The Trail of the Serpent Part 2

Book the Third.
Holy Institution.

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Chapter I.
The Value of an Opera-Glass.

Paris!—City of fashion, pleasure, beauty, wealth, rank, talent, and indeed all the glories of the earth. City of palaces, in which La Vallière smiled, and Scarron sneered; under whose roofs the echoes of Bossuet's voice have resounded, while folly, coming to be amused, has gone away in tears, only to forget to-morrow what it has heard to-night. Glorious city, in which a bon mot is more famous than a good action; which is richer in the records of Ninon de Lenclos than in those of Joan of Arc; for which Beaumarchais wrote, and Marmoutel moralised; which Scottish John Law infected with a furious madness, in those halcyon days when jolly, good-tempered, accomplished, easy-going Philippe of Orleans held the reins of power. Paris, which young Arouet, afterwards Voltaire, ruled with the distant jingle of his jester's wand, from the far retreat of Ferney. Paris, in which Madame du Deffand dragged out those weary, brilliant, dismal, salon-keeping years, quarrelling with Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse, and corresponding with Horace Walpole; ce cher Horace, who described those brilliant French ladies as women who neglected all the duties of life, and gave very pretty suppers.

Paris, in which Bailly spoke, and Madame Roland dreamed; in which Marie Antoinette despaired, and gentle Princess Elizabeth laid down her saintly life; in which the son of St. Louis went calmly to the red mouth of that terrible machine invented by the charitable doctor who thought to benefit his fellow creatures. City, under whose roofs bilious Robespierre suspected and feared; beneath whose shadow the glorious twenty-two went hand in hand to death, with the psalm of freedom swelling from their lips. Paris, which rejoiced when Marengo was won, and rang joy-bells for the victories of Lodd Arcola, Austerlitz, Auerstadt, and Jena; Paris, which mourned ​over fatal Waterloo, and opened its arms, after weary years of waiting, to take to its heart only the ashes of the ruler of its election; Paris, the marvellous; Paris, the beautiful, whose streets are streets of palaces—fairy wonders of opulence and art;—can it be that under some of thy myriad roofs there are such incidental trifles as misery, starvation, vice, crime, and death? Nay, we will not push the question, but enter at once into one of the most brilliant of the temples of that goddess whose names are Pleasure, Fashion, Folly, and Idleness: and what more splendid shrine can we choose whereat to worship the divinity called Pleasure than the Italian Opera House?

To-night the house is thronged with fashion and beauty. Bright uniforms glitter in the backgrounds of the boxes, and sprinkle the crowded parterre. The Citizen King is there—not King of France; no such poor title will he have, but King of the French. His throne is based, not on the broad land, but on the living hearts of his people. May it never prove to be built on a shallow foundation! In eighteen hundred and forty-two all is well for Louis Philippe and his happy family.

In the front row of the stalls, close to the orchestra, a young man lounges, with his opera-glass in his hand. He is handsome and very elegant, and is dressed in the most perfect taste and the highest fashion. Dark curling hair clusters round his delicately white forehead; his eyes are of a bright blue, shaded by auburn lashes, which contrast rather strangely with his dark hair. A very dark and thick moustache only reveals now and then his thin lower lip and a set of dazzling white teeth. His nose is a delicate aquiline, and his features altogether bear the stamp of aristocracy. He is quite alone, this elegant lounger, and of the crowd of people of rank and fashion around him not one turns to speak to him. His listless white hand is thrown on the cushion of the stall on which he leans, as he glances round the house with one indifferent sweep of his opera-glass. Presently his attention is arrested by the conversation of two gentlemen close to him, and without seeming to listen, he hears what they are saying.

"Is the Spanish princess here to-night?" asks one.

"What, the marquis's niece, the girl who has that immense property in Spanish America? Yes, she is in the box next to the king's; don't you see her diamonds? They and her eyes are brilliant enough to set the curtains of the box on fire."

"She is immensely rich, then?"

"She is an Eldorado. The Marquis de Cevennes has no children, and all his property will go to her; her Spanish American property comes from her mother. She is an orphan, as you know, and the marquis is her guardian."

"She is handsome; but there's just a little too much of the ​demon in those great almond-shaped black eyes and that small determined mouth. What a fortune she would be to some intriguing adventurer!"

"An adventurer! Valerie de Cevennes the prize of an adventurer! Show me the man capable of winning her, without rank and fortune equal to hers; and I will say you have found the eighth wonder of the world."

The listener's eyes light up with a strange flash, and lifting his glass, he looks for a few moments carelessly round the house, and then fixes his gaze upon the box next to that occupied by the royal party.

The Spanish beauty is indeed a glorious creature; of a loveliness rich alike in form and colour, but with hauteur and determination expressed in every feature of her face. A man of some fifty years of age is seated by her side, and behind her chair two or three gentlemen stand, the breasts of whose coats glitter with stars and orders. They are speaking to her; but she pays very little attention to them. If she answers, it is only by a word, or a bend of her proud head, which she does not turn towards them. She never takes her eyes from the curtain, which presently rises. The opera is La Sonnambula. The Elvino is the great singer of the day—a young man whose glorious voice and handsome face have made him the rage of the musical world. Of his origin different stories are told. Some say he was originally a shoemaker, others declare him to be the son of a prince. He has, however, made his fortune at seven-and-twenty, and can afford to laugh at these stories. The opera proceeds, and the powerful glass of the lounger in the stalls records the minutest change in the face of Valerie de Cevennes. It records one faint quiver, and then a firmer compression of the thin lips, when the Elvino appears; and the eyes of the lounger fasten more intently, if possible, than before upon the face of the Spanish beauty.

Presently Elvino sings the grand burst of passionate reproach, in which he upbraids Amina's fancied falsehood. As the house applauds at the close of the scene, Valerie's bouquet falls at the feet of the Amina. Elvino, taking it in his hand, presents it to the lady, and as he does so, the lounger's glass—which, more rapidly than the bouquet has fallen, has turned to the stage—records a movement so quick as to be almost a feat of legerdemain. The great tenor has taken a note from the bouquet. The lounger sees the triumphant glance towards the box next the king's, though it is rapid as lightning. He sees the tiny morsel of glistening paper crumpled in the singer's hand; and after one last contemplative look at the proud brow and set lips of Valerie de Cevennes, he lowers the glass.

"My glass is well worth the fifteen guineas I paid for it," he ​whispers to himself. "That girl can command her eyes; they have not one traitorous flash. But those thin lips cannot keep a secret from a man with a decent amount of brains."

When the opera is over, the lounger of the stalls leaves his place by the orchestra, and loiters in the winter night outside the stage-door. Perhaps he is enamoured of some lovely coryphée—lovely in all the gorgeousness of flake white and liquid rouge; and yet that can scarcely be, or he would be still in the stalls, or hovering about the side-scenes, for the ballet is not over. Two or three carriages, belonging to the principal singers, are waiting at the stage-door. Presently a tall, stylish-looking man, in a loose over-coat, emerges; a groom opens the door of a well-appointed little brougham, but the gentleman says—

"No, Farée, you can go home. I shall walk."

"But, monsieur," remonstrates the man, "monsieur is not aware that it rains."

Monsieur says he is quite aware of the rain; but that he has an umbrella, and prefers walking. So the brougham drives off with the distressed Farée, who consoles himself at a café high up on the boulevard, where he plays écarté with a limp little pack of cards, and drinks effervescing lemonade.

The lounger of the stalls, standing in the shadow, hears this little dialogue, and sees also, by the light of the carriage-lamps, that the gentleman in the loose coat is no less a personage than the hero of the opera. The lounger also seems to be indifferent to the rain, and to have a fancy for walking; for when Elvino crosses the road and turns into an opposite street, the lounger follows. It is a dark night, with a little drizzling rain—a night by no means calculated to tempt an elegantly-dressed young man to brave all the disagreeables and perils of dirty pavements and overflowing gutters; but neither Elvino nor the lounger seem to care for mud or rain, for they walk at a rapid pace through several streets—the lounger always a good way behind and always in the shadow. He has a light step, which wakes no echo on the wet pavement; and the fashionable tenor has no idea that he is followed. He walks through long narrow streets to the Rue Rivoli, thence across one of the bridges. Presently he enters a very aristocratic but retired street, in a lonely quarter of the city. The distant roll of carriages and the tramp of a passing gendarmes are the only sounds that break the silence. There is not a creature to be seen in the wide street but the two men. Elvino turns to look about him, sees no one, and walks on till he comes to a mansion at the corner, screened from the street by a high wall, with great gates and a porter's lodge. Detached from the house, and sheltered by an angle of the wall, is a little pavilion, the windows of which look into the courtyard or garden within. Close to this pavilion is a narrow low door ​of carved oak, studded with great iron nails, and almost hidden in the heavy masonry of the wall which frames it. The house in early times has been a convent, and is now the property of the Marquis de Cevennes. Elvino, with one more glance up and down the dimly-lighted street, approaches this doorway, and stooping down to the key-hole whistles softly three bars of a melody from Don Giovanni—La ci darem la mano.

"So!" says the lounger, standing in the shadow of a house opposite, "we are getting deeper into the mystery; the curtain is up, and the play is going to begin."

As the clocks of Paris chime the half-hour after eleven the little door turns on its hinges, and a faint light in the courtyard within falls upon the figure of the fashionable tenor. This light comes from a lamp in the hand of a pretty-looking, smartly-dressed girl, who has opened the door.

"She is not the woman I took her for, this Valerie," says the lounger, "or she would have opened that door herself. She makes her waiting-maid her confidante—a false step, which proves her either stupid or inexperienced. Not stupid; her face gives the lie to that. Inexperienced then. So much the better."

As the spy meditates thus, Elvino passes through the doorway, stooping as he crosses the threshold, and the light disappears.

"This is either a private marriage, or something worse," mutters the lounger. "Scarcely the last. Hers is the face of a woman capable of a madness, but not of degradation—the face of a Phaedra rather than a Messalina. I have seen enough of the play for to-night."

 Chapter II.

Working in the Dark.

Early the next morning a gentleman rings the bell of the porter's lodge belonging to the mansion of the Marquis de Cevennes, and on seeing the porter addresses him thus—

"The lady's-maid of Mademoiselle Valerie de Cevennes is perhaps visible at this early hour?"

The porter thinks not; it is very early, only eight o'clock; Mademoiselle Finette never appears till nine. The toilette of her mistress is generally concluded by twelve; after twelve, the porter thinks monsieur may succeed in seeing Mademoiselle Finette—before twelve, he thinks not.

The stranger rewards the porter with a five-franc piece for this valuable information; it is very valuable to the stranger, who is the lounger of the last night, to discover that the name of the girl who held the lamp is Finette.

​The lounger seems to have as little to do this morning as he had last night; for he leans against the gateway, his cane in his hand, and a half-smoked cigar in his mouth, looking up at the house of the marquis with lazy indifference.

The porter, conciliated by the five-franc piece, is inclined to gossip.

"A fine old building," says the lounger, still looking up at the house, every window of which is shrouded by ponderous Venetian shutters.

"Yes, a fine old building. It has been in the family of the marquis for two hundred years, but was sadly mutilated in the first revolution; monsieur may see the work of the cannon amongst the stone decorations."

"And that pavillion to the left, with the painted windows and Gothic decorations—a most extraordinary little edifice," says the lounger.

Yes, monsieur has observed it? It is a great deal more modern than the house; was built so lately as the reign of Louis the Fifteenth, by a dissipated old marquis who gave supper-parties at which the guests used to pour champagne out of the windows, and pelt the servants in the courtyard with the empty bottles. It is certainly a curious little place; but would monsieur believe something more curious?

Monsieur declares that he is quite willing to believe anything the porter may be good enough to tell him. He says this with a well-bred indifference, as he lights a fresh cigar, which is quite aristocratic, and which might stamp him a scion of the noble house of De Cevennes itself.

"Then," replies the porter, "monsieur must know that Mademoiselle Valerie, the proud, the high-born, the beautiful, has lately taken it into her aristocratic head to occupy that pavilion, attended only by her maid Finette, in preference to her magnificent apartments, which monsieur may see yonder on the first floor of the mansion—a range of ten windows. Does not monsieur think this very extraordinary?"

Scarcely. Young ladies have strange whims. Monsieur never allows himself to be surprised by a woman's conduct, or he might pass his life in a state of continual astonishment.

The porter perfectly agrees with monsieur. The porter is a married man, "and, monsieur———?" the porter ventures to ask with a shrug of interrogation.

Monseiur says he is not married yet.

Something in monsieur's manner emboldens the porter to say

"But monsieur is perhaps contemplating a marriage?"

Monsieur takes his cigar from his mouth, raises his blue eyes to the level of the range of ten windows, indicated just now by ​the porter, takes one long and meditative survey of the magnificent mansion opposite him, and then replies, with aristocratic indifference—

"Perhaps. These Cevennes are immensely rich?"

"Immensely! To the amount of millions." The porter is prone to extravagant gesticulation, but he cannot lift either his eyebrows or his shoulders high enough to express the extent of the wealth of the De Cevennes.

The lounger takes out his pocket-book, writes a few lines, and tearing the leaf out, gives it to the porter, saying—

"You will favour me, my good friend, by giving this to Mademoiselle Finette at your earliest convenience. You were not always a married man; and can therefore understand that it will be as well to deliver my little note secretly."

Nothing can exceed the intense significance of the porter's wink as he takes charge of the note. The lounger nods an indifferent good-day, and strolls away.

"A marquis at the least," says the porter. "O, Mademoiselle Finette, you do not wear black satin gowns and a gold watch and chain for nothing."

The lounger is ubiquitous, this winter's day. At three o'clock in the afternoon he is seated on a bench in the gardens of the Luxembourg, smoking a cigar. He is dressed as before, in the last Parisian fashion; but his greatcoat is a little open at the throat, displaying a loosely-tied cravat of a peculiarly bright blue.

A young person of the genus lady's-maid, tripping daintily by, is apparently attracted by this blue cravat, for she hovers about the bench for a few moments and then seats herself at the extreme end of it, as far as possible from the indifferent lounger, who has not once noticed her by so much as one glance of his cold blue eyes.

His cigar is nearly finished, so he waits till it is quite done; then, throwing away the stump, he says, scarcely looking at his neighbour—

"Mademoiselle Finette, I presume?"

"The same, monsieur."

"Then perhaps, mademoiselle, as you have condescended to favour me with an interview, and as the business on which I have to address you is of a strictly private nature, you will also condescend to come a little nearer to me?"

He says this without appearing to look at her, while he lights another cigar. He is evidently a desperate smoker, and caresses his cigar, looking at the red light and blue smoke almost as if it were his familiar spirit, by whose aid he could work out wonderful calculations in the black art, and without which he would perhaps be powerless. Mademoiselle Finette ​looks at him with a great deal of surprise and not a little indignation, but obeys him, nevertheless, and seats herself close by his side.

"I trust monsieur will believe that I should never have consented to afford him this interview, had I not been assured—"

"Monsieur will spare you, mademoiselle, the trouble of telling him why you come here, since it is enough for him that you are here. I have nothing to do, mademoiselle, either with your motives or your scruples. I told you in my note that I required you to do me a service, for which I could afford to pay you handsomely; that, on the other hand, if you were unwilling to do me this service, I had it in my power to cause your dismissal from your situation. Your coming here is a tacit declaration of your willingness to serve me. So much and no more preface is needed. And now to business."

He seems to sweep this curt preface away, as he waves off a cloud of the blue smoke from his cigar with one motion of his small hand. The lady's-maid, thoroughly subdued by a manner which is quite new to her, awaits his pleasure to speak, and stares at him with surprised black eyes.

He is not in a hurry. He seems to be consulting the blue smoke prior to committing himself by any further remark. He takes his cigar from his mouth, and looks into the bright red spot at the lighted end, as if it were the lurid eye of his familiar demon. After consulting it for a few seconds he says, with the same indifference with which he would make some observation on the winter's day—

"So, your mistress, Mademoiselle Valerie de Cevennes, has been so imprudent as to contract a secret marriage with an opera-singer?"

He has determined on hazarding his guess. If he is right, it is the best and swiftest way of coming at the truth; if wrong, he is no worse off than before. One glance at the girl's face tells him he has struck home, and has hit upon the entire truth. He is striking in the dark: but he is a mathematician, and can calculate the effect of every blow.

"Yes, a secret marriage, of which you were the witness."

This is his second blow; and again the girl's face tells him he has struck home.

"Father Pérot has betrayed us, then, monsieur, for he alone could tell you this," said Finette.

The lounger understands in a moment that Father Pérot is the priest who performed the marriage. Another point in his game. He continues, still stopping now and then to take a puff at his cigar, and speaking with an air of complete indifference—

"You see, then, that this secret marriage, and the part you ​look with regard to it, have, no matter whether through the worthy priest, Father Pérot———"(he stops at this point to knock the ashes from his cigar, and a sidelong glance at the girl's face tells him that he is right again, Father Pérot is the priest)—"or some other channel, come to my knowledge. Though a French woman, you may be acquainted with the celebrated aphorism of one of our English neighbours, 'Knowledge is power.' Very well, mademoiselle, how if I use my power?"

"Monsieur means that he can deprive me of my present place, and prevent my getting another." As she said this, Mademoiselle Finette screwed out of one of her black eyes a small bead of water, which was the best thing she could produce in the way of a tear, but which, coming into immediate contact with a sticky white compound called pearl-powder, used by the lady's-maid to enhance her personal charms, looked rather more like a digestive pill than anything else.

"But, on the other hand, I may not use my power; and, indeed, I should deeply regret the painful necessity which would compel me to injure a lady."

Mademoiselle Finette, encouraged by this speech, wiped away the digestive pill.

"Therefore, mademoiselle, the case resolves itself to this: serve me, and I will reward you; refuse to do so, and I can injure you."

A cold glitter in the blue eyes converts the words into a threat, without the aid of any extra emphasis from the voice.

"Monsieur has only to command," answers the lady's-maid; "I am ready to serve him."

"This Monsieur Elvino will be at the gate of the little pavilion to-night———?"

"At a quarter to twelve."

"Then I will be there at half-past eleven. You will admit me instead of him. That is all."

"But my mistress, monsieur: she will discover that I have betrayed her, and she will kill me. You do not know Mademoiselle de Cevennes."

"Pardon me, I think I do know her. She need never learn that you have betrayed her. Remember, I have discovered the appointed signal;—you are deceived by my use of that signal, and you open the door to the wrong man. For the rest I will shield you from all harm. Your mistress is a glorious creature; but perhaps that high spirit may be taught to bend."

"It must first be broken, monsieur," says Mademoiselle Finette.

"Perhaps," answers the lounger, rising as he speaks. "Made​moiselle, au revoir." He drops five twinkling pieces of gold into her hand, and strolls slowly away.

The lady's-maid watches the receding figure with a bewildered stare. Well may Finette Léris be puzzled by this man: he might mystify wiser heads than hers. As he walks with his lounging gait through the winter sunset, many turn to look at his aristocratic figure, fair face, and black hair. If the worst man who looked at him could have seen straight through those clear blue eyes into his soul, would there have been something revealed which might have shocked and revolted even this worst man? Perhaps. Treachery is revolting, surely, to the worst of us. The worst of us might shrink appalled from the contemplation of those hideous secrets which are hidden in the plotting brain and the unflinching heart of the cold-blooded traitor.

