a bath before thy dinner.  So Verronax is come.  I am glad thou wilt see him, my father.  The youth has grown up with my own children, and is as dear to me as my own son.  Ah, here comes my Columba!”

For the maidens were by this time returning, and Columba, robed in white, with a black veil, worn mantilla fashion over her raven hair, so as to shade her soft, liquid, dark eyes, came up the steps, and with a graceful obeisance to her father and the Bishop, took the seat to which the former drew her beside them.

“Has all gone well, my little dove?” asked her father.

“Perfectly well so far, my father,” she replied; but there was anxiety in her eyes until the gate again opened and admitted the male contingent of the procession.  No sooner had she seen them safely advancing up the box avenue than she murmured something about preparing for the meal, and, desiring a dismissal from her father, disappeared into the women’s apartments, while the old man smiled at her pretty maidenly modesty.

Of the three men who were advancing, one, Marcus Æmilius, about seven or eight and twenty years of age, was much what the Senator must have been at his age—sturdy, resolute, with keen eyes, and crisp, curled, short black hair.  His younger brother, Lucius, was taller, slighter, more delicately made, with the same pensive Italian eyes as his sister, and a gentle, thoughtful countenance.  The tonsure had not yet touched his soft, dark brown locks; but it was the last time he would march among the laity, for, both by his own desire and that of his dead mother, he was destined to the priesthood.  Beside these two brothers came a much taller figure.  The Arvernii seem to have been Gael rather than Cymri, and the mountain chief, Titus Julius Verronax, as the Romans rendered his name of Fearnagh, was of the purest descent.  He had thick, wavy chestnut hair, not cut so short as that of the Romans, though kept with the same care.  His eyebrows were dark, his eyes, both in hue and brightness, like a hawk’s, his features nobly moulded, and his tall form, though large and stately, was in perfect symmetry, and had the free bearing and light springiness befitting a mountaineer.  He wore the toga as an official scarf, but was in his national garb of the loose trousers and short coat, and the gold torq round his neck had come to him from prehistoric ages.  He had the short Roman sword in his belt, and carried in his hand a long hunting-spear, without which he seldom stirred abroad, as it served him both as alpenstock and as defence against the wolves and bears of the mountains.  Behind him stalked a magnificent dog, of a kind approaching the Irish wolfhound, a perfect picture of graceful outline and of strength, swiftness, and dignity, slightly shaggy, and of tawny colouring—in all respects curiously like his master.

In language, learning, and manners Verronax the Arvernian was, however, a highly cultivated Roman, as Sidonius perceived in the first word of respectful welcome that he spoke when presented to the Bishop.

All had gone off well.  Old Meinhard had been on the watch, and had restrained any insult, if such had been intended, by the other Goths, who had stood watching in silence the blessing of the fields and vineyards of Deodatus.

The peril over, the Æmilian household partook cheerfully of the social meal.  Marina, the wife of Marcus, and Columba sat on carved chairs, the men of the family reclining on the couches constructed to hold three.  The bright wit of Sidonius, an eminent conversationalist, shone the more brightly for his rejoicing at his return to his beloved country and flock, and to the friend of his youth.  There were such gleams in the storms that were overwhelming the tottering Empire, to which indeed these men belonged only in heart and in name.

The meal was for a fast day, and consisted of preparations of eggs, milk, flour, and fish from the mountain streams, but daintily cooked, for the traditions of the old Roman gastronomy survived, and Marina, though half a Gaul, was anxious that her housekeeping should shine in the eyes of the Bishop, who in his secular days had been known to have a full appreciation of the refinements of the table.

When the family rose and the benediction had been pronounced, Columba was seen collecting some of the remnants in a basket.

“Thou surely dost not intend going to that widow of thine to-day,” exclaimed her sister-in-law, Marina, “after such a walk on the mountain?”

“Indeed I must, sister,” replied Columba; “she was in much pain and weakness yesterday, and needs me more than usual.”

“And it is close to the farm of Deodatus,” Marina continued to object, “where, the slaves tell me, there are I know not how many fresh barbarian guests!”

“I shall of course take Stentor and Athenais,” said Columba.

“A pair of slaves can be of no use.  Marcus, dost thou hear?  Forbid thy sister’s folly.”

“I will guard my sister,” said Lucius, becoming aware of what was passing.

“Who should escort her save myself?” said the graceful Verronax, turning at the same moment from replying to some inquiries from the Bishop.

“I doubt whether his escort be not the most perilous thing of all,” sighed Marina.

“Come, Marina,” said her husband good-humouredly, “be not always a boder of ill.  Thou deemest a Goth worse than a gorgon or hydra, whereas, I assure you, they are very good fellows after all, if you stand up to them like a man, and trust their word.  Old Meinhard is a capital hunting comrade.”

Wherewith the worthy Marcus went off with his little son at his heels to inspect the doings of the slaves in the farm-court in the rear, having no taste for the occupation of his father and the Bishop, who composed themselves to listen to a MS. of the letters of S. Gregory Nazianzen, which Sidonius had lately acquired, and which was read aloud to them by a secretary slave.

Some time had thus passed when a confused sound made the Senator start up.  He beheld his daughter and her escort within the lower court, but the slaves were hastily barring the gates behind them, and loud cries of “Justice!  Vengeance!” in the Gothic tongue, struck his only too well-accustomed ears.

Columba flung herself before him, crying—

“O father, have pity!  It was for our holy faith.”

“He blasphemed,” was all that was uttered by Verronax, on whose dress there was blood.

“Open the gates,” called out the Senator, as the cry outside waxed louder.  “None shall cry for justice in vain at the gate of an Æmilius.  Go, Marcus, admit such as have a right to enter and be heard.  Rise, my daughter, show thyself a true Roman and Christian maiden before these barbarians.  And thou, my son, alas, what hast thou done?” he added, turning to Verronax, and taking his arm while walking towards the tribunal, where he did justice as chief magistrate of the Roman settlement.

A few words told all.  While Columba was engaged with her sick widow, a young stranger Goth strolled up, one who had stood combing his long fair hair, and making contemptuous gestures as the Rogation procession passed in the morning.  He and his comrades began offensively to scoff at the two young men for having taken part in the procession, uttering the blasphemies which the invocation of our Blessed Lord was wont to call forth.

Verronax turned wrathfully round, a hasty challenge passed, a rapid exchange of blows; and while the Arvernian received only a slight scratch, the Goth fell slain before the hovel.  His comrades were unarmed and intimidated.  They rushed back to fetch weapons from the house of Deodatus, and there had been full time to take Columba safely home, Verronax and his dog stalking statelily in the rear as her guardians.

“Thou shouldst have sought thine impregnable crag, my son,” said the Senator sadly.

“To bring the barbarian vengeance upon this house?” responded Verronax.

“Alas, my son, thou know’st mine oath.”

“I know it, my father.”

“It forbids not thy ransoming thyself.”

Verronax smiled slightly, and touched the collar at his throat.

“This is all the gold that I possess.”

The Senator rapidly appraised it with his eye.  There was a regular tariff on the lives of free Romans, free Goths, guests, and trusted men of the King; and if the deceased were merely a lite, or freeman of the lowest rank, it was just possible that the gold collar might purchase its master’s life, provided he were not too proud to part with the ancestral badge.

By this time the tribunal had been reached—a special portion of the peristyle, with a curule chair, inlaid with ivory, placed on a tesselated pavement, as in the old days of the Republic, and a servant on each side held the lictor’s axe and bundle of rods, which betokened stern Roman justice, wellnigh a mockery now.  The forum of the city would have been the regular place, but since an earthquake had done much damage there, and some tumults had taken place among the citizens, the seat of judgment had by general consent been placed in the Æmilian household as the place of chief security, and as he was the accredited magistrate with their Gothic masters, as Sidonius had been before his banishment.

As Sidonius looked at the grave face of the Senator, set like a rock, but deadly pale, he thought it was no unworthy representative of Brutus or Manlius of old who sat on that seat.

Alas! would he not be bound by his fatal oath to be only too true a representative of their relentless justice?

On one side of the judgment-seat stood Verronax, towering above all around; behind him Marina and Columba, clinging together, trembling and tearful, but their weeping restrained by the looks of the Senator, and by a certain remnant of hope.

To the other side advanced the Goths, all much larger and taller men than any one except the young Gaulish chieftain.  The foremost was a rugged-looking veteran, with grizzled locks and beard, and a sunburnt face.  This was Meinhard, the head of the garrison on Deodatus’s farm, a man well known to Æmilius, and able to speak Latin enough to hold communication with the Romans.  Several younger men pressed rudely behind him, but they were evidently impressed by the dignity of the tribunal, though it was with a loud and fierce shout that they recognised Verronax standing so still and unmoved.

“Silence!” exclaimed the Senator, lifting his ivory staff.

Meinhard likewise made gestures to hush them, and they ceased, while the Senator, greeting Meinhard and inviting him to share his seat of authority, demanded what they asked.

“Right!” was their cry.  “Right on the slayer of Odorik, the son of Odo, of the lineage of Odin, our guest, and of the King’s trust.”

“Right shall ye have, O Goths,” returned Æmilius.  “A Roman never flinches from justice.  Who are witnesses to the deed?  Didst thou behold it, O Meinhard, son of Thorulf?”

“No, noble Æmilius.  It had not been wrought had I been present; but here are those who can avouch it.  Stand forth, Egilulf, son of Amalrik.”

“It needs not,” said Verronax.  “I acknowledge the deed.  The Goth scoffed at us for invoking a created Man.  I could not stand by to hear my Master insulted, and I smote him, but in open fight, whereof I bear the token.”

“That is true,” said Meinhard.  “I know that Verronax, the Arvernian, would strike no coward blow.  Therefore did I withhold these comrades of Odorik from rushing on thee in their fury; but none the less art thou in feud with Odo, the father of Odorik, who will require of thee either thy blood or the wehrgeld.”

“Wehrgeld I have none to pay,” returned Verronax, in the same calm voice.

“I have sworn!” said Æmilius in a clear low voice, steady but full of suppressed anguish.  A shriek was heard among the women, and Sidonius stepped forth and demanded the amount of wehrgeld.

“That must be for King Euric to decide,” returned Meinhard.  “He will fix the amount, and it will be for Odo to choose whether he will accept it.  The mulct will be high, for the youth was of high Baltic blood, and had but lately arrived with his father from the north!”

“Enough,” said Verronax.  “Listen, Meinhard.  Thou knowest me, and the Arvernian faith.  Leave me this night to make my peace with Heaven and my parting with man.  At the hour of six to-morrow morning, I swear that I will surrender myself into thine hands to be dealt with as it may please the father of this young man.”

“So let it be, Meinhard,” said Æmilius, in a stifled voice.

“I know Æmilius, and I know Verronax,” returned the Goth.

They grasped hands, and then Meinhard drew off his followers, leaving two, at the request of Marcus, to act as sentinels at the gate.

The Senator sat with his hands clasped over his face in unutterable grief, Columba threw herself into the arms of her betrothed, Marina tore her hair, and shrieked out—

“I will not hold my peace!  It is cruel!  It is wicked!  It is barbarous!”

“Silence, Marina,” said Verronax.  “It is just!  I am no ignorant child.  I knew the penalty when I incurred it!  My Columba, remember, though it was a hasty blow, it was in defence of our Master’s Name.”

The thought might comfort her by and by; as yet it could not.

The Senator rose and took his hand.

“Thou dost forgive me, my son?” he said.

“I should find it hard to forgive one who lessened my respect for the Æmilian constancy,” returned Verronax.

Then he led Marcus aside to make arrangements with him respecting his small mountain estate and the remnant of his tribe, since Marina was his nearest relative, and her little son would, if he were cut off, be the sole heir to the ancestral glories of Vercingetorix.

“And I cannot stir to save such a youth as that!” cried the Senator in a tone of agony as he wrung the hand of Sidonius.  “I have bound mine own hands, when I would sell all I have to save him.  O my friend and father, well mightest thou blame my rashness, and doubt the justice that could be stern where the heart was not touched.”

“But I am not bound by thine oath, my friend,” said Sidonius.  “True it is that the Master would not be served by the temporal sword, yet such zeal as that of this youth merits that we should strive to deliver him.  Utmost justice would here be utmost wrong.  May I send one of your slaves as a messenger to my son to see what he can raise?  Though I fear me gold and silver is more scarce than it was in our younger days.”

This was done, and young Lucius also took a summons from the Bishop to the deacons of the Church in the town, authorising the use of the sacred vessels to raise the ransom, but almost all of these had been already parted with in the time of a terrible famine which had ravaged Arvernia a few years previously, and had denuded all the wealthy and charitable families of their plate and jewels.  Indeed Verronax shrank from the treasure of the Church being thus applied.  Columba might indeed weep for him exultingly as a martyr, but, as he well knew, martyrs do not begin as murderers, and passion, pugnacity, and national hatred had been uppermost with him.  It was the hap of war, and he was ready to take it patiently, and prepare himself for death as a brave Christian man, but not a hero or a martyr; and there was little hope either that a ransom so considerable as the rank of the parties would require could be raised without the aid of the Æmilii, or that, even if it were, the fierce old father would accept it.  The more civilised Goths, whose families had ranged Italy, Spain, and Aquitaine for two or three generations, made murder the matter of bargain that had shocked Æmilius; but this was an old man from the mountain cradle of the race, unsophisticated, and but lately converted.

THE CAT OF CAT COPSE

A HAMPSHIRE TRADITION

I

 
The Dane! the Dane!  The heathen Dane
Is wasting Hampshire’s coast again—
From ravaged church and plundered farm
Flash the dread beacons of alarm—
   Fly, helpless peasants, fly!
Ytene’s green banks and forest shades,
Her heathery slopes and gorse-clad glades
   Re-echo to the cry—
Where is the King, whose strong right hand
Hath oft from danger freed the land?
Nor fleet nor covenant avails
To drive aloof those pirate sails,
   In vain is Alfred’s sword;
Vain seems in every sacred fane
The chant—‘From fury of the Dane,
   Deliver us, good Lord.’
 

II

 
The long keels have the Needles past,
Wight’s fairest bowers are flaming fast;
From Solent’s waves rise many a mast,
With swelling sails of gold and red,
Dragon and serpent at each head,
Havoc and slaughter breathing forth,
Steer on these locusts of the north.
Each vessel bears a deadly freight;
Each Viking, fired with greed and hate,
His axe is whetting for the strife,
And counting how each Christian life
Shall win him fame in Skaldic lays,
And in Valhalla endless praise.
For Hamble’s river straight they steer;
Prayer is in vain, no aid is near—
Hopeless and helpless all must die.
Oh, fainting heart and failing eye,
Look forth upon the foe once more!
Why leap they not upon the shore?
Why pause their keels upon the strand,
As checked by some resistless hand?
The sail they spread, the oars they ply,
Yet neither may advance nor fly.
 

III

 
Who is it holds them helpless there?
’Tis He Who hears the anguished prayer;
   ’Tis He Who to the wave
Hath fixed the bound—mud, rock, or sand—
To mark how far upon the strand
   Its foaming sweep may rave.
What is it, but the ebbing tide,
That leaves them here, by Hamble’s side,
So firm embedded in the mud
No force of stream, nor storm, nor flood,
Shall ever these five ships bear forth
To fiords and islets of the north;
A thousand years shall pass away,
And leave those keels in Hamble’s bay.
 

IV

 
Ill were it in my rhyme to tell
The work of slaughter that befell;
In sooth it was a savage time—
Crime ever will engender crime.
Each Viking, as he swam to land,
Fell by a Saxon’s vengeful hand;
Turn we from all that vengeance wild—
Where on the deck there cowered a child,
And, closely to his bosom prest,
A snow-white kitten found a nest.
That tender boy, with tresses fair,
Was Edric, Egbert’s cherished heir;
The plaything of the homestead he,
Now fondled on his grandame’s knee;
Or as beside the hearth he sat,
Oft sporting with his snow-white cat;
Now by the chaplain taught to read,
And lisp his Pater and his Creed;
Well nurtured at his mother’s side,
And by his father trained to ride,
To speak the truth, to draw the bow,
And all an English Thane should know,
His days had been as one bright dream—
As smooth as his own river’s stream!
Until, at good King Alfred’s call,
Thane Egbert left his native hall.
 

V

 
Then, five days later, shout and yell,
And shrieks and howls of slaughter fell,
Upon the peaceful homestead came.
’Mid flashing sword, and axe, and flame,
Snatched by a Viking’s iron grasp,
From his slain mother’s dying clasp,
Saved from the household’s flaming grave,
Edric was dragged, a destined slave,
Some northern dame to serve, or heed
The flocks that on the Sæter feed.
Still, with scarce conscious hold he clung
To the white cat, that closely hung
Seeking her refuge in his arm,
Her shelter in the wild alarm—
And who can tell how oft his moan
Was soothed by her soft purring tone?
Time keeping with retracted claw,
Or patting with her velvet paw;
Although of home and friends bereft,
Still this one comforter was left,
So lithe, so swift, so soft, so white,
She might have seemed his guardian sprite.
   The rude Danes deemed her such;
And whispered tales of ‘disir’ bound
To human lords, as bird or hound.
Nor one ’mid all the fleet was found
   To hurt one tender paw.
And when the captive knelt to pray
None would his orisons gainsay;
For as they marked him day by day,
   Increased their wondering awe.
 

VI

 
Crouched by the mast, the child and cat,
Through the dire time of slaughter sat,
   By terror both spellbound;
But when night came, a silence drear
Fell on the coast; and far or near,
No voice caught Edric’s wakeful ear,
   Save water’s lapping sound.
He wandered from the stern to prow,
Ate of the stores, and marvelled how
   He yet might reach the ground;
Till low and lower sank the tide,
Dark banks of mud spread far and wide
   Around that fast-bound wreck.
Then the lone boy climbed down the ship,
To cross the mud by bound and skip,
   His cat upon his neck.
Light was his weight and swift his leap,
Now would he softly tread, now creep,
For treacherous was the mud, and deep
From stone to weed, from weed to plank,
Leaving a hole where’er he sank;
With panting breath and sore taxed strength
The solid earth he felt at length.
Sheltered within the copse he lay,
When dawn had brightened into day,
For when one moment there was seen,
His red cap glancing ’mid the green,
   A fearful cry arose—
“Here lurks a Dane!”  “The Dane seek out”
With knife and axe, the rabble rout
Made the copse ring with yell and shout
   To find their dreaded foes.
And Edric feared to meet a stroke,
Before they knew the tongue he spoke.
Hid ’mid the branches of an oak,
   He heard their calls and blows.
Of food he had a simple store,
And when the churls the chase gave o’er,
And evening sunk upon the vale,
With rubbing head and upright tail,
Pacing before him to and fro,
Puss lured him on the way to go—
Coaxing him on, with tender wile,
O’er heath and down for many a mile.
Ask me not how her course she knows.
He from Whom every instinct flows
Hath breathed into His creatures power,
Giving to each its needful dower;
And strive and question as we will,
We cannot trace the inborn skill,
Nor fathom how, where’er she roam,
The cat ne’er fails to find her home.
 

VII

 
What pen may dare to paint the woe,
When Egbert saw his home laid low?
Where, by the desolated hearth,
The mother lay who gave him birth,
And, close beside, his fair young wife,
And servants, slain in bootless strife—
   Mournful the King stood near.
Alfred, who came to be his guest,
And deeply rued that his behest
Had all unguarded left that nest,
   To meet such ruin drear.
With hand, and heart, and lip, he gave
All king or friend, both true and brave,
Could give, one pang of grief to save,
   To comfort, or to cheer—
As from the blackened walls they drew
Each corpse, and laid with reverence due;
And then it was that Egbert knew
   All save the child were here.
King Alfred’s noble head was bent,
A monarch’s pain his bosom rent;
Kindly he wrung Thane Egbert’s hand—
“Lo! these have won the blissful land,
Where foeman’s shout is heard no more,
Nor wild waves beat upon the shore;
Brief was the pang, the strife is o’er—
   They are at peace, my friend!
Safe, where the weary are at rest;
Safe, where the banish’d and opprest
   Find joys that never end.”
Thane Egbert groaned, and scarce might speak
For tears that ploughed his hardy cheek,
   As his dread task was done.
And for the slain, from monk and priest
Rose requiems that never ceased,
   While still he sought his son.
“Oh, would to Heaven!” that father said,
“There lay my darling calmly dead,
Rather than as a thrall be bred—
   His Christian faith undone.”
“Nay, life is hope!” bespake the King,
“God o’er the child can spread His wing
And shield him in the Northman’s power
Safe as in Alswyth’s guarded bower;
Treaty and ransom may be found
To win him back to English ground.”
 