Chapter III.
The Wrong Footstep.

Half-past eleven from the great booming voice of Notre Dame the magnificent. Half-past eleven from every turret in the vast city of Paris. The musical tones of the timepiece over the chimney in the boudoir of the pavilion testify to the fact five minutes afterwards. It is an elegant timepiece, surmounted by a group from the hand of a fashionable sculptor, a group in which a golden Cupid has hushed a grim bronze Saturn to sleep, and has hidden the old man's hour-glass under one of his lacquered wings—a pretty design enough, though the sand in the glass will never move the slower, or wrinkles and gray hairs be longer coming, because of the prettiness of that patrician timepiece; for the minute-hand on the best dial-plate that all Paris can produce is not surer in its course than that dark end which spares not the brightest beginning, that weary awakening which awaits the fairest dream.

This little apartment in the pavilion belonging to the house of the Marquis de Cevennes is furnished in the style of the Pompadour days of elegance, luxury, and frivolity. Oval portraits of the reigning beauties of that day are let into the panels of the walls, and "Louis the Well-beloved" smiles an insipid Bourbon smile above the mantelpiece. The pencil of Boucher has immortalized those frail goddesses of the Versailles Olympus, and their coquettish loveliness lights the room almost as if they were living creatures, smiling unchangingly on every corner. The chimney-piece is of marble, exquisitely carved with lotuses and water-nymphs. A wood fire burns upon the gilded dogs which ornament the hearth. A priceless Persian carpet covers the centre of the polished floor; and a golden Cupid, suspended ​from the painted ceiling in an attitude which suggests such a determination of blood to the head as must ultimately result in apoplexy, holds a lamp of alabaster, which floods the room with a soft light.

Under this light the mistress of the apartment, Valerie de Cevennes, looks gloriously handsome. She is seated in a low arm-chair by the hearth—looking sometimes into the red blaze at her feet, with dreamy eyes, whose profound gaze, though thoughtful, is not sorrowful. This girl has taken a desperate step in marrying secretly the man she loves; but she has no regret, for she does love; and loss of position seems so small a thing in the balance when weighed against this love, which is as yet unacquainted with sorrow, that she almost forgets she has lost it. Even while her eyes are fixed upon the wood fire at her feet, you may see that she is listening; and when the clocks have chimed the half-hour, she turns her head towards the door of the apartment, and listens intently. In five minutes she hears something—a faint sound in the distance, the sound of an outer door turning on its hinges. She starts, and her eyes brighten; she glances at the timepiece, and from the timepiece to the tiny watch at her side.

"So soon!" she mutters; "he said a quarter to twelve. If my uncle had been here! And he only left me at eleven o'clock!"

She listens again; the sounds come nearer—two more doors open, and then there are footsteps on the stairs. At the sound of these footsteps she starts again, with a look of anxiety in her face.

"Is he ill," she says, "that he walks so slowly? Hark!"

She turns pale and clasps her hands tightly upon her breast.

"It is not his step!"

She knows she is betrayed; and in that one moment she prepares herself for the worst. She leans her hand upon the back of the chair from which she has risen, and stands, with her thin lips firmly set, facing the door. She may be facing her fate for aught she knows, but she is ready to face anything.

The door opens, and the lounger of the morning enters. He wears a coat and hat of exactly the same shape and colour as those worn by the fashionable tenor, and he resembles the tenor in build and height. An easy thing, in the obscurity of the night, for the faithful Pinette to admit this stranger without discovering her mistake. One glance at the face and attitude of Valerie de Cevennes tells him that she is not unprepared for his appearance. This takes him off his guard. Has he, too, been betrayed by the lady's-maid? He never guesses that his light step betrayed him to the listening ear which love has made so acute. He seen that the young and beautiful girl is prepared to ​give him battle. He is disappointed. He had counted upon her surprise and confusion, and he feels that he has lost a point in his game. She does not speak, but stands quietly waiting for him to address her, as she might were he an ordinary visitor.

"She is a more wonderful woman than I thought," he says to himself, "and the battle will be a sharp one. No matter! The victory will be so much the sweeter."

He removes his hat, and the light falls full upon his pale fair face. Something in that face, she cannot tell what, seems in a faint, dim manner, familiar to her—she has seen some one like this man, but when, or where, she cannot remember.

"You are surprised, madame, to see me," he says, for he feels that he must begin the attack, and that he must not spare a single blow, for he is to fight with one who can parry his thrusts and strike again. "You are surprised. You command yourself admirably in repressing any demonstration of surprise, but you are not the less surprised."

"I am certainly surprised, monsieur, at receiving any visitor at such an hour." She says this with perfect composure.

"Scarcely, madame," he looks at the timepiece; "for in five minutes from this your husband will—or should—be here."

Her lips tighten, and her jaw grows rigid in spite of herself. The secret is known, then—known to this stranger, who dares to intrude himself upon her on the strength of this knowledge.

"Monsieur," she says, "people rarely insult Valerie de Cevennes with impunity. You shall hear from my uncle to-morrow morning; for to-night—" she lays her hand upon the mother-of-pearl handle of a little bell; he stops her, saying, smilingly,

"Nay, madame, we are not playing a farce. You wish to show me the door? You would ring that bell, which no one can answer but Finette, your maid, since there is no one else in this charming little establishment. I shall not be afraid of Finette, even if you are so imprudent as to summon her; and I shall not leave you till you have done me the honour of granting me an interview. For the rest, I am not talking to Valerie de Cevennes, but to Valerie de Lancy; Valerie, the wife of Elvino; Valerie, the lady of Don Giovanni."

De Lancy is the name of the fashionable tenor. This time the haughty girl's thin lips quiver, with a rapid, convulsive movement. What stings her proud soul is the contempt with which this man speaks of her husband. Is it such a disgrace, then, this marriage of wealth, rank, and beauty, with genius and art?

"Monsieur," she says, "you have discovered my secret. I have been betrayed either by my servant, or the priest who married me—no matter which of them is the traitor. You, who, from your conduct of to-night, are evidently an adventurer, a ​person to whom it would be utterly vain to speak of honour, chivalry, and gentlemanly feeling—since they are doubtless words of which you do not even know the meaning—you wish to turn the possession of this secret to account. In other words, you desire to be bought off. You know, then, what I can afford to pay you. Be good enough to say how much will satisfy you, and I will appoint a time and place at which you shall receive your earnings. You will be so kind as to lose no time. It is on the stroke of twelve; in a moment Monsieur De Lancy will be here. He may not be disposed to make so good a bargain with you as I am. He might be tempted to throw you out of the window."

She has said this with entire self-possession. She might be talking to her modiste, so thoroughly indifferent is she in her high-bred ease and freezing contempt for the man to whom she is speaking. As she finishes she sinks quietly into her easy-chair. She takes up a book from a little table near her, and begins to cut the leaves with a jewelled-handled paper-knife. But the battle has only just begun, and she does not yet know her opponent.

He watches her for a moment; marks the steady hand with which she slowly cuts leaf after leaf, without once notching the paper; and then he deliberately seats himself opposite to her in the easy-chair on the other side of the fireplace. She lifts her eyes from the book, and looks him full in the face with an expression of supreme disdain; but as she looks, he can see how eagerly she is also listening for her husband's step. He has a blow to strike which he knows will be a heavy one.

"Do not, madame," he says, "distract yourself by listening for your husband's arrival. He will not be here to-night."

This is a terrible blow. She tries to speak, but her lips only move inarticulately.

"No, he will not be here. You do not suppose, madame, that when I contemplated, nay, contrived and arranged an interview with so charming a person as yourself, I could possibly be so deficient in foresight as to allow that interview to be disturbed at the expiration of one quarter of an hour? No; Monsieur Don Giovanni will not be here to-night."

Again she tries to speak, but the words refuse to come. He continues, as though he interpreted what she wants to say,—

"You will naturally ask what other engagement detains him from his lovely wife's society? Well, it is, as I think, a supper at the Trois Frères. As there are ladies invited, the party will no doubt break up early; and you will, I dare say, see Monsieur de Lancy by four or five o'clock in the morning."

She tries to resume her employment with the paper-knife, but this time she tears the leaves to pieces in her endeavours to cut ​them. Her anguish and her womanhood get the better of her pride and her power of endurance. She crumples the book in her clenched hands, and throws it into the fire. Her visitor smiles. His blows are beginning to tell.

For a few minutes there is silence. Presently he takes out his cigar-case.

"I need scarcely ask permission, madame. All these opera-singers smoke, and no doubt you are indulgent to the weakness of our dear Elvino?"

"Monsieur de Lancy is a gentleman, and would not presume to smoke in a lady's presence. Once more, monsieur, be good enough to say how much money you require of me to ensure your silence?"

"Nay, madame," he replies, as he bends over the wood fire, and lights his cigar by the blaze of the burning book, "there is no occasion for such desperate haste. You are really surprisingly superior to the ordinary weakness of your sex. Setting apart your courage, self-endurance, and determination, which are positively wonderful, you are so entirely deficient in curiosity."

She looks at him with a glance which seems to say she scorns to ask him what he means by this.

"You say your maid, Finette, or the good priest, Monsieur Perot, must have betrayed your confidence. Suppose it was from neither of those persons I received my information?"

"There is no other source, monsieur, from which you could obtain it."

"Nay, madame, reflect. Is there no other person whose vanity may have prompted him to reveal this secret? Do you think it, madame, so utterly improbable that Monsieur de Lancy himself may have been tempted to boast over his wine of his conquest of the heiress of all the De Cevennes?"

"It is a base falsehood, monsieur, which you are uttering."

"Nay, madame, I make no assertion. I am only putting a case. Suppose at a supper at the Maison Dorée, amongst his comrades of the Opera and his admirers of the stalls—to say nothing of the coryphées, who, somehow or other, contrive to find a place at these recherché little banquets—suppose our friend, Don Giovanni, imprudently ventures some allusion to a lady of rank and fortune whom his melodious voice or his dark eyes have captivated? This little party is not, perhaps, satisfied with an allusion; it requires facts; it is incredulous; it lays heavy odds that Elvino cannot name the lady; and in the end the whole story is told, and the health of Valerie de Cevennes is drank in Cliquot's finest brand of champagne. Suppose this, madame, and you may, perhaps, guess whence I got my information."

Throughout this speech Valerie has sat facing him, with her ​eyes fixed in a strange and ghastly stare. Once she lifts her hand to her throat, as if to save herself from choking; and when the schemer has finished speaking she slides heavily from her chair, and falls on her knees upon the Persian hearth-rug, with her small hands convulsively clasped about her heart. But she is not insensible, and she never takes her eyes from his face. She is a woman who neither weeps nor faints—she suffers.

"I am here, madame," the lounger continues—and now she listens to him eagerly; "I am here for two purposes. To help myself before all things; to help you afterwards, if I can. I have had to use a rough scalpel, madame, but I may not be an unskilful physician. You love this tenor singer very deeply; you must do so; since for his sake you were willing to brave the contempt of that which you also love very much—the world—the great world in which you move."

"I did love him, monsieur—God! how deeply, how madly, how blindly! Nay, it is not to such an eye as yours that I would reveal the secrets of my heart and mind. Enough, I loved him! But for the man who could degrade the name of the woman who had sacrificed so much for his sake, and hold the sacrifice so lightly—for the man who could make that woman's name a jest among the companions of a tavern, Valerie de Cevennes has but one sentiment, and that is—contempt."

"I admire your spirit, madame; but then, remember, the subject can scarcely be so easily dismissed. A husband is not to be shaken off so lightly; and is it likely that Monsieur de Lancy will readily resign a marriage which, as a speculation, is so brilliantly advantageous? Perhaps you do not know that it has been, ever since his début, his design to sell his handsome face to the highest bidder; that he has—pardon me, madame—been for two years on the look-out for an heiress possessed of more gold than discrimination, whom a few pretty namby-pamby speeches selected from the librettos of the operas he is familiar with would captivate and subdue."

The haughty spirit is bent to the very dust. This girl, truth itself, never for a moment questions the words which are breaking her heart. There is something too painfully probable in this bitter humiliation.

"Oh, what have I done," she cries, "what have I done, that the golden dream of my life should be broken by such an awakening as this?"

"Madame, I have told you that I wish, if I can, to help you. I pretend no disinterested or Utopian generosity. You are rich, and can afford to pay me for my services. There are only three persons who, besides yourself, were witnesses of or ​concerned in this marriage—Father Pérot, Finette, and Monsieur de Lancy. The priest and the maid-servant may be silenced; and for Don Giovanni—we will talk of him to-morrow. Stay, has he any letters of yours in his possession?"

"He returns my letters one by one as he receives them," she mutters.

"Good—it is so easy to retract what one has said; but so difficult to deny one's handwriting."

"The De Cevennes do not lie, monsieur!"

"Do they not? What, madame, have you acted no lies, though you may not have spoken them? Have you never lied with your face, when you have worn a look of calm indifference, while the mental effort with which you stopped the violent beating of your heart produced a dull physical torture in your breast; when, in the crowded opera-house, you heard his step upon the stage? Wasted lies, madame; wasted torture; for your idol was not worth them. Your god laughed at your worship, because he was a false god, and the attributes for which you worshipped him—truth, loyalty, and genius, such as man never before possessed—were not his, but the offspring of your own imagination, with which you invested him, because you were in love with his handsome face. Bah! madame, after all, you were only the fool of a chiselled profile and a melodious voice. You are not the first of your sex so fooled; Heaven forbid you should be the last!"

"You have shown me why I should hate this man; show me my revenge, if you wish to serve me. My countrywomen do not forgive. Gaston de Lancy, to have been the slave of your every word; the blind idolator of your every glance; to have given so much; and, as my reward, to reap only your contempt!"

There are no tears in her eyes as she says this in a hoarse voice. Perhaps long years hence she may come to weep over this wild infatuation—now, her despair is too bitter for tears.

The lounger still preserves the charming indifference which stamps him of her own class. He says, in reply to her entreaty,—

"I can lead you to your revenge, madame, if your noble Spanish blood does not recoil from the ordeal. Dress yourself to-morrow night in your servant's clothes, wearing of course a thick veil; take a hackney coach, and at ten o'clock be at the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne. I will join you there. You shall have your revenge, madame, and I will show you how to turn that revenge (which is in itself an expensive luxury) to practical account. In a few days you may perhaps be able to say, 'There is no such person as Gaston de Lancy: the terrible delusion was only a dream; I have awoke, and I am free!"

​She passes her trembling hand across her brow, and looks at the speaker, as if she tried in vain to gather the meaning of his words.

"At ten o'clock, at the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne? I will be there," she murmurs faintly.

"Good! And now, madame, adieu! I fear I have fatigued you by this long interview. Stay! You should know the name of the man to whom you allow the honour of serving you."

He takes out his card-case, lays a card on the tiny table at her side, bows low to her, and leaves her—leaves her stricken to the dust. He looks back at her as he opens the door, and watches her for a moment, with a smile upon his face. His blows have had their full effect.

O Valerie, Valerie! loving so wildly, to be so degraded, humiliated, deceived! Little wonder that you cry to-night. There is no light in the sky—there is no glory in the world! Earth is weary, heaven is dark, and death alone is the friend of the broken heart!

Chapter IV.
Ocular Demonstration.

Inscribed on the card which the lounger leaves on the table of Mademoiselle de Cevennes, or Madame de Lancy, is the name of Raymond Marolles. The lounger, then, is Raymond Marolles, and it is he whom we must follow, on the morning after the stormy interview in the pavilion.

He occupies a charming apartment in the Champs Elysées; small, of course, as befitting a bachelor, but furnished in the best taste. On entering his rooms there is one thing you could scarcely fail to notice; and this is the surprising neatness, the almost mathematical precision, with which everything is arranged. Books, pictures, desks, pistols, small-swords, boxing-gloves, riding-whips, canes, and guns—every object is disposed in an order quite unusual in a bachelor's apartment. But this habit of neatness is one of the idiosyncrasies of Monsieur Marolles. It is to be seen in his exquisitely-appointed dress; in his carefully-trimmed moustache; it is to be heard even in the inflexions of his voice, which rise and fall with rather monotonous though melodious regularity, and which are never broken by anything so vulgar as anger or emotion.

At ten o'clock this morning he is still seated at breakfast. He has eaten nothing, but he is drinking his second cup of strong coffee, and it is easy to see that he is thinking very deeply.

​"Yes," he mutters, "I must find a way to convince her; she must be thoroughly convinced before she will be induced to act. My first blows have told so well, I must not fail in my master-stroke. But how to convince her—words alone will not satisfy her long; there must be ocular demonstration."

He finishes his cup of coffee, and sits playing with the teaspoon, clinking it with a low musical sound against the china teacup. Presently he hits it with one loud ringing stroke. That stroke is a note of triumph. He has been working a problem and has found the solution. He takes up his hat and hurries out of the house; but as soon as he is out of doors he slackens his step, and resumes his usual lounging gait. He crosses the Place de la Concorde, and makes his way to the Boulevard, and only turns aside when he reaches the Italian Opera House. It is to the stage-door he directs his steps. An old man, the doorkeeper, is busy in the little dark hall, manufacturing a pot à feu, and warming his hands at the same time at a tiny stove in a corner. He is quite accustomed to the apparition of a stylish young man; so he scarcely looks up when the shadow of Raymond Marolles darkens the doorway.

"Good morning, Monsieur Concierge," says Raymond; "you are very busy, I see."

"A little domestic avocation, that is all, monsieur, being a bachelor."

The doorkeeper is rather elderly, and somewhat snuffy for a bachelor; but he is very fond of informing the visitors of the stage-door that he has never sacrificed his liberty at the shrine of Hymen. He thinks, perhaps, that they might scruple to give their messages to a married man.

"Not too busy, then, for a little conversation, my friend?" asks the visitor, slipping a five-franc piece into the porter's dingy hand.

"Never too busy for that, monsieur;" and the porter abandons the pot à feu to its fate, and dusts with his coloured handkerchief a knock-kneed-looking easy-chair, which he presents to monsieur.

Monsieur is very condescending, and the doorkeeper is very communicative. He gives monsieur a great deal of useful information about the salaries of the principal dancers; the bouquets and diamond bracelets thrown to them; the airs and graces indulged in by them; and divers other interesting facts. Presently monsieur, who has been graciously though rather languidly interested in all this, says—"Do you happen to have amongst your supernumeraries or choruses, or any of your insignificant people, one of those mimics so generally met with in a theatre?"

"Ah," says the doorkeeper, chuckling, "I see monsieur knows ​theatre. We have indeed two or three mimics; but one above all—a chorus-singer, a great man, who can strike off an imitation which is life itself; a drunken, dissolute fellow, monsieur, or he would have taken to principal characters and made himself a name. A fellow with a soul for nothing but dominoes and vulgar wine-shops; but a wonderful mimic."

"Ah! and he imitates, I suppose, all your great people—your prima donna, your basso, your tenor—" hazards Monsieur Raymond Marolles.

"Yes, monsieur. You should hear him mimic this new tenor, this Monsieur Gaston de Lancy, who has made such a sensation this season. He is not a bad-looking fellow, pretty much the same height as De Lancy, and he can assume his manner, voice, and walk, so completely that———"

"Perhaps in a dark room you could scarcely tell one from the other, eh?"

"Precisely, monsieur."

"I have rather a curiosity about these sort of people; and I should like to see this man, if———" he hesitates, jingling some silver in his pocket.

"Nay, monsieur," says the porter; "nothing more easy, this Moucée is always here about this time. They call the chorus to rehearsal while the great people are lounging over their breakfasts. We shall find him either on the stage, or in one of the dressing-rooms playing dominoes. This way, monsieur."

Raymond Marolles follows the doorkeeper down dark passages and up innumerable flights of stairs; till, very high up, he stops at a low door, on the other side of which there is evidently a rather noisy party. This door the porter opens without ceremony, and he and Monsieur Marolles enter a long low room, with bare white-washed walls, scrawled over with charcoal caricatures of prima donnas and tenors, with impossible noses and spindle legs. Seated at a deal table is a group of young men, shabbily dressed, playing at dominoes, while others look on and bet upon the game. They are all smoking tiny cigarettes which look like damp curl-papers, and which last about two minutes each.

"Pardon me, Monsieur Moucée," says the porter, addressing one of the domino players, a good-looking young man, with a pale dark face and black hair—"pardon me that I disturb your pleasant game; but I bring a gentleman who wishes to make your acquaintance."

The chorus-singer rises, gives a lingering look at a double-six he was just going to play, and advances to where Monsieur Marolles is standing.

"At monsieur's service," he says, with an unstudied but graceful bow.

​Raymond Marolles, with an ease of manner all his own passes his arm through that of the young man, and leads him out into the passage.

"I have heard, Monsieur Moucée, that you possess a talent for mimicry which is of a very superior order. Are you willing to assist with this talent in a little farce I am preparing for the amusement of a lady? If so you will have a claim (which I shall not forget) on my gratitude and on my purse."

This last word makes Paul Moucée prick up his ears. Poor fellow! his last coin has gone for the half-ounce of tobacco he has just consumed. He expresses himself only too happy to obey the commands of monsieur.

Monsieur suggests that they shall repair to an adjoining café, at which they can have half-an-hour's quiet conversation. They do so; and at the end of the half hour, Monsieur Marolles parts with Paul Moucée at the door of this café. As they separate Raymond looks at his watch—"Half-past eleven; all goes better than I could have even hoped. This man will do very well for our friend Elvino, and the lady shall have ocular demonstration. Now for the rest of my work; and to-night, my proud and beautiful heiress, for you."

As the clocks strike ten that night, a hackney-coach stops close to the entrance of the Bois de Boulogne; and as the coachman checks his horse, a gentleman emerges from the gloom, and goes up to the door of the coach, which he opens before the driver can dismount. This gentleman is Monsieur Raymond Marolles, and Valerie de Lancy is seated in the coach.

"Punctual, madame!" he says. "Ah, in the smallest matters you are superior to your sex. May I request you to step out and walk with me for some little distance?"

The lady, who is thickly veiled, only bows her head in reply; but she is by his side in a moment. He gives the coachman some directions, and the man drives off a few paces; he then offers his arm to Valerie.

"Nay, monsieur," she says, in a cold, hard voice, "I can follow you, or I can walk by your side. I had rather not take your arm."

Perhaps it is as well for this man's schemes that it is too dark for his companion to see the smile that lifts his black moustache, or the glitter in his blue eyes. He is something of a physiologist as well as a mathematician, this man; and he can tell what she has suffered since last night by the change in her voice alone. It has a dull and monotonous sound, and the tone seems to have gone out of it for ever. If the dead could speak, they might speak thus.

"This way, then, madame," he says. "My first object is to convince you of the treachery of the man for whom you have ​sacrificed so much. Have you strength to live through the discovery?"

"I lived through last night. Come, monsieur, waste no more time in words, or I shall think you are a charlatan. Let me hear from his lips that I have cause to hate him."

"Follow me, then, and softly."

He leads her into the wood. The trees are very young as yet, but all is obscure to-night. There is not a star in the sky; the December night is dark and cold. A slight fall of snow has whitened the ground, and deadens the sound of footsteps. Raymond and Valerie might be two shadows, as they glide amongst the trees. After they have walked about a quarter of a mile, he catches her by the arm, and draws her hurriedly into the shadow of a group of young pine-trees. "Now," he says, "now listen."

She hears a voice whose every tone she knows. At first there is a rushing sound in her ears, as if all the blood were surging from her heart up to her brain; but presently she hears distinctly; presently too, her eyes grow somewhat accustomed to the gloom; and she sees a few paces from her the dim outline of a tall figure, familiar to her. It is Gaston de Lancy, who is standing with one arm round the slight waist of a young girl, his head bending down with the graceful droop she knows so well, as he looks in her face.

Marolles' voice whispers in her ear, "The girl is a dancer from one of the minor theatres, whom he knew before he was a great man. Her name, I think, is Rosette, or something like it. She loves him very much; perhaps almost as much as you do, in spite of the quarterings on your shield."

He feels the slender hand, which before disdained to lean upon his arm, now clasp his wrist, and tighten, as if each taper finger were an iron vice.

"Listen," he says again. "Listen to the drama, madame. I am the chorus!"

It is the girl who is speaking. "But, Gaston, this marriage, this marriage, which has almost broken my heart."

"Was a sacrifice to our love, my Rosette. For your sake alone would I have made such a sacrifice. But this haughty lady's wealth will make us happy in a distant land. She little thinks, poor fool, for whose sake I endure her patrician airs, her graces of the old régime, her caprices, and her folly. Only be patient, Rosette, and trust me. The day that is to unite us for ever is not far distant, believe me."

It is the voice of Gaston de Lancy. Who should better know those tones than his wife? Who should better know them than she to whose proud heart they strike death?

The girl speaks again. "And you do not love this fine lady, Gaston? Only tell me that you do not love her!"

​Again the familiar voice speaks. "Love her! Bah! We never love these fine ladies who give us such tender glances from opera-boxes. We never admire these great heiresses, who fall in love with a handsome face, and have not enough modesty to keep the sentiment a secret; who think they honour us by a marriage which they are ashamed to confess; and who fancy we must needs be devoted to them, because, after their fashion, they are in love with us."

"Have you heard enough?" asked Raymond Marolles.

"Give me a pistol or a dagger!" she gasped, in a hoarse whisper; "let me shoot him dead, or stab him to the heart, that I may go away and die in peace!"

"So," muttered Raymond, "she has heard enough. Come, madame. Yet—stay, one last look. You are sure that is Monsieur de Lancy?"

The man and the girl are standing a few yards from them; his back is turned to Valerie, but she would know him amongst a thousand by the dark hair and the peculiar bend of the head.

"Sure!" she answers. "Am I myself?"

"Come, then; we have another place to visit to-night. You are satisfied, are you not, madame, now that you have had ocular demonstration?"

Chapter V.
The King of Spades.

When Monsieur Marolles offers his arm to lead Valerie de Cevennes back to the coach, it is accepted passively enough. Little matter now what new degradation she endures. Her pride can never fall lower than it has fallen. Despised by the man she loved so tenderly, the world's contempt is nothing to her.

In a few minutes they are both seated in the coach driving through the Champs Elysées.

"Are you taking me home?" she asks.

"No, madame, we have another errand, as I told you."

"And that errand?"

"I am going to take you where you will have your fortune told."

"My fortune!" she exclaims, with a bitter laugh.

"Bah! madame," says her companion. "Let us understand each other. I hope I have not to deal with a romantic and lovesick girl. I will not gall your pride by recalling to your recollection in what a contemptible position I have found you. I offer my services to rescue you from that contemptible ​position; but I do so in the firm belief that you are a woman of spirit, courage, and determination, and———"

"And that I can pay you well," she adds, scornfully.

"And that you can pay me well. I am no Don Quixote, madame; nor have I any great respect for that gentleman. Believe me, I intend that you shall pay me well for my services, as you will learn by-and-by."

Again there is the cold glitter in the blue eyes, and the ominous smile which a moustache does well to hide.

"But," he continues, "if you have a mind to break your heart for an opera-singer's handsome face, go and break it in your boudoir, madame, with no better confidante than your lady's-maid; for you are not worthy of the services of Raymond Marolles."

"You rate your services very high, then, monsieur?"

"Perhaps. Look you madame: you despise me because I am an adventurer. Had I been born in the purple—lord, even in my cradle, of wide lands and a great name, you would respect me. Now, I respect myself because I am an adventurer; because by the force alone of my own mind I have risen from what I was, to be what I am. I will show you my cradle some day. It had no tapestried coverlet or embroidered curtains, I can assure you."

They are driving now through a dark street, in a neighbourhood utterly unknown to the lady.

"Where are you taking me?" she asks again, with something like fear in her voice.

"As I told you before, to have your fortune told. Nay, madame, unless you trust me, I cannot serve you. Remember, it is to my interest to serve you well: you can therefore have no cause for fear."

As he speaks they stop before a ponderous gateway in the blank wall of a high dark-looking house. They are somewhere in the neighbourhood of Notre Dame, for the grand old towers loom dimly in the darkness. Monsieur Marolles gets out of the coach and rings a bell, at the sound of which the porter opens the door. Raymond assists Valerie to dismount, and leads her across a courtyard into a little hall, and up a stone staircase to the fifth story of the house. At another time her courage might have failed her in this strange house, at so late an hour, with this man, of whom she knows nothing; but she is reckless to-night.

There is nothing very alarming in the aspect of the room into which Raymond leads her. It is a cheerful little apartment lighted with gas. There is a small stove, near a table, before which is seated a gentlemanly-looking man, of some forty years of age. He has a very pale face, a broad forehead, from ​which the hair is brushed away behind the ears: he wears blue spectacles, which entirely conceal his eyes, and in a manner shade his face. You cannot tell what he is thinking of; for it is a peculiarity of this man that the mouth, which with other people is generally the most expressive feature, has with him no expression whatever. It is a thin, straight line, which opens and shuts as he speaks, but which never curves into a smile, or contracts when he frowns.

He is deeply engaged, bending over a pack of cards spread out on the green cloth which covers the table, as if he were playing écarté without an opponent, when Raymond opens the door; but he rises at the sight of the lady, and bows low to her. He has the air of a student rather than of a man of the world.

"My good Blurosset," says Raymond, "I have brought a lady to see you, to whom I have been speaking very highly of your talents."

"With the pasteboard or the crucible?" asks the impassible mouth.

"Both, my dear fellow; we shall want both your talents. Sit down, madame; I must do the honours of the apartment, for my friend Laurent Blurosset is too much a man of science to be a man of gallantry. Sit down, madame; place yourself at this table—there, opposite Monsieur Blurosset, and then to business."

This Raymond Marolles, of whom she knows absolutely nothing, has a strange influence over Valerie; an influence against which she no longer struggles. She obeys him passively, and seats herself before the little green baize-covered table.

The blue spectacles of Monsieur Laurent Blurosset look at her attentively for two or three minutes. As for the eyes behind the spectacles, she cannot even guess what might be revealed in their light. The man seems to have a strange advantage in looking at every one as from behind a screen. His own face, with hidden eyes and inflexible mouth, is like a blank wall.

"Now then, Blurosset, we will begin with the pasteboard. Madame would like to have her fortune told. She knows of course that this fortune-telling is mere charlatanism, but she wishes to see one of the cleverest charlatans."

"Charlatanism! Charlatan! Well, it doesn't matter. I believe in what I read here, because I find it true. The first time I find a false meaning in these bits of pasteboard I shall throw them into that fire, and never touch a card again. They've been the hobby of twenty years, but you know I could do it, Englishman!"

"Englishman!" exclaimed Valerie, looking up with astonishment.

​"Yes," answered Raymond, laughing; "a surname which Monsieur Blurosset has bestowed upon me, in ridicule of my politics, which happened once to resemble those of our honest neighbour, John Bull."

Monsieur Blurosset nods an assent to Raymond's assertion, as he takes the cards in his thin yellow-white hands and begins shuffling them. He does this with a skill peculiar to himself, and you could almost guess in watching him that these little pieces of pasteboard have been his companions for twenty years. Presently he arranges them in groups of threes, fives, sevens, and nines, on the green baize, reserving a few cards in his hand; then the blue spectacles are lifted and contemplate Valerie for two or three seconds.

"Your friend is the queen of spades," he says, turning to Raymond.

"Decidedly," replies Monsieur Marolles. "How the insipid diamond beauties fade beside this gorgeous loveliness of the south!"

Valerie does not hear the compliment, which at another time she would have resented as an insult. She is absorbed in watching the groups of cards over which the blue spectacles are so intently bent.

Monsieur Blurosset seems to be working some abstruse calculations with these groups of cards, assisted by those he has in his hand. The spectacles wander from the threes to the nines; from the sevens to the fives; back again; across again; from five to nine, from three to seven; from five to three, from seven to nine. Presently he says—

"The king of spades is everywhere here." He does not look up as he speaks—never raising the spectacles from the cards. His manner of speaking is so passionless and mechanical, that he might almost be some calculating automaton.

"The king of spades," says Raymond, "is a dark and handsome young man."

"Yes," says Blurosset, "he's everywhere beside the queen of spades."

Valerie in spite of herself is absorbed by this man's words. She never takes her eyes from the spectacles and the thin pale lips of the fortune-teller.

"I do not like his influence. It is bad. This king of spades is dragging the queen down, down into the very mire." Valerie's cheeks can scarcely grow whiter than it has been ever since the revelation of the Bois de Boulogne, but she cannot repress a shudder at these words.

"There is a falsehood," continues Monsieur Blurosset; "and there is a fair woman here."

"A fair woman! That girl we saw to-night is fair," whispers ​Raymond. "No doubt Monsieur Don Giovanni admires blondes, having himself the southern beauty."

"The fair woman is always with the king of spades," says the fortune-teller. "There is here no falsehood—nothing but devotion. The king of spades can be true; he is true to this diamond woman; but for the queen of spades he has nothing but treachery."

"Is there anything more on the cards?" asks Raymond.

"Yes! A priest—a marriage—money. Ah! this king of spades imagines that he is within reach of a great fortune."

"Does he deceive himself?"

"Yes! Now the treachery changes sides. The queen of spades is in it now———But stay—the traitor, the real traitor is here; this fair man—the knave of diamonds———"

Raymond Marolles lays his white hand suddenly upon the card to which Blurosset is pointing, and says, hurriedly,—

"Bah! You have told us all about yesterday; now tell us of to-morrow." And then he adds, in a whisper, in the ear of Monsieur Blurosset,—

"Fool! have you forgotten your lesson?"

"They will speak the truth," mutters the fortune-teller. "I was carried away by them. I will be more careful."

This whispered dialogue is unheard by Valerie, who sits immovable, awaiting the sentence of the oracle, as if the monotonous voice of Monsieur Blurosset were the voice of Nemesis.

"Now then for the future," says Raymond. "It is possible to tell what has happened. We wish to pass the confines of the possible: tell us, then, what is going to happen."

Monsieur Blurosset collects the cards, shuffles them, and rearranges them in groups, as before. Again the blue spectacles wander. From three to nine; from nine to seven; from seven to five; Valerie following them with bright and hollow eyes. Presently the fortune-teller says, in his old mechanical way—

"The queen of spades is very proud."

"Yes," mutters Raymond in Valerie's ear. "Heaven help the king who injures such a queen!"

She does not take her eyes from the blue spectacles of Monsieur Blurosset; but there is a tightening of her determined mouth which seems like an assent to this remark.

"She can hate as well as love. The king of spades is in danger," says the fortune-teller.

There is, for a few minutes, dead silence, while the blue spectacles shift from group to group of cards; Valerie intently watcning them, Raymond intently watching her.

This time there seems to be something difficult in the calculation of the numbers. The spectacles shift hither and thither, ​and the thin white lips move silently and rapidly, from seven to nine, and back again to seven.

"There is something on the cards that puzzles you," says Raymond, breaking the deathly silence. "What is it?"

"A death!" answers the passionless voice of Monsieur Blurosset. "A violent death, which bears no outward sign of violence. I said, did I not, that the king of spades was in danger?"

"You did."

From three to five, from five to nine, from nine to seven, from seven to nine: the groups of cards form a circle: three times round the circle, as the sun goes; back again, and three times round the circle in a contrary direction: across the circle from three to seven, from seven to five, from five to nine, and the blue spectacles come to a dead stop at nine.

"Before twelve o'clock to-morrow night the king of spades will be dead!" says the monotonous voice of Monsieur Blurosset. The voices of the clocks of Paris seem to take up Monsieur Blurosset's voice as they strike the hour of midnight.

Twenty-four hours for the king of spades!

Monsieur Blurosset gathers up his cards and drops them into his pocket. Malicious people say that he sleeps with them under his pillow; that he plays écarté by himself in his sleep; and that he has played piquet with a very tall dark gentleman, whom the porter never let either in or out, and who left a sulphureous and suffocating atmosphere behind him in Monsieur Blurosset's little apartment.

"Good!" says Monsieur Raymond Marolles. "So much for the pasteboard. Now for the crucible."

For the first time since the discovery of the treachery of her husband Valerie de Lancy smiles. She has a beautiful smile, which curves the delicate lips without distorting them, and which brightens in her large dark eyes with a glorious fire of the sunny south. But for all that, Heaven save the man who has injured her from the light of such a smile as hers of to-night.

"You want my assistance in some matters of chemistry?" asks Blurosset.

"Yes! I forgot to tell you, madame, that my friend Laurent Blurosset—though he chooses to hide himself in one of the most obscure streets of Paris—is perhaps one of the greatest men in this mighty city. He is a chemist who will one day work a revolution in the chemical science; but he is a fanatic, madame, or, let me rather say, he is a lover, and his crucible is his mistress. This blind devotion to a science is surely only another form of the world's great madness—love! Who knows what bright eyes a problem in Euclid may have replaced? Who can ​tell what fair hair may not have been forgotten in the search after a Greek root?"

Valerie shivers. Heaven help that shattered heart! Every word that touches on the master-passion of her life is a wound that pierces it to the core.

"You do not smoke, Blurosset. Foolish man you do not know how to live. Pardon, madame." He lights his cigar at the green-shaded gas-lamp, seats himself close to the stove, and smokes for a few minutes in silence.

Valerie, still seated before the little table, watches him with fixed eyes, waiting for him to speak.

In the utter shipwreck of her every hope this adventurer is the only anchor to which she can cling. Presently he says, in his most easy and indifferent manner,—

"It was the fashion at the close of the fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth century for the ladies of Italy to acquire a certain knowledge of some of the principles of chemistry. Of course, at the head of these ladies we must place Lucretia Borgia."

Monsieur Blurosset nods an assent. Valerie looks from Raymond to the blue spectacles; but the face of the chemist testifies no shade of surprise at the singularity of Raymond's observation.