VIII

 
The funeral obsequies were o’er,
   But lingered still the Thane,
Hanging around his home once more,
   Feeding his bitter pain.
The King would fain with friendly force
Urge him anew to mount his horse,
Turn from the piteous sight away,
And fresh begin life’s saddened day,
His loved ones looking yet to greet,
Where ne’er shall part the blest who meet.
Just then a voice that well he knew,
A sound that mixed the purr and mew,
   Went to the father’s heart.
On a large stone King Alfred sat
Against his buskin rubbed a cat,
   Snow-white in every part,
Though drenched and soiled from head to tail.
The poor Thane’s tears poured down like hail—
“Poor puss, in vain thy loving wail,”
   Then came a joyful start!
A little hand was on his cloak—
“Father!” a voice beside him spoke,
   Emerging from the wood.
All travel-stained, and marked with mire,
With trace of blood, and toil, and fire,
Yet safe and sound beside his sire,
   Edric before them stood.
And as his father wept for joy,
King Alfred blessed the rescued boy,
   And thanked his Maker good!
Who doth the captive’s prayer fulfil,
Making His creatures work His will
   By means not understood.
 

NOTE.—The remains of the five Danish vessels still lie embedded in the mud of the Hamble River near Southampton, though parts have been carried off and used as wood for furniture in the farm-houses.  The neighbouring wood is known as Cat Copse, and a tradition has been handed down that a cat, and a boy in a red cap, escaped from the Danish ships, took refuge there.

DE FACTO AND DE JURE

I.  DE FACTO

The later summer sunbeams lay on an expanse of slightly broken ground where purple and crimson heather were relieved by the golden blossoms of the dwarf gorse, interspersed with white stars of stitch-wort.  Here and there, on the slopes, grew stunted oaks and hollies, whose polished leaves gleamed white with the reflection of the light; but there was not a trace of human habitation save a track, as if trodden by horses’ feet, clear of the furze and heath, and bordered by soft bent grass, beginning to grow brown.

Near this track—for path it could hardly be called—stood a slender lad waiting and watching, a little round cap covering his short-cut brown hair, a crimson tunic reaching to his knee, leggings and shoes of deerhide, and a sword at his side, fastened by a belt of the like skin, guarded and clasped with silver.  His features were delicate, though sunburnt, and his eyes were riveted on the distance, where the path had disappeared amid the luxuriant spires of ling.

A hunting-horn sounded, and the youth drew himself together into an attitude of eager attention; the baying of hounds and trampling of horses’ hoofs came nearer and nearer, and by and by there came in view the ends of boar-spears, the tall points of bows, a cluster of heads of men and horses—strong, sturdy, shaggy, sure-footed creatures, almost ponies, but the only steeds fit to pursue the chase on this rough and encumbered ground.

Foremost rode, with ivory and gold hunting-horn slung in a rich Spanish baldrick, and a slender gilt circlet round his green hunting-cap, a stout figure, with a face tanned to a fiery colour, keen eyes of a dark auburn tint, and a shock of hair of the same deep red.

At sight of him, the lad flung himself on his knees on the path, with the cry, “Haro!  Haro!  Justice, Sir King!”

“Out of my way, English hound!” cried the King.  “This is no time for thy Haro.”

“Nay, but one word, good fair King!  I am French—French by my father’s side!” cried the lad, as there was a halt, more from the instinct of the horse than the will of the King.  ‘Bertram de Maisonforte!  My father married the Lady of Boyatt, and her inheritance was confirmed to him by your father, brave King William, my Lord; but now he is dead, and his kinsman, Roger de Maisonforte, hath ousted her and me, her son and lawful heir, from house and home, and we pray for justice, Sir King?’

‘Ha, Roger, thou there!  What say’st thou to this bold beggar!’ shouted the Red King.

‘I say,’ returned a black, bronzed hunter, pressing to the front, ‘that what I hold of thee, King William, on tenure of homage, and of two good horses and staunch hounds yearly, I yield to no English mongrel churl, who dares to meddle with me.’

‘Thou hear’st, lad,’ said Rufus, with his accustomed oath, ‘homage hath been done to us for the land, nor may it be taken back.  Out of our way, or—’

‘Sir! sir!’ entreated the lad, grasping the bridle, ‘if no more might be, we would be content if Sir Roger would but leave my mother enough for her maintenance among the nuns of Romsey, and give me a horse and suit of mail to go on the Holy War with Duke Robert.’

‘Ho! ho! a modest request for a beggarly English clown!’ cried the King, aiming a blow at the lad with his whip, and pushing on his horse, so as almost to throw him back on the heath.  ‘Ho! ho! fit him out for a fool’s errand!’

‘We’ll fit him!  We’ll teach him to take the cross at other men’s expense!’ shouted the followers, seizing on the boy.

‘Nay; we’ll bestow his cross on him for a free gift!’ exclaimed Roger de Maisonforte.

And Bertram, struggling desperately in vain among the band of ruffians, found his left arm bared, and two long and painful slashes, in the form of the Crusader’s cross, inflicted, amid loud laughter, as the blood sprang forth.

‘There, Sir Crusader,’ said Roger, grinding his teeth over him.  ‘Go on thy way now—as a horse-boy, if so please thee, and know better than to throw thy mean false English pretension in the face of a gentle Norman.’

Men, horses, dogs, all seemed to trample and scoff at Bertram as he fell back on the elastic stems of the heath and gorse, whose prickles seemed to renew the insults by scratching his face.  When the King’s horn, the calls, the brutal laughter, and the baying of the dogs had begun to die away in the distance, he gathered himself together, sat up, and tried to find some means of stanching the blood.  Not only was the wound in a place hard to reach, but it had been ploughed with the point of a boar-spear, and was grievously torn.  He could do nothing with it, and, as he perceived, he had further been robbed of his sword, his last possession, his father’s sword.

The large tears of mingled rage, grief, and pain might well spring from the poor boy’s eyes in his utter loneliness, as he clenched his hand with powerless wrath, and regained his feet, to retrace, as best he might, his way to where his widowed mother had found a temporary shelter in a small religious house.

The sun grew hotter and hotter, Bertram’s wound bled, though not profusely, the smart grew upon him, his tongue was parched with thirst, and though he kept resolutely on, his breath came panting, his head grew dizzy, his eyes dim, his feet faltered, and at last, just as he attained a wider and more trodden way, he dropped insensible by the side of the path, his dry lips trying to utter the cry, “Lord, have mercy on me!”

II.  DE JURE

When Bertram de Maisonforte opened his eyes again cold waters were on his face, wine was moistening his lips, the burning of his wound was assuaged by cooling oil, while a bandage was being applied, and he was supported on a breast and in arms, clad indeed in a hauberk, but as tenderly kind as the full deep voice that spoke in English, “He comes round.  How now, my child?”

“Father,” murmured Bertram, with dreamy senses.

“Better now; another sup from the flask, David,” again said the kind voice, and looking up, he became aware of the beautiful benignant face, deep blue eyes, and long light locks of the man in early middle age who had laid him on his knee, while a priest was binding his arm, and a fair and graceful boy, a little younger than himself, was standing by with the flask of wine in his hand, and a face of such girlish beauty that as he knelt to hold the wine to his lips, Bertram asked—

“Am I among the Angels?”

“Not yet,” said the elder man.  “Art thou near thine home?”

“Alack!  I have no home, kind sir,” said Bertram, now able to raise himself and to perceive that he was in the midst of a small hand of armed men, such as every knight or noble necessarily carried about with him for protection.  There was a standard with a dragon, and their leader himself was armed, all save his head, and, as Bertram saw, was a man of massive strength, noble stature, and kingly appearance.

“What shall we do for thee?” he asked.  “Who hath put thee in this evil case?”

Bertram gave his name, and at its Norman sound there was a start of repulsion from the boy.  “French after all!” he exclaimed.

“Nay, David,” said the leader, “if I mind me rightly, the Lady Elftrud of Boyatt wedded a brave Norman of that name.  Art thou her son?  I see something of her face, and thou hast an English tongue.”

“I am; I am her only son!” exclaimed Bertram; and as he told of his wrongs and the usage he had met with, young David cried out with indignation—

“Uncle, uncle, how canst thou suffer that these things should be?  Here are our faithful cnihts.  Let us ride to the forest.  Wherefore should it not be with Red William and his ruffians as with Scottish Duncan and Donald?”

“Hush thee, David, my nephew.  Thou knowest that may not be.  But for thee, young Bertram, we will see what can be done.  Canst sit a horse now?”

“Yea, my lord, full well.  I know not what came over me, even now,” said Bertram, much ashamed of the condition in which he had been found.

A sumpter horse was found for him, the leader of the party saying that they would go on to his own home, where the youth’s wound should be looked to, and they could then decide what could be done for him.

Bertram was still so far faint, suffering, weak, and weary, that he was hardly awake to curiosity as to his surroundings, and had quite enough to do to keep his seat in the saddle, and follow in the wake of the leader’s tall white horse, above which shone his bright chain mail and his still brighter golden locks, so that the exhausted boy began in some measure to feel as if he were following St. Michael on his way to some better world.

Now and then the tall figure turned to see how it was with him, and as he drooped more with fatigue and pain, bade one of the retainers keep beside him and support him.

Thus at length the cavalcade left the heathery expanse and reached a valley, green with meadow-land and waving corn, with silvery beards of barley rippling in the evening light, and cows and sheep being gathered for the night towards a dwelling where the river had been trained to form a moat round low green ramparts enclosing a number of one-storied thatched houses and barns, with one round tower, a strong embattled gateway, and at a little distance a square church tower, and other cottages standing outside.

A shout of ecstasy broke out from the village as the advancing party was seen and recognised.  Men, women, and children, rudely but substantially clad, and many wearing the collar of the thrall, ran out from their houses, baring their heads, bowing low, and each in turn receiving some kind word or nod of greeting from the lord whom they welcomed, while one after another of his armed followers turned aside, and was absorbed into a happy family by wife or parent.  A drawbridge crossed the moat, and there was a throng of joyful servants in the archway—foremost a priest, stretching out his hands in blessing, and a foreign-looking old woman, gray-haired and dark-eyed, who gathered young David into her embrace as he sprang from his horse, calling him her heart’s darling and her sunshine, and demanding, with a certain alarm, where were his brothers.

“In Scotland, dear Nurse Agnes—even where they should be,” was David’s answer.  “We are conquerors, do you see!  Edgar is a crowned and anointed King—seated on the holy stone of Scone, and Alexander is beside him to fight for him!”

“It is even so, nurse,” said the elder man, turning from the priest, to whom he had more briefly spoken; “God hath blessed our arms, and young Edgar has his right.  God shield him in it!  And now, nurse, here is a poor youth who needs thy care, after one of Red William’s rough jests.”

III.  KING AT HOME

Weary, faint, and feverish as Bertram de Maisonforte was, he was past caring for anything but the relief of rest, cool drink, and the dressing of his wound; nor did he even ask where he was until he awoke in broad daylight the next morning, to the sound of church bells, to the sight of a low but spacious chamber, with stone walls, deerskins laid on the floor, and the old nurse standing by him with a cup of refreshing drink, and ready to attend to his wound.

It was then that, feeling greatly refreshed, he ventured upon asking her in whose house he was, and who was the good lord who had taken pity on him.

“Who should it be save him who should be the good lord of every Englishman,” she replied, “mine own dear foster-son, the princely Atheling—he who takes up the cause of every injured man save his own?”

Bertram was amazed, for he had only heard Normans speak of Edgar Atheling, the heir of the ancient race, as a poor, tame-spirited, wretched creature, unable to assert himself, and therefore left unmolested by the conquerors out of contempt.  He proceeded to ask what the journey was from which the Atheling was returning, and the nurse, nothing loth, beguiled the tendance on his arm by explaining how she had long ago travelled from Hungary with her charges, Edgar, Margaret, and Christina; how it had come about that the crown, which should have been her darling’s, had been seized by the fierce duke from beyond the sea; how Edgar, then a mere child, had been forced to swear oaths of fealty by which he held himself still bound; how her sweetest pearl of ladies, her jewel Margaret, had been wedded to the rude wild King of Scots, and how her gentle sweetness and holiness had tamed and softened him, so that she had been the blessing of his kingdom till he and his eldest son had fallen at Alnwick while she lay a-dying; how the fierce savage Scots had risen and driven forth her young children; and how their uncle the Atheling had ridden forth, taken them to his home, bred them in all holiness and uprightness and good and knightly courage, and when Edgar and Alexander, the two eldest, were full grown, had gone northward with them once more, and had won back, in fair field, the throne of their father Malcolm.

Truly there might well be rejoicing and triumph on the estate where the Atheling ruled as a father and had been sorely missed.  He was at his early mass of thanksgiving at present, and Bertram was so much better that Nurse Agnes did not withstand his desire to rise and join the household and villagers, who were all collected in the building, low and massive, but on which Edgar Atheling had lavished the rich ornamental work introduced by the Normans.  The round arched doorway was set in a succession of elaborate zigzags, birds’ heads, lions’ faces, twists and knots; and within, the altar-hangings and the priest’s robes were stiff with the exquisite and elaborate embroidery for which the English nunneries were famed.

The whole building, with its low-browed roof, circular chancel arch still more richly adorned, and stout short columns, was filled with kneeling figures in rough homespun or sheepskin garments, and with shaggy heads, above which towered the shining golden locks of the Atheling, which were allowed to grow to a much greater length than was the Norman fashion, and beside him was the still fairer head of his young nephew, David of Scotland.  It was a thanksgiving service for their victory and safe return; and Bertram was just in time for the Te Deum that followed the mass.

The Atheling, after all was over, came forth, exchanging greetings with one after another of his franklins, cnihts, and thralls, all of whom seemed to be equally delighted to see him back again, and whom he bade to a feast in the hall, which would be prepared in the course of the day.  Some, meantime, went to their homes near at hand, others would amuse themselves with games at ball, archery, singlestick, and the like, in an open space within the moat—where others fished.

Bertram was not neglected.  The Atheling inquired after his health, heard his story in more detail, and after musing on it, said that after setting affairs in order at home, he meant to visit his sister and niece in the Abbey at Romsey, and would then make some arrangement for the Lady of Maisonforte; also he would endeavour to see the King on his return to Winchester, and endeavour to plead with him.

“William will at times hearken to an old comrade,” he said; “but it is an ill time to take him when he is hot upon the chase.  Meantime, thou art scarce yet fit to ride, and needest more of good Agnes’s leech-craft.”

Bertram was indeed stiff and weary enough to be quite content to lie on a bearskin in the wide hall of the dwelling, or under the eaves without, and watch the doings with some amusement.

He had been bred in some contempt of the Saxons.  His father’s marriage had been viewed as a mésalliance, and though the knight of Maisonforte had been honourable and kindly, and the Lady Elftrud had fared better than many a Saxon bride, still the French and the Breton dames of the neighbourhood had looked down on her, and the retainers had taught her son to look on the English race as swine, boors, and churls, ignorant of all gentle arts, of skill and grace.

But here was young David among youths of his own age, tilting as gracefully and well as any young Norman could—making Bertram long that his arm should cease to be so heavy and burning, so that he might show his prowess.

Here was a contention with bow and arrow that would not have disgraced the best men-at-arms of Maisonforte—here again, later in the day, was minstrelsy of a higher order than his father’s ears had cared for, but of which his mother had whispered her traditions.

Here, again, was the chaplain showing his brother-priests with the greatest pride and delight a scroll of Latin, copied from a MS. Psalter of the holy and Venerable Beda by the hand of his own dear pupil, young David.

Bertram, who could neither read nor write, and knew no more Latin than his Paternoster, Credo, and Ave, absolutely did not believe his eyes and ears till he had asked the question, whether this were indeed the youth’s work.  How could it be possible to wield pen as well as lance?

But the wonder of all was the Atheling.  After an absence of more than a year, there was much to be adjusted, and his authority on his own lands was thoroughly judicial even for life or death, since even under Norman sway he held the power of an earl.

Seated in a high-backed, cross-legged chair—his majestic form commanding honour and respect—he heard one after another causes that came before him, reserved for his judgment, questions of heirship, disputes about cattle, complaints of thievery, encroachments on land; and Bertram, listening with the interest that judgment never fails to excite, was deeply impressed with the clear-headedness, the ready thought, and the justice of the decision, even when the dispute lay between Saxon and Norman, always with reference to the laws of Alfred and Edward which he seemed to carry in his head.

Indeed, ere long, two Norman knights, hearing of the Atheling’s return, came to congratulate him, and lay before him a dispute of boundaries which they declared they would rather entrust to him than to any other.  And they treated him far more as a prince than as a Saxon churl.

They willingly accepted his invitation to go in to the feast of welcome, and a noble one it was, with music and minstrelsy, hospitality to all around, plenty and joy, wassail bowls going round, and the Atheling presiding over it, and with a strange and quiet influence, breaking up the entertainment in all good will, by the memory of his sweet sister Margaret’s grace-cup, ere mirth had become madness, or the English could incur their reproach of coarse revelry.

“And,” as the Norman knight who had prevailed said to Bertram, “Sir Edgar the Atheling had thus shown himself truly an uncrowned King.”

IV.  WHO SHALL BE KING?

The noble cloisters of Romsey, with the grand church rising in their midst, had a lodging-place, strictly cut off from the nunnery, for male visitors.

Into this Edgar Atheling rode with his armed train, and as they entered, some strange expression in the faces of the porters and guards met them.

“Had my lord heard the news?” demanded a priest, who hastened forward, bowing low.

“No, Holy Father.  No ill of my sister?” anxiously inquired the Prince.

“The Mother Abbess is well, my Lord Atheling; but the King—William the Red—is gone to his account.  He was found two eves ago pierced to the heart with an arrow beneath an oak in Malwood Chace.”

“God have mercy on his poor soul!” ejaculated Edgar, crossing himself.  “No moment vouchsafed for penitence!  Alas!  Who did the deed, Father Dunstan?”

“That is not known,” returned the priest, “save that Walter Tyrrel is fled like a hunted felon beyond seas, and my Lord Henry to Winchester.”

Young David pressed up to his uncle’s side.

“Sir, sir,” he said, “what a time is this!  Duke Robert absent, none know where; our men used to war, all ready to gather round you.  This rule will be ended, the old race restored.  Say but the word, and I will ride back and raise our franklins as one man.  Thou wilt, too, Bertram!”

“With all mine heart!” cried Bertram.  “Let me be the first to do mine homage.”

And as Edgar Atheling stood in the outer court, with lofty head and noble thoughtful face, pure-complexioned and high-browed, each who beheld him felt that there stood a king of men.  A shout of “King Edgar!  Edgar, King of England,” echoed through the buildings; and priests, men-at-arms, and peasants began to press forward to do him homage.  But he raised his hand—

“Hold, children,” he said.  “I thank you all; but much must come ere ye imperil yourselves by making oaths to me that ye might soon have to break!  Let me pass on and see my sister.”

Abbeys were not strictly cloistered then, and the Abbess Christina was at the door, a tall woman, older than her brother, and somewhat hard-featured, and beside her was a lovely fair girl, with peach-like cheeks and bright blue eyes, who threw herself into David’s arms, full of delight.

“Brother,” said Christina, “did I hear aright?  And have they hailed thee King?  Are the years of cruel wrong ended at last?  Victor for others, wilt thou be victor for thyself?”

“What is consistent with God’s will, and with mine oaths, that I hope to do,” was Edgar’s reply.

But even as he stood beside the Abbess in the porch, without having yet entered, there was a clattering and trampling of horse, and through the gate came hastily a young man in a hauberk, with a ring of gold about his helmet, holding out his hands as he saw the Atheling.

“Sire Edgar,” he said, “I knew not I should find you here, when I came to pay my first devoirs as a King to the Lady Mother Abbess” (he kissed her unwilling hand) “and the Lady Edith.”

Edith turned away a blushing face, and the Abbess faltered—

“As a King?”

“Yea, lady.  As such have I been owned by all at Winchester.  I should be at Westminster for my Coronation, save that I turned from my course to win her who shall share my crown.”

“Is it even thus, Henry?” said Edgar.  “Hast not thought of other rights?”

“Of that crazed fellow Robert’s?” demanded Henry.  “Trouble not thine head for him!  Even if he came back living from this Holy War in the East, my father had too much mercy on England to leave it to the like of him.”

“There be other and older rights, Sir Henry,” said the Abbess.

Henry looked up for a moment in some consternation.  “Ho!  Sir Edgar, thou hast been so long a peaceful man that I had forgotten.  Thou knowest thy day went by with Hereward le Wake.  See, fair Edith and I know one another—she shall be my Queen.”

“Veiled and vowed,” began the Abbess.

“Oh, not yet!  Tell her not yet!” whispered Edith in David’s ear.

“Thou little traitress!  Wed thy house’s foe, who takes thine uncle’s place?  Nay!  I will none of thee,” said David, shaking her off roughly; but her uncle threw his arm round her kindly.

At that moment a Norman knight spurred up to Henry with some communication that made him look uneasy, and Christina, laying her hand on Edgar’s arm, said: “Brother, we have vaults.  Thy troop outnumbers his.  The people of good old Wessex are with thee!  Now is thy time!  Save thy country.  Restore the line and laws of Alfred and Edward.”