"Then," continued Monsieur Marolles, "if a lady was deeply injured or cruelly insulted by the man she loved; if her pride was trampled in the dust, or her name and her weakness held up to ridicule and contempt—then she knew how to avenge herself and to defy the world. A tender pressure of the traitor's hand; a flower or a ribbon given as a pledge of love; the leaves of a book hastily turned over with the tips of moistened fingers—people had such vulgar habits in those days—and behold the gentleman died, and no one was any the wiser but the worms, with whose constitutions aqua tofana at second hand may possibly have disagreed."

"Vultures have died from the effects of poisoned carrion," muttered Monsieur Blurosset.

"But in this degenerate age," continued Raymond, "what can our Parisian ladies do when they have reason to be revenged on a traitor? The poor blunderers can only give him half a pint of laudanum, or an ounce or so of arsenic, and run the risk of detection half an hour after his death! I think that time is a circle, and that we retreat as we advance, in spite of our talk of progress."

His horrible words, thrice horrible when contrasted with the coolness of his easy manner, freeze Valerie to the very heart; but she does not make one effort to interrupt him.

"Now," my good Blurosset," he resumes, "what I want of ​you is this. Something which will change a glass of wine into a death-warrant, but which will defy the scrutiny of a college of physicians. This lady wishes to take a lesson in chemistry. She will, of course, only experimentalise on rabbits, and she is so tender-hearted that, as you see, she shudders even at the thought of that little cruelty. For the rest, to repay you for your trouble, if you will give her pen and ink, she will write you an order on her banker for five thousand francs.

Monsieur Blurosset appears no more surprised at this request than if he had been asked for a glass of water. He goes to a cabinet, which he opens, and after a little search selects a small tin box, from which he takes a few grains of white powder, which he screws carelessly in a scrap of newspaper. He is so much accustomed to handling these compounds that he treats them with very small ceremony.

"It is a slow poison," he says. "For a full-grown rabbit use the eighth part of what you have there; the whole of it would poison a man; but death in either case would not be immediate. The operation of the poison occupies some hours before it terminates fatally."

"Madame will use it with discretion," says Raymond; "do not fear."

Monsieur Blurosset holds out the little packet as if expecting Valerie to take it; she recoils with a ghastly face, and shudders as she looks from the chemist to Raymond Marolles.

"In this degenerate age," says Raymond, looking her steadily in the face, "our women cannot redress their own wrongs, however deadly those wrongs may be; they must have fathers, brothers, or uncles to fight for them, and the world to witness the struggle. Bah! There is not a woman in France who is any better than a sentimental schoolgirl."

Valerie stretches out her small hand to receive the packet.

"Give me the pen, monsieur," says she; and the chemist presents her a half-sheet of paper, on which she writes hurriedly an order on her bankers, which she signs in full with her maiden name.

Monsieur Blurosset looked over the paper as she wrote.

"Valerie de Cevennes!" he exclaimed. "I did not know I was honoured by so aristocratic a visitor."

Valerie put her hand to her head as if bewildered. "My name!" she muttered, "I forgot, I forgot."

"What do you fear, madame?" asked Raymond, with a smile. "Are you not among friends?"

"For pity's sake, monsieur," she said, "give me your arm, and take me back to the carriage! I shall drop down dead if I stay longer in this room."

​The blue spectacles contemplated her gravely for a moment. Monsieur Blurosset laid one cold hand upon her pulse, and with the other took a little bottle from the cabinet, out of which he gave his visitor a few drops of a transparent liquid.

"She will do now," he said to Raymond, "till you get her home; then see that she takes this," he added, handing Monsieur Marolles another phial; "it is an opiate which will procure her six hours' sleep. Without that she would go mad."

Raymond led Valerie from the room; but, once outside, her head fell heavily on his shoulder, and he was obliged to carry her down the steep stairs.

"I think," he muttered to himself as he went out into the courtyard with his unconscious burden, "I think we have sealed the doom of the king of spades!"

Chapter VI.
A Glass of Wine.

Upon a little table in the boudoir of the pavilion lay a letter. It was the first thing Valerie de Lancy beheld on entering the room, with Raymond Marolles by her side, half an hour after she had left the apartment of Monsieur Blurosset. This letter was in the handwriting of her husband, and it bore the postmark of Rouen. Valerie's face told her companion whom the letter came from before she took it in her hand.

"Read it," he said, coolly. "It contains his excuses, no doubt. Let us see what pretty story he has invented. In his early professional career his companions surnamed him Baron Munchausen."

Valerie's hand shook as she broke the seal; but she read the letter carefully through, and then turning to Raymond she said—

"You arc right; his excuse is excellent, only a little too transparent: listen.

"'The reason of my absence from Paris'—(absence from Paris, and to-night in the Bois de Boulogne)—'is most extraordinary. At the conclusion of the opera last night, I was summoned to the stage-door, where I found a messenger waiting for me, who told me he had come post-haste from Rouen, where my mother was lying dangerously ill, and to implore me, if I wished to see her before her death, to start for that place immediately. Even my love for you, which you well know, Valerie, is the absorbing passion of my life, was forgotten in such a moment. I had no means of communicating with you without endangering our secret. Imagine, then, my surprise on my arrival here, to find that my mother is in perfect health, and had of course sent no messenger to me. I fear in this mystery ​some conspiracy which threatens the safety of our secret. I shall be in Paris to-night, but too late to see you. To-morrow, at dusk, I shall be at the dear little pavilion, once more to be blest by a smile from the only eyes I love.—Gaston de Lancy."

"Rather a blundering epistle," muttered Raymond. "I should really have given him credit for something better. You will receive him to-morrow evening, madame?"

She knew so well the purport of this question that her hand almost involuntarily tightened on the little packet given her by Monsieur Blurosset, which she had held all this time, but she did not answer him.

"You will receive him to-morrow; or by to-morrow night all Paris will know of this romantic but rather ridiculous marriage; it will be in all the newspapers—caricatured in all the print-shops; Charivari will have a word or two about it, and little boys will cry it in the streets, a full, true, and particular account for only one sous. But then, as I said before, you are superior to your sex, and perhaps you will not mind this kind of thing."

"I shall see him to-morrow evening at dusk," she said, in a hoarse whisper not pleasant to hear; "and I shall never see him again after to-morrow."

"Once more, then, good night," says Raymond. "But stay, Monsieur begs you will take this opiate. Nay," he muttered with a laugh as she looked at him strangely, "you may be perfectly assured of its harmlessness. Remember, I have not been paid yet."

He bowed, and left the room. She did not lift her eyes to look at him as he bade her adieu. Those hollow tearless eyes were fixed on the letter she held in her left hand. She was thinking of the first time she saw this handwriting, when every letter seemed a character inscribed in fire, because his hand had shaped it; when the tiniest scrap of paper covered with the most ordinary words was a precious talisman, a jewel of more price than the diamonds of all the Cevennes.

The short winter's day died out, and through the dusk a young man, in a thick greatcoat, walked rapidly along the broad quiet street in which the pavilion stood. Once or twice he looked round to assure himself that he was unobserved. He tried the handle of the little wooden door, found it unfastened, opened it softly, and went in. In a few minutes he was in the boudoir, and by the side of Valerie. The girl's proud face was paler than when he had last seen it; and when he tenderly asked the reason of this change, she said,—

"I have been anxious about you, Gaston. You can scarcely wonder."

​"The voice too, even your voice is changed," he said anxiously. "Stay, surely I am the victim of no juggling snare. It is—it is Valerie."

The little boudoir was only lighted by the wood fire burning on the low hearth. He drew her towards the blaze, and looked her full in the face.

"You would scarcely believe me," he said; "but for the moment I half doubted if it were really you. The false alarm, the hurried journey, one thing and another have upset me so completely, that you seemed changed—altered; I can scarcely tell you how, but altered very much."

She seated herself in the easy-chair by the hearth. There was an embroidered velvet footstool at her feet, and he placed himself on this, and sat looking up in her face. She laid her slender hands on his dark hair, and looked straight into his eyes. Who shall read her thoughts at this moment? She had learnt to despise him, but she had never ceased to love him. She had cause to hate him; but she could scarcely have told whether the bitter anguish which rent her heart were nearer akin to love or hate.

"Pshaw, Gaston!" she exclaimed, "you are full of silly fancies to-night. And I, you see, do not offer to reproach you once for the uneasiness you have caused me. See how readily I accept your excuse for your absence, and never breathe one doubt of its truth. Now, were I a jealous or suspicious woman, I might have a hundred doubts. I might think you did not love me, and fancy that your absence was a voluntary one. I might even be so foolish as to picture you with another whom you loved better than me."

"Valerie!" he said, reproachfully, raising her small hand to his lips.

"Nay," she cried, with a light laugh, "this might be the thought of a jealous woman. But could I think so of you, Gaston?"

"Hark!" he said, starting and rising hastily; "did you not hear something?

"What?"

"A rustling sound by that door—the door of your dressing-room. Finette is not there, is she? I left her in the anteroom below."

"No, no, Gaston; there is no one there; this is another of your silly fancies."

He glanced uneasily towards the door, but re-seated himself at her feet, and looked once more upward to the proudly beautiful face. Valerie did not look at her companion, but at the fire. Her dark eyes were fixed upon the blaze, and she seemed almost unconscious of Gaston de Lancy's presence. ​What did she see in the red light? Her shipwrecked soul? The ruins of her hopes? The ghost of her dead happiness? The image of a long and dreary future, in which the love on whose foundation she had built a bright and peaceful life to come could have no part? What did she see? A warning arm stretched out to save her from the commission of a dreadful deed, which, once committed, must shut her out from all earthly sympathy, though not perhaps from heavenly forgiveness; or a stern finger pointing to the dark end to which she hastens with a purpose in her heart so strange and fearful to her she scarcely can believe it is her own, or that she is herself?

With her left hand still upon the dark hair—which even now she could not touch without a tenderness, that, having no part in her nature of to-day, seemed like some relic of the wreck of the past—she stretched out her right arm towards a table near her, on which there were some decanters and glasses that clashed with a silvery sound under her touch.

"I must try and cure you of your fancies, Gaston. My physician insists on my taking every day at luncheon a glass of that old Madeira of which my uncle is so fond. They have not removed the wine—you shall take some; pour it out yourself. See, here is the decanter. I will hold the glass for you."

She held the antique diamond-cut glass with a steady hand while Gaston poured the wine into it. The light from the wood fire flickered, and he spilt some of the Madeira over her dress. They both laughed at this, and her laugh rang out the clearer of the two.

There was a third person who laughed; but his was a silent laugh. This third person was Monsieur Marolles, who stood within the half-open door that led into Valerie's dressing-room.

"So," he says to himself, "this is even better than I had hoped. I feared his handsome face would shake her resolution. The light in those dark eyes is very beautiful, no doubt, but it has not long to burn."

As the firelight flashed upon the glass, Gaston held it for a moment between his eyes and the blaze.

"Your uncle's wine is not very clear," he said; "but I would drink the vilest vinegar from the worst tavern in Paris, if you poured it out for me, Valerie."

As he emptied the glass the little time-piece struck six.

"I must go, Valerie. I play Gennaro in Lucretia Borgia, and the King is to be at the theatre to-night. You will come? I shall not sing well if you are not there."

"Yes, yes, Gaston." She laid her hand upon her head as she spoke.

​"Are you ill?" he asked, anxiously.

"No, no, it is nothing. Go, Gaston; you must not keep his Majesty waiting," she said.

I wonder whether as she spoke there rose the image in her mind of a King who reigns in undisputed power over the earth's wide face; whose throne no revolution ever shook; whose edict no creature ever yet set aside, and to whom all terrible things give place, owning in him the King of Terrors!

The young man took his wife in his arms and pressed his lips to her forehead. It was damp with a deadly cold perspiration.

"I am sure you are ill, Valerie," he said.

She shivered violently, but pushing him towards the door, said, "No, no, Gaston; go, I implore you; you will be late; at the theatre you will see me. Till then, adieu."

He was gone. She closed the door upon him rapidly, and with one long shudder fell to the ground, striking her head against the gilded moulding of the door. Monsieur Marolles emerged from the shadow, and lifting her from the floor, placed her in the chair by the hearth. Her head fell heavily back upon the velvet cushions, but her large black eyes were open. I have said before, this woman was not subject to fainting-fits.

She caught Raymond's hand in hers with a convulsive grasp.

"Madame," he said, "you have shown yourself indeed a daughter of the haughty line of the De Cevennes. You have avenged yourself most nobly."

The large black eyes did not look at him. They were fixed on vacancy. Vacancy? No! there could be no such thing as vacancy for this woman. Henceforth for her the whole earth must be filled with one hideous phantom.

There were two wine-glasses on the table which stood a little way behind the low chair in which Valerie was seated—very beautiful glasses, antique, exquisitely cut, and emblazoned with the arms of the De Cevennes. In one of those glasses, the one from which Gaston de Lancy had drunk, there remained a few drops of wine, and a little white sediment. Valerie did not see Raymond, as with a stealthy hand he removed this glass from the table, and put it in the pocket of his greatcoat.

He looked once more at her as she sat with rigid mouth and staring eyes, and then he said, as he moved towards the door,—

"I shall see you at the opera, madame! I shall be in the stalls. You will be, with more than your wonted brilliancy and beauty, the centre of observation in the box next to the King's. Remember, that until to-night is over, your play will ​not be played out. Au revoir, madame. To-morrow I shall say mademoiselle! For to-morrow the secret marriage of Valerie de Cevennes with an opera-singer will only be a foolish memory of the past."

Chapter VII.
The Last Act of Lucretia Borgia.

Two hours after this interview in the pavilion Raymond Marolles is seated in his old place in the front row of the stalls. Several times during the prologue and the first act of the opera his glass seeks the box next to that of the King, always to find it empty. But after the curtain has fallen on the finale to the first act, the quiet watcher raises his glass once more, and sees Valerie enter, leaning on her uncle's arm. Her dark beauty loses nothing by its unusual pallor, and her eyes to-night have a brilliancy which, to the admiring crowd, who know so little and so little care to know the secrets of her proud soul, is very beautiful. She wears a high dress of dark green velvet, fastened at the throat with one small diamond ornament, which trembles and emits bright scintillations of rainbow light. This sombre dress, her deadly pallor, and the strange fire in her eyes, give to her beauty of to-night a certain peculiarity which renders her more than usually the observed of all observers.

She seats herself directly facing the stage, laying down her costly bouquet, which is of one pure white, being composed entirely of orange-flowers, snowdrops, and jasmine, a mixture of winter, summer, and hot-house blossoms for which her florist knows how to charge her. She veils the intensity which is the distinctive character of her face with a weary listless glance to-night. She does not once look round the house. She has no need to look, for it seems as if without looking she can see the pale face of Monsieur Marolles, who lounges with his back to the orchestra, and his opera-glass in his hand.

The Marquis de Cevennes glances at the programme of the opera, and throws it away from him with a dissatisfied air.

"That abominable poisoning woman!" he says; "when will the Parisians be tired of horrors?"

His niece raises her eyebrows slightly, but does not lift her eyelids as she says—"Ah, when, indeed!"

"I don't like these subjects," continued the marquis. "Even the handling of a Victor Hugo cannot make them otherwise than repulsive: and then again, there is something to be said on the score of their evil tendency. They set a dangerous example. Lucretia Borgia, in black velvet, avenging an insult ​according to the rules of high art and to the music of Donizetti is very charming, no doubt; but we don't want our wives and daughters to learn how they may poison us without fear of detection. What do you say, Rinval?" he asked, turning to a young officer who had just entered the box. "Do you think I am right?"

"Entirely, my dear marquis. The representation of such a hideous subject is a sin against beauty and innocence," he said, bowing to Valerie. "And, though the music is very exquisite———"

"Yes," said Valerie, "my uncle cannot help admiring the music. How have they been singing to night?"

"Why, strange to say, for once De Lancy has disappointed his admirers. His Gennaro is a very weak performance."

"Indeed!" She takes her bouquet in her hand and plays with the drooping blossom of a snowdrop. "A weak performance? You surprise me really!" She might be speaking of the flowers she holds, from the perfect indifference of her tone.

"They say he is ill," continues Monsieur Rinval. "He almost broke down in the 'Pescator ignobile.' But the curtain has risen—we shall have the poison scene soon, and you can judge for yourself."

She laughs. "Nay," she says, "I have never been so enthusiastic an admirer of this young man as you are, Monsieur Rinval. I should not think the world had come to an end if he happened to sing a false note."

The young Parisian bent over her chair, admiring her grace and beauty—admiring, perhaps, more than all, the haughty indifference with which she spoke of the opera-singer, as if he were something too far removed from her sphere for her to be in earnest about him even for one moment. Might he not have wondered even more, if he had admired her less, could he have known that as she looked up at him with a radiant face, she could not even see him standing close beside her; that to her clouded sight the opera-house was only a confusion of waving lights and burning eyes; and that, in the midst of a chaos of blood and fire, she saw the vision of her lover and her husband dying by the hand that had caressed him?

"Now for the banquet scene," exclaimed Monsieur Rinval. "Ah! there is Gennaro. Is he not gloriously handsome in ruby velvet and gold? That clubbed Venetian wig becomes him. It is a wig, I suppose."

"Oh, no doubt. That sort of people owe half their beauty to wigs, and white and red paint, do they not?" she asked, contemptuously; and even as she spoke she was thinking of ​the dark hair which her white fingers had smoothed away from the broad brow so often, in that time which, gone by a few short days, seemed centuries ago to her. She had suffered the anguish of a life-time in losing the bright dream of her life.

"See," said Monsieur Rinval, "Gennaro has the poisoned goblet in his hand. He is acting very badly. He is supporting himself with one hand on the back of that chair, though he has not yet drunk the fatal draught."

De Lancy was indeed leaning on an antique stage-chair for support. Once he passed his hand across his forehead, as if to collect his scattered senses, but he drank the wine, and went on with the music. Presently, however, every performer in the orchestra looked up as if thunderstruck. He had left off singing in the middle of a concerted piece; but the Maffeo Orsini took up the passage, and the opera proceeded.

"He is either ill, or he does not know the music," said Monsieur Rinval. "If the last, it is really shameful; and he presumes on the indulgence of the public."

"It is always the case with these favourites, is it not?" asked Valerie.

At this moment the centre of the stage was thrown open. There entered first a procession of black and shrouded monks singing a dirge. Next, pale, haughty, and vengeful, the terrible Lucretia burst upon the scene.

Scornful and triumphant she told the companions of Gennaro that their doom was sealed, pointing to where, in the ghastly background, were ranged five coffins, waiting for their destined occupants. The audience, riveted by the scene, awaited that thrilling question of Gennaro, "Then, madame, where is the sixth?" and as De Lancy emerged from behind his comrades every eye was fixed upon him.

He advanced towards Lucretia, tried to sing, but his voice broke on the first note; he caught with his hand convulsively at his throat, staggered a pace or two forward, and then fell heavily to the floor. There was immediate consternation and confusion on the stage; chorus and singers crowded round him; one of the singers knelt down by his side, and raised his head. As he did so, the curtain fell suddenly.

"I was certain he was ill," said Monsieur Rinval, "I fear it must be apoplexy."

"It is rather an uncharitable suggestion," said the marquis; "but do you not think it just possible that the young man may be tipsy?"

There was a great buzz of surprise amongst the audience, and in about three minutes one of the performers came before the curtain, and announced that in consequence of the sudden and alarming illness of Monsieur de Lancy it was impossible to con​elude the opera. He requested the indulgence of the audience for a favourite ballet which would commence immediately.

The orchestra began the overture of the ballet, and several of the audience rose to leave the house.

"Will you stop any longer, Valerie? or has this dismal finale dispirited you?" said the marquis.

"A little," said Valerie; "besides, we have promised to look in at Madame de Vermanville's concert before going to the duchess's ball."

Monsieur Rinval helped to muffle her in her cloak, and then offered her his arm. As they passed from the great entrance to the carriage of the marquis, Valerie dropped her bouquet. A gentleman advanced from the crowd and restored it to her.

"I congratulate you alike on your strength of mind, as on your beauty, mademoiselle!" he said, in a whisper too low for her companions to hear, but with a terrible emphasis on the last word.

As she stepped into the carriage, she heard a bystander say—

"Poor fellow, only seven-and-twenty! And so marvellously handsome and gifted!"

"Dear me," said Monsieur Rinval, drawing up the carriage window, "how very shocking! De Lancy is dead!"

Valerie did not utter one exclamation at this announcement. She was looking steadily out of the opposite window. She was counting the lamps in the streets through the mist of a winter's night.

"Only twenty-seven!" she cried hysterically, "only twenty-seven! It might have been thirty-seven, forty-seven, fifty-seven! But he despised her love; he trampled out the best feelings of her soul; so it was only twenty-seven! Marvellously handsome, and only twenty-seven!"

"For heaven's sake open the windows and stop the carriage, Rinval!" cried the marquis—"I'm sure my niece is ill."

She burst into a long, ringing laugh.

"My dear uncle, you are quite mistaken. I never was better in my life; but it seems to me as if the death of this opera-singer has driven everybody mad."

They drove rapidly home, and took her into the house. The maid Finette begged that her mistress might be carried to the pavilion, but the marquis overruled her, and had his niece taken into her old suite of apartments in the mansion. The first physicians in Paris were sent for, and when they came they pronounced her to be seized by a brain-fever, which promised to be a very terrible one.

Chapter VIII.
Bad Dreams and a Worse Waking.

The sudden and melancholy death of Gaston de Lancy caused a considerable sensation throughout Paris; more especially as it was attributed by many to poison. By whom administered, or from what motive, none could guess. There was one story, however, circulated that was believed by some people, though it bore very little appearance of probability. It was reported that on the afternoon preceding the night on which De Lancy died, a stranger had obtained admission behind the scenes of the opera-house, and had been seen in earnest conversation with the man whose duty it was to provide the goblets of wine for the poison scene in Lucretia Borgia. Some went so far as to say, that this stranger had bribed the man to put the contents of a small packet into the bottom of the glass given on the stage to De Lancy. But so improbable a story was believed by very few, and, of course, stoutly denied by the man in question. The doctors attributed the death of the young man to apoplexy. There was no inquest held on his remains; and at the wish of his mother he was buried at Rouen, and his funeral was no doubt a peculiarly quiet one, for no one was allowed to know when the ceremonial took place. Paris soon forgot its favourite. A few engravings of him, in one or two of his great characters, lingered for some time in the windows of the fashionable print-shops. Brief memoirs of him appeared in several papers, and in one or two magazines; and in a couple of weeks he was forgotten. If he had been a great general, or a great minister, it is possible that he would not have been remembered much longer. The new tenor had a fair complexion and blue eyes, and had two extra notes of falsetto. So the opera-house was as brilliant as ever, though there was for the time being a prejudice among opera-goers and opera-singers against Lucretia Borgia, and that opera was put on the shelf for the remainder of the season.

A month after the death of De Lancy the physician pronounced Mademoiselle de Cervennes sufficiently recovered to be removed from Paris to her uncle's chateau in Normandy. Her illness had been a terrible one. For many days she had been delirious. Ah, who shall paint the fearful dreams of that delirium!—dreams, of the anguish of which her disjointed sentences could tell so little? The face of the man she had loved had haunted her in every phase, wearing every expression—now thoughtful, now sparkling with vivacity, now cynical, now melancholy; but always distinct and palpable, and always before her night and day. The scene of her first meeting with him; her secret ​marriage; the little chapel a few miles out of Paris; the old priest; the bitter discovery in the Bois de Boulogne—the scene of his treachery; the lamp-lit apartment of Monsieur de Blurosset; the cards and the poisons. Every action of this dark period of her life she acted over in her disordered brain again and again a hundred times through the long day, and a hundred times more through the still longer night. So when at the expiration of a month, she was strong enough to walk from one room into another, it was but a wreck of his proud and lovely heiress which met her uncle's eyes.

The château of the marquis, some miles from the town of Caen, was situated in a park which was as wild and uncultivated as a wood. A park full of old timber, and marshy reedy grounds dotted with pools of stagnant water, which in the good days of the old regime were beaten nightly by the submissive peasantry, that monseigneur, the marquis might sleep on his bedstead of ormolu and buhl à la Louis Quatorze, undisturbed by the croaking of the frogs.

Everything around was falling into ruin; the château had been sacked, and one wing of it burnt down, in the year 1793; and the present marquis, then a very little boy, had fled with his father to the hospitable shores of England, where for more than twenty years of his life he had lived in poverty and obscurity, teaching sometimes his native language, sometimes mathematics, sometimes music, sometimes one thing, sometimes another, for his daily bread. But with the restoration of the Bourbons came the restoration of the marquis to title and fortune. A wealthy marriage with the widow of a rich Buonapartist restored the house of De Cevennes to its former grandeur; and looking now at the proud and stately head of that house, it was a difficult thing to imagine that this man had ever taught French, music, and mathematics, for a few shillings a lesson, in the obscure academies of an English manufacturing town.

The dreary park, which surrounded the still more dreary and tumble-down château, was white with the fallen snow, through which the servants, or their servants the neighbouring peasantry, coming backwards and forwards with some message or commission from the village, waded knee-deep, or well nigh lost themselves in some unsuspected hollow where the white drifts had swept and lay collected in masses whose depth was dangerous. The dark oak-panelled apartments appropriated to Valerie looked out upon the snow-clad wilderness; and very dismal they seemed in the dying February day.

Grim pictures of dead-and-gone branches of this haughty house stared and frowned from their heavy frames at the pale girl, half seated, half reclining in a great easy-chair in the deep embayed window. One terrible mail-clad baron, who had ​fought and fallen at disastrous Agincourt, held an uplifted axe, and in the evening shadow it seemed to Valerie as if he raised it with a threatening glance beneath his heavy brows, which took a purpose and a meaning as the painted eyes met hers. And turn which way she would, the eyes of these dark portraits seemed to follow her; sometimes threateningly, sometimes reproachfully, sometimes with a melancholy look fraught with a strange and ominous sadness that chilled her to the soul.

Logs of wood burned on the great hearth, supported by massive iron dogs, and their nickering light falling now here now there, left always the corners of the large room in shadow. The chill white night looking in at the high window strove with the fire light for mastery, and won it, so that the cheery beams playing bo-peep among the quaint oak carving of the panelled walls and ceiling hid themselves abashed before the chill stare of the cold steel-blue winter sky. The white face of the sick girl under this dismal light looked almost as still and lifeless as the face of her grandmother, in powder and patches, simpering down at her from the wall. She sat alone—no book near her, no sign of any womanly occupation in the great chamber, no friend to watch or tend her (for she had refused all companionship); she sat with listless hands drooping upon the velvet cushions of her chair, her head thrown back, as if in utter abandonment of all things on the face of the wide earth, and her dark eyes staring straight before her out into the dead waste of winter snow.

So she has sat since early morning; so she will sit till her maid comes to her and leads her to her dreary bedchamber. So she sits when her uncle visits her, and tries every means in his power to awaken a smile, or bring one look of animation into that dead face. Yes, it is the face of a dead woman. Dead to hope, dead to love, dead to the past; still more utterly dead to a future, which, since it cannot restore the dead, can give her nothing.

So the short February days, which seem so long to her, fade into the endless winter nights; and for her the morning has no light, nor the darkness any shelter. The consolations of that holy Church, on which for ages past her ancestors have leant for succour as on a rock of mighty and eternal strength, she dare not seek. Her uncle's chaplain, a white-haired old man who had nursed her in his arms a baby, and who resides at the château, beloved and honoured by all around, comes to her every morning, and on each visit tries anew to win her confidence; but in vain. How can she pour into the ears of this good and benevolent old man her dismal story? Surely he would cast her from him with contumely and horror. Surely he would tell her that for her there is no hope; that even a ​merciful Heaven, ready to hear the prayer of every sinner, would be deaf to the despairing cries of such a guilty wretch as she.

So, impenitent and despairing, she wears out the time, and waits for death. Sometimes she thinks of the arch tempter who smoothed the path of crime and misery in which she had trodden, and, who, in doing so seemed so much a part of herself, and so closely linked with her anguish and her revenge, that she often, in the weakness of her shattered mind, wondered if there were indeed such a person, or whether he might not be only the hideous incarnation of her own dark thoughts. He had spoken though of payment, of reward for his base services. If he were indeed human as her wretched self, why did he not come to claim his due?

As the lonely impenitent woman pondered thus in the wintry dusk, her uncle entered the chamber in which she sat.

"My dear Valerie," he said, "I am sorry to disturb you, but a person has just arrived on horseback from Caen. He has travelled, he says, all the way from Paris to see you, and he knows that you will grant him an interview. I told him it was not likely you would do so, and that you certainly would not with my consent. Who can this person be who has the impertinence to intrude at such a time as this? His name is entirely unknown to me."

He gave her a card. She looked at it, and read aloud—

"'Monsieur Raymond Marolles.' The person is quite right, my dear uncle; I will see him."

"But, Valerie!" remonstrated the marquis.

She looked at him, with her mother's proud Spanish blood mantling in her pale cheek.

"My dear uncle," she said quietly, "it is agreed between us, is it not, that I am in all things my own mistress, and that you have entire confidence in me? When you cease to trust me, we had better bid each other farewell, for we can then no longer live beneath the same roof."

He looked with one imploring glance at the inflexible face, but it was fixed as death.

"Tell them," she said, "to conduct Monsieur Marolles to this apartment. I must see him, and alone."

The marquis left her, and in a few moments Raymond entered the room, ushered in by the groom of the chambers.

He had the old air of well-bred and fashionable indifference which so well became him, and carried a light gold-headed riding-whip in his hand.

"Mademoiselle," he said, "will perhaps pardon my intrusion of this evening, which can scarcely surprise her, if she will be ​pleased to remember that more than a month has elapsed since a melancholy occurrence at the Royal Italian Opera House, and that I have some right to be impatient."

She did not answer him immediately; for at this moment a servant entered, carrying a lamp, which he placed on the table by her side, and afterwards drew the heavy velvet curtains across the great window, shutting out the chill winter night.

"You are very much altered, mademoiselle," said Raymond, as he scrutinized the wan face under the lamp-light.

"That is scarcely strange," she answered, in a chilling tone. "I am not yet accustomed to crime, and cannot wear the memory of it lightly."

Her visitor was dusting his polished riding-boot with his handkerchief as he spoke. Looking up with a smile, he said,—

"Nay, mademoiselle, I give you credit for more philosophy. Why use ugly words? Crime—poison—murder!" He paused between each of these three words, as if every syllable had been some sharp instrument—as if every time he spoke he stabbed her to the heart and stopped to calculate the depth of the wound. "There are no such words as those for beauty and high rank. A person far removed from our sphere offends us, and we sweep him from our path. We might as well regret the venomous insect which, having stung us, we destroy."

She did not acknowledge his words by so much as one glance or gesture, but said coldly,—

"You were so candid as to confess, monsieur, when you served me, yonder in Paris, that you did so in the expectation of a reward. You are here, no doubt, to claim that reward?"

He looked up at her with so strange a light in his blue eyes, and so singular a smile curving the dark moustache which hid his thin arched lips, that in spite of herself she was startled into looking at him anxiously. He was determined that in the game they were playing she should hold no hidden cards, and he was therefore resolved to see her face stripped of its mask of cold indifference. After a minute's pause he answered her question,—

"I am."

"It is well, monsieur. Will you be good enough to state the amount you claim for your services?"

"You are determined, mademoiselle, it appears," he said, with the strange light still glittering in his eyes, "you are determined to give me credit for none but the most mercenary sentiments. Suppose I do not claim any amount of money in repayment of my services?"

"Then, monsieur, I have wronged you. You are a disinterested villain, and, as such, worthy of the respect of the wicked. But since this is the case, our interview is at end. I am sorry ​you decline the reward you have earned so worthily, and I have the honour to wish you good evening."

He gave a low musical laugh. "Pardon me, mademoiselle," he said, "but really your words amuse me. 'A disinterested villain!' Believe me, when I tell you that disinterested villany is as great an impossibility as disinterested virtue. You are mistaken, mademoiselle, but only as to the nature of the reward I come to claim. You would confine the question to one of money. Cannot you imagine that I have acted in the hope of a higher reward than any recompense your banker's book could afford me?"

She looked at him with a puzzled expression, but his face was hidden. He was trifling with his light riding-whip, and looking down at the hearth. After a minute's pause he lifted his head, and glanced at her with the same dangerous smile.

"You cannot guess, then, mademoiselle, the price I claim for my services yonder?" he asked.

"No."

"Nay, mademoiselle, reflect."

"It would be useless. I might anticipate your claiming half my fortune, as I am, in a manner, in your power———"

"Oh, yes," he murmured softly, interrupting her, "you are, in a manner, in my power certainly."

"But the possibility of your claiming from me anything except money has never for a moment occurred to me."

"Mademoiselle, when first I saw you I looked at you through an opera-glass from my place in the stalls of the Italian Opera. The glass, mademoiselle, was an excellent one, for it revealed every line and every change in your beautiful face. From my observation of that face I made two or three conclusions about your character, which I now find were not made upon false premises. You are impulsive, mademoiselle, but you are not far-seeing. You are strong in your resolutions when once your mind is fixed; but that mind is easily influenced by others. You have passion, genius, courage—rare and beautiful gifts which distinguish you from the rest of womankind; but you have not that power of calculation, that inductive science, which never sees the effect without looking for the cause, which men have christened mathematics. I, mademoiselle, am a mathematician. As such, I sat down to play a deep and dangerous game with you; and as such, now that the hour has come at which I can show my hand, you will see that I hold the winning cards."

"I cannot understand, monsieur———"

"Perhaps not, yet. When you first honoured me with an interview you were pleased to call me 'an adventurer.' You used the expression as a term of reproach. Strange to say, I never ​held it in that light. When it pleased Heaven, or Fate—whichever name you please to give the abstraction—to throw me out upon a world with which my life has been one long war, it pleased that Power to give me nothing but my brains for weapons in the great fight. No rank, no rent-roll, neither mother nor father, friend nor patron. All to win, and nothing to lose. How much I had won when I first saw you it would be hard for you, born in those great saloons to which I have struggled from the mire of the streets—it would be very hard, I say, for you to guess. I entered Paris one year ago, possessed of a sum of money which to me was wealth, but which might, perhaps, to you, be a month's income. I had only one object—to multiply that sum a hundredfold. I became, therefore, a speculator, or, as you call it, 'an adventurer.' As a speculator, I took my seat in the stalls of the Opera House the night I first saw you."

She looked at him in utter bewilderment, as he sat in his most careless attitude, playing with the gold handle of his riding-whip, but she did not attempt to speak, and he continued,—

"I happened to hear from a bystander that you were the richest woman in France. Do you know, mademoiselle, how an adventurer, with a tolerably handsome face and a sufficiently gentlemanly address, generally calculates on enriching himself? Or, if you do not know, can you guess?"

"No," she muttered, looking at him now as if she were in a trance, and he had some strange magnetic power over her.

"Then, mademoiselle, I must enlighten you. The adventurer who does not care to grow grey and decrepit in making a fortune by that slow and uncertain mode which people call 'honest industry,' looks about him for a fortune ready made and waiting for him to claim it. He makes a wealthy marriage."

"A wealthy marriage?" She repeated the words after him, as if mechanically.

"Therefore, mademoiselle, on seeing you, and on hearing the extent of your fortune, I said to myself, 'That is the woman I must marry!'"

"Monsieur!" She started indignantly from her reclining attitude; but the effort was too much for her shattered frame, and she sank back exhausted.

"Nay, mademoiselle, I did not say 'That is the woman I will marry,' but rather, 'That is the woman I must try to marry;' for as yet, remember, I did not hold one card in the great game I had to play. I raised my glass, and looked long at your face. A very beautiful face, mademoiselle, as you and your glass have long decided between you. I was—pardon me—disappointed. Had you been an ugly woman, my chances would have been so much better. Had you been disfigured by a hump—(if it had ​been but the faintest elevation of one white shoulder, prouder, perhaps, than its fellow)—had your hair been tinged with even a suspicion of the ardent hue which prejudice condemns, it would have been a wonderful advantage to me. Vain hope to win you by flattery, when even the truth must sound like flattery. And then, again, one glance told me that you were no pretty simpleton, to be won by a stratagem, or bewildered by romantic speeches. And yet, mademoiselle, I did not despair. You were beautiful; you were impassioned. In your veins ran the purple blood of a nation whose children's love and hate are both akin to madness! You had, in short, a soul, and you might have a secret!"

"Monsieur!"

"At any rate it would be no lost time to watch you. I therefore watched. Two or three gentlemen were talking to you; you did not listen to them; you were asked the same question three times, and on the second repetition of it you started, and replied as by an effort. You were weary, or indifferent. Now, as I have told you, mademoiselle, in the science of mathematics we acknowledge no effect without a cause; there was a cause, then, for this distraction on your part. In a few minutes the curtain rose. You were no longer absent-minded. Elvino came on the stage—you were all attention. You tried, mademoiselle, not to appear attentive; but your mouth, the most flexible feature in your face, betrayed you. The cause, then, of your late distraction was Elvino, otherwise the fashionable tenor, Gaston de Lancy."

"Monsieur, for pity's sake——" she cried imploringly.

"This was card number one. My chances were looking up. In a few minutes I saw you throw your bouquet on the stage I also saw the note. You had a secret, mademoiselle, and I possessed the clue to it. My cards were good ones. The rest must be done by good play. I knew I was no bad player, and I sat down to the game with the determination to rise a winner."

"Finish the recital of your villany, monsieur, I beg—it really becomes wearisome." She tried as she spoke to imitate his own indifference of manner; but she was utterly subdued and broken down, and waited for him to continue as the victim might wait the pleasure of the executioner, and with as little thought of opposing him.

"Then, mademoiselle, I have little more to say, except to claim my reward. That reward is—your hand." He said this as if he never even dreamt of the possibility of a refusal.

"Are you mad, monsieur?" She had for some time anticipated this climax, and she felt how utterly powerless she was in the hands of an unscrupulous villain. How unscrupulous she did not yet know.