“Thou know’st not what thou wouldst have, Christina,” said Edgar.  “One sea of blood wherever a Norman castle rises!  I love my people too well to lead them to a fruitless struggle with all the might of Normandy unless I saw better hope than lies before me now!  Mind thee, I swore to Duke William that I would withstand neither him nor any son of his whom the English duly hailed.  Yet, I will see how it is with this young man,” he added, as she fell back muttering, “Craven!  Who ever won throne without blood?”

Henry had an anxious face when he turned from his knight, who, no doubt, had told him how completely he was in the Atheling’s power.

“Sir Edgar,” he said, “a word with you.  Winchester is not far off—nor Porchester—nor my brother William’s Free companies, and his treasure.  Normans will scarce see Duke William’s son tampered with, nor bow their heads to the English!”

“Belike, Henry of Normandy,” said Edgar, rising above him in his grave majesty.  “Yet have I a question or two to put to thee.  Thou art a graver, more scholarly man than thy brother, less like to be led away by furies.  Have the people of England and Normandy sworn to thee willingly as their King?”

“Even so, in the Minster,” Henry began, and would have said more, but Edgar again made his gesture of authority.

“Wilt thou grant them the charter of Alfred and Edward, with copies spread throughout the land?”

“I will.”

“Wilt thou do equal justice between English and Norman?”

“To the best of my power.”

“Wilt thou bring home the Archbishop, fill up the dioceses, do thy part by the Church?”

“So help me God, I will.”

“Then, Henry of Normandy, I, Edgar Atheling, kiss thine hand, and become thy man; and may God deal with thee, as thou dost with England.”

The noble form of Edgar bent before the slighter younger figure of Henry, who burst into tears, genuine at the moment, and vowed most earnestly to be a good King to the entire people.  No doubt, he meant it—then.

And now—far more humbly, he made his suit to the Atheling for the hand of his niece.

Edgar took her apart.  “Edith, canst thou brook this man?”

“Uncle, he was good to me when we were children together at the old King’s Court.  I have made no vows, I tore the veil mine aunt threw over me from mine head.  Methinks with me beside him he would never be hard to our people.”

“So be it then, Edith.  If he holds to this purpose when he hath been crowned at Westminster, he shall have thee, though I fear thou hast chosen a hard lot, and wilt rue the day when thou didst quit these peaceful walls.”

And one more stipulation was made by Edgar the Atheling, ere he rode to own Henry as King in the face of the English people at Westminster—namely, that Boyatt should be restored to the true heiress the Lady Elftrud.  And to Roger, compensation was secretly made at the Atheling’s expense, ere departing with Bertram in his train for the Holy War.  For Bertram could not look at the scar without feeling himself a Crusader; and Edgar judged it better for England to remove himself for awhile, while he laid all earthly aspirations at the Feet of the King of kings.

The little English troop arrived just in time to share in the capture of the Holy City, to join in the eager procession of conquerors to the Holy Sepulchre, and to hear Godfrey de Bouillon elected to defend the sacred possession, refusing to wear a crown where the King of Saints and Lord of Heaven and Earth had worn a Crown of Thorns.

SIGBERT’S GUERDON

A feudal castle, of massive stone, with donjon keep and high crenellated wall, gateway tower, moat and drawbridge, was a strange, incongruous sight in one of the purple-red stony slopes of Palestine, with Hermon’s snowy peak rising high above.  It was accounted for, however, by the golden crosses of the kingdom of Jerusalem waving above the watch-tower, that rose like a pointing finger above the keep, in company with a lesser ensign bearing a couchant hound, sable.

It was a narrow rocky pass that the Castle of Gebel-Aroun guarded, overlooking a winding ravine between the spurs of the hills, descending into the fertile plain of Esdraelon from the heights of Galilee Hills, noted in many an Israelite battle, and now held by the Crusaders.

Bare, hard, and rocky were the hills around—the slopes and the valley itself, which in the earlier season had been filled with rich grass, Calvary clover, blood-red anemones, and pale yellow amaryllis, only showed their arid brown or gray remnants.  The moat had become a deep waterless cleft; and beneath, on the accessible sides towards the glen, clustered a collection of black horsehair tents, the foremost surmounted by the ill-omened crescent.

The burning sun had driven every creature under shelter, and no one was visible; but well was it known that watch and ward was closely kept from beneath those dark tents, that to the eyes within had the air of couching beasts of prey.  Yes, couching to devour what could not fail to be theirs, in spite of the mighty walls of rock and impregnable keep, for those deadly and insidious foes, hunger and thirst, were within, gaining the battle for the Saracens without, who had merely to wait in patience for the result.

Some years previously, Sir William de Hundberg, a Norman knight, had been expelled from his English castle by the partisans of Stephen, and with wife and children had followed Count Fulk of Anjou to his kingdom of Palestine, and had been endowed by him with one of the fortresses which guarded the passes of Galilee, under that exaggeration of the feudal system which prevailed in the crusading kingdom of Jerusalem.

Climate speedily did its work with the lady, warfare with two of her sons, and there only remained of the family a youth of seventeen, Walter, and his sister Mabel, fourteen, who was already betrothed to the young Baron of Courtwood, then about to return to England.  The treaty with Stephen and the success of young Henry of Anjou gave Sir William hopes of restitution; but just as he was about to conduct her to Jerusalem for the wedding, before going back to England, he fell sick of one of the recurring fevers of the country; and almost at the same time the castle was beleaguered by a troop of Arabs, under the command of a much-dreaded Sheik.

His constitution was already much shaken, and Sir William, after a few days of alternate torpor and delirium, passed away, without having been conscious enough to leave any counsel to his children, or any directions to Father Philip, the chaplain, or Sigbert, his English squire.

At the moment, sorrow was not disturbed by any great alarm, for the castle was well victualled, and had a good well, supplied by springs from the mountains; and Father Philip, after performing the funeral rites for his lord, undertook to make his way to Tiberias, or to Jerusalem, with tidings of their need; and it was fully anticipated that succour would arrive long before the stores in the castle had been exhausted.

But time went on, and, though food was not absolutely lacking, the spring of water which had hitherto supplied the garrison began to fail.  Whether through summer heats, or whether the wily enemy had succeeded in cutting off the source, where once there had been a clear crystal pool in the rock, cold as the snow from which it came, there only dribbled a few scanty drops, caught with difficulty, and only imbibed from utter necessity, so great was the suspicion of their being poisoned by the enemy.

The wine was entirely gone, and the salted provision, which alone remained, made the misery of thirst almost unbearable.

On the cushions, richly embroidered in dainty Eastern colouring, lay Mabel de Hundberg, with dry lips half opened and panting, too weary to move, yet listening all intent.

Another moment, and in chamois leather coat, his helmet in hand, entered her brother from the turret stair, and threw himself down hopelessly, answering her gesture.

“No, no, of course no.  The dust was only from another swarm of those hateful Saracens.  I knew it would be so.  Pah! it has made my tongue more like old boot leather than ever.  Have no more drops been squeezed from the well?  It’s time the cup was filled!”

“It was Roger’s turn.  Sigbert said he should have the next,” said Mabel.

Walter uttered an imprecation upon Roger, and a still stronger one on Sigbert’s meddling.  But instantly the cry was, “Where is Sigbert?”

Walter even took the trouble to shout up and down the stair for Sigbert, and to demand hotly of the weary, dejected men-at-arms where Sigbert was; but no one could tell.

“Gone over to the enemy, the old traitor,” said Walter, again dropping on the divan.

“Never!  Sigbert is no traitor,” returned his sister.

“He is an English churl, and all churls are traitors,” responded Walter.

The old nurse, who was fitfully fanning Mabel with a dried palm-leaf, made a growl of utter dissent, and Mabel exclaimed, “None was ever so faithful as good old Sigbert.”

It was a promising quarrel, but their lips were too dry to keep it up for more than a snarl or two.  Walter cast himself down, and bade old Tata fan him; why should Mabel have it all to herself?

Then sounds of wrangling were heard below, and Walter roused himself to go down and interfere.  The men were disputing over some miserable dregs of wine at the bottom of a skin.  Walter shouted to call them to order, but they paid little heed.

“Do not meddle and make, young sir,” said a low-browed, swarthy fellow.  “There’s plenty of cool drink of the right sort out there.”

“Traitor!” cried Walter; “better die than yield.”

“If one have no mind for dying like an old crab in a rock,” said the man.

“They would think nought of making an end of us out there,” said another.

“I’d as lief be choked at once by a cord as by thirst,” was the answer.

“That you are like to be, if you talk such treason,” threatened Walter.  “Seize him, Richard—Martin.”

Richard and Martin, however, hung back, one muttering that Gil had done nothing, and the other that he might be in the right of it; and when Walter burst out in angry threats he was answered in a gruff voice that he had better take care what he said, “There was no standing not only wasting with thirst and hunger, but besides being blustered at by a hot-headed lad, that scarce knew a hauberk from a helmet.”

Walter, in his rage, threw himself with drawn sword on the mutineer, but was seized and dragged back by half a dozen stalwart arms, such as he had no power to resist, and he was held fast amid rude laughs and brutal questions whether he should thus be carried to the Saracens, and his sister with him.

“The old Sheik would give a round sum for a fair young damsel like her!” were the words that maddened her brother into a desperate struggle, baffled with a hoarse laugh by the men-at-arms, who were keeping him down, hand and foot, when a new voice sounded: “How now, fellows!  What’s this?”

In one moment Walter was released and on his feet, and the men fell back, ashamed and gloomy, as a sturdy figure, with sun-browned face, light locks worn away by the helmet, and slightly grizzled, stood among them, in a much-rubbed and soiled chamois leather garment.

Walter broke out into passionate exclamations; the men, evidently ashamed, met them with murmurs and growls.  “Bad enough, bad enough!” broke in Sigbert; “but there’s no need to make it worse.  Better to waste with hunger and thirst than be a nidering fellow—rising against your lord in his distress.”

“We would never have done it if he would have kept a civil tongue.”

“Civility’s hard to a tongue dried up,” returned Sigbert.  “But look you here, comrades, leave me a word with my young lord here, and I plight my faith that you shall have enow to quench your thirst within six hours at the least.”

There was an attempt at a cheer, broken by the murmur, “We have heard enough of that!  It is always six hours and six hours.”

“And the Saracen hounds outside would at least give us a draught of water ere they made away with us,” said another.

“Saracens, forsooth!” said Sigbert.  “You shall leave the Saracens far behind you.  A few words first with my lord, and you shall hear.  Meanwhile, you, John Cook, take all the beef remaining; make it in small fardels, such as a man may easily carry.”

“That’s soon done,” muttered the cook.  “The entire weight would scarce bow a lad’s shoulders.”

“The rest of you put together what you would save from the enemy, and is not too heavy to carry.”  One man made some attempt at growling at a mere lad being consulted, while the stout warriors were kept in ignorance; but the spirit of discipline and confidence had returned with Sigbert, and no one heeded the murmur.  Meantime, Sigbert followed the young Lord Walter up the rough winding stairs to the chamber where Mabel lay on her cushions.  “What! what!” demanded the boy, pausing to enter.  Sigbert, by way of answer, quietly produced from some hidden pouch two figs.  Walter snatched at one with a cry of joy.  Mabel held out her hand, then, with a gasp, drew it back.  “Has Roger had one?”

Sigbert signed in the affirmative, and Mabel took a bite of the luscious fruit with a gasp of pleasure, yet paused once more to hold the remainder to her nurse.

“The Saints bless you, my sweet lamb!” exclaimed the old woman; “finish it yourself.  I could not.”

“If you don’t want it, give it to me,” put in Walter.

“For shame, my lord,” Sigbert did not scruple to say, nor could the thirsty girl help finishing the refreshing morsel, while Walter, with some scanty murmur of excuse, demanded where it came from, and what Sigbert had meant by promises of safety.

“Sir,” said Sigbert, “you may remember how some time back your honoured father threw one of the fellaheen into the dungeon for maiming old Leo.”

“The villain!  I remember.  I thought he was hanged.”

“No, sir.  He escaped.  I went to take him food, and he was gone!  I then found an opening in the vault, of which I spoke to none, save your father, for fear of mischief; but I built it up with stones.  Now, in our extremity, I bethought me of it, and resolved to try whether the prisoner had truly escaped, for where he went, we might go.  Long and darksome is the way underground, but it opens at last through one of the old burial-places of the Jews into the thickets upon the bank of the Jordan.”

“The Jordan!  Little short of a league!” exclaimed Walter.

“A league, underground, and in the dark,” sighed Mabel.

“Better than starving here like a rat in a trap,” returned her brother.

“Ah yes; oh yes!  I will think of the cool river and the trees at the end.”

“You will find chill enough, lady, long ere you reach the river,” said Sigbert.  “You must wrap yourself well.  ’Tis an ugsome passage; but your heart must not fail you, for it is the only hope left us.”

The two young people were far too glad to hear of any prospect of release, to think much of the dangers or discomforts of the mode.  Walter danced for joy up and down the room like a young colt, as he thought of being in a few hours more in the free open air, with the sound of water rippling below, and the shade of trees above him.  Mabel threw herself on her knees before her rude crucifix, partly in thankfulness, partly in dread of the passage that was to come first.

“Like going through the grave to life,” she murmured to her nurse.

And when the scanty garrison was gathered together, as many as possible provided with brands that might serve as torches, and Sigbert led them, lower and lower, down rugged steps hewn in the rock, through vaults where only a gleam came from above, and then through deeper cavernous places, intensely dark, there was a shudder perceptible by the clank and rattle of the armour which each had donned.  In the midst, Walter paused and exclaimed—

“Our banner!  How leave it to the Paynim dogs?”

“It’s here, sir,” said Sigbert, showing a bundle on his back.

“Warning to the foe to break in and seek us,” grumbled Gilbert.

“Not so,” replied Sigbert.  “I borrowed an old wrapper of nurse’s that will cheat their eyes till we shall be far beyond their ken.”

In the last dungeon a black opening lay before them, just seen by the light of the lamp Sigbert carried, but so low that there was no entrance save on hands and knees.

“That den!” exclaimed Walter.  “’Tis a rat-hole.  Never can we go that way.”

“I have tried it, sir,” quoth Sigbert.  “Where I can go, you can go.  Your sister quails not.”

“It is fearful,” said Mabel, unable to repress a shiver; “but, Walter, think what is before us if we stay here!  The Saints will guard us.”

“The worst and lowest part only lasts for a few rods,” explained Sigbert.  “Now, sir, give your orders.  Torches and lanterns, save Hubert’s and nurse’s, to be extinguished.  We cannot waste them too soon, but beware of loosing hold on them.”

Walter repeated the orders thus dictated to him, and Sigbert arranged the file.  It was absolutely needful that Sigbert should go first to lead the way.  Mabel was to follow him for the sake of his help, then her brother, next nurse, happily the only other female.  Between two stout and trustworthy men the wounded Roger came.  Then one after another the rest of the men-at-arms and servants, five-and-twenty in number.  The last of the file was Hubert, with a lamp; the others had to move in darkness.  There had been no horse of any value in the castle, for the knight’s charger had been mortally hurt in his last expedition, and there had been no opportunity of procuring another.  A deerhound, however, pushed and scrambled to the front, and Sigbert observed that he might be of great use in running before them.  Before entering, however, Sigbert gave the caution that no word nor cry must be uttered aloud, hap what might, until permission was given, for they would pass under the Saracen camp, and there was no knowing whether the sounds would reach the ears above ground.

A strange plunge it was into the utter darkness, crawling on hands and knees, with the chill cavernous gloom and rock seeming to press in upon those who slowly crept along, the dim light of Sigbert’s lamp barely showing as he slowly moved on before.  One of the two in the rear was dropped and extinguished in the dismal passage, a loss proclaimed by a suppressed groan passing along the line, and a louder exclamation from Walter, causing Sigbert to utter a sharp ‘Hush!’ enforced by a thud and tramp above, as if the rock were coming down on them, but which probably was the trampling of horses in the camp above.

The smoke of the lamp in front drifted back, and the air was more and more oppressive.  Mabel, with set teeth and compressed lips, struggled on, clinging tight to the end of the cord which Sigbert had tied to his body for her to hold by, while in like manner Walter’s hand was upon her dress.  It became more and more difficult to breathe, or crawl on, till at last, just as there was a sense that it was unbearable, and that it would be easier to lie still and die than be dragged an inch farther, the air became freer, the roof seemed to be farther away, the cavern wider, and the motion freer.

Sigbert helped his young lady to stand upright, and one by one all the train regained their feet.  The lamp was passed along to be rekindled, speech was permitted, crevices above sometimes admitted air, sometimes dripped with water.  The worst was over—probably the first part had been excavated, the farther portion was one of the many natural ‘dens and caves of the earth,’ in which Palestine abounds.  There was still a considerable distance to be traversed, the lamps burnt out, and had to be succeeded by torches carefully husbanded, for the way was rough and rocky, and a stumble might end in a fall into an abyss.  In time, however, openings of side galleries were seen, niches in the wall, and tokens that the outer portion of the cavern had been once a burial-place of the ancient Israelites—‘the dog Jews,’ as the Crusaders called them, with a shudder of loathing and contempt.

And joy infinite—clear daylight and a waving tree were perceptible beyond.  It was daylight, was it? but the sun was low.  Five hours at least had been spent in that dismal transit, before the exhausted, soiled, and chilled company stepped forth into a green thicket with the Jordan rushing far below.  Five weeks’ siege in a narrow fortress, then the two miles of subterranean struggle—these might well make the grass beneath the wild sycamore, the cork-tree, the long reeds, the willows, above all, the sound of the flowing water, absolute ecstasy.  There was an instant rush for the river, impeded by many a thorn-bush and creeper; but almost anything green was welcome at the moment, and the only disappointment was at the height and steepness of the banks of rock.  However, at last one happy man found a place where it was possible to climb down to the shingly bed of the river, close to a great mass of the branching headed papyrus reed.  Into the muddy but eminently sweet water most of them waded; helmets became cups, hands scooped up the water, there were gasps of joy and refreshment and blessing on the cool wave so long needed.

Sigbert and Walter between them helped down Mabel and her nurse, and found a secure spot for them, where weary faces, feet, and hands might be laved in the pool beneath a rock.

Then, taking up a bow and arrows laid down by one of the men, Sigbert applied himself to the endeavour to shoot some of the water-fowl which were flying wildly about over the reeds in the unwonted disturbance caused by the bathers.  He brought down two or three of the duck kind, and another of the party had bethought him of angling with a string and one of the only too numerous insects, and had caught sundry of the unsuspecting and excellent fish.  He had also carefully preserved a little fire, and, setting his boy to collect fuel, he produced embers enough to cook both fish and birds sufficiently to form an appetising meal for those who had been reduced to scraps of salt food for full a fortnight.

“All is well so far,” said Walter, with his little lordly air.  “We have arranged our retreat with great skill.  The only regret is that I have been forced to leave the castle to the enemy! the castle we were bound to defend.”

“Nay, sir, if it be your will,” said Sigbert, “the tables might yet be turned on the Saracen.”

With great eagerness Walter asked how this could be, and Sigbert reminded him that many a time it had been observed from the tower that, though the Saracens kept careful watch on the gates of the besieged so as to prevent a sally, they left the rear of their camp absolutely undefended, after the ordinary Eastern fashion, and Sigbert, with some dim recollection of rhymed chronicles of Gideon and of Jonathan, believed that these enemies might be surprised after the same fashion as theirs.  Walter leapt up for joy, but Sigbert had to remind him that the sun was scarcely set, and that time must be given for the Saracens to fall asleep before the attack; besides that, his own men needed repose.

“There is all the distance to be traversed,” said Walter.

“Barely a league, sir.”

It was hard to believe that the space, so endless underground, was so short above, and Walter was utterly incredulous, till, climbing the side of the ravine so high as to be above the trees, Sigbert showed him the familiar landmarks known in hunting excursions with his father.  He was all eagerness; but Sigbert insisted on waiting till past midnight before moving, that the men might have time to regain their vigour by sleep, and also that there might be time for the Saracens to fall into the deepest of all slumbers in full security.

The moon was low in the West when Sigbert roused the party, having calculated that it would light them on the way, but would be set by the time the attack was to be made.

For Mabel’s security it was arranged that a small and most unwilling guard should remain with her, near enough to be able to perceive how matters went; and if there appeared to be defeat and danger for her brother, there would probably be full time to reach Tiberias even on foot.

However, the men of the party had little fear that flight would be needed, for, though perhaps no one would have thought of the scheme for himself, there was a general sense that what Sigbert devised was prudent, and that he would not imperil his young lord and lady upon a desperate venture.

Keeping well and compactly together, the little band moved on, along arid, rocky paths, starting now and then at the howls of the jackals which gradually gathered into a pack, and began to follow, as if—some one whispered—they scented prey, “On whom?” was the question.