​"Nay, mademoiselle, remember! A man has been poisoned. Easy enough to set suspicion, which has already pointed to foul play, more fully at work. Easy enough to prove a certain secret marriage, a certain midnight visit to that renowned and not too highly-respected chemist, Monsieur Blurosset. Easy enough to produce the order for five thousand francs signed by Mademoiselle de Cevennes. And should these proofs not carry with them conviction, I am the fortunate possessor of a wine-glass emblazoned with the arms of your house, in which still remains the sediment of a poison well known to the more distinguished members of the medical science. I think, mademoiselle, these few evidences, added to the powerful motive revealed by your secret marriage, would be quite sufficient to set every newspaper in France busy with the details of a murder unprecedented in the criminal annals of this country. But, mademoiselle, I have wearied you; you are pale, exhausted. I have no wish to hurry you into a rash acceptance of my offer. Think of it, and to-morrow let me hear your decision. Till then, adieu." He rose as he spoke.

She bowed her head in assent to his last proposition, and he left her.

Did he know, or did he guess, that there might be another reason to render her acceptance of his hand possible? Did he think that even his obscure name might be a shelter to her in days to come?

O Valerie, Valerie, for ever haunted by the one beloved creature gone out of this world never to return! For ever pursued by the image of the love which never was—which at its best and brightest was—but a false dream. Most treacherous when most tender, most cruel when most kind, most completely false when it most seemed a holy truth. Weep, Valerie, for the long years to come, whose dismal burden shall for ever be, "Oh, never, never more!"

Chapter IX.
A Marriage in High Life.

A month from the time at which this interview took place, everyone worth speaking of in Paris is busy talking of a singular marriage about to be celebrated in that smaller and upper circle which forms the apex of the fashionable pyramid. The niece and heiress of the Marquis de Cevennes is about to marry a gentleman of whom the Faubourg St. Germain knows very little. But though the faubourg knows very little, the faubourg has, notwithstanding, a great deal to say; perhaps all the more from the very slight foundation it has for its asser​tions. Thus, on Tuesday the faubourg affirms that Monsieur Raymond Marolles is a German, and a political refugee. On Wednesday the faubourg rescinds: he is not a German, he is a Frenchman, the son of an illegitimate son of Philip Egalité, and, consequently, nephew to the king, by whose influence the marriage has been negotiated. The faubourg, in short, has so many accounts of Monsieur Raymond Marolles, that it is quite unnecessary for the Marquis de Cevennes to give any account of him whatever, and he alone, therefore, is silent on the subject. Monsieur Marolles is a very worthy man—a gentleman, of course—and his niece is very much attached to him; beyond this, the marquis does not condescend to enlighten his numerous acquaintance. How much more might the faubourg have to say if it could for one moment imagine the details of a stormy scene which took place between the uncle and niece at the château in Normandy, when, kneeling before the cross, Valerie swore that there was so dreadful a reason for this strange marriage, that, did her uncle know it, he would himself kneel at her feet and implore her to sacrifice herself to save the honour of her noble house. What might have been suggested to the mind of the marquis by these dark hints no one knew; but he ceased to oppose the marriage of the only scion of one of the highest families in France with a man who could tell nothing of himself, except that he had received the education of a gentleman, and had a will strong enough to conquer fortune.

The religious solemnization of the marriage was performed with great magnificence at the Madeleine. Wealth, rank, and fashion were equally represented at the dejeûner which succeeded the ceremonial, and Monsieur Marolles found himself the centre of a circle of the old nobility of France. It would have been very difficult, even for an attentive observer, to discover one triumphant flash in those light blue eyes, or one smile playing round the thin lips, by which a stranger might divine that the bridegroom of to-day was the winner of a deep-laid and villanous scheme. He bore his good fortune, in fact, with such well-bred indifference, that the faubourg immediately set him down as a great man, even if not one of the set which was the seventh heaven in that Parisian paradise. And it would have been equally difficult for any observer to read the secret of the pale but beautiful face of the bride. Cold, serene, and haughty, she smiled a stereotyped smile upon all, and showed no more agitation during the ceremony than she might have done had she been personating a bride in an acted charade.

It may be, that the hour when any event, however startling, however painful, could move her from this cold serenity, had for ever passed away. It may be, that having outlived all the ​happiness of her life, she had almost outlived the faculty of feeling or of suffering, and must henceforth exist only for the world—a distinguished actress in the great comedy of fashionable life.

She is standing in a window filled with exotics, which form a great screen of dark green leaves and tropical flowers, through which the blue spring sky looks in, clear, bright, and cold. She is talking to an elderly duchess, a languid and rather faded personage, dressed in ruby velvet, and equally distinguished for the magnificence of her lace and the artful composition of her complexion, which is as near an approach to nature as can be achieved by pearl-powder. "And you leave France in a month, to take possession of your estates in South America?" she asks.

"In a month, yes," says Valerie, playing with the large dark leaf of a magnolia. "I am anxious to see my mother's native country. I am tired of Paris."

"Really? You surprise me!" The languid duchess cannot conceive the possibility of any one being tired of a Parisian existence. She is deep in her thirty-fourth platonic attachment—the object, a celebrated novelist of the transcendental school; and as at this moment she sees him entering the room by a distant door, she strolls away from the window, carrying her perfumed complexion through the delighted crowd.

Perhaps Monsieur Raymond Marolles, standing talking to an old Buonapartist general, whose breast is one constellation of stars and crosses, had only been waiting for this opportunity, for he advanced presently with soft step and graceful carriage towards the ottoman on which his bride had seated herself. She was trifling with her costly bridal bouquet as the bridegroom approached her, plucking the perfumed petals one by one, and scattering them on the ground at her feet in very wantonness.

"Valerie," he said, bending over her, and speaking in tones which, by reason of the softness of their intonation, might have been tender, but for the want of some diviner melody from within the soul of the man; not having which, they had the false jingle of a spurious coin.

The spot in which the bride was seated was so sheltered by the flowers and the satin hangings which shrouded the window, that it formed a little alcove, shut out from the crowded room.

"Valerie!" he repeated; and finding that she did not answer, he laid his white ungloved hand upon her jewelled wrist.

She started to her feet, drawing herself up to her fullest height, and shaking off his hand with a gesture which, had he been the foulest and most loathsome reptile crawling upon the ​earth's wide face, could not have bespoken a more intense abhorrence.

"There could not be a better time than this," she said, "to say what I have to say. You may perhaps imagine that to be compelled to speak to you at all is so abhorrent to me, that I shall use the fewest words I can, and use those words in their very fullest sense. You are the incarnation of misery and crime. As such you can perhaps understand how deeply I hate you. You are a villain; and so mean and despicable a villain, that even in the hour of your success you are a creature to be pitied; since from the very depth of your degradation you lack the power to know how much you are degraded! As such I scorn and loathe you, as we loathe those venemous reptiles which, from their noxious qualities, defy our power to handle and exterminate them."

"And as your husband, madame?" Her bitter words discomposed him so little, that he stooped to pick up a costly flower which in her passion she had thrown down, and placed it carefully in his button-hole. "As your husband, madame? The state of your feelings towards me in that character is perhaps a question more to the point."

"You are right," she said, casting all assumption of indifference aside, and trembling with scornful rage. "That is the question. Your speculation has been a successful one."

"Entirely successful," he replied, still arranging the flower in his coat.

"You have the command of my fortune———"

"A fortune which many princes might be proud to possess," he interposed, looking at the blossom, not at her. He may possibly have been a brave man, but he was not distinguished for looking in people's faces, and he did not care about meeting her eyes to-day.

"But if you think the words whose sacred import has been prostituted by us this day have any meaning for you or me; if you think there is a lacquey or a groom in this vast city, a ragged mendicant standing at a church-door whom I would not sooner call my husband than the wretch who stands beside me now, you neither know me nor my sex. My fortune you are welcome to. Take it, squander it, scatter it to the winds, spend it to the last farthing on the low vices that are pleasure to such men as you. But dare to address me with but one word from your false lips, dare to approach me so near as to touch but the hem of my dress, and that moment I proclaim the story of our marriage from first to last. Believe me when I say—and if you look me in the face you will believe me—the restraining influence is very slight that holds me back from standing now in the centre of this assembly to proclaim myself a vile and cruel ​murderess, and you my tempter and accomplice. Believe me when I tell you that it needs but one look of yours to provoke me to blazon this hideous secret, and cry its details in the very market-place. Believe this, and rest contented with the wages of your work."

Exhausted by her passion, she sank into her seat. Raymond looked at her with a supercilious sneer. He despised her for this sudden outbreak of rage and hatred, for he felt how much his calculating brain and icy temperament made him her superior.

"You are somewhat hasty, madame, in your conclusions. Who said I was discontented with the wages of my work, when for those wages alone I have played the game in which, as you say, I am the conqueror? For the rest, I do not think I am the man to break my heart for love of any woman breathing, as I never quite understood what this same weakness of the brain, which men have christened love, really is; and even were the light of dark eyes necessary to my happiness, I need scarcely tell you, madame, that beauty is very indulgent to a man with such a fortune as I am master of to-day. There is nothing on earth to prevent our agreeing remarkably well; and perhaps this marriage, which you speak of so bitterly, may be as happy as many other unions, which, were I Asmodeus and you my pupil, we could look down on to-day through the housetops of this good city of Paris."

I wonder whether Monsieur Marolles was right? I wonder whether this thrice-sacred sacrament, ordained by an Almighty Power for the glory and the happiness of the earth, is ever, by any chance, profaned and changed into a bitter mockery or a wicked lie? Whether, by any hazard, these holy words were ever used in any dark hour of this world's history, to join such people as had been happier far asunder, though they had been parted in their graves; or whether, indeed, this solemn ceremonial has not so often united such people, with a chain no time has power to wear or lengthen, that it has at last, unto some ill-directed minds, sunk to the level of a pitiful and worn-out farce?

Chapter X.
Animal Magnetism.

Nearly a month has passed since this strange marriage, and Monsieur Blurosset is seated at his little green-covered table, the lamp-light falling full upon the outspread pack of cards, over which the blue spectacles bend with the same intent and ​concentrated gaze as on the night when the fate of Valerie hung on the lips of the professor of chemistry and pasteboard. Every now and then, with light and careful fingers, Monsieur Blurosset changes the position of some card or cards. Sometimes he throws himself back in his chair and thinks deeply. The expressionless mouth, which betrays no secrets, tells nothing of the nature of his thoughts. Sometimes he makes notes on a long slip of paper; rows of figures, and problems in algebra, over which he ponders long. By-and-by, for the first time, he looks up and listens.

His little apartment has two doors. One, which leads out on to the staircase; a second, which communicates with his bed-chamber. This door is open a very little, but enough to show that there is a feeble light burning within the chamber. It is in the direction of this door that the blue spectacles are fixed when Monsieur Blurosset suspends his calculations in order to listen; and it is to a sound within this room that he listens intently.

That sound is the laboured and heavy breathing of a man. The room is tenanted.

"Good," says Monsieur Blurosset, presently, "the respiration is certainly more regular. It is really a most wonderful case."

As he says this, he looks at his watch. "Five minutes past eleven—time for the dose," he mutters.

He goes to the little cabinet from which he took the drug he gave to Valerie, and busies himself with some bottles, from which he mixes a draught in a small medicine-glass; he holds it to the light, puts it to his lips, and then passes with it into the next room.

There is a sound as if the person to whom he gave the medicine made some faint resistance, but in a few minutes Monsieur Blurosset emerges from the room carrying the empty glass.

He reseats himself before the green table, and resumes his contemplation of the cards. Presently a bell rings. "So late," mutters Monsieur Blurosset; "it is most likely some one for me." He rises, sweeps the cards into one pack, and going over to the door of his bedroom, shuts its softly. When he has done so, he listens for a moment with his ear close to the woodwork. There is not a sound of the breathing within.

He has scarcely done so when the bell rings for the second time. He opens the door communicating with the staircase, and admits a visitor. The visitor is a woman, very plainly dressed, and thickly veiled.

"Monsieur Blurosset?" she says, inquiringly.

"The same, madame. Please enter, and be good enough to be seated." He hands her a chair at a little distance from the green table, and as far away as he can place it from the door of ​the bedchamber: she sits down, and as he appears to wait for her to speak, she says,—

"I have heard of your fame, monsieur, and come———"

"Nay, madame," he says, interrupting her, "you can raise your veil if you will. I perfectly remember you; I never forget voices, Mademoiselle de Cevennes."

There is no shade of impertinence in his manner as he says this; he speaks as though he were merely stating a simple fact which it is as well for her to know. He has the air, in all he does or says, of a scientific man who has no existence out of the region of science.

Valerie—for it is indeed she—raises her veil.

"Monsieur," she says, "you are candid with me, and it will be the best for me to be frank with you. I am very unhappy—I have been so for some months past; and I shall be so until my dying day. One reason alone has prevented my coming to you long ere this, to offer you half my fortune for such another drug as that which you sold to me some time past. You may judge, then, that reason is a very powerful one, since, though death alone can give me peace, I yet do not wish to die. But I wish to have at my command a means of certain death. I may never use it at all: I swear never to use it on anyone but myself!"

All this time the blue spectacles have been fixed on her face, and now Monsieur Blurosset interrupts her—

"And now for such a drug, mademoiselle, you would offer me a large sum of money?" he asks.

"I would, monsieur."

"I cannot sell it you," he says, as quietly as though he were speaking of some unimportant trifle.

"You cannot?" she exclaims.

"No, mademoiselle. I am a man absorbed entirely in the pursuit of science. My life has been so long devoted to science only, that perhaps I may have come to hold everything beyond the circle of my little laboratory too lightly. You asked me some time since for a poison, or at least you were introduced to me by a pupil of mine, at whose request I sold you a drug. I had been twenty years studying the properties of that drug. I may not know them fully yet, but I expect to do so before this year is out. I gave it to you, and, for all I know to the contrary, it may in your hands have done some mischief." He pauses here and looks at her for a moment; but she has borne the knowledge of her crime so long, and it has become so much a part of her, that she does not flinch under his scrutiny.

"I placed a weapon in your hands," he continues, "and I had no right to do so. I never thought of this at that time; but I have thought of it since. For the rest, I have no inducement to sell you the drug you ask for. Money is of little use to me. ​except in the necessary expenses of the chemicals I use. These"—he points to the cards—"give me enough for those expenses; beyond those, my wants amount to some few francs a week."

"Then you will not sell me this drug? You are determined?" she asks.

"Quite determined."

She shrugs her shoulders. "As you please. There is always some river within reach of the wretched; and you may depend, monsieur, that they who cannot support life will find a means of death. I will wish you good evening."

She is about to leave the room, when she stops, with her hand upon the lock of the door, and turns round.

She stands for a few minutes motionless and silent, holding the handle of the door, and with her other hand upon her heart. Monsieur Blurosset has the faintest shadow of a look of surprise in his expressionless countenance.

"I don't know what is the matter with me to-night," she says, "but something seems to root me to this spot. I cannot leave this room."

"You are ill, mademoiselle, perhaps. Let me give you some restorative."

"No, no, I am not ill."

Again she is silent; her eyes are fixed, not on the chemist, but with a strange vacant gaze upon the wall before her. Suddenly she asks him,—

"Do you believe in animal magnetism?"

"Madame, I have spent half my lifetime in trying to answer that question, and I can only answer it now by halves. Sometimes no; sometimes yes."

"Do you believe it possible for one soul to be gifted with a mysterious prescience of the emotions of another soul?—to be sad when that is sad, though utterly unconscious of any cause for sadness; and to rejoice when that is happy, having no reason for rejoicing?"

"I cannot answer your question, madame, because it involves another. I never yet have discovered what the soul really is. Animal magnetism, if it ever become a science, will be a material science, and the soul escapes from all material dissection."

"Do you believe, then, that by some subtle influence, whose nature is unknown to us, we may have a strange consciousness of the presence or the approach of some people, conveyed to us by neither the hearing nor the sight, but rather as if we felt that they were near?"

"You believe this possible, madame, or you would not ask the question."

"Perhaps. I have sometimes thought that I had this conciousness; but it related to a person who is dead———"

​"Yes. madame."

"And—you will think me mad; Heaven knows, I think myself so—I feel as if that person were near me to-night."

The chemist rises, and, going over to her, feels her pulse. It is rapid and intermittent. She is evidently violently agitated, though she is trying with her utmost power to control herself.

"But you say that this person is dead?" he asks.

"Yes; he died some months since."

"You know that there are no such things as ghosts?"

"I am perfectly convinced of that!"

"And yet—?" he asks.

"And yet I feel as though the dead were near me to-night. Tell me—there is no one in this room but ourselves?"

"No one."

"And that door—it leads———"

"Into the room in which I sleep."

"And there is no one there?" she asks.

"No one. Let me give you a sedative, madame: you are certainly ill."

"No, no, monsieur; you are very good. I am still weak from the effects of a long illness. That weakness may be the cause of my silly fancies of to-night. To-morrow I leave France, perhaps for ever."

She leaves him; but on the steep dark staircase she pauses for a moment, and seems irresolute, as if half determined to return: then she hurries on, and in a minute is in the street.

She takes a circuitous route towards the house in which she lives. So plainly dressed, and thickly veiled, no one stops to notice her as she walks along.

Her husband, Monsieur Marolles, is engaged at a dinner given by a distinguished member of the chamber of peers. Decidedly he has held winning cards in the game of life. And she, for ever haunted by the past, with weary step goes onward to a dark and unknown future.

Book the Fourth.
NAPOLEON THE GREAT.

---

Chapter I.
The Boy from Slopperton.

Eight years have passed since the trial of Richard Marwood. How have those eight years been spent by "Daredevil Dick?"

In a small room a few feet square, in the County Lunatic Asylum, fourteen miles from the town of Slopperton, with no human being's companionship but that of a grumpy old deaf keeper, and a boy, his assistant—for eight monotonous years this man's existence has crept slowly on; always the same: the same food, the same hours at which that food must be eaten, the same rules and regulations for every action of his inactive life. Think of this, and pity the man surnamed "Daredevil Dick," and once the maddest and merriest creature in a mad and merry circle. Think of the daily walk in a great square flagged yard—the solitary walk, for he is not allowed even the fellowship of the other lunatics, lest the madness which led him to commit an awful crime should again break out, and endanger the lives of those about him. During eight long years he has counted every stone in the flooring, every flaw and every crack in each of those stones. He knows the shape of every shadow that falls upon the whitewashed wall, and can, at all seasons of the year, tell the hour by the falling of it. He knows that at such a time on a summer's evening the shadows of the iron bars of the window will make long black lines across the ground, and mount and mount, dividing the wall as if it were in panels, till they meet, and absorbing altogether the declining light, surround and absorb him too, till he is once more alone in the darkness. He knows, too, that at such a time on the grey winter's morning these same shadows will be the first indications of the coming light; that, from the thick gloom of the dead night they will break out upon the wall, with strips of glimmering day between, only enough like light to show the blackness of the shade. He has sometimes been mad enough and wretched enough to pray that these shadows might fall differently, that the very order of nature might be reversed, to break this bitter and deadly mono​tony. He has sometimes prayed that, looking up, he might see a great fire in the sky, and know that the world was at an end. How often he has prayed to die, it would be difficult to say. At one time it was his only prayer; at one time he did not pray at all. He has been permitted at intervals to see his mother; but her visits, though he has counted the days, hours, and even minutes between them, have only left him more despondent than ever. She brings so much with her into his lonely prison, so much memory of a joyous past, of freedom, of a happy home, whose happiness he did his best in his wild youth to destroy; the memory, too, of that careless youth, its boon companions, its devoted friends. She brings so much of all this back to him by the mere fact of her presence, that she leaves behind her the blackness of a despair far more terrible than the most terrible death. She represents to him the outer world; for she is the only creature belonging to it who ever crosses the threshold of his prison. The asylum chaplain, the asylum doctor, the keepers and the officials belonging to the asylum—all these are part and parcel of this great prison-house of stone, brick, and mortar and seem to be about as capable of feeling for him, listening to him, or understanding him, as the stones, bricks, and mortar themselves. Routine is the ruler of this great prison; and if this wretched insane criminal cannot live by rules and regulations, he must die according to them, and be buried by them, and so be done with, out of the way; and his little room, No. 35, will be ready for some one else, as wicked, as dangerous, and as unfortunate as he.

During the earlier part of his imprisonment the idea had pervaded the asylum that as he had been found guilty of committing one murder, he might, very likely, find it necessary to his peculiar state of mind to commit more murders, and would probably find it soothing to his feelings to assassinate anybody who might come in his way any morning before breakfast. The watch kept upon him was therefore for some time very strict. He was rather popular at first in the asylum, as a distinguished public character; and the keepers, though a little shy of attending upon him in their proper persons, were extremely fond of peering in at him through a little oval opening in the upper panel of the door of his cell. They also brought such visitors as came to improve their minds by going over the hospital for the insane to have a special and private view of this maniacal murderer; and they generally received an extra donation from the sight-seers thus gratified. Even the lunatics themselves were interested in the supposed assassin. A gentleman, who claimed to be the Emperor of the German Ocean and the Chelsea Waterworks, was very anxious to see him, as he had received a despatch from his minister of police ​informing him that Richard Marwood had red hair, and he particularly wished to confirm this intelligence, or to give the minister his congé.

Another highly-respectable person, whose case was before the House of Commons, and who took minutes of it every day on a slate, with a bit of slate pencil which he wore attached to his button-hole by a string, and which also served him as a toothpick—the slate being intrusted to a keeper who forwarded it to the electric telegraph, to be laid on the table of the House, and brought home, washed clean, in half an hour, which was always done to the minute;—this gentleman also sighed for an introduction to poor Dick, for Maria Martin had come to him in a vision all the way from the Red Barn, to tell him that the prisoner was his first cousin, through the marriage of his uncle with the third daughter of Henry the Eighth's seventh wife; and he considered it only natural and proper that such near relations should become intimately acquainted with each other.

A lady, who pronounced herself to be the only child of the Pope of Rome, by a secret union with a highly-respectable youngperson, heiress to a gentleman connected with the muffin trade somewhere about Drury Lane, fell in love off-hand with Richard, from description alone; and begged one of the keepers to let him know that she had a clue to a subterranean passage, which led straight from the asylum to a baker's shop in Little Russell Street, Covent Garden, a distance of some two hundred and fifty miles, and had been originally constructed by William the Conqueror for the convenience of his visits to Fair Rosamond when the weather was bad. The lady begged her messenger to inform Mr. Marwood that if he liked to unite his fortune with hers, they could escape by this passage, and set up in the muffin business—unless, indeed, his Holiness of the triple crown invited them over to the Vatican, which perhaps, under existing circumstances, was hardly likely.

But though a wonder, which elsewhere would only last nine days, may in the dreary monotony of such a place as this, endure for more than nine weeks, it must still die out at last. So at last Richard was forgotten by every one except his heartbroken mother, and the keeper and boy attending upon him.

His peculiar hallucination being his fancy that he was the Emperor Napoleon the First, was, of course, little wonder in a place where every wretched creature fancied himself some one or something which he was not; where men and women walked about in long disjointed dreams, which had no waking but in death; where once bright and gifted human beings found a wild and imbecile happiness in crowns of straw, and decorations of paper and rags; which was more sad to see than the worst misery a consciousness of their state might have brought them. ​At first, Richard had talked wildly of his fancied greatness, had called his little room the rock of St. Helena, and his keeper, Sir Hudson Lowe. But he grew quieter day by day, and at last never spoke at all, except in answer to a question. And so on, for eight long years.

In the autumn of the eighth year he fell ill. A strange illness. Perhaps scarcely to be called an illness. Rather a dying out of the last light of hope, and an utter abandonment of himself to despair. Yes, that was the name of the disease under which the high and bold spirit of Daredevil Dick sank at last. Despair. A curious disease. Not to be cured by rules and regulations, however salutary those rules might be; not to be cured even by the Board, which was supposed to be in a manner omnipotent, and to be able to cure anything in one sitting; not to be cured certainly by the asylum doctor, who found Richard's case very difficult to deal with—more especially difficult since there was no positive physical malady to attack. There was a physical malady, because the patient grew every day weaker, lost appetite, and was compelled to take to his bed; but it was the malady of the mind acting on the body, and the cure of the last could only be effected by the cure of the first.

So Richard lay upon his narrow little couch, watching the shadows on the bare wall, and the clouds that passed across the patch of sky which he could see through the barred window opposite his bed, through long sunny days, and moonlight nights, throughout the month of September.

Thus it happened that one dull afternoon, on looking up, he saw a darker cloud than usual hurry by; and in its train another, darker still; then a black troop of ragged followers; and then such a shower of rain came down, as he could not remember having seen throughout the time of his captivity. But this heavy shower was only the beginning of three weeks' rainy weather; at the end of which time the country round was flooded in every direction, and Richard heard his keeper tell another man that the river outside the prison, which usually ran within twenty feet of the wall on one side of the great yard, was now swollen to such a degree as to wash the stonework of this wall for a considerable height.

The day Richard heard this he heard another dialogue, which took place in the passage outside his room. He was lying on his bed, thinking of the bitterness of his fate, as he had thought so many hundred times, through so many hundred days, till he had become, as it were, the slave of a dreadful habit of his mind, and was obliged to go over the same ground for ever and ever, whether he would or no—he was lying thus, when he heard big keeper say,— ​"To think as how the discontented little beast should take and go and better hisself at such a time as this here, when there ain't a boy to be had for love or money—which three shillings a week is all the Board will give—as will come here to take care of him."

Richard knew himself to be the "him" alluded to. The doctor had ordered the boy to sit up with him at night during the latter part of his illness, and it had been something of a relief to him, in the blank monotony of his life, to watch this boy's attempts to keep awake, and his furtive games at marbles under the bed when he thought Richard was not looking, or to listen to his snoring when he slept.

"You see, boys as is as bold as brass many ways—as would run under 'osses' heads, and like it; as thinks it fun to run across the railroad when there's a hexpress hengine a comin', and as will amuse theirselves for the hour together with twopen'orth of gunpowder and a lighted candle—still feels timersome about sittin' up alone of nights with him," said the keeper.

"But he's harmless enough, ain't he?" asked the other.

"Harmless! Lord bless his poor hinnercent 'art! there ain't no more harm in him nor a baby. But it's no use a sayin' that, for there ain't a boy far or near what'll come and help to take care of him."

A minute or two after this, the keeper came into Richard's room with the regulation basin of broth—a panacea, as it was supposed, for all ills, from water on the brain to rheumatism. As he put the basin down, and was about to go, Richard spoke to him,—

"The boy is going, then?"

"Yes, sir." The keeper treated him with great respect, for he had been handsomely fed by Mrs. Marwood on every visit throughout the eight years of her son's imprisonment. "Yes, he's a-goin', sir. The place ain't lively enough for him, if you please. I'd lively him, if I was the Board! Ain't he had the run of the passages and half an hour every night to enjoy hisself in the yard! He's a goin' into a doctor's service. He says it'll be jolly, carring out medicine for other people to take, and gloating over the thought of 'em a-taking it."

"And you can't get another boy to come here?"

"Well, you see, sir, the boys about here don't seem to take kindly to the place. So I've got orders from the Board to put an advertisement in one of the Slopperton papers; and I'm a-goin' to do it this afternoon. So you'll have a change in your attendance, maybe, sir, before the week's out."

Nothing could better prove the utter dreariness and desolation of Richard's life than that such a thing as the probable ​arrival of a strange boy to wait upon him seemed an event of importance. He could not help, though he despised himself for his folly, speculating upon the possible appearance of the new boy. Would he be big or little, stout or thin? What would be the colour of his eyes and hair? Would his voice be gruff or squeaky; or would it be that peculiar and uncertain voice, common to over-grown boys, which is gruff one minute and squeaky the next, and always is in one of these extremes when you most expect it to be in the other?

But these speculations were of course a part of his madness; for it is not to be supposed that a long course of solitary confinement could produce any dreadful change in the mind of a sane man; or surely no human justices or lawgivers would ever adjudge so terrible a punishment to any creature, human as themselves, and no more liable to error than themselves.

So Richard, lying on his little bed through the long rainy days, awaits the departure of his old attendant and the coming of a new one; and in the twilight of the third day he still lies looking up at the square grated window, and counting the drops falling from the eaves—for there is at last some cessation in the violence of the rain. He knows it is an autumn evening; but he has not seen the golden red of one fallen leaf, or the subdued colouring of one autumnal flower: he knows it is the end of September, because his keeper has told him so; and when his window is open, he can hear sometimes, far away, deadened by the rainy atmosphere as well as by the distance, the occasional report of some sportsman's gun. He thinks, as he hears this, of a September many years ago, when he and a scapegrace companion took a fortnight's shooting in a country where to brush against a bush, or to tread upon the long grass, was to send a feathered creature whirring up in the clear air. He remembers the merry pedestrian journey, the roadside inns, the pretty barmaids, the joint purse; the blue smoke from two short meerschaum pipes curling up to the grey morning sky; the merry laughter from two happy hearts ringing out upon the chill morning air. He remembers encounters with savage gamekeepers, of such ferocious principle and tender consciences as even the administration of a half-crown could not lull to sleep; he remembers jovial evenings in the great kitchens of old inns, where unknown quantities of good old ale were drunk, and comic songs were sung, with such a chorus, that to join in it was to be overcome by such fatigue, or to be reduced from wildest mirth to such a pitch of sudden melancholy, as ultimately to lead to the finishing of the evening in tears, or else under the table. He remembers all these things, and he wonders—as, being a madman, it is natural he should—wonders whether it can be ​indeed himself, who once was that wittiest, handsomest, most generous, and best of fellows, baptised long ago in a river of sparkling hock, moselle, and burgundy, "Daredevil Dick."

But something more than these sad memories comes with the deepening twilight, for presently Richard hears the door of his room unlocked, and his keeper's voice, saying,—

"There, go in, and tell the gent you've come. I'm a-comin' in with his supper and his lamp presently, and then I'll tell you what you've got to do."

Naturally Richard looked round in the direction of the door, for he knew this must be the strange boy. Now, his late juvenile attendant had numbered some fifteen summers; to say nothing of the same number of winters, duly chronicled by chilblains and chapped hands. Richard's eyes therefore looked towards the open door at about that height from the ground which a lad of fifteen has commonly attained; and looking thus, Richard saw nothing. He therefore lowered his glance, and in about the neighbourhood of what would have been the lowest button of his last attendant's waistcoat, he beheld the small pale thin face of a very small and very thin boy.

This small boy was standing rubbing his right little foot against his left little wizen leg, and looking intently at Richard. To say that his tiny face had a great deal of character in it would not be to say much; what face he had was all character.

Determination, concentration, energy, strength of will, and brightness of intellect, were all written in unmistakable lines upon that pale pinched face. The boy's features were wonderfully regular, and had nothing in common with the ordinary features of a boy of his age and his class; the tiny nose was a perfect aquiline; the decided mouth might have belonged to a prime minister with the blood of the Plantagenets in his veins. The eyes, of a bluish grey, were small, and a little too near together, but the light in them was the light of an intelligence marvellous in one so young.

Richard, though a wild and reckless fellow, had never been devoid of thought, and in the good days past had dabbled in many a science, and had adopted and abandoned many a creed. He was something of a physiognomist, and he read enough in one glance at this boy's face to awaken both surprise and interest in him.

"So," said he, "you are the new boy! Sit down," he pointed to a little wooden stool near the bed as he spoke. "Sit down, and make yourself at home."

The boy obeyed, and seated himself firmly by the side of Richard's pillow; but the stool was so low, and he was so small, that Richard had to change his position to look over the edge of the bed at his new attendant. While Daredevil Dick contem​plated him the boy's small grey eyes peered round the four whitewashed walls, and then fixed themselves upon the barred window with such a look of concentration, that it seemed to Richard as if the little lad must be calculating the thickness and power of resistance of each iron bar with the accuracy of a mathematician.

"What's your name, my lad?" asked Richard. He had been always beloved by all his inferiors for a manner combining the stately reserve of a great king with the friendly condescension of a popular prince.

"Slosh, sir," answered the boy, bringing his grey eyes with a great effort away from the iron bars and back to Richard.

"Slosh! A curious name. Your surname, I suppose?"

"Surname and christen name too, sir. Slosh—short for Sloshy."

"But have you no surname, then?"

"No, sir; fondling, sir."

"A foundling: dear me, and you are called Sloshy! Why, that is the name of the river that runs through Slopperton."

"Yes, sir, which I was found in the mud of the river, sir, when I was only three months old, sir."

"Found in the river—were you? Poor boy—and by whom?"

"By the gent what adopted me, sir."

"And he is?" asked Richard.

"A gent connected with the police force, sir; detective———"

This one word worked a sudden change in Richard's manner. He raised himself on his elbow, looked intently at the boy, and asked, eagerly,—

"This detective, what is his name? But no," he muttered, "I did not even know the name of that man. Stay—tell me, you know perhaps some of the men in the Slopperton police force besides your adopted father?"

"I knows every man jack of 'em, sir; and a fine staff they is—a credit to their country and a happiness to theirselves."

"Do you happen to know amongst them a dumb man?" asked Richard.

"Lor', sir, that's him."

"Who?"

"Father, sir. The gent what found me and adopted me. I've got a message for you, sir, from father, and I was a-goin' to give it you, only I thought I'd look about me a little first; but stay—Oh, dear, the gentleman's took and fainted. Here," he said, running to the door and calling out in a shrill voice, "come and unlock this here place, will yer, and look alive with that lump! The gentleman's gone off into a dead faint, and there ain't so much as a drop of water to chuck over his face."

The prisoner had indeed fallen back insensible on the bed. ​For eight long years he had nourished in his heart a glimmering though dying hope that he might one day receive some token of remembrance from the man who had taken a strange part in the eventful crisis of his life. This ray of light had lately died out, along with every other ray which had once illuminated his dreary life; but in the very moment when hope was abandoned, the token once eagerly looked for came upon him so suddenly, that the shock was too much for his shattered mind and feeble frame.

When Richard recovered from his swoon, he found himself alone with the boy from Slopperton. He was a little startled by the position of that young person, who had seated himself upon the small square deal table by the bedside, commanding from this elevation a full view of Richard's face, whereon his two small grey eyes were intently fixed, with that same odd look of concentration with which he had regarded the iron bars.

"Come now," said he, with the consolatory tone of an experienced sick-nurse; "come now, we mustn't give way like this, just because we hears from our friends; because, you see, if we does, our friends can't be no good to us whichever way their intention may be."

"You said you had a message for me," said Richard, in feeble but anxious tones.

"Well, it ain't a long un, and here it is," answered the young gentleman from his extempore pulpit; and then he continued, with very much the air of giving out a text—"Keep up your pecker."

"Keep up what?" muttered Richard.

"Your pecker. 'Keep up your pecker,' them's his words; and as he never yet vos known to make a dirty dinner off his own syllables, it ain't likely as he'll take and eat 'em. He says to me—on his fingers, in course—'Tell the gent to keep up his pecker, and leave all the rest to you; for you're a pocket edition of all the sharpness as ever knives was nothing to, or else say I've brought you up for no good whatsomedever.'"

This was rather a vague speech; so perhaps it is scarcely strange that Richard did not derive much immediate comfort from it. But, in spite of himself, he did derive a great deal of comfort from the presence of this boy, though he almost despised himself for attaching the least importance to the words of an urchin of little better than eight years of age. Certainly this urchin of eight had a shrewdness of manner which would have been almost remarkable in a man of the world of fifty, and Richard could scarcely help fancying that he must have graduated in some other hemisphere, and been thrown, small as to size, but full grown as to acuteness, into this; or it seemed as if some great strong man had been reduced into the compass of ​a little boy, in order to make him sharper, as cooks boil down a gallon of gravy to a pint in the manufacture of strong soup. But, however the boy came to be what he was, there he was, holding forth from his pulpit, and handing Richard the regulation basin of broth which composed his supper.

"Now, what you've got to do," said he, "is to get well; for until you are well, and strong too, there ain't the least probability of your bein' able to change your apartments, if you should feel so inclined, which perhaps ain't likely."

Richard looked at the diminutive speaker with a wonderment he could not repress.

"Starin' won't cure you," said his juvenile attendant, with friendly disrespect, "not if you took the pattern of my face till you could draw it in the dark. The best thing you can do is to eat your supper, and to-morrow we must try what we can do for you in the way of port wine; for if you ain't strong and well afore that ere river outside this ere vall goes down, it's a chance but vot it'll be a long time afore you sees the outside of the val in question."

Richard caught hold of the boy's small arm with a grasp which, in spite of his weakness, had a convulsive energy that nearly toppled his youthful attendant from his elevation.

"You never can think of anything so wild?" he said, in a tumult of agitation.

"Lor' bless yer 'art, no," said the boy; "we never thinks of anything vot's wild—our 'abits is business-like; but vot you've got to do is to go to sleep, and not to worrit yourself; and as I said before, I say again, when you're well and strong we'll think about changin' these apartments. We can make excuse that the look-out was too lively, or that the colour of the whitewash was a-hinjurin' our eyesight."

For the first time for many nights Richard slept well; and opening his eyes the next morning, his first anxiety was to convince himself that the arrival of the boy from Slopperton was not some foolish dream engendered in his disordered brain. No, there the boy sat: whether he had been to sleep on the table, or whether he had never taken his eyes off Richard the whole night, there he was, with those eyes fixed, exactly as they had been the night before, on the prisoner's face.

"Why, I declare we're all the better for our good night's rest," he said, rubbing his hands, as he contemplated Richard; "and we're ready for our breakfast as soon as ever we can get it, which will be soon, judging by our keeper's hobnailed boots as is a-comin' down the passage with a tray in his hand."

This rather confused statement was confirmed by a noise in the stone corridor without, which sounded as if a pair of stout working men's bluchers were walking in company with a basin and a teaspoon.

​"Hush!" said the boy, holding up a warning forefinger, "keep it dark!" Richard did not exactly know what he was to keep dark; but as he had, without one effort at resistance, surrendered himself, mentally and physically, to the direction of his small attendant, he lay perfectly still, and did not utter a word.