On a cliff looking down on the Arab camp, and above it on the dark mass of the castle, where, in the watch-tower, Sigbert had left a lamp burning, they halted just as the half-moon was dipping below the heights towards the Mediterranean.  Here the Lady Mabel and her guard were to wait until they heard the sounds which to their practised ears would show how the fight went.

The Arab shout of victory they knew only too well, and it was to be the signal of flight towards Tiberias; but if success was with the assailants, the war-cry ‘Deus vult,’ and ‘St. Hubert for Hundberg,’ were to be followed by the hymn of victory as the token that it was safe to descend.

All was dark, save for the magnificent stars of an Eastern night, as Mabel, her nurse, and the five men, commanded by the wounded Roger, stood silently praying while listening intently to the muffled tramp of their own people, descending on the blacker mass denoting the Saracen tents.

The sounds of feet died away, only the jackal’s whine and moan, were heard.  Then suddenly came a flash of lights in different directions, and shouts here, there, everywhere, cries, yells, darkness, an undistinguishable medley of noise, the shrill shriek of the Moslem, and the exulting war-cry of the Christian ringing farther and farther off, in the long valley leading towards the Jordan fords.

Dawn began to break—overthrown tents could be seen.  Mabel had time to wonder whether she was forgotten, when the hymn began to sound, pealing on her ears up the pass, and she had not had time for more than an earnest thanksgiving, and a few steps down the rocky pathway, before a horse’s tread was heard, and a man-at-arms came towards her leading a slender, beautiful Arab horse.  “All well! the young lord and all.  The Saracens, surprised, fled without ever guessing the number of their foes.  The Sheik made prisoner in his tent.  Ay, and a greater still, the Emir Hussein Bey, who had arrived to take possession of the castle only that very evening.  What a ransom he would pay!  Horses and all were taken, the spoil of the country round, and Master Sigbert had sent this palfrey for Lady Mabel to ride down.”

Perhaps Sigbert, in all his haste and occupation, had been able to discern that the gentle little mare was not likely to display the Arab steed’s perilous attachment to a master, for Mabel was safely mounted, and ere sunrise was greeted by her joyous and victorious brother.  “Is not this noble, sister?  Down went the Pagan dogs before my good sword!  There are a score of them dragged off to the dead man’s hollow for the jackals and vultures; but I kept one fellow uppermost to show you the gash I made!  Come and see.”

Roger here observed that the horse might grow restive at the carcase, and Mabel was excused the sight, though Walter continued to relate his exploits, and demand whether he had not won his spurs by so grand a ruse and victory.

“Truly I think Sigbert has,” said his sister.  “It was all his doing.”

“Sigbert, an English churl!  What are you thinking of, Mabel?”

“I am thinking to whom the honour is due.”

“You are a mere child, sister, or you would know better.  Sigbert is a very fair squire; but what is a squire’s business but to put his master in the way of honour?  Do not talk such folly.”

Mabel was silenced, and after being conducted across the bare trampled ground among the tents of the Arabs, she re-entered the castle, where in the court groups of disarmed Arabs stood, their bournouses pulled over their brows, their long lances heaped in a corner, grim and disconsolate at their discomfiture and captivity.

A repast of stewed kid, fruit, and sherbet was prepared for her and her brother from the spoil, after which both were weary enough to throw themselves on their cushions for a long sound sleep.

Mabel slept the longer, and when she awoke, she found that the sun was setting, and that supper was nearly ready.

Walter met her just as she had arranged her dress, to bid nurse make ready her bales, for they were to start at dawn on the morrow for Tiberias.  It was quite possible that the enemy might return in force to deliver their Emir.  A small garrison, freshly provisioned, could hold out the castle until relief could be sent; but it would be best to conduct the two important prisoners direct to the King, to say nothing of Walter’s desire to present them and to display these testimonies of his prowess before the Court of Jerusalem.

The Emir was a tall, slim, courteous Arab, with the exquisite manners of the desert.  Both he and the Sheik were invited to the meal.  Both looked startled and shocked at the entrance of the fair-haired damsel, and the Sheik crouched in a corner, with a savage glare in his eye like a freshly caught wild beast, though the Emir sat cross-legged on the couch eating, and talking in the lingua Franca, which was almost a native tongue, to the son and daughter of the Crusader.  From him Walter learnt that King Fulk was probably at Tiberias, and this quickened the eagerness of all for a start.  It took place in the earliest morning, so as to avoid the heat of the day.  How different from the departure in the dark underground passage!

Horses enough had been captured to afford the Emir and the Sheik each his own beautiful steed (the more readily that the creatures could hardly have been ridden by any one else), and their parole was trusted not to attempt to escape.  Walter, Mabel, Sigbert, and Roger were also mounted, and asses were found in the camp for the nurse, and the men who had been hurt in the night’s surprise.

The only mischance on the way was that in the noontide halt, just as the shimmer of the Lake of Galilee met their eyes, under a huge terebinth-tree, growing on a rock, when all, except Sigbert, had composed themselves to a siesta, there was a sudden sound of loud and angry altercation, and, as the sleepers started up, the Emir was seen grasping the bridle of the horse on which the Sheik sat downcast and abject under the storm of fierce indignant words hurled at him for thus degrading his tribe and all Islam by breaking his plighted word to the Christian.

This was in Arabic, and the Emir further insisted on his prostrating himself to ask pardon, while he himself in lingua Franca explained that the man was of a low and savage tribe of Bedouins, who knew not how to keep faith.

Walter broke out in loud threats, declaring that the traitor dog ought to be hung up at once on the tree, or dragged along with hands tied behind him; but Sigbert contented himself with placing a man at each side of his horse’s head, as they proceeded on their way to the strongly fortified town of the ancient Herods, perched at the head of the dark gray Lake of Galilee, shut in by mountain peaks.  The second part of the journey was necessarily begun in glowing heat, for it was most undesirable to have to spend a night in the open country, and it was needful to push on to a fortified hospice or monastery of St. John, which formed a half-way house.

Weary, dusty, athirst, they came in sight of it in the evening; and Walter and Roger rode forward to request admittance.  The porter begged them to wait when he heard that the party included women and Saracen prisoners; and Walter began to storm.  However, a few moments more brought a tall old Knight Hospitalier to the gate, and he made no difficulties as to lodging the Saracens in a building at the end of the Court, where they could be well guarded; and Mabel and her nurse were received in a part of the precincts appropriated to female pilgrims.

It was a bare and empty place, a round turret over the gateway, with a stone floor, and a few mats rolled up in the corner, mats which former pilgrims had not left in an inviting condition.

However, the notions of comfort of the twelfth century were not exacting.  Water to wash away the dust of travel was brought to the door, and was followed by a substantial meal on roasted kid and thin cakes of bread.  Sigbert came up with permission for the women to attend compline, though only strictly veiled; and Mabel knelt in the little cool cryptlike chapel, almost like the late place of her escape, and returned thanks for the deliverance from their recent peril.

Then, fresh mats and cushions having been supplied, the damsel and her nurse slept profoundly, and were only roused by a bell for a mass in the darkness just before dawn, after which they again set forth, the commander of the Hospice himself, and three or four knights, accompanying them, and conversing familiarly with the Emir on the current interests of Palestine.

About half-way onward, the glint and glitter of spears was seen amid a cloud of dust on the hill-path opposite.  The troop drew together on their guard, though, as the Hospitalier observed, from the side of Tiberias an enemy could scarcely come.  A scout was sent forward to reconnoitre; but, even before he came spurring joyously back, the golden crosses of Jerusalem had been recognised, and confirmed his tidings that it was the rearguard of the army, commanded by King Fulk himself, on the way to the relief of the Castle of Gebel-Aroun.

In a brief half-hour more, young Walter de Hundberg, with his sister by his side, was kneeling before an alert, slender, wiry figure in plain chamois leather, with a worn sunburnt face and keen blue eyes—Fulk of Anjou—who had resigned his French county to lead the crusading cause in Palestine.

“Stand up, fair youth, and tell thy tale, and how thou hast forestalled our succour.”

Walter told his tale of the blockaded castle, the underground passage, and the dexterous surprise of the besiegers, ending by presenting, not ungracefully, his captives to the pleasure of the King.

“Why, this is well done!” exclaimed Fulk.  “Thou art a youth of promise, and wilt well be a prop to our grandson’s English throne.  Thou shalt take knighthood from mine own hand as thy prowess well deserveth.  And thou, fair damsel, here is one whom we could scarce hold back from rushing with single hand to deliver his betrothed.  Sir Raymond of Courtwood, you are balked of winning thy lady at the sword’s point, but thou wilt scarce rejoice the less.”

A dark-eyed, slender young knight, in bright armour, drew towards Mabel, and she let him take her hand; but she was intent on something else, and exclaimed—

“Oh, sir, Sir King, let me speak one word!  The guerdon should not be only my brother’s.  The device that served us was—our squire’s.”

The Baron of Courtwood uttered a fierce exclamation.  Walter muttered, “Mabel, do not be such a meddling fool”; but the King asked, “And who may this same squire be?”

“An old English churl,” said Walter impatiently.  “My father took him as his squire for want of a better.”

“And he has been like a father to us,” added Mabel

“Silence, sister!  It is not for you to speak!” petulantly cried Walter.  “Not that the Baron of Courtwood need be jealous,” added he, laughing somewhat rudely.  “Where is the fellow?  Stand forth, Sigbert.”

Travel and heat-soiled, sunburnt, gray, and ragged, armour rusted, leathern garment stained, the rugged figure came forward, footsore and lame, for he had given up his horse to an exhausted man-at-arms.  A laugh went round at the bare idea of the young lady’s preferring such a form to the splendid young knight, her destined bridegroom.

“Is this the esquire who hath done such good service, according to the young lady?” asked the King.

“Ay, sir,” returned Walter; “he is true and faithful enough, though nothing to be proud of in looks; and he served us well in my sally and attack.”

“It was his—” Mabel tried to say, but Sigbert hushed her.

“Let be, let be, my sweet lady; it was but my bounden duty.”

“What’s that?  Speak out what passes there,” demanded young Courtwood, half-jealously still.

“A mere English villein, little better than a valet of the camp!” were the exclamations around.  “A noble damsel take note of him!  Fie for shame!”

“He has been true and brave,” said the King.  “Dost ask a guerdon for him, young sir?” he added to Walter.

“What wouldst have, old Sigbert?” asked Walter, in a patronising voice.

“I ask nothing, sir,” returned the old squire.  “To have seen my lord’s children in safety is all I wish.  I have but done my duty.”

King Fulk, who saw through the whole more clearly than some of those around, yet still had the true Angevin and Norman contempt for a Saxon, here said: “Old man, thou art trusty and shrewd, and mayst be useful.  Wilt thou take service as one of my men-at-arms?”

“Thou mayst,” said Walter; “thou art not bound to me.  England hath enough of Saxon churls without thee, and I shall purvey myself an esquire of youthful grace and noble blood.”

Mabel looked at her betrothed and began to speak.

“No, no, sweet lady, I will have none of that rough, old masterful sort about me.”

“Sir King,” said Sigbert, “I thank thee heartily.  I would still serve the Cross; but my vow has been, when my young lord and lady should need me no more, to take the Cross of St. John with the Hospitaliers.”

“As a lay brother?  Bethink thee,” said Fulk of Anjou.  “Noble blood is needed for a Knight of the Order.”

Sigbert smiled slightly, in spite of all the sadness of his face, and the Knight Commander who had ridden with them, a Fleming by birth, said—

“For that matter, Sir King, we are satisfied.  Sigbert, the son of Sigfrid, hath proved his descent from the old English kings of the East Saxons, and the Order will rejoice to enrol in the novitiate so experienced a warrior.”

“Is this indeed so?” asked Fulk.  “A good lineage, even if English!”

“But rebel,” muttered Courtwood.

“It is so, Sir King,” said Sigbert.  “My father was disseised of the lands of Hundberg, and died in the fens fighting under Hereward le Wake.  My mother dwelt under the protection of the Abbey of Colchester, and, by and by, I served under our Atheling, and, when King Henry’s wars in Normandy were over, I followed the Lord of Hundberg’s banner, because the men-at-arms were mine own neighbours, and his lady my kinswoman.  Roger can testify to my birth and lineage.”

“So, thou art true heir of Hundberg, if that be the name of thine English castle?”

“Ay, sir, save for the Norman!  But I would not, if I could, meddle with thee, my young lord, though thou dost look at me askance, spite of having learnt of me to ride and use thy lance.  I am the last of the English line of old Sigfrid the Wormbane, and a childless man, and I trust the land and the serfs will be well with thee, who art English born, and son to Wulfrida of Lexden.  And I trust that thou, my sweet Lady Mabel, will be a happy bride and wife.  All I look for is to end my days under the Cross, in the cause of the Holy Sepulchre, whether as warrior or lay brother.  Yes, dear lady, that is enough for old Sigbert.”

And Mabel had to acquiesce and believe that her old friend found peace and gladness beneath the eight-pointed Cross, when she and her brother sailed for England, where she would behold the green fields and purple heather of which he had told her amid the rocks of Palestine.

Moreover, she thought of him when on her way through France, she heard the young monk Bernard, then rising into fame, preach on the beleaguered city, saved by the poor wise man; and tell how, when the city was safe, none remembered the poor man.  True, the preacher gave it a mystic meaning, and interpreted it as meaning the emphatically Poor Man by Whom Salvation came, and Whom too few bear in mind.  Yet such a higher meaning did not exclude the thought of one whose deserts surpassed his honours here on earth.

THE BEGGAR’S LEGACY

 
An Alderman bold, Henry Smith was enrolled,
   Of the Silversmiths’ Company;
Highly praised was his name, his skill had high fame,
   And a prosperous man was he.
 
 
Knights drank to his health, and lauded his wealth;
   Sailors came from the Western Main,
Their prizes they sold, of ingots of gold,
   Or plate from the galleys of Spain.
 
 
Then beakers full fine, to hold the red wine,
   Were cast in his furnace’s mould,
Or tankards rich chased, in intricate taste,
   Gimmal rings of the purest gold.
 
 
On each New Year’s morn, no man thought it scorn—
   Whether statesman, or warrior brave—
The choicest device, of costliest price,
   For a royal off’ring to crave.
 
 
“Bring here such a toy as the most may joy
   The eyes of our gracious Queen,
Rows of orient pearls, gold pins for her curls,
   Silver network, all glistening sheen.”
 
 
Each buyer who came—lord, squire, or dame—
   Behaved in most courteous guise,
Showing honour due, as to one they knew
   To be at once wealthy and wise.
 
 
In London Guild Hall, the citizens all,
   Esteemed him their future Lord Mayor;
Not one did he meet, in market or street,
   But made him a reverence fair.
 
 
“Ho,” said Master Smith, “I will try the pith
   Of this smooth-faced courtesy;
Do they prize myself, do they prize my pelf,
   Do they value what’s mine or me?”
 
 
His gold chain of pride he hath laid aside,
   And furred gown of the scarlet red;
He set on his back a fardel and pack,
   And a hood on his grizzled head.
 
 
His ’prentices all he hath left in stall,
   But running right close by his side,
In spite of his rags, guarding well his bags,
   His small Messan dog would abide.
 
 
So thus, up and down, through village and town,
   In rain or in sunny weather,
Through Surrey’s fair land, his staff in his hand,
   Went he and the dog together.
 
 
“Good folk, hear my prayer, of your bounty spare,
   Help a wanderer in his need;
Better days I have seen, a rich man I have been,
   Esteemed both in word and deed.”
 
 
In the first long street, certain forms he did meet,
   But scarce might behold their faces;
From matted elf-locks eyes stared like an ox,
   And shambling were their paces!
 
 
Not one gave him cheer, nor would one come near,
   As he turned him away to go,
Then a heavy stone at the dog was thrown,
   To deal a right cowardly blow.
 
 
In Mitcham’s fair vale, the men ’gan to rail,
   “Not a vagabond may come near;”
Each mother’s son ran, each boy and each man,
   To summon the constable here.
 
 
The cart’s tail behind, the beggar they bind,
   They flogged him full long and full sore;
They hunted him out, did that rabble rout,
   And bade him come thither no more!
 
 
All weary and bruised, and scurvily used,
   He went trudging along his track;
The lesson was stern he had come to learn,
   And yet he disdained to turn back.
 
 
Where Walton-on-Thames gleams fair through the stems
   Of its tufted willow palms,
There were loitering folk who most vilely spoke,
   Nor would give him one groat in alms.
 
 
“Dog Smith,” was the cry, “behold him go by,
   The fool who hath lost all he had!”
For only to tease can delight and can please
   The ill-nurtured village lad.
 
 
Behold, in Betchworth was a blazing hearth
   With a hospitable door.
“Thou art tired and lame,” quoth a kindly dame,
   “Come taste of our humble store.
 
 
“Though scant be our fare, thou art welcome to share;
   We rejoice to give thee our best;
Come sit by our fire, thou weary old sire,
   Come in, little doggie, and rest.”
 
 
And where Mole the slow doth by Cobham go,
   He beheld a small village maiden;
Of loose flocks of wool her lap was quite full,
   With a bundle her arms were laden.
 
 
“What seekest thou, child, ’mid the bushes wild,
   Thy face and thine arms that thus tear?”
“The wool the sheep leave, to spin and to weave;
   It makes us our clothes to wear.”
 
 
Then she led him in, where her mother did spin,
   And make barley bannocks to eat;
They gave him enough, though the food was rough—
   The kindliness made it most sweet.
 
 
Many years had past, report ran at last,
   The rich Alderman Smith was dead.
Then each knight and dame, and each merchant came,
   To hear his last testament read.
 
 
I, Harry Smith, found of mind clear and sound,
   Thus make and devise my last will:
While England shall stand, I bequeath my land,
   My last legacies to fulfil.
 
 
“To the muddy spot, where they cleaned them not,
   When amongst their fields I did roam;
To every one there with the unkempt hair
   I bequeath a small-toothed comb.
 
 
“Next, to Mitcham proud, and the gaping crowd,
   Who for nobody’s sorrows grieve;
With a lash double-thong, plaited firm and strong,
   A horsewhip full stout do I leave.
 
 
“To Walton-on-Thames, where, ’mid willow stems,
   The lads and the lasses idle;
To restrain their tongues, and breath of their lungs,
   I bequeath a bit and a bridle.
 
 
“To Betchworth so fair, and the households there
   Who so well did the stranger cheer,
I leave as my doles to the pious souls,
   Full seventy pounds by the year.
 
 
“To Cobham the thrifty I leave a good fifty,
   To be laid out in cloth dyed dark;
On Sabbath-day to be given away,
   And known by Smith’s badge and mark.
 
 
“To Leatherhead too my gratitude’s due,
   For a welcome most freely given;
Let my bounty remain, for each village to gain,
   Whence the poor man was never driven.”
 
 
So in each sweet dale, and bright sunny vale,
   In the garden of England blest;
Those have found a friend, whose gifts do not end,
   Who gave to that stranger a rest!
 

Henry Smith’s history is literally true.  He was a silversmith of immense wealth in London in the latter part of the sixteenth century, but in his later years he chose to perambulate the county of Surrey as a beggar, and was known as ‘Dog Smith.’  He met with various fortune in different parishes, and at Mitcham was flogged at the cart’s tail.  On his death, apparently in 1627, he was found to have left bequests to almost every place in Surrey, according to the manners of the inhabitants—to Mitcham a horsewhip, to Walton-on-Thames a bridle, to Betchworth, Leatherhead, and many more, endowments which produce from £50 to £75 a year, and to Cobham a sum to be spent annually in woollen cloth of a uniform colour, bearing Smith’s badge, to be given away in church to the poor and impotent, as the following tablet still records:—

1627

Item—That the Gift to the impotent and aged poor people, shall be bestowed in Apparell of one Coulour, with some Badge or other Mark, that it may be known to be the Gift of the said Henry Smith, or else in Bread, flesh, or fish on the Sabbath-day publickly in the Church.  In Witness whereof the said Henry Smith did put to his Hand and seal the Twenty-first day of January in the Second Year of the Reign of our most gracious Sovereign Lord King Charles the First.

A REVIEW OF NIECES

GENERAL SIR EDWARD FULFORD, K.G.C., to his sister MISS FULFORD

UNITED SERVICE CLUB, 29th June.

My Dear Charlotte,—I find I shall need at least a month to get through the necessary business; so that I shall only have a week at last for my dear mother and the party collected at New Cove.  You will have ample time to decide which of the nieces shall be asked to accompany us, but you had better give no hint of the plan till you have studied them thoroughly.  After all the years that you have accompanied me on all my stations, you know how much depends on the young lady of our house being one able to make things pleasant to the strange varieties who will claim our hospitality in a place like Malta, yet not likely to flag if left in solitude with you.  She must be used enough to society to do the honours genially and gracefully, and not have her head turned by being the chief young lady in the place.  She ought to be well bred, if not high bred, enough to give a tone to the society of her contemporaries, and above all she must not flirt.  If I found flirtation going on with the officers, I should send her home on the spot.  Of course, all this means that she must have the only real spring of good breeding, and be a thoroughly good, religious, unselfish, right-minded girl; otherwise we should have to rue our scheme.  In spite of all you would do towards moulding and training a young maiden, there will be so many distractions and unavoidable counter-influences that the experiment would be too hazardous, unless there were a character and manners ready formed.  There ought likewise to be cultivation and intelligence to profit by the opportunities she will have.  I should not like Greece and Italy, to say nothing of Egypt and Palestine, to be only so much gape seed.  You must have an eye likewise to good temper, equal to cope with the various emergencies of travelling.  N.B.  You should have more than one in your eye, for probably the first choice will be of some one too precious to be attainable.—Your affectionate brother,

EDWARD FULFORD.

MISS FULFORD to SIR EDWARD FULFORD

1 SHINGLE COTTAGES, NEW COVE, S. CLEMENTS, 30th June.

My Dear Edward,—When Sydney Smith led Perfection to the Pea because the Pea would not come to Perfection, he could hardly have had such an ideal as yours.  Your intended niece is much like the ‘not impossible she’ of a youth under twenty.  One comfort is that such is the blindness of your kind that you will imagine all these charms in whatever good, ladylike, simple-hearted girl I pitch upon, and such I am sure I shall find all my nieces.  The only difficulty will be in deciding, and that will be fixed by details of style, and the parents’ willingness to spare their child.

This is an excellent plan of yours for bringing the whole family together round our dear old mother and her home daughter.  This is the end house of three on a little promontory, and has a charming view—of the sea in the first place, and then on the one side of what is called by courtesy the parade, on the top of the sea wall where there is a broad walk leading to S. Clements, nearly two miles off.  There are not above a dozen houses altogether, and the hotel is taken for the two families from London and Oxford, while the Druces are to be in the house but one next to us, the middle one being unluckily let off to various inhabitants.  We have one bedroom free where we may lodge some of the overflowings, and I believe the whole party are to take their chief meals together in the large room at the hotel.  The houses are mostly scattered, being such as fortunate skippers build as an investment, and that their wives may amuse themselves with lodgers in their absence.  The church is the weakest point in this otherwise charming place.  The nearest, and actually the parish church, is a hideous compo structure, built in the worst of times as a chapel of ease to S. Clements.  I am afraid my mother’s loyalty to the parochial system will make her secure a pew there, though at the farther end of the town there is a new church which is all that can be wished, and about a mile and a half inland there is a village church called Hollyford, held, I believe, by a former fellow-curate of Horace Druce.  Perhaps they will exchange duties, if Horace can be persuaded to take a longer holiday than merely for the three weeks he has provided for at Bourne Parva.  They cannot come till Monday week, but our Oxford professor and his party come on Thursday, and Edith will bring her girls the next day.  Her husband, our Q.C., cannot come till his circuit is over, but of course you know more about his movements than I do.  I wonder you have never said anything about those girls of his, but I suppose you class them as unattainable.  I have said nothing to my mother or Emily of our plans, as I wish to be perfectly unbiased, and as I have seen none of the nieces for five years, and am prepared to delight in them all, I may be reckoned as a blank sheet as to their merits.—Your affectionate sister,

CHARLOTTE FULFORD.

July 4.—By noon to-day arrived Martyn,¹ with Mary his wife, Margaret and Avice their daughters, Uchtred their second son, and poor Harry Fulford’s orphan, Isabel, who has had a home with them ever since she left school.  Though she is only a cousin once removed, she seems to fall into the category of eligible nieces, and indeed she seems the obvious companion for us, as she has no home, and seems to me rather set aside among the others.  I hope there is no jealousy, for she is much better looking than her cousins, with gentle, liquid eyes, a pretty complexion, and a wistful expression.  Moreover, she is dressed in a quiet ladylike way, whereas grandmamma looked out just now in the twilight and said, “My dear Martyn, have you brought three boys down?”  It was a showery, chilly evening, and they were all out admiring the waves.  Ulsters and sailor hats were appropriate enough then, but the genders were not easy to distinguish, especially as the elder girl wears her hair short—no improvement to a keen face which needs softening.  She is much too like a callow undergraduate altogether, and her sister follows suit, though perhaps with more refinement of feature—indeed she looks delicate, and was soon called in.  They are in slight mourning, and appear in gray serges.  They left a strap of books on the sofa, of somewhat alarming light literature for the seaside.  Bacon’s Essays and Elements of Logic were the first Emily beheld, and while she stood regarding them with mingled horror and respect, in ran Avice to fetch them, as the two sisters are reading up for the Oxford exam—‘ination’ she added when she saw her two feeble-minded aunts looking for the rest of the word.  However, she says it is only Pica who is going up for it this time.  She herself was not considered strong enough.  Yet there have those two set themselves down with their books under the rocks, blind to all the glory of sea and shore, deaf to the dash and ripple of the waves!  I long to go and shout Wordsworth’s warning about ‘growing double’ to them.  I am glad to say that Uchtred has come and fetched Avice away.  I can hardly believe Martyn and Mary parents to this grown-up family.  They look as youthful as ever, and are as active and vigorous, and full of their jokes with one another and their children.  They are now gone out to the point of the rocks at the end of our promontory, fishing for microscopical monsters, and comporting themselves boy and girl fashion.

Isabel has meantime been chatting very pleasantly with grandmamma, and trying to extricate us from our bewilderment as to names and nicknames.  My poor mother, after strenuously preventing abbreviations in her own family, has to endure them in her descendants, and as every one names a daughter after her, there is some excuse!  This Oxford Margaret goes by the name of Pie or Pica, apparently because it is the remotest portion of Magpie, and her London cousin is universally known as Metelill—the Danish form, I believe; but in the Bourne Parva family the young Margaret Druce is nothing worse than Meg, and her elder sister remains Jane.  “Nobody would dare to call her anything else,” says Isa.  Avice cannot but be sometimes translated into the Bird; while my poor name, in my second London niece, has become the masculine Charley.  “I shall know why when I see her,” says Isa laughing.  This good-natured damsel is coming out walking with us old folks, and will walk on with me, when grandmamma turns back with Emily.  Her great desire is to find the whereabouts of a convalescent home in which she and her cousins have subscribed to place a poor young dressmaker for a six weeks’ rest; but I am afraid it is on the opposite side of S. Clements, too far for a walk.

July 5.—Why did you never tell me how charming Metelill is?  I never supposed the Fulford features capable of so much beauty, and the whole manner and address are so delightful that I do not wonder that all her cousins are devoted to her; Uchtred, or Butts, as they are pleased to name him, has brightened into another creature since she came, and she seems like sunshine to us all.  As to my namesake, I am sorry to say that I perceive the appropriateness of Charley; but I suppose it is style, for the masculine dress which in Pica and Avice has an air of being worn for mere convenience’ sake, and is quite ladylike, especially on Avice, has in her an appearance of defiance and coquetry.  Her fox-terrier always shares her room, which therefore is eschewed by her sister, and this has made a change in our arrangements.  We had thought the room in our house, which it seems is an object of competition, would suit best for Jane Druce and one of her little sisters; but a hint was given by either Pica or her mother that it would be a great boon to let Jane and Avice share it, as they are very great friends, and we had the latter there installed.  However, this fox-terrier made Metelill protest against sleeping at the hotel with her sister, and her mother begged us to take her in.  Thereupon, Emily saw Isa looking annoyed, and on inquiry she replied sweetly, “Oh, never mind, aunty dear; I daresay Wasp won’t be so bad as he looks; and I’ll try not to be silly, and then I daresay Charley will not tease me!  Only I had hoped to be with dear Metelill; but no doubt she will prefer her Bird—people always do.”  So they were going to make that poor child the victim!  For it seems Pica has a room to herself, and will not give it up or take in any one.  Emily went at once to Avice and asked whether she would mind going to the hotel, and letting Isa be with Metelill, and this she agreed to at once.  I don’t know why I tell you all these details, except that they are straws to show the way of the wind, and you will see how Isabel is always the sacrifice, unless some one stands up for her.  Here comes Martyn to beguile me out to the beach.

July 6 (Sunday).—My mother drove to church and took Edith, who was glad neither to walk nor to have to skirmish for a seat.  Isa walked with Emily and me, and so we made up our five for our seat, which, to our dismay, is in the gallery, but, happily for my mother, the stairs are easy.  The pews there are not quite so close to one’s nose as those in the body of the church; they are a little wider, and are furnished with hassocks instead of traps to prevent kneeling, so that we think ourselves well off, and we were agreeably surprised at the service.  There is a new incumbent who is striving to modify things as well as his people and their architecture permit, and who preached an excellent sermon.  So we triumph over the young folk, who try to persuade us that the gallery is a judgment on us for giving in to the hired pew system.  They may banter me as much as they like, but I don’t like to see them jest with grandmamma about it, as if they were on equal terms, and she does not understand it either.  “My dear,” she gravely says, “your grandpapa always said it was a duty to support the parish church.”  “Nothing will do but the Congregational system in these days; don’t you think so?” began Pica dogmatically, when her father called her off.  Martyn cannot bear to see his mother teased.  He and his wife, with the young ones, made their way to Hollyford, where they found a primitive old church and a service to match, but were terribly late, and had to sit in worm-eaten pews near the door, amid scents of peppermint and southernwood.  On the way back, Martyn fraternised with a Mr. Methuen, a Cambridge tutor with a reading party, who has, I am sorry to say, arrived at the house vis-à-vis to ours, on the other side of the cove.  Our Oxford young ladies turn up their noses at the light blue, and say the men have not the finish of the dark; but Charley is in wild spirits.  I heard her announcing the arrival thus: “I say, Isa, what a stunning lark!  Not but that I was up to it all the time, or else I should have skedaddled; for this place was bound to be as dull as ditchwater.”  “But how did you know?” asked Isa.  “Why, Bertie Elwood tipped me a line that he was coming down here with his coach, or else I should have told the mater I couldn’t stand it and gone to stay with some one.”  This Bertie Elwood is, it seems, one of the many London acquaintance.  He looks inoffensive, and so do the others, but I wish they had chosen some other spot for their studies, and so perhaps does their tutor, though he is now smoking very happily under a rock with Martyn.

I shall be curious to hear the result of your throwing the handkerchief.—Your affectionate brother,

E. F.

MISS FULFORD to SIR EDWARD FULFORD

July 24.—I threw the handkerchief by asking Martyn and Mary to spare their daughter.  Tears came into Mary’s eyes, the first I ever saw there, and she tried in vain to say something ridiculous.  Martyn walked to the window and said huskily, “Dr. A– said it would confirm her health to spend a few winters in the South.  Thank you, Charlotte!”  They did not doubt a moment, but Martyn feels the parting more than I ever thought he would, and Pica and Uchtred go about howling and bewailing, and declaring that they never shall know where to find anything again.

Avice herself is much more sorrowful than glad, though she is too courteous and grateful not to show herself gracious to me.  She did entreat me to take Isa instead, so earnestly that I was obliged to read her your decided objections.  It was a blow to her at first, but she is rapidly consoling herself over the wonderful commissions she accepts.  She is to observe Mediterranean zoophytes, and send them home on glass slides for the family benefit.  She is to send her father photographs and drawings to illustrate his lectures, and Jane has begged for a pebble or rock from S. Paul’s Bay, to show to her class at school.  Indeed, I believe Avice is to write a special journal, to be published in the Bourne Parva Parish Magazine; Charley begs for a sea-horse, and Freddy has been instructed by one of the pupils to bargain for nothing less than the Colossus of Rhodes; Metelill is quite as cordial in her rejoicing, and Edith owns that, now it has come to the point, she is very glad to keep her daughter.

And Isa?  Well, she is mortified, poor child.  I think she must have cried bitterly over the disappointment, for she looked very wretched when we met at dinner.

Meanwhile, Martyn had a walk with Emily, who found that he was very sorry not to be relieved from Isabel, though he knew you were quite right not to take her.  He thought Oxford not a good place for such a girl, and the absence of the trustworthy Avice would make things worse.  Then Emily proposed to take Isabel back to the Birchwood with her.  Grandmamma really likes the girl, who is kind and attentive.  There are no young people to whom she could do harm, Emily can look after her, and will be glad of help and companionship.  The whole family council agreed that it will be a really charitable work, and that if any one can do her good, it will be the mother and Aunt Emily.

Isa has acquiesced with an overflow of gratitude and affection to them for taking pity on her.  It sounds a little fulsome, but I believe some of it is genuine.  She is really glad that some one wishes for her, and I can quite believe that she will lose in Avice all that made life congenial to her under Mary’s brisk uncompromising rule.  If she can only learn to be true—true to herself and to others—she will yet be a woman to love and esteem, and at Birchwood they will do their best to show that religious sentiment must be connected with Truth.

And so ends my study of the manners of my nieces, convincing me the more that as the manners are, so is the man or woman.  The heart, or rather the soul, forms the manners, and they are the man.

C. F.

COME TO HER KINGDOM

‘Take care!  Oh, take care!’

Whisk, swish, click, click, through the little crowd at Stokesley on a fine April afternoon, of jocund children just let loose from school, and mothers emerging from their meeting, collecting their progeny after the fashion of old ewes with their lambs; Susan Merrifield in a huge, carefully preserved brown mushroom hat, with a big basket under one arm, and a roll of calico under the other; her sister Elizabeth with a book in one hand, and a packet of ambulance illustrations; the Vicar, Mr. Doyle, and his sister likewise loaded, talking to them about the farmer’s wedding of the morning, for which the bells had been ringing fitfully all day, and had just burst out again.  Such was the scene, through which, like a flash, spun a tricycle, from which a tiny curly-haired being in knickerbockers was barely saved by his mother’s seizing him by one arm.

‘A tricycle!’ exclaimed the Vicar.

‘A woman!  Oh!’ cried Susan in horror, ‘and she’s stopping—at the Gap.  Oh!’

‘My dear Susie, you must have seen ladies on tricycles before,’ whispered her sister.

‘No, indeed, I am thankful to say I have not!  If it should be Miss Arthuret!’ said Susan, with inexpressible tones in her voice.

‘She was bowing right and left,’ said the Vicar, a little maliciously; ‘depend upon it, she thought this was a welcome from the rural population.’

‘Hark! here’s something coming.’

The Bonchamp fly came rattling up, loaded with luggage, and with a quiet lady in black seated in it, which stopped at the same gate.

‘The obedient mother, no doubt,’ said Elizabeth.  ‘She looks like a lady.’

There had been a good deal of excitement at Stokesley about the property known by the pleasing name of the Gap.  An old gentleman had lived there for many years, always in a secluded state, and latterly imbecile, and on his death in the previous year no one had for some time appeared as heir; but it became known that the inheritrix was a young lady, a great-niece, living with a widowed mother in one of the large manufacturing towns in the north of England.  Her father had been a clergyman and had died when she was an infant.  That was all that was known, and as the house had become almost uninhabitable, the necessary repairs had prevented the heiress from taking possession all this time.  It was not a very large inheritance, only comprising a small farm, the substantial village shop, four or five cottages, and a moderate-sized house and grounds, where the neglected trees had grown to strange irregular proportions, equally with the income, which, owing to the outgoings being small, had increased to about £800 or £900 a year, and of course it was a subject of much anxiety with Admiral Merrifield’s family to know what sort of people the newcomers would prove.

Of the large family only the two eldest daughters were at home; Susan, now nearly forty, had never left it, but had been the daughter-of-all-work at home and lady-of-all-work to the parish ever since she had emerged from the schoolroom; her apricot complexion showing hardly any change, and such as there was never perceived by her parents.  The Admiral, still a light, wiry, hale man, as active as ever, with his hands full of county, parish, and farming business; an invalid for many years, but getting into that health which is la jeunesse de la vieillesse.

Elizabeth had, from twenty-five to thirty-two, been spared from home by her father to take care of his stepmother in London, where she had beguiled her time with a certain amount of authorship under a nom de plume, and had been introduced to some choice society both through her literary abilities and her family connections.

Four years previous the old lady had died, leaving her a legacy, which, together with her gains, would have enabled her to keep such a home in town as to remain in touch with the world to which she had been introduced; but she had never lost her Stokesley heart enough for the temptation to outweigh the disappointment she would have caused at home, and the satisfaction and rest of being among her own people.  So she only went up for an occasional visit, and had become the brightness of the house, and Susan’s beloved partner in all her works.

Her father, who understood better than did her mother and sister what she had given up, had insisted on her having a sitting-room to herself, which she embellished with the personal possessions she had accumulated, and where she pursued her own avocations in the forenoon, often indeed interrupted, but never showing, and not often feeling, that it was to her hindrance, and indeed the family looked on her work sufficiently as a profession, not only to acquiesce, but to have a certain complacency in it, though it was a kind of transparent fiction that MESA was an anagram of her initials and that of Stokesley.  Her mother at any rate believed that none of the neighbours guessed at any such thing.

Stokesley was a good deal out of the world, five miles from the station at Bonchamp, over hilly, stony roads, so that the cyclist movement had barely reached it; the neighbourhood was sparse, and Mrs. Merrifield’s health had not been conducive to visiting, any more than was her inclination, so that there was a little agitation about first calls.

The newcomers appeared at church on Sunday at all the services.  A bright-faced girl of one-and-twenty, with little black eyes like coals of fire, a tight ulster, like a riding habit, and a small billycock hat, rather dismayed those who still held that bonnets ought to be the Sunday gear of all beyond childhood; but the mother, in rich black silk, was unexceptionable.

Refusing to be marshalled up the aisle to the seat which persistent tradition assigned to the Gap in the aristocratic quarter, daughter and mother (it was impossible not thus to call them) sat themselves down on the first vacant place, close to a surviving white smock-frock, and blind to the bewildered glances of his much-bent friend in velveteen, who, hobbling in next after, found himself displaced and separated alike from his well-thumbed prayer and hymn book and the companion who found the places for him.

‘It ain’t fitty like,’ said the old man confidentially to Susan, ‘nor the ladies wouldn’t like it when we comes in with our old coats all of a muck with wet.’

‘The principle is right,’ said Bessie, when this was repeated to her; ‘but practice ought to wait till native manners and customs are learnt.’

The two sisters offered to save their mother the first visit—leave her card, or make her excuses; but Mrs. Merrifield held that a card thus left savoured of deceit, and that the deed must be womanfully done in person.  But she would not wait till the horses could be spared, saying that for near village neighbours it was more friendly to go down in her donkey-chair; and so she did, Bessie driving her, and the Admiral walking with them.

The Gap had, ever since Bessie could remember, been absolutely shrouded in trees, its encircling wall hidden in ivy bushes, over which laburnums, lilacs, pink thorns, and horse chestnuts towered; and the drive from the seldom-opened gate was almost obstructed by the sweeping arms of laurels and larches.

It was obstructed now, but by these same limbs lying amputated; and ‘chop, chop!’ was heard in the distance.

‘Oh, the Arbutus!’ sighed Bessie.

‘Clearing was much needed,’ said her father, with a man’s propensity for the axe.

The donkey, however, thought it uncanny, ‘upon the pivot of his skull, turned round his long left ear,’ and planted his feet firmly.  Mrs. Merrifield, deprecating the struggle by which her husband would on such occasions enforce discipline, begged to get out; and while this was going on, the ulstered young lady, with a small axe in hand, came, as it were, to the rescue, and, while the donkey was committed to a small boy, explained hastily, ‘So overgrown, there is nothing to be done but to let in light and air.  My mother is at home,’ she added; ‘she will be happy to see you,’ and, conducting them in with complete self-possession—rather, as it occurred to Bessie, as the Queen might have led the way to the Duchess of Kent, though there was a perfect simplicity and evident enjoyment about her that was very prepossessing, and took off the edge of the sense of conceit.  Besides, the palace was, to London eyes at least, so little to boast of, with the narrow little box of a wooden porch, the odd, one-sided vestibule, and the tiny anteroom with the worn carpet; but the drawing-room, in spite of George IV furniture, was really pretty, with French windows opening on a well-mown lawn, and fresh importations of knick-knacks, and vases of wild flowers, which made it look inhabited and pleasant.  There was no one there, and the young lady proceeded to fetch her mother; and the unguarded voice was caught by Bessie’s quick ears from the window.

‘Here are Admiral and Mrs. Merrifield, and one daughter.  Come along, little mammy!  Worthy, homely old folks—just in your line.’

To Bessie’s relief, she perceived that this was wholly unheard by her father and mother.  And there was no withstanding the eager, happy, shy looks of the mother, whose whole face betrayed that after many storms she had come into a haven of peace, and that she was proud to owe it to her daughter.

A few words showed that mother and daughter were absolutely enchanted with Stokesley, their own situation, and one another—the young lady evidently all the more because she perceived so much to be done.

‘Everything wants improving.  It is so choked up,’ she said, ‘one wants to let in the light.’

‘There are a good many trees,’ said the Admiral, while Bessie suspected that she meant figuratively as well as literally; and as the damsel was evidently burning to be out at her clearing operations again, and had never parted with her axe, the Admiral offered to go with her and tell her about the trees, for, as he observed, she could hardly judge of those not yet out in leaf.

She accepted him, though Bessie shrewdly suspected that the advice would be little heeded, and, not fancying the wet grass and branches, nor the demolition of old friends, she did not follow the pair, but effaced herself, and listened with much interest to the two mothers, who sat on the sofa with their heads together.  Either Mrs. Merrifield was wonderful in inspiring confidence, or it was only too delightful to Mrs. Arthuret to find a listener of her own standing to whom to pour forth her full heart of thankfulness and delight in her daughter.  ‘Oh, it is too much!’ occurred so often in her talk that, if it had not been said with liquid eyes, choking voice, and hands clasped in devout gratitude, it would have been tedious; but Mrs. Merrifield thoroughly went along with it, and was deeply touched.

The whole story, as it became known, partly in these confidences, partly afterwards, was this.  The good lady, who had struck the family at first as a somewhat elderly mother for so young a daughter, had been for many years a governess, engaged all the time to a curate, who only obtained a small district incumbency in a town, after wear and tear, waiting and anxiety, had so exhausted him that the second winter brought on bronchitis, and he scarcely lived to see his little daughter, Arthurine.  The mother had struggled on upon a pittance eked out with such music teaching as she could procure, with her little girl for her sole care, joy, and pride—a child who, as she declared, had never given her one moment’s pang or uneasiness.

‘Poor mamma, could she say that of any one of her nine?’ thought Bessie; and Mrs. Merrifield made no such attempt.

Arthurine had brought home all prizes, all distinctions at the High School, but—here was the only disappointment of her life—a low fever had prevented her trying for a scholarship at Girton.  In consideration, however, of her great abilities and high qualities, as well as out of the great kindness of the committee, she had been made an assistant to one of the class mistresses, and had worked on with her own studies, till the wonderful tidings came of the inheritance that had fallen to her quite unexpectedly; for since her husband’s death Mrs. Arthuret had known nothing of his family, and while he was alive there were too many between him and the succession for the chance to occur to him as possible.  The relief and blessing were more than the good lady could utter.  All things are comparative, and to one whose assured income had been £70 a year, £800 was unbounded wealth; to one who had spent her life in schoolrooms and lodgings, the Gap was a lordly demesne.

‘And what do you think was the first thing my sweet child said?’ added Mrs. Arthuret, with her eyes glittering through tears.  ‘Mammy, you shall never hear the scales again, and you shall have the best Mocha coffee every day of your life.’

Bessie felt that after this she must like the sweet child, though sweetness did not seem to her the predominant feature in Arthurine.

After the pathos to which she had listened there was somewhat of a comedy to come, for the ladies had spent the autumn abroad, and had seen and enjoyed much.  ‘It was a perfect feast to see how Arthurine entered into it all,’ said the mother.  ‘She was never at a loss, and explained it all to me.  Besides, perhaps you have seen her article?’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Her article in the Kensington.  It attracted a great deal of attention, and she has had many compliments.’

‘Oh! the Kensington Magazine,’ said Mrs. Merrifield, rather uneasily, for she was as anxious that Bessie should not be suspected of writing in the said periodical as the other mother was that Arthurine should have the fame of her contributions.

‘Do you take it?’ asked Mrs. Arthuret, ‘for we should be very glad to lend it to you.’

A whole pile was on the table, and Mrs. Merrifield looked at them with feeble thanks and an odd sort of conscious dread, though she could with perfect truth have denied either ‘taking it’ or reading it.

Bessie came to her relief.  ‘Thank you,’ she said; ‘we do; some of us have it.  Is your daughter’s article signed A. A., and doesn’t it describe a boarding-house on the Italian lakes?  I thought it very clever and amusing.’

Mrs. Arthuret’s face lighted up.  ‘Oh yes, my dear,’ slipped out in her delight.  ‘And do you know, it all came of her letter to one of the High School ladies, who is sister to the sub-editor, such a clever, superior girl!  She read it to the headmistress and all, and they agreed that it was too good to be lost, and Arthurine copied it out and added to it, and he—Mr. Jarrett—said it was just what he wanted—so full of information and liveliness—and she is writing some more for him.’

Mrs. Merrifield was rather shocked, but she felt that she herself was in a glass house, was, in fact, keeping a literary daughter, so she only committed herself to, ‘She is very young.’

‘Only one-and-twenty,’ returned Mrs. Arthuret triumphantly; ‘but then she has had such advantages, and made such use of them.  Everything seems to come at once, though, perhaps, it is unthankful to say so.  Of course, it is no object now, but I could not help thinking what it would have been to us to have discovered this talent of hers at the time when we could hardly make both ends meet.’

‘She will find plenty of use for it,’ said Mrs. Merrifield, who, as the wife of a country squire and the mother of nine children, did not find it too easy to make her ends meet upon a larger income.

‘Oh yes! indeed she will, the generous child.  She is full of plans for the regeneration of the village.’

Poor Mrs. Merrifield! this was quite too much for her.  She thought it irreverent to apply the word in any save an ecclesiastical sense; nor did she at all desire to have the parish, which was considered to be admirably worked by the constituted authorities, ‘regenerated,’ whatever that might mean, by a young lady of one-and-twenty.  She rose up and observed to her daughter that she saw papa out upon the lawn, and she thought it was time to go home.

Mrs. Arthuret came out with them, and found what Bessie could only regard as a scene of desolation.  Though gentlemen, as a rule, have no mercy on trees, and ladies are equally inclined to cry, ‘Woodman, spare that tree,’ the rule was reversed, for Miss Arthuret was cutting, and ordering cutting all round her ruthlessly with something of the pleasure of a child in breaking a new toy to prove that it is his own, scarcely listening when the Admiral told her what the trees were, and how beautiful in their season; while even as to the evergreens, she did not know a yew from a cedar, and declared that she must get rid of this horrid old laurustinus, while she lopped away at a Portugal laurel.  Her one idea seemed to be that it was very unwholesome to live in a house surrounded with trees; and the united influence of the Merrifields, working on her mother by representing what would be the absence of shade in a few months’ time, barely availed to save the life of the big cedar; while the great rhododendron, wont to present a mountain of shining leaves and pale purple blossoms every summer, was hewn down without remorse as an awful old laurel, and left a desolate brown patch in its stead.

‘Is it an emblem,’ thought Bessie, ‘of what she would like to do to all of us poor old obstructions?’

After all, Mrs. Merrifield could not help liking the gentle mother, by force of sympathy; and the Admiral was somewhat fascinated by the freshness and impetuosity of the damsel, as elderly men are wont to be with young girls who amuse them with what they are apt to view as an original form of the silliness common to the whole female world except their own wives, and perhaps their daughters; and Bessie was extremely amused, and held her peace, as she had been used to do in London.  Susan was perhaps the most annoyed and indignant.  She was presiding over seams and button-holes the next afternoon at school, when the mother and daughter walked in; and the whole troop started to their feet and curtsied.

‘Don’t make them stand!  I hate adulation.  Sit down, please.  Where’s the master?’

‘In the boys’ school, ma’am,’ said the mistress, uncomfortably indicating the presence of Miss Merrifield, who felt herself obliged to come forward and shake hands.

‘Oh! so you have separate schools.  Is not that a needless expense?’

‘It has always been so,’ returned Susan quietly.

‘Board?  No?  Well, no doubt you are right; but I suppose it is at a sacrifice of efficiency.  Have you cookery classes?’

‘We have not apparatus, and the girls go out too early for it to be of much use.’

‘Ah, that’s a mistake.  Drawing?’

‘The boys draw.’

‘I shall go and see them.  Not the girls?  They look orderly enough; but are they intelligent?  Well, I shall look in and examine them on their special subjects, if they have any.  I suppose not.’

‘Only class.  Grammar and needlework.’

‘I see, the old routine.  Quite the village school.’

‘It is very nice work,’ put in Mrs. Arthuret, who had been looking at it.

‘Oh yes, it always is when everything is sacrificed to it.  Good-morning, I shall see more of you, Mrs.—ahem.’

‘Please, ma’am, should I tell her that she is not a school manager?’ inquired the mistress, somewhat indignantly, when the two ladies had departed.

‘You had better ask the Vicar what to do,’ responded Susan.

The schoolmaster, on his side, seemed to have had so much advice and offers of assistance in lessons on history, geography, and physical science, that he had been obliged to refer her to the managers, and explain that till the next inspection he was bound to abide by the time-table.

‘Ah, well, I will be one of the managers another year.’

So she told the Vicar, who smiled, and said, ‘We must elect you.’

‘I am sure much ought to be done.  It is mere waste to have two separate schools, when a master can bring the children on so much better in the higher subjects.’

‘Mrs. Merrifield and the rest of us are inclined to think that what stands highest of all with us is endangered by mixed schools,’ said Mr. Doyle.

‘Oh!’ Arthurine opened her eyes; ‘but education does all that!’

‘Education does, but knowledge is not wisdom.  Susan Merrifield’s influence has done more for our young women than the best class teaching could do.’

‘Oh, but the Merrifields are all so bornés and homely; they stand in the way of all culture.’

‘Indeed,’ said the Vicar, who had in his pocket a very favourable review of MESA’s new historical essay.

‘Surely an old-fashioned squire and Lady Bountiful and their very narrow daughters should not be allowed to prevent improvement, pauperise the place, and keep it in its old grooves.’

‘Well, we shall see what you think by the time you have lived here long enough to be eligible for—what?’

‘School manager, guardian of the poor!’ cried Arthurine.

‘We shall see,’ repeated the Vicar.  ‘Good-morning.’

He asked Bessie’s leave to disclose who MESA was.

‘Oh, don’t!’ she cried, ‘it would spoil the fun!  Besides, mamma would not like it, which is a better reason.’

There were plenty of books, old and new, in Bessie’s room, magazines and reviews, but they did not come about the house much, unless any of the Rockstone cousins or the younger generation were staying there, or her brother David had come for a rest of mind and body.  Between housekeeping, gardening, parish work, and pottering, Mrs. Merrifield and Susan never had time for reading, except that Susan thought it her duty to keep something improving in hand, which generally lasted her six weeks on a moderate average.  The Admiral found quite reading enough in the newspapers, pamphlets, and business publications; and their neighbours, the Greville family, were chiefly devoted to hunting and lawn tennis, so that there was some reason in Mrs. Arthuret’s lamentation to the Vicar that dear Arthurine did so miss intellectual society, such as she had been used to with the High School mistresses—two of whom had actually been at Girton!

‘Does she not get on with Bessie Merrifield?’ he asked.

‘Miss Bessie has a very sweet face; Arthurine did say she seemed well informed and more intelligent than her sister.  Perhaps Arthurine might take her up.  It would be such an advantage to the poor girl.’

‘Which?’ was on Mr. Doyle’s tongue, but he restrained it, and only observed that Bessie had lived for a good many years in London.

‘So I understood,’ said Arthurine, ‘but with an old grandmother, and that is quite as bad as if it was in the country; but I will see about it.  I might get up a debating society, or one for studying German.’

In the meantime Arthurine decided on improving and embellishing the parish with a drinking fountain, and meeting Bessie one afternoon in the village, she started the idea.

‘But,’ said Bessie, ‘there is a very good supply.  Papa saw that good water was accessible to all the houses in the village street ten years ago, and the outlying ones have wells, and there’s the brook for the cattle.’

‘I am sure every village should have a fountain and a trough, and I shall have it here instead of this dirty corner.’

‘Can you get the ground?’

‘Oh, any one would give ground for such a purpose!  Whose is it?’

‘Mr. Grice’s, at Butter End.’

The next time Susan and Bessie encountered Arthurine, she began—

‘Can you or Admiral Merrifield do nothing with that horrid old Grice!  Never was any one so pigheaded and stupid.’

‘What?  He won’t part with the land you want?’

‘No; I wrote to him and got no answer.  Then I wrote again, and I got a peaked-hand sort of note that his wife wrote, I should think.  “Mr. Grice presented his compliments” (compliments indeed!), “and had no intention of parting with any part of Spragg’s portion.”  Well, then I called to represent what a benefit it would be to the parish and his own cattle, and what do you think the old brute said?—that “there was a great deal too much done for the parish already, and he wouldn’t have no hand in setting up the labourers, who were quite impudent enough already.”  Well, I saw it was of no use to talk to an old wretch like that about social movements and equal rights, so I only put the question whether having pure water easily accessible would not tend to make them better behaved and less impudent as he called it, upon which he broke out into a tirade.  “He didn’t hold with cold water and teetotal, not he.  Why, it had come to that—that there was no such thing as getting a fair day’s work out of a labouring man with their temperance, and their lectures, and their schools, and their county councils and what not!”  Really I had read of such people, but I hardly believed they still existed.’

‘Grice is very old, and the regular old sort of farmer,’ said Bessie.

‘But could not the Admiral persuade him, or Mr. Doyle?’

‘Oh no,’ said Susan, ‘it would be of no use.  He was just as bad about a playground for the boys, though it would have prevented their being troublesome elsewhere.’

‘Besides,’ added Bessie, ‘I am sure papa would say that there is no necessity.  He had the water analysed, and it is quite good, and plenty of it.’

‘Well, I shall see what can be done.’

‘She thinks us as bad as old Grice,’ said Susan, as they saw her walking away in a determined manner.

The next thing that was heard was the Admiral coming in from the servants’ hall, whither he had been summoned by ‘Please, sir, James Hodd wishes to speak to you.’

‘What is this friend of yours about, Bessie?’

‘What friend, papa?’

‘Why, this Miss Arthur—what d’ye call her?’ said the Admiral (who on the whole was much more attracted by her than were his daughters).  ‘Here’s a deputation from her tenant, James Hodd, with “Please, sir, I wants to know if ’tis allowed to turn folks out of their houses as they’ve paid rent for reg’lar with a week’s notice, when they pays by the year.”’

‘You don’t mean it!’ exclaimed Mrs. Merrifield and Susan together.

‘Poor old Mrs. West,’ said the mother.

‘And all the Tibbinses!’ exclaimed Susan.  ‘She can’t do it, can she, papa?’

‘Certainly not, without the proper notice, and so I told James, and that the notice she had sent down to him was so much waste-paper.’

‘So at least she has created a village Hampden,’ said Bessie, ‘though, depend upon it, she little supposes herself to be the petty tyrant.’

‘I must go and explain to her, I suppose, to-morrow morning,’ said the Admiral.

However, he had scarcely reached his own gate before the ulstered form was seen rushing up to him.

‘Oh!  Admiral Merrifield, good-morning; I was coming to ask you—’

‘And I was coming to you.’

‘Oh!  Admiral, is it really so—as that impudent man told me—that those horrid people can’t be got out of those awful tumbledown, unhealthy places for all that immense time?’

The Admiral promised that none of his family should mention the matter, and that he would do his best to silence Mrs. Rudden, who for that matter probably believed the whole letter to have been forged, and would not enter into the enthusiasm of autographs.

‘Oh, thank you!  It is so kind,’ said the mother; and Arthurine, who looked as if she had not slept all night, and was ready to burst into tears on the least provocation, murmured something to the same effect, which the Admiral answered, half hearing—

‘Never mind, my dear, you will be wiser another time; young people will be inexperienced.’

‘Is that the cruellest cut of all?’ thought Miss Elmore, as she beheld her former pupil scarcely restraining herself enough for the farewell civilities, and then breaking down into a flood of tears.

Her mother hovered over her with, ‘What is it?  Oh! my dear child, you need not be afraid; he is so kind!’

‘I hate people to be kind, that is the very thing,’ said Arthurine,—‘Oh!  Miss Elmore, don’t go!—while he is meaning all the time that I have made such a fool of myself!  And he is glad, I know he is, he and his hateful, stupid, stolid daughters.’

‘My dear! my dear!’ exclaimed her mother.

‘Well, haven’t they done nothing but thwart me, whatever I wanted to do, and aren’t they triumphing now in this abominable man’s treachery, and my being taken in?  I shall go away, and sell the place, and never come back again.’

‘I should think that was the most decided way of confessing a failure,’ said Miss Elmore; and as Mrs. Arthuret was called away by the imperative summons to the butcher, she spoke more freely.  ‘Your mother looks terrified at being so routed up again.’

‘Oh, mother will be happy anywhere; and how can I stay with these stick-in-the-mud people, just like what I have read about?’

‘And have gibbeted!  Really, Arthurine, I should call them very generous!’

‘It is their thick skins,’ muttered she; ‘at least so the Myttons said; but, indeed, I did not mean to be so personal as it was thought.’

‘But tell me.  Why did you not get on with Mesa?’

‘That was a regular take-in.  Not to tell one!  When I began my German class, she put me out with useless explanations.’

‘What kind of explanations?’

‘Oh, about the Swiss being under the Empire, or something, and she would go into parallels of Saxon words, and English poetry, such as our Fraülein never troubled us with.  But I showed her it would not do.’

‘So instead of learning what you had not sense to appreciate, you wanted to teach your old routine.’

‘But, indeed, she could not pronounce at all well, and she looked ever so long at difficult bits, and then she even tried to correct me.’

‘Did she go on coming after you silenced her?’

‘Yes, and never tried to interfere again.’

‘I am afraid she drew her own conclusions about High Schools.’

‘Oh, Miss Elmore, you used to like us to be thorough and not discursive, and how could anybody brought up in this stultifying place, ages ago, know what will tell in an exam?’

‘Oh! Arthurine.  How often have I told you that examinations are not education.  I never saw so plainly that I have not educated you.’

‘I wanted to prepare Daisy and Pansy, and they didn’t care about her prosing when we wanted to get on with the book.’

‘Which would have been the best education for them, poor girls, an example of courtesy, patience, and humility, or getting on, as you call it?’

‘Oh! Miss Elmore, you are very hard on me, when I have just been so cruelly disappointed.’

‘My dear child, it is only because I want you to discover why you have been so cruelly disappointed.’

It would be wearisome to relate all that Arthurine finally told of those thwartings by the Merrifields which had thrown her into the arms of the Mytton family, nor how Miss Elmore brought her to confess that each scheme was either impracticable, or might have been injurious, and that a little grain of humility might have made her see things very differently.  Yet it must be owned that the good lady felt rather like bending a bow that would spring back again.

Bessie Merrifield had, like her family, been inclined to conclude that all was the fault of High Schools.  She did not see Miss Elmore at first, thinking the Arthurets not likely to wish to be intruded upon, and having besides a good deal to think over.  For she and her father had talked over the proposal, which pecuniarily was so tempting, and he, without prejudice, but on principle, had concurred with her in deciding that it was her duty not to add one touch of attractiveness to aught which supported a cause contrary to their strongest convictions.  Her father’s approbation was the crowning pleasure, though she felt the external testimony to her abilities, quite enough to sympathise with such intoxication of success as to make any compliment seem possible.  Miss Elmore had one long talk with her, beginning by saying—

‘I wish to consult you about my poor, foolish child.’

‘Ah!  I am afraid we have not helped her enough!’ said Bessie.  ‘If we had been more sympathetic she might have trusted us more.’

‘Then you are good enough to believe that it was not all folly and presumption.’

‘I am sure it was not,’ said Bessie.  ‘None of us ever thought it more than inexperience and a little exaltation, with immense good intention at the bottom.  Of course, our dear old habits did look dull, coming from life and activity, and we rather resented her contempt for them; but I am quite sure that after a little while, every one will forget all about this, or only recollect it as one does a girlish scrape.’

‘Yes.  To suppose all the neighbourhood occupied in laughing at her is only another phase of self-importance.  You see, the poor child necessarily lived in a very narrow world, where examinations came, whatever I could do, to seem everything, and she only knew things beyond by books.  She had success enough there to turn her head, and not going to Cambridge, never had fair measure of her abilities.  Then came prosperity—’

‘Quite enough to upset any one’s balance,’ said Bessie.  ‘In fact, only a very sober, not to say stolid, nature would have stood it.’

‘Poor things!  They were so happy—so open-hearted.  I did long to caution them.  “Pull cup, steady hand.”’

‘It will all come right now,’ said Bessie.  ‘Mrs Arthuret spoke of their going away for the winter; I do not think it will be a bad plan, for then we can start quite fresh with them; and the intimacy with the Myttons will be broken, though I am sorry for the poor girls.  They have no harm in them, and Arthurine was doing them good.’

‘A whisper to you, Miss Merrifield—they are going back with me, to be prepared for governesses at Arthurine’s expense.  It is the only thing for them in the crash that young man has brought on the family.’

‘Dear, good Arthurine!  She only needed to learn how to carry her cup.’

MRS. BATSEYES

I. FATHER AND DAUGHTER

SCENE.—The drawing-room of Darkglade Vicarage.  Mr. Aveland, an elderly clergyman.  Mrs. Moldwarp, widow on the verge of middle age.

Mr. A.  So, my dear good child, you will come back to me, and do what you can for the lonely old man!

Mrs. M.  I know nothing can really make up—

Mr. A.  Ah! my dear, you know only too well by your own experience, but if any one could, it would be you.  And at least you will let nothing drop in the parish work.  You and Cicely together will be able to take that up when Euphrasia is gone too.

Mrs. M.  It will be delightful to me to come back to it!  You know I was to the manner born.  Nothing seems to be so natural!

Mr. A.  I am only afraid you are giving up a great deal.  I don’t know that I could accept it—except for the parish and these poor children.

Mrs. M.  Now, dear father, you are not to talk so!  Is not this my home, my first home, and though it has lost its very dearest centre, what can be so dear to me when my own has long been broken?

Mr. A.  But the young folks—young Londoners are apt to feel such a change a great sacrifice.

Mrs. M.  Lucius always longs to be here whenever he is on shore, and Cicely.  Oh! it will be so good for Cicely to be with you, dear father.  I know some day you will be able to enjoy her.  And I do look forward to having her to myself, as I have never had before since she was a little creature in the nursery.  It is so fortunate that I had not closed the treaty for the house at Brompton, so that I can come whenever Phrasie decides on leaving you.

Mr. A.  And she must not be long delayed.  She and Holland have waited for each other quite long enough.  Your dear mother begged that there should be no delay; and neither you nor I, Mary, could bear to shorten the time of happiness together that may be granted them.  She will have no scruple about leaving George’s children now you and Cicely will see to them—poor little things!

Mrs. M.  Cicely has always longed for a sphere, and between the children and the parish she will be quite happy.  You need have no fears for her, father!

II.  BROTHER AND SISTER

SCENE—The broad walk under the Vicarage garden wall, Lucius Moldwarp, a lieutenant in the Navy.  Cicely Moldwarp.

C.  Isn’t it disgusting, Lucius?

L.  What is?

C.  This proceeding of the mother’s.

L.  Do you mean coming down here to live?

C.  Of course I do!  Without so much as consulting me.

L.  The captain does not ordinarily consult the crew.

C.  Bosh, Lucius.  That habit of discipline makes you quite stupid.  Now, haven’t I the right to be consulted?

L.  (A whistle)

C.  (A stamp)

L.  Pray, what would your sagacity have proposed for grandpapa and the small children?

C.  (Hesitation.)

L.  (A slight laugh.)

C.  I do think it is quite shocking of Aunt Phrasie to be in such haste to marry!

L.  After eleven years—eh? or twelve, is it?

C.  I mean of course so soon after her mother’s death.

L.  You know dear granny herself begged that the wedding might not be put off on that account.

C.  Mr. Holland might come and live here.

L.  Perhaps he thinks he has a right to be consulted.

C.  Then she might take those children away with her.

L.  Leaving grandpapa alone.

C.  The Curate might live in the house.

L.  Lively and satisfactory to mother.  Come now, Cis, why are you so dead set against this plan?  It is only because your august consent has not been asked?

C.  I should have minded less if the pros and cons had been set before me, instead of being treated like a chattel; but I do not think my education should be sacrificed.

L.  Not educated!  At twenty!

C.  Don’t be so silly, Lucius.  This is the time when the most important brain work is to be done.  There are the art classes at the Slade, and the lectures I am down for, and the Senior Cambridge and cookery and nursing.  Yes, I see you make faces!  You sailors think women are only meant for you to play with when you are on shore; but I must work.

L.  Work enough here!

C.  Goody-goody!  Babies, school-children, and old women!  I’m meant for something beyond that, or what are intellect and artistic faculty given for?

L.  You could read for Cambridge exam. all the same.  Here are tons of books, and grandpapa would help you.  Why not?  He is not a bit of a dull man.  He is up to everything.

C.  So far as you know.  Oh no, he is not naturally dense.  He is a dear old man; but you know clerics of his date, especially when they have vegetated in the country, never know anything but the Fathers and church architecture.

L.  Hum!  I should have said the old gentleman had a pretty good intelligence of his own.  I know he set me on my legs for my exam. as none of the masters at old Coade’s ever did.  What has made you take such a mortal aversion to the place?  We used to think it next door to Paradise when we were small children.

C.  Of course, when country freedom was everything, and we knew nothing of rational intercourse; but when all the most intellectual houses are open to me, it is intolerable to be buried alive here with nothing to talk of but clerical shop, and nothing to do but read to old women, and cram the unfortunate children with the catechism.  And mother and Aunt Phrasie expect me to be in raptures!

L.  Whereas you seem to be meditating a demonstration.

C.  I shall tell mother that if she must needs come down to wallow in her native goodiness, it is due to let me board in Kensington till my courses are completed.

L.  Since she won’t be an unnatural daughter, she is to leave the part to you.  Well, I suppose it will be for the general peace.

C.  Now, Lucius, you speak out of the remains of the old tyrannical barbarism, when the daughters were nothing but goods and chattels.

L.  Goods, yes, indeed, and betters.

C.  No doubt the men liked it!  But won’t you stand by me, Lucius?  You say it would be for the general peace.

L.  I only said you would be better away than making yourself obnoxious.  I can’t think how you can have the heart, Cis, such a pet as you always were.

C.  I would not hurt their feelings for the world, only my improvement is too important to be sacrificed, and if no one else will stand up for me, I must stand up for myself.

III.  BRIDE-ELECT AND FATHER

SCENE.—Three weeks later.  Breakfast table at Darkglade Vicarage, Mr. Aveland and Euphrasia reading their letters.  Three little children eating bread and milk.

E.  There!  Mary has got the house at Brompton off her hands and can come for good on the 11th.  That is the greatest possible comfort.  She wants to bring her piano; it has a better tone than ours.

Mr. A.  Certainly!  Little Miss Hilda there will soon be strumming her scales on the old one, and Mary and Cis will send me to sleep in the evening with hers.

E.  Oh!

Mr. A.  Why, Phrasie, what’s the matter?

E.  This is a blow!  Cicely is only coming to be bridesmaid, and then going back to board at Kensington and go on with her studies.

Mr. A.  To board?  All alone?

E.  Oh! that’s the way with young ladies!

Mr. A.  Mary cannot have consented.

E.  Have you done, little folks?  Then say grace, Hilda, and run out till the lesson bell rings.  Yes, poor Mary, I am afraid she thinks all that Cecilia decrees is right; or if she does not naturally believe so, she is made to.

Mr. A.  Come, come, Phrasie, I always thought Mary a model mother.

E.  So did I, and so she was while the children were small, except that they were more free and easy with her than was the way in our time.  And I think she is all that is to be desired to her son; but when last I was in London, I cannot say I was satisfied, I thought Cissy had got beyond her.

Mr. A.  For want of a father?

E.  Not entirely.  You know I could not think Charles Moldwarp quite worthy of Mary, though she never saw it.

Mr. A.  Latterly we saw so little of him!  He liked to spend his holiday in mountain climbing, and Mary made her visits here alone.

E.  Exactly so.  Sympathy faded out between them, though she, poor dear, never betrayed it, if she realised it, which I doubt.  And as Cissy took after her father, this may have weakened her allegiance to her mother.  At any rate, as soon as she was thought to have outgrown her mother’s teaching, those greater things, mother’s influence and culture, were not thought of, and she went to school and had her companions and interests apart; while Mary, good soul, filled up the vacancy with good works, and if once you get into the swing of that sort of thing in town, there’s no end to the demands upon your time.  I don’t think she ever let them bore her husband.  He was out all day, and didn’t want her; but I am afraid they do bore her daughter, and absorb attention and time, so as to hinder full companionship, till Cissy has grown up an extraneous creature, not formed by her.  Mary thinks, in her humility, dear old thing, that it is a much superior creature; but I don’t like it as well as the old sort.

Mr. A.  The old barndoor hen hatched her eggs and bred up her chicks better than the fine prize fowl.  Eh?

E.  So that incubator-hatched chicks, with a hot-bed instead of a hovering wing and tender cluck-cluck, are the fashion!  I was in hopes that coming down to the old coop, with no professors to run after, and you to lead them both, all would right itself, but it seems my young lady wants more improving.

Mr. A.  Well, my dear, it must be mortifying to a clever girl to have her studies cut short.

E.  Certainly; but in my time we held that studies were subordinate to duties; and that there were other kinds of improvement than in model-drawing and all the rest of it.

Mr. A.  It will not be for long, and Cissy will find the people, or has found them, and Mary will accept them.

E.  If her native instinct objects, she will be cajoled or bullied into seeing with Cissy’s eyes.

Mr. A.  Well, Euphrasia, my dear, let us trust that people are the best judges of their own affairs, and remember that the world has got beyond us.  Mary was always a sensible, right-minded girl, and I cannot believe her as blind as you would make out.

E.  At any rate, dear papa, you never have to say to her as to me, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’

IV.  MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

SCENE.—Darkglade Vicarage drawing-room.

Mrs. M.  So, my dear, you think it impossible to be happy here?

C.  Little Mamsey, why will you never understand?  It is not a question of happiness, but of duty to myself.

Mrs. M.  And that is—

C.  Not to throw away all my chances of self-improvement by burrowing into this hole.

Mrs. M.  Oh, my dear, I don’t like to hear you call it so.

C.  Yes, I know you care for it.  You were bred up here, and know nothing better, poor old Mamsey, and pottering suits you exactly; but it is too much to ask me to sacrifice my wider fields of culture and usefulness.

Mrs. M.  Grandpapa would enjoy nothing so much as reading with you.  He said so.

C.  Oxford half a century old and wearing off ever since.  No, I thank you!  Besides, it is not only physical science, but art.

Mrs. M.  There’s the School of Art at Holbrook.

C.  My dear mother, I am far past country schools of art!

Mrs. M.  It is not as if you intended to take up art as a profession.

C.  Mother! will nothing ever make you understand?  Nothing ought to be half-studied, merely to pass away the time as an accomplishment (uttered with infinite scorn, accentuated on the second syllable), just to do things to sell at bazaars.  No!  Art with me means work worthy of exhibition, with a market-price, and founded on a thorough knowledge of the secrets of the human frame.

Mrs. M.  Those classes!  I don’t like all I hear of them, or their attendants.

C.  If you will listen to all the gossip of all the old women of both sexes, I can’t help it!  Can’t you trust to innocence and earnestness?

Mrs. M.  I wish it was the Art College at Wimbledon.  Then I should be quite comfortable about you.

C.  Have not we gone into all that already?  You know I must go to the fountain-head, and not be put off with mere feminine, lady-like studies!  Pah!  Besides, in lodgings I can be useful.  I shall give two evenings in the week to the East End, to the Society for the Diversion and Civilisation of the Poor.

Mrs. M.  Surely there is room for usefulness here!  Think of the children!  And for diversion and civilisation, how glad we should be of your fresh life and brightness among poor people!

C.  Such poor!  Why, even if grandpapa would let me give a lecture on geology, or a reading from Dickens, old Prudence Blake would go about saying it hadn’t done nothing for her poor soul.

Mrs. M.  Grandpapa wanted last winter to have penny readings, only there was nobody to do it.  He would give you full scope for that, or for lectures.

C.  Yes; about vaccination and fresh air! or a reading of John Gilpin or the Pied Piper.  Mamsey, you know a model parish stifles me.  I can’t stand your prim school-children, drilled in the Catechism, and your old women who get out the Bible and the clean apron when they see you a quarter of a mile off.  Free air and open minds for me!  No, I won’t have you sighing, mother.  You have returned to your native element, and you must let me return to mine.

Mrs. M.  Very well, my dear.  Perhaps a year or two of study in town may be due to you, though this is a great disappointment to grandpapa and me.  I know Mrs. Payne will make a pleasant and safe home for you, if you must be boarded.

C.  Too late for that.  I always meant to be with Betty Thurston at Mrs. Kaye’s.  In fact, I have written to engage my room.  So there’s an end of it.  Come, come, don’t look vexed.  It is better to make an end of it at once.  There are things that one must decide for oneself.

V.  TWO FRIENDS

SCENE—Over the fire in Mrs. Kaye’s boarding-house.  Cecilia Moldwarp and Betty Thurston.

C.  So I settled the matter at once.

B.  Quite right, too, Cis.

C.  The dear woman was torn every way.  Grandpapa and Aunt Phrasie wanted her to pin me down into the native stodge; and Lucius, like a true man, went in for subjection: so there was nothing for it but to put my foot down.  And though little mother might moan a little to me, I knew she would stand up stoutly for me to all the rest, and vindicate my liberty.

B.  To keep you down there.  Such a place is very well to breathe in occasionally, like a whale; but as to living in them—

C.  Just hear how they spend the day.  First, 7.30, prayers in church.  The dear old man has hammered on at them these forty years, with a congregation averaging 4 to 2.5.

B.  You are surely not expected to attend at that primitive Christian hour!  Cruelty to animals!

C.  If I don’t, the absence of such an important unit hurts folks’ feelings, and I am driven to the fabrication of excuses.  After breakfast, whatever is available trots off to din the Catechism and Genesis into the school-children’s heads—the only things my respected forefather cares about teaching them.  Of course back again to the children’s lessons.

B.  What children?

C.  Didn’t I explain?  Three Indian orphans of my uncle’s, turned upon my grandfather—jolly little kids enough, as long as one hasn’t to teach them.

B.  Are governesses unknown in those parts?

C.  Too costly; and besides, my mother was designed by nature for a nursery-governess.  She has taught the two elder ones to be wonderfully good when she is called off.  ‘The butcher, ma’am’; or, ‘Mrs. Tyler wants to speak to you, ma’am’; or, ‘Jane Cox is come for a hospital paper, ma’am.’  Then early dinner, of all things detestable, succeeded by school needlework, mothers’ meeting, and children’s walk, combined with district visiting, or reading to old women.  Church again, high tea, and evenings again pleasingly varied by choir practices, night schools, or silence, while grandpapa concocts his sermon.

B.  Is this the easy life to which Mrs. Moldwarp has retired?

C.  It is her native element.  People of her generation think it their vocation to be ladies-of-all-work to the parish of Stickinthemud cum-Humdrum.

B.  All-work indeed!

C.  I did not include Sundays, which are one rush of meals, schools, and services, including harmonium.

B.  No society or rational conversation, of course?

C.  Adjacent clergy and clergy woman rather less capable of aught but shop than the natives themselves!  You see, even if I did offer myself as a victim, I couldn’t do the thing!  Fancy my going on about the six Mosaic days, and Jonah’s whale, and Jael’s nail, and doing their duty in that state of life where it has pleased Heaven to place them.

B.  Impossible, my dear!  Those things can’t be taught—if they are to be taught—except by those who accept them as entirely as ever; and it is absurd to think of keeping you where you would be totally devoid of all intellectual food!

SCENE.—Art Student and distinguished Professor a year later.  Soirée in a London drawing-room.  Professor Dunlop and Cecilia.

Prof. D.  Miss Moldwarp?  Is your mother here?

C.  No; she is not in town.

Prof. D.  Not living there?

C.  She lives with my grandfather at Darkglade.

Prof. D.  Indeed!  I hope Mr. and Mrs. Aveland are well?

C.  Thank you, he is well; but my grandmother is dead.

Prof. D.  Oh, I am sorry!  I had not heard of his loss.  How long ago did it happen?

C.  Last January twelvemonth.  My aunt is married, and my mother has taken her place at home.

Prof. D.  Then you are here on a visit.  Where are you staying?

C.  No, I live here.  I am studying in the Slade schools.

Prof. D.  This must have greatly changed my dear old friend’s life!

C.  I did not know that you were acquainted with my grandfather.

Prof. D.  I was one of his pupils.  I may say that I owe everything to him.  It is long since I have been at Darkglade, but it always seemed to me an ideal place.

C.  Rather out of the world.

Prof. D.  Of one sort of world perhaps; but what a beautiful combination is to be seen there of the highest powers with the lowliest work!  So entirely has he dedicated himself that he really feels the guidance of a ploughman’s soul a higher task than the grandest achievement in science or literature.  By the bye, I hope he will take up his pen again.  It is really wanted.  Will you give him a message from me?

C.  How strange!  I never knew that he was an author.

Prof. D.  Ah! you are a young thing, and these are abstruse subjects.

C.  Oh! the Fathers and Ritual, I suppose?

Prof. D.  No doubt he is a great authority there, as a man of his ability must be; but I was thinking of a course of scientific papers he put forth ten years ago, taking up the arguments against materialism as no one could do who is not as thoroughly at home as he is in the latest discoveries and hypotheses.  He ought to answer that paper in the Critical World.

C.  I was so much interested in that paper.

Prof. D.  It has just the speciousness that runs away with young people.  I should like to talk it over with him.  Do you think I should be in the way if I ran down?

C.  I should think a visit from you would be an immense pleasure to him; and I am sure it would be good for the place to be stirred up.

Prof. D.  You have not learnt to prize that atmosphere in which things always seem to assume their true proportion, and to prompt the cry of St. Bernard’s brother—‘All earth for me, all heaven for you.’

C.  That was surely an outcome of the time when people used to sacrifice certainties to uncertainties, and spoil life for the sake of they knew not what.

Prof. D.  For eye hath not seen, nor ear heard.

Stranger.  Mr. Dunlop!  This is an unexpected pleasure!

C. (alone).  Well, wonders will never cease.  The great Professor Dunlop talking to me quite preachy and goody; and of all people in the world, the old man at Darkglade turning out to be a great physiologist!

VII. TWO OLD FRIENDS

SCENE.—Darkglade Vicarage study.  Mr. Aveland and Professor Dunlop.

Prof. D.  Thank you, sir.  It has been a great pleasure to talk over these matters with you; I hope a great benefit.

Mr. A.  I am sure it is a great benefit to us to have a breath from the outer world.  I hope you will never let so long a time go by without our meeting.  Remember, as iron sharpeneth iron, so doth a man’s countenance that of his friend.

Prof. D.  I shall be only too thankful.  I rejoice in the having met your grand-daughter, who encouraged me to offer myself.  Is she permanently in town?

Mr. A.  She shows no inclination to return.  I hoped she would do so after the last competition; but there is always another stage to be mounted.  I wish she would come back, for her mother ought not to be left single-handed; but young people seem to require so much external education in these days, instead of being content to work on at home, that I sometimes question which is more effectual, learning or being taught.

Prof. D.  Being poured-upon versus imbibing?

Mr. A.  It may depend on what amount there is to imbibe; and I imagine that the child views this region as an arid waste; as of course we are considerably out of date.

Prof. D.  The supply would be a good deal fresher and purer!

Mr. A.  Do you know anything of her present surroundings?

Prof. D.  I confess that I was surprised to meet her with Mrs. Eyeless, a lady who is active in disseminating Positivism, and all tending that way.  She rather startled me by some of her remarks; but probably it was only jargon and desire to show off.  Have you seen her lately?

Mr. A.  At Christmas, but only for a short time, when it struck me that she treated us with the patronage of precocious youth; and I thought she made the most of a cold when church or parish was concerned.  I hinted as much; but her mother seemed quite satisfied.  Poor girl!  Have I been blind?  I did not like her going to live at one of those boarding-houses for lady students.  Do you know anything of them?

Prof. D.  Of course all depends on the individual lady at the head, and the responsibility she undertakes, as well as on the tone of the inmates.  With some, it would be only staying in a safe and guarded home.  In others, there is a great amount of liberty, the girls going out without inquiry whether, with whom, or when they return.

Mr. A.  American fashion!  Well, they say young women are equal to taking care of themselves.  I wonder whether my daughter understands this, or whether it is so at Cecilia’s abode.  Do you know?

Prof. D.  I am afraid I do.  The niece of a friend of mine was there, and left it, much distressed and confused by the agnostic opinions that were freely broached there.  How did your grand-daughter come to choose it?

Mr. A.  For the sake of being with a friend.  I think Thurston is the name.

Prof. D.  I know something of that family; clever people, but bred up—on principle, if it can be so called, with their minds a blank as to religion.  I remember seeing one of the daughters at the party where I met Miss Moldwarp.

Mr. A.  So this is the society into which we have allowed our poor child to run!  I blame myself exceedingly for not having made more inquiries.  Grief made me selfishly passive, or I should have opened my eyes and theirs to the danger.  My poor Mary, what a shock it will be to her!

Prof. D.  Was not she on the spot?

Mr. A.  True; but, poor dear, she is of a gentle nature, easily led, and seeing only what her affection lets her perceive.  And now, she is not strong.

Prof. D.  She is not looking well.

Mr. A.  You think so!  I wonder whether I have been blind, and let her undertake too much.

Prof. D.  Suppose you were to bring her to town for a few days.  We should be delighted to have you, and she could see the doctor to whom she is accustomed.  Then you can judge for yourself about her daughter.

Mr. A.  Thank you, Dunlop!  It will be a great comfort if it can be managed.

VIII.  AUNT AND NIECE

SCENE.—In a hansom cab.  Mrs. Holland and Cecilia.

Mrs. H.  I wanted to speak to you, Cissy.

C.  I thought so!

Mrs. H.  What do you think of your mother?

C.  Poor old darling.  They have been worrying her till she has got hipped and nervous about herself.

Mrs. H.  Do you know what spasms she has been having?

C.  Oh! mother has had spasms as long as I can remember; and the more she thinks of them the worse they are.  I have often heard her say so.

Mrs. H.  Yes; she has gone on much too long overworking herself, and not letting your grandfather suspect anything amiss.

C.  Nerves.  That is what it always is.

Mrs. H.  Dr. Brownlow says there is failure of heart, not dangerous or advanced at present, but that there is an overstrain of all the powers, and that unless she keeps fairly quiet, and free from hurry and worry, there may be very serious, if not fatal attacks.

C.  I never did think much of Dr. Brownlow.  He told me my palpitations were nothing but indigestion, and I am sure they were not!

Mrs. H.  Well, Cissy, something must be done to relieve your mother of some of her burthens.

C.  I see what you are driving at, Aunt Phrasie; but I cannot go back till I have finished these courses.  There’s my picture, there’s the cookery school, the ambulance lectures, and our sketching tour in August.  Ever so many engagements.  I shall be free in the autumn, and then I will go down and see about it.  I told mother so.

Mrs. H.  All the hot trying months of summer without help!

C.  I never can understand why they don’t have a governess.

Mrs. H.  Can’t you?  Is there not a considerable outgoing on your behalf?

C.  That is my own.  I am not bound to educate my uncle’s children at my expense.

Mrs. H.  No; but if you contributed your share to the housekeeping, you would make a difference, and surely you cannot leave your mother to break down her health by overworking herself in this manner.

C.  Why does grandpapa let her do so?

Mrs. H.  Partly he does not see, partly he cannot help it.  He has been so entirely accustomed to have all those family and parish details taken off his hands, and borne easily as they were when your dear grandmamma and I were both there at home, that he cannot understand that they can be over much—especially as they are so small in themselves.  Besides, he is not so young as he was, and your dear mother cannot bear to trouble him.

C.  Well, I shall go there in September and see about it.  It is impossible before.

Mrs. H.  In the hopping holidays, when the stress of work is over!  Cannot you see with your own eyes how fagged and ill your mother looks, and how much she wants help?

C.  Oh! she will be all right again after this rest.  I tell you, Aunt Phrasie, it is impossible at present—(cab stops).

IX.  THE TWO SISTERS

SCENE.—A room in Professor Dunlop’s house.  Mrs. Moldwarp and Mrs. Holland.

Mrs. H.  I have done my best, but I can’t move her an inch.

Mrs. M.  Poor dear girl!  Yet it seems hardly fair to make my health the lever, when really there is nothing serious the matter.

Mrs. H.  I can’t understand the infatuation.  Can there be any love affair?

Mrs. M.  Oh no, Phrasie; it is worse!

Mrs. H.  Worse!  Mary, what can you mean?

Mrs. M.  Yes, it is worse.  I got at the whole truth yesterday.  My poor child’s faith has gone!  Oh, how could I let her go and let her mingle among all those people, all unguarded!

Mrs. H.  Do you mean that this is the real reason that she will not come home?

Mrs. M.  Yes; she told me plainly at last that she could not stand our round of services.  They seem empty and obsolete to her, and she could not feign to attend them or vex us, and cause remarks by staying away, and of course she neither could nor would teach anything but secular matters.  ‘My coming would be nothing but pain to everybody,’ she said.

Mrs H.  You did not tell me this before my drive with her.

Mrs. M.  No, I never saw you alone; besides, I thought you would speak more freely without the knowledge.  And, to tell the truth, I did think it possible that consideration for me might bring my poor Cissy down to us, and that when once under my father’s influence, all these mists might clear away.  But I do not deserve it.  I have been an unfaithful parent, shutting my eyes in feeble indulgence, and letting her drift into these quicksands.

Mrs. H.  Fashion and imitation, my dear Mary; it will pass away.  Now, you are not to talk any more.

Mrs. M.  I can’t— (A spasm comes on.)

X.  AUNT AND NEPHEW

SCENE.—Six months later, Darkglade Vicarage, a darkened room.  Mrs. Holland and Lucius.

Mrs. H.  Yes, Lucius, we have all much to reproach ourselves with; even poor grandpapa is heart-broken at having been too much absorbed to perceive how your dear mother was overtasked.

L.  You did all you could, aunt; you took home one child, and caused the other to be sent to school.

Mrs. H.  Yes, too late to be of any use.

L.  And after all, I don’t think it was overwork that broke the poor dear one down, so much as grief at that wretched sister of mine.

Mrs. H.  Don’t speak of her in that way, Lucius.

L.  How can I help it?  I could say worse!

Mrs. H.  She is broken-hearted, poor thing.

L.  Well she may be.

Mrs. H.  Ah, the special point of sorrow to your dear mother was that she blamed herself, for—

L.  How could she?  How can you say so, aunt?

Mrs. H.  Wait a moment, Lucius.  What grieved her was the giving in to Cissy’s determination, seeing with her eyes, and not allowing herself to perceive that what she wished might not be good for her.

L.  Cissy always did domineer over mother.

Mrs. H.  Yes; and your mother was so used to thinking Cissy’s judgment right that she never could or would see when it was time to make a stand, and prevent her own first impressions from being talked down as old-fashioned,—letting her eyes be bandaged, in fact.

L.  So she vexed herself over Cissy’s fault; but did not you try to make Cissy see what she was about?

Mrs. H.  True; but if love had blinded my dear sister, Cissy was doubly blinded—

L.  By conceit and self-will.

Mrs. H.  Poor girl, I am too sorry for her now to use those hard words, but I am afraid it is true.  First she could or would not see either that her companions might be undesirable guides, or that her duty lay here, and then nothing would show her that her mother’s health was failing.  Indeed, by that time the sort of blindness had come upon her which really broke your mother’s heart.

L.  You mean her unbelief, agnosticism, or whatever she chooses to call it.  I thought at least women were safe from that style of thing.  It is all fashion and bad company, I suppose?

Mrs. H.  I hope and pray that it may be so; but I am afraid that it goes deeper than you imagine.  Still, I see hope in her extreme unhappiness, and in the remembrance of your dear mother’s last words and prayers.

XI.  GRANDFATHER AND GRAND-DAUGHTER

A month later.  Mr. Aveland and Cecilia.

Mr. A.  My dear child, I wish I could do anything for you.

C.  You had better let me go back to London, grandpapa.

Mr. A.  Do you really wish it?

C.  I don’t know.  I hate it all; but if I were in the midst of everything again, it might stifle the pain a little.

Mr. A.  I am afraid that is not the right way of curing it.

C.  Oh, I suppose it will wear down in time.

Mr. A.  Is that well?

C.  I don’t know.  It is only unbearable as it is; and yet when I think of my life in town, the din and the chatter and the bustle, and the nobody caring, seem doubly intolerable; but I shall work off that.  You had better let me go, grandpapa.  The sight of me can be nothing but a grief and pain to you.

Mr. A.  No; it gives me hope.

C.  Hope of what?

Mr. A.  That away from the whirl you will find your way to peace.

C.  I don’t see how.  Quiet only makes me more miserable.

Mr. A.  My poor child, if you can speak out and tell me exactly how it is with you, I think it might be comfortable to you.  If it is the missing your mother, and blaming yourself for having allowed her to overdo herself, I may well share with you in that.  I feel most grievously that I never perceived how much she was undertaking, nor how she flagged under it.  Unselfish people want others to think for them, and I did not.

C.  Dear grandpapa, it would not have been too much if I had come and helped.  I know that; but it is not the worst.  You can’t feel as I do—that if my desertion led to her overworking herself, Aunt Phrasie and Lucius say that what really broke her down was the opinions I cannot help having.  Say it was not, grandpapa.

Mr. A.  I wish I could, my dear; but I cannot conceal that unhappiness about you, and regret for having let you expose yourself to those unfortunate arguments, broke her spirits so that her energies were unequal to the strain that I allowed to be laid on her.

C.  Poor dear mother!  And you and she can feel in that way about the importance of what to me seems—pardon me, grandpapa—utterly unproved.

Mr. A.  You hold everything unproved that you cannot work out like a mathematical demonstration.

C.  I can’t help it, grandpapa.  I read and read, till all the premises become lost in the cloud of myths that belong to all nations.  I don’t want to think such things.  I saw dear mother rest on her belief, and grow peaceful.  They were perfect realities to her; but I cannot unthink.  I would give anything to think that she is in perfect happiness now, and that we shall meet again; but nothing seems certain to me.  All is extinguished.

Mr. A.  How do you mean?

C.  They—Betty and her set, I mean—laughed at and argued one thing after another, till they showed me that there were no positive grounds to go on.

Mr. A.  No material grounds.

C.  And what else is certain?

Mr. A.  Do you think your mother was not certain?

C.  I saw she was; I see you are certain.  But what am I to do?  I cannot unthink.

Mr. A.  Poor child, they have loosed you from the shore, because you could not see it, and left you to flounder in the waves.

C.  Well, so I feel it sometimes; but if I could only feel that there was a shore, I would try to get my foothold.  Oh, with all my heart!

Mr. A.  Will you take my word, dear child—the word of one who can dare humbly to say he has proved it, so as to be as sure as of the floor we are standing on, that that Rock exists; and God grant that you may, in prayer and patience, be brought to rest on it once more.

C.  Once more!  I don’t think I ever did so really.  I only did not think, and kept away from what was dull and tiresome.  Didn’t you read something about ‘If thou hadst known—’

Mr. A.  ‘If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things that belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.’  But oh, my dear girl, it is my hope and prayer, not for ever.  If you will endure to walk in darkness for a while, till the light be again revealed to you.

C.  At any rate, dear grandfather, I will do what mother entreated, and not leave you alone.

XII

Two years later.  St. Thomas’s Day.

C.  Grandpapa, may I come with you on Christmas morning?

Mr. A.  You make me a truly happy Christmas, dear child.

C.  I think I feel somewhat as St. Thomas did, in to-day’s Gospel.  It went home to my heart

Mr. A.  Ah, child, to us that ‘Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed,’ must mean those who are ready to know by faith instead of material tangible proof.

CHOPS

You ask me why I call that old great-grandmother black cat Chops?  Well, thereby hangs a tale.  I don’t mean the black tail which is standing upright and quivering at your caresses, but a story that there will be time to tell you before Charlie gets home from market.

Seven years ago, Charlie had just finished his training both at an agricultural college and under a farmer, and was thinking of going out to Texas or to Canada, and sending for me when he should have been able to make a new home for me, when his godfather, Mr. Newton, offered to let him come down and look after the draining and otherwise reclaiming of this great piece of waste land.  It had come to Mr. Newton through some mortgages, I believe, and he thought something might be made of it by an active agent.  It was the first time Mr. Newton had shown the least interest in us, though he was a cousin of our poor mother’s; and Charlie was very much gratified, more especially as when he had £150 a year and a house, he thought I might leave the school where I was working as a teacher, and make a home with him.

Yes, this is the house; but it has grown a good deal since we settled down, and will grow more before you come to it for good.  Then it was only meant for a superior sort of gamekeeper, and had only six rooms in it—parlour, kitchen, and back kitchen, and three bedrooms above them; but this we agreed would be ample for ourselves and Betsey, an old servant of our mother’s, who could turn her hand to anything, and on the break-up of our home had begged to join us again whenever or wherever we should have a house of our own once more.

We have half a dozen cottages near us now; but then it seemed to us like a lodge in a vast wilderness—three miles away from everything, shop, house, or church.  Betsey fairly sat down and cried when she heard how far away was the butcher, and it really seemed as if we were to have the inconveniences of colonisation without the honour of it.  However, contrivances made us merry; we made our rooms pretty and pleasant, and as a pony and trap were essential to Charlie in his work, we were able to fetch and carry easily.  Moreover, we had already a fair kitchen garden laid out, and there were outhouses for pigs and poultry, so that even while draining and fencing were going on, we raised a good proportion of our own provisions, and very proud of them we were; our own mustard and cress, which we sowed in our initials, tasted doubly sweet when we reaped them as our earliest crop.

Mr. Newton had always said that some day he should drop down and see how Charles was getting on, but as he hardly ever stirred from his office in London, and only answered letters in the briefest and most business-like way, we had pretty well left off expecting him.

We had been here about six months, and had killed our first pig—‘a pretty little porker as ever was seen,’ as Betsey said.  It was hard to understand, after all the petting, admiration, and back-scratching Betsey had bestowed on him, how ready she was to sentence him, and triumph in his death; while I, feeble-minded creature, delayed rising in the morning that I might cower under the bedclothes and stop my ears against his dying squeals.  However, when he was no more, the housekeeping spirit triumphed in our independence of the butcher, while his fry and other delicacies lasted, and Betsey was supremely happy over the saltings of the legs, etc., with a view to the more distant future.

It was a cold day of early spring.  I had been down the lanes and brought in five tiny starved primroses with short stems, for which Betsey scolded me soundly, telling me that the first brood of chickens was always the same in number as the first primroses brought into the house.  I eked them out with moss in a saucer, and then, how well I remember the foolish, weary feeling that I wished something would happen to break the quiet.  We were out of the reach of new books, and the two magazines we took in would not be due for ten long days.  I did not feel sensible or energetic enough to turn to one of the standard well-bound volumes that had been Charlie’s school prizes, and at the moment I hated my needlework, both steady sewing and fancy work.  It was the same with my piano.  I had no new fashionable music, and I was in a mood to disdain what was good and classical.  So, as the twilight came on, I sat drearily by the fire, fondling the cat—yes, this same black cat—and thinking that my life at the ladies’ college had been a good deal livelier, and that if I had given it up for the sake of my brother’s society, I had very little of that.

The hunt had gone by last week—what a treat it would be if some one would meet with a little accident and be carried in here!

Behold, I heard a step at the back door, and the loud call of ‘Kitty!  Kitty!’  There stood Charlie, as usual covered with clay nearly up to the top of his gaiters—clay either pale yellow, or horrid light blue, according to the direction of his walk.  He was beginning frantically to unbutton them, and as he beheld me he cried out, ‘Kitty! he’s coming!’ and before I could say, ‘Who?’ he went on, ‘Old Newton.  His fly is working through the mud in Draggletail Lane.  The driver hailed me to ask the way, and when I saw who it was, I cut across to give you notice.  He’ll stay the night to a dead certainty.’

What was to be done?  A wild hope seized me that, at sight of the place, he would retain his fly and go off elsewhere for better accommodation.

Only, where would he find it?  The nearest town, where the only railway station then was, was eight miles off, and he was not likely to plod back thither again, and the village inn, five miles away, was little more than a pot-house.

No, we must rise to the occasion, Betsey and I, while Charlie was making himself respectable to receive the guest.  Where was he to sleep?  What was he to eat?  A daintily fed, rather hypochrondriacal old bachelor, who seldom stirred out of his comfortable house in London.  What a guest for us!

The council was held while the gaiters were being unbuttoned.  He must have my room, and I would sleep with Betsey.  As to food, it was impossible to send to the butcher; and even if I could have sacrificed my precious Dorking fowls, there would have been scant time to prepare them.

There was nothing for it but to give him the pork chops, intended for our to-morrow’s dinner, and if he did not like them, he might fall back upon poached eggs and rashers.

‘Mind,’ called Charlie, as I dashed into my room to remove my properties and light the fire, so that it might get over its first smoking fit,—‘mind you lock up the cat.  He hates them like poison.’

It was so long before the carriage appeared, that I began half to hope, half to fear, it was a false alarm; but at last, just as it was perfectly dark, we heard it stop at the garden gate, and Charlie dashed out to open the fly door, and bring in the guest, who was panting, nervous—almost terrified, at a wild drive, so contrary to all his experiences.  When the flyman’s demands had been appeased, and we had got the poor old gentleman out of his wraps, he turned out to be a neat, little, prim-looking London lawyer, clean-shaved, and with an indoor complexion.  I daresay Charlie, with his big frame, sunburnt face, curly beard, and loud hearty voice, seemed to him like a kind of savage, and he thought he had got among the Aborigines.

After all, he had written to announce his coming.  But he had not calculated on our never getting our letters unless we sent for them.  He was the very pink of politeness to me, and mourned so much over putting me to inconvenience that we could only profess our delight and desire to make him comfortable.

On the whole, it went off very well.  I gave him a cup of tea to warm and occupy him while the upstairs’ chimney was coming to its senses; and then Charles took him upstairs.  He reappeared in precise evening dress, putting us to shame; for Charles had not a dress-coat big enough for him to get into, and I had forgotten to secure my black silk before abandoning my room.  We could not ask him to eat in the best kitchen, as was our practice, and he showed himself rather dismayed at our having only one sitting-room, saying he had not thought the cottage such a dog-hole, or known that it would be inhabited by a lady; and then he paid some pretty compliment on the feminine hand evident in the room.  We had laid the table before he came down, but the waiting was managed by ourselves, or rather, by Charles, for Mr. Newton’s politeness made him jump up whenever I moved; so that I had to sit still and do the lady hostess, while my brother changed plates and brought in relays of the chops from the kitchen.  They were a great success.  Mr. Newton eyed them for a moment distrustfully, but Betsey had turned them out beautifully—all fair and delicate with transparent fat, and a brown stripe telling of the gridiron.  He refused the egg alternative, and greatly enjoyed them and our Brussels sprouts, speaking highly of the pleasure of country fare, and apologising about the good appetising effects of a journey, when Charlie tempted him with a third chop, the hottest and most perfect of all.

I think we also produced a rhubarb tart, and I know he commended our prudence in having no wine, and though he refused my brother’s ale, seemed highly satisfied with a tumbler of brandy and water, when I quitted the gentlemen to see to the coffee, while they talked over the scheme for farm-buildings, which Charlie had sent up to him.

When I bade him good-night, a couple of hours later, he was evidently in a serene state of mind, regarding us as very superior young people.

In the middle of the night, Betsey and I were appalled by a tremendous knocking on the wall.  I threw on a dressing-gown and made for the door, while Betsey felt for the matches.  As I opened a crack of the door, Charlie’s voice was to be heard, ‘Yes, yes; I’ll get you some, sir.  You’ll be better presently,’ interspersed with heavy groans; then, seeing me wide awake, he begged that Betsey would go down and get some hot water—‘and mustard,’ called out a suffering voice.  ‘Oh, those chops!’

Poor Mr. Newton had, it appeared, wakened with a horrible oppression on his chest, and at once attributing it to his unwonted meal of pork chops, he had begun, in the dark, knocking and calling with great energy.  Charlie had stumbled in in the dark, not waiting to light a candle, and indeed ours were chiefly lamps, which took time to light.  Betsey had hers, however, and had bustled into some clothes, tumbling downstairs to see whether any water were still hot in the copper, Charlie running down to help her, while I fumbled about for a lamp and listened with awe to the groans from within, wondering which of us would have to go for the doctor.

Up came Charlie, in his shirt sleeves, with a steaming jug in one hand and a lamp in the other.  Up came Betsey, in a scarlet petticoat and plaid shawl, her gray locks in curl-papers, and a tallow-candle in hand.  The door was thrown open, Charlie observing,

‘Now, sir,’ then breaking out into ‘Thunder and turf’ (his favourite Hibernian ejaculation); ‘Ssssssss!’ and therewith, her green eyes all one glare, out burst this cat!  She was the nightmare!  She had been sitting on the unfortunate man’s chest, and all her weight had been laid to the score of the chops!

No doubt she had been attracted by the fire, stolen up in the confusion of the house, remained hidden whilst Mr. Newton was going to bed, and when the fire went out, settled herself on his chest, as it seems he slept on his back, and it was a warm position.

Probably his knockings on the wall dislodged her; but if so, imagination carried on the sense of oppression, and with feline pertinacity she had returned as soon as he was still again.

Poor old gentleman!  I am afraid he heard some irrepressible laughter, and it was very sore to him to be ridiculous.  His grave dignity and politeness when he came down very late the next morning were something awful, and it must have been very dreadful to him that he could not get away till half the day was over.

So dry and short was he over matters of business that Charles actually thought we might begin to pack up and make our arrangements for emigrating.  Grave, dry, and civil as ever, he departed, and I never saw him more, nor do I think he ever entirely forgave me.  There did not, however, come any dismissal, and when Charlie had occasion to go up to his office and see him, he was just the same as ever, and acceded to the various arrangements which have made this a civilised, though still rather remote place.

And when he died, a year ago, to our surprise we found that this same reclaimed property was left to my brother.  The consequence whereof you well know, my dear little sister that is to be.  Poor old Chops! you had nearly marred our fortunes; and now, will you go with me to my home at the Rectory, or do you prefer your old abode to your old mistress?