In obedience to this youthful director, he also took his breakfast, to the last mouthful of the regulation bread, and to the last spoonful of the regulation coffee—ay, even to the grounds (which, preponderating in that liquid, formed a species of stratum at the bottom of the basin, commonly known to the inmates of the asylum as "the thick")—for as the boy said, "grounds is strengthening." Breakfast finished, the asylum physician came, in the course of his rounds, for his matutinal visit to Richard's cell. His skill was entirely at a loss to find any cure for so strange a disease as that which affected the prisoner. One of the leading features, however, in this young man's sickness, had been an entire loss of appetite, and almost an entire inability to sleep. When, therefore, he heard that his patient had eaten a good supper, slept well all night, and had just finished the regulation breakfast, he said,—

"Come, come, we are getting better, then—our complaint is taking a turn. We are quiet in our mind, too, eh? Not fretting about Moscow, or making ourselves unhappy about Waterloo, I hope?"

The asylum doctor was a cheerful easy good-tempered fellow, who humoured the fancies of his patients, however wild they might be; and though half the kings in the history of England, and some sovereigns unchronicled in any history whatever were represented in the establishment, he was never known to forget the respect due to a monarch, however condescending that monarch might be. He was, therefore, a general favourite; and had received more orders of the Bath and the Garter, in the shape of red tape and scraps of paper, and more title-deeds, in the way of old curl-papers and bits of newspaper, than would have served as the stock-in-trade of a marine storekeeper, with the addition of a few bottles and a black doll. He knew that one characteristic of Richard's madness was to fancy himself the chained eagle of the sea-bound rock, and he thought to humour the patient by humouring the hallucination.

Richard looked at this gentleman with a thoughtful glance in his dark eyes.

"I didn't mind Moscow, sir," he said, very gravely; "the elements beat me there—and they were stronger than Hannibal; but at Waterloo, what broke my heart was—not the defeat, but the disgrace!" He turned away his head as he epoke, and lay in silence, with his back turned to the good natured physician.

​"No complaints about Sir Hudson Lowe, I hope?" said the medical man. "They give you everything you want, general?"

The good doctor, being so much in the habit of humouring his patients, had their titles always at the tip of his tongue; and walked about in a perfect atmosphere of Pinnock's Goldsmith.

As the general made no reply to his question, the doctor looked from him to the boy, who had, out of respect to the medical official, descended from his pulpit, and stood tugging at a very diminutive lock of hair, with an action which he intended to represent a bow.

"Does he ask for anything?" asked the doctor.

"Don't he, sir?" said the boy, answering one question with another. "He's been doing nothin' for ever so long but askin' for a drop o' wine. He says he feels a kind of sinkin' that nothin' but wine can cure."

"He shall have it, then," said the doctor. "A little port wine with a touch of iron in it would help to bring him round as soon as anything, and be sure you see that he takes it. I've been giving him quinine for some time past; but it has done so little towards making him stronger, that I sometimes doubt his having taken it. Has he complained of anything else?"

"Well, sir," said the boy, this time looking at his questioner very intently, and seeming to consider every word before he said it, "there is somethin' which I can make out from what he says when he talks to hisself—and he does talk to hisself awful—somethin' which preys upon his mind very much; but I don't suppose it's much good mentioning it either." Here he stopped, hesitating, and looking very earnestly at the doctor.

"Why not, my boy?"

"Because you see, sir, what he hankers after is agen the rules of the asylum—leastways, the rules the Board makes for such as him."

"But what is it, my good lad? Tell me what it is he wishes for?" said the medical man.

"Why, it's a singular wish, I dare say, sir; but he's allus a talkin' about the other lun——" he hesitated, as if out of delicacy towards Richard, and substituted the word "boarders" for that which he had been about to use—"and he says, if he could only be allowed to mix with 'em now and then he'd be as happy as a king. But, of course, as I was a-tellin' him when you come in, sir, that's agen the rules of the establishment, and in consequence is impossible—'cause why, these 'ere rules is like Swedes and Nasturtiums—[the boy from Slopperton may possibly have been thinking of the Medes and Persians]—and can't be gone agen."

​"I don't know about that," said the good-natured doctor. "So, general," he added, turning to Richard, who had shifted his position, and now lay looking at his visitor rather anxiously, "so, general, you would like to mix with your friends out there?"

"Indeed I should, sir." Those deep and earnest dark eyes, with which Richard watched the doctor's face, were scarcely the eyes of a madman.

"Very well, then," said the medical man, "very well; we must see if it can't be managed. But I say, general, you'll find the Prince Regent among your fellow-boarders; and I wouldn't answer for your not meeting with Lord Gastlereagh, and that might cause unpleasantness—eh, general?"

"No, no, sir; there's no fear of that. Political differences should never———"

"Interfere with private friendship. A noble sentiment, general. Very well, you shall mix with the other boarders to-morrow. I'll speak to the Board about it this afternoon. This, luckily, is a Board-day. You'll find George the Fourth a very nice fellow. He came here because he would take everything of other people's that he could lay his hands on, and said he was only taking taxes from his subjects. Good-day. I'll send round some port wine immediately, and you shall have a couple of glasses a day given you; so keep up your spirits, general."

"Well," said the boy from Slopperton, as the doctor closed the door behind him, "that 'ere medical officer's a regular brick: and all I can say is to repeat his last words—which ought to be printed in gold letters a foot high—and those words is,—'Keep up your spirits, general.'"

Chapter II.
Mr. Augustus Darley and Mr. Joseph Peters go out Fishing.

A long period of incessant rains had by no means improved the natural beauties of the Sloshy; nor had it in any manner enhanced the advantages attending a residence on the banks of that river. The occupants of the houses by the waterside were in the habit of going to sleep at night with the firm conviction that the lower portion of their tenement was a comfortable kitchen, and awakening in the morning were apt to find it a miniature lake.

Then, again, the river had a knack of dropping in at odd times, in a friendly way, when least expected—when Mrs. Jones was cooking the Sunday's dinner, or while Mrs. Brown was gone to market; and, as its manner of entering an apartment was, ​after the fashion of a ghost in a melodrama, to rise through the floor, the surprise occasioned by its appearance was not unalloyed by vexation.

It would intrude, an uninvited guest, at a social tea-party, and suddenly isolate every visitor on his or her chair as on an island. There was not a mouse or a black-beetle in any of the kitchens by the Sloshy whose life was worth the holding, such an enemy was the swelling water to all domestic peace or comfort.

It is true that to some fresh and adventurous spirits the rising of the river afforded a kind of eccentric gratification. It gave a smack of the flavour of Venice to the dull insipidity of Slopperton life; and to an imaginative mind every coal-barge that went by became a gondola, and only wanted a cavalier, with a very short doublet, pointed shoes, and a guitar, to make it perfection.

Indeed, Miss Jones, milliner and dressmaker, had been heard to say, that when she saw the water coming up to the parlour-windows she could hardly believe she was not really in the city of the winged horses, round the corner out of the square of St. Mark's, and three doors from the Bridge of Sighs. Miss Jones was well up in Venetian topography, as she was engaged in the perusal of a powerful work in penny numbers, detailing the adventures of a celebrated "Bravo" of that city.

To the ardent minds of the juvenile denizens of the waterside the swollen river was a source of pure and unalloyed delight. To take a tour round one's own back kitchen in a washing-tub, with a duster for a sail, is perhaps, at the age of six, a more perfect species of enjoyment than that afforded by any Alpine glories or Highland scenery through which we may wander in after-years, when Reason has taught us her cold lesson, that, however bright the sun may shine on one side of the mountain, the shadows are awaiting us on the other.

There is a gentleman in a cutaway coat and a white hat, smoking a very short and black clay pipe, as he loiters on the bank of the Sloshy. I wonder what he thinks of the river?

It is eight years since this gentleman was last in Slopperton; then he came as a witness in the trial of Richard Marwood; then he had a black eye, and was out-at-elbows; now, his optics are surrounded with no dark shades which mar their natural colour—clear bright grey. Now, too, he is, to speak familiarly, in high feather. His cutaway coat of the newest fashion (for there is fashion even in cutaways); his plaid trousers, painfully tight at the knees, and admirably adapted to display the development of the calf, are still bright with the greens and blues of the Macdonald. His hat is not crushed or indented in above half-a-dozen directions—a sign that it is comparatively new, for the circle in which he moves considers bonneting a friendly ​demonstration, and to knock a man's hat off his head and into the gutter rather a polite attention.

Yes, during the last eight years the prospects of Mr. Augustus Darley—(that is the name of the witness)—have been decidedly looking up. Eight years ago he was a medical student, loose on wide London; eating bread-and-cheese and drinking bottled stout in dissecting-rooms, and chalking up alarming scores at the caravansary round the corner of Goodge Street—when the proprietor of the caravansary would chalk up. There were days which that stern man refused to mark with a white stone. Now, he has a dispensary of his own; a marvellous place, which would be entirely devoted to scientific pursuits if dominoes and racing calendars did not in some degree predominate therein. This dispensary is in a populous neighbourhood on the Surrey side of the water; and in the streets and squares—to say nothing of the court and mews—round this establishment the name of Augustus Darley is synonymous with everything which is popular and pleasant. His very presence is said to be as good as physic. Now, as physic in the abstract, and apart from its curative qualities, is scarcely a very pleasant thing, this may be considered rather a doubtful compliment; but for all that, it was meant in perfect good faith, and what's more, it meant a great deal.

When anybody felt ill, he sent for Gus Darley—(he had never been called Mr. but once in his life, and then by a sheriff's officer, who, arresting him for the first time, wasn't on familiar terms; all Cursitor Street knew him as "Gus, old fellow," and "Darley, my boy," before long). If the patient was very bad, Gus told him a good story. If the case seemed a serious one, he sang a comic song. If the patient felt, in popular parlance, "low," Darley would stop to supper; and if by that time the patient was not entirely restored, his medical adviser would send him a ha'porth of Epsom salts, or three-farthings' worth of rhubarb and magnesia, jocosely labelled "The Mixture." It was a comforting delusion, laboured under by every patient of Gus Darley's, that the young surgeon prescribed for him a very mysterious and peculiar amalgamation of drugs, which, though certain death to any other man, was the only preparation in the whole pharmacopoeia that could possibly keep him alive.

There was a saying current in the neighbourhood of the dispensary, to the effect that Gus Darley's description of the Derby Day was the best Epsom salts ever invented for the cure of man's diseases; and he has been known to come home from the races at ten o'clock at night, and assist at a sick-bed (successfully), with a wet towel round his head, and a painful conviction that he was prescribing for two patients at once.

But all this time he is strolling by the swollen Sloshy, with ​his pipe in his mouth and a contemplative face, which ever and anon looks earnestly up the river. Presently he stops by a boat-builder's yard, and speaks to a man at work.

"Well," he says, "is that boat finished yet?"

"Yes, sir," says the man, "quite finished, and uncommon well she looks too; you might eat your dinner off her; the paint's as dry as a bone,"

"How about the false bottom I spoke of?" he asks.

"Oh, that's all right, sir, two feet and a half deep, and six feet and a half long. I'll tell you what, sir,—no offence—but you must catch a precious sight more eels than I think you will catch, if you mean to fill the bottom of that 'ere punt."

As the man speaks, he points to where the boat lies high and dry in the builder's yard. A great awkward flat-bottomed punt, big enough to hold half-a-dozen people.

Gus strolls up to look at it. The man follows him.

He lifts up the bottom of the boat with a great thick loop of rope. It is made like a trap-door, two feet and a half above the keel.

"Why," said Gus, "a man could lie down in the keel of the boat, with that main deck over him."

"To be sure he could, sir, and a pretty long un, too; though I don't say much for its being a over-comfortable berth. He might feel himself rather cramped if he was of a restless disposition."

Gus laughed, and said,—"You're right, he might, certainly, poor fellow! Come, now, you're rather a tall chap, I should like to see if you could lie down there comfortably for a minute or so. We'll talk about some beer when you come out."

The man looked at Mr. Darley with rather a puzzled glance. He had heard the legend of the mistletoe bough. He had helped to build the boat, but for all that there might be a hidden spring somewhere about it, and Gus's request might conceal some sinister intent; but no one who had once looked our medical friend in the face ever doubted him; so the man laughed and said,—

"Well, you're a rum un, whoever the other is" (people were rarely very deferential in their manner of addressing Gus Darley); "howsomedever, here's to oblige you." And the man got into the boat, and lying down, suffered Gus to lower the false bottom of it over him.

"How do you feel?" asks Gus. "Can you breathe?—have you plenty of air?"

"All right, sir," says the man through a hole in the plank, "It's quite a extensive berth, when you've once settled yourself, only it ain't much calculated for active exercise."

​"Do you think you could stand it for half an hour?" Gus enquires.

"Lor, bless you, sir! for half-a-dozen hours, if I was paid accordin'."

"Should you think half-a-crown enough for twenty minutes?"

"Well, I don't know, sir; suppose you made it three shillings?"

"Very good," said Gus; "three shillings it shall be. It's now half-past twelve;" he looks at his watch as he speaks. "I'll sit here and smoke a pipe; and if you lie quiet till ten minutes to one, you'll have earned the three bob."

Gus steps into the boat, and seats himself at the prow; the man's head lies at the stern.

"Can you see me?" Gus inquires.

"Yes, sir, when I squints."

"Very well, then, you can see I don't make a bolt of it. Make your mind easy: there's five minutes gone already."

Gus finishes his pipe, looks at his watch again—a quarter to one. He whistles a scene from an opera, and then jumps out of the boat and pulls up the false bottom.

"All's right," he says; "time's up."

The man gets out and stretches his legs and arms, as if to convince himself that those members are unimpaired.

"Well, was it pretty comfortable?" Gus asks.

"Lor' love you, sir! regular jolly, with the exception of bein' rather warm, and makin' a cove precious dry."

Gus gives the man wherewith to assuage this drought, and says,—

"You may shove the boat down to the water, then. My friend will be here in a minute with the tackle, and we can then see about making a start."

The boat is launched, and the man amuses himself with rowing a few yards up the river, while Gus waits for his friend. In about ten minutes his friend arrives, in the person of Mr. Joseph Peters, of the police force, with a couple of eel-spears over his shoulder (which give him somewhat the appearance of a dry-land Neptune), and a good-sized carpet-bag, which he carries in his hand.

Gus and he exchange a few remarks in the silent alphabet, in which Gus is almost as great an adept as the dumb detective, and they step into the punt.

The boat-builder's man is sent for a gallon of beer in a stone bottle, a half-quartern loaf, and a piece of cheese. These provisions being shipped, Darley and Peters each take an oar, and they pull away from the bank and strike out into the middle of the river.

Chapter III.
The Emperor bids adieu to Elba.

On this same day, but at a later hour in the afternoon, Richard Marwood, better known as the Emperor Napoleon, joined the inmates of the county asylum in their daily exercise in the grounds allotted for that purpose. These grounds consisted of prim grass-plots, adorned with here and there a bed in which some dismal shrubs, or a few sickly chrysanthemums held up their gloomy heads, beaten and shattered by the recent heavy rains. These grass-plots were surrounded by stiff straight gravel-walks; and the whole was shut in by a high wall, surmounted by a chevaux-de-frise. The iron spikes composing this adornment had been added of late years; for, in spite of the comforts and attractions of the establishment, some foolish inhabitants thereof, languishing for gayer and more dazzling scenes, had been known to attempt, if not to effect, an escape from the numerous advantages of their home. I cannot venture to say whether or not the vegetable creation may have some mysterious sympathy with animated nature; but certainly no trees, shrubs, flowers, grass, or weeds ever grew like the trees, shrubs, flowers, grass, and weeds in the grounds of the county lunatic asylum. From the gaunt elm, which stretched out two great rugged arms, as if in a wild imprecation, such as might come from the lips of some human victim of the worst form of insanity, to the frivolous chickweed in a corner of a gravel-walk, which grew as if not a root, or leaf, or fibre but had a different purpose to its fellow, and flew off at its own peculiar tangent, with an infantine and kittenish madness, such as might have afflicted a love-sick miss of seventeen; from the great melancholy mad laurel-bushes that rocked themselves to and fro in the wind with a restlessness known only to the insane, to the eccentric dandelions that reared their disordered heads from amidst the troubled and dishevelled grass—every green thing in that great place seemed more or less a victim to that terrible disease whose influence is of so subtle a nature, that it infects the very stones of the dark walls which shut in shattered minds that once were strong and whole, and fallen intellects that once were bright and lofty.

But as a stranger to this place, looking for the first time at the groups of men and women lounging slowly up and down these gravel-walks, perhaps what most startles you, perhaps even what most distresses you, is, that these wretched people scarcely seem unhappy. Oh, merciful and wondrous wise dispensation from Him who fits the back to bear the burden! He so appoints it. The man, whose doubts or fears, or wild aspirings to the misty far-away, all the world's wisdom could not yester​day appease, is to-day made happy by a scrap of paper or a shred of ribbon. We who, standing in the blessed light, look in upon this piteous mental darkness, are perhaps most unhappy, because we cannot tell how much or how little sorrow this death-in-life may shroud. They have passed away from us; their language is not our language, nor their world our world. I think some one has asked a strange question—Who can tell whether their folly may not perhaps be better than our wisdom? He only, from whose mighty hand comes the music of every soul, can tell which is the discord and which the harmony. "We look at them as we look at all else—through the darkened glass of earth's uncertainty.

No, they do not seem unhappy. Queen Victoria is talking to Lady Jane Grey about to-day's dinner, and the reprehensible superabundance of fat in a leg-of-mutton served up thereat. Chronology never disturbs these good people; nobody thinks it any disgrace to be an anachronism. Lord Brougham will divide an unripe apple with Cicero, and William the Conqueror will walk arm-in-arm with Pius the Ninth, without the least uneasiness on the score of probability; and when, on one occasion, a gentleman, who for three years had enjoyed considerable popularity as Cardinal Wolsey, all of a sudden recovered, and confessed to being plain John Thomson, the inmates of the asylum were unanimous in feeling and expressing the most profound contempt for his unhappy state.

To-day, however, Richard is the hero. He is surrounded immediately on his appearance by all the celebrities and a great many of the non-celebrities of the establishment. The Emperor of the German Ocean and the Chelsea Waterworks in particular has so much to say to him, that he does not know how to begin; and when he does begin, has to go back and begin again, in a manner both affable and bewildering.

Why did not Richard join them before, he asks—they are so very pleasant, they are so very social; why, in goodness-gracious' name (he opens his eyes very wide as he utters the name of goodness-gracious, and looks back over his shoulder rather as if he thinks he may have invoked some fiend), why did not Richard join them?

Richard tells him he was not allowed to do so.

On this, the potentate looks intensely mysterious. He is rather stout, and wears a head-dress of his own manufacture—a species of coronet, constructed of a newspaper and a blue-and-white bird's-eye pocket-handkerchief. He puts his hands to the very furthest extent that he can push them into his trousers-pockets; plants himself right before Richard on the gravel-walk, and says, with a wink of intense significance, "Was it the Khan?"

​Richard says, he thinks not.

"Not the Khan!" he mutters thoughtfully. "You really are of opinion that it was not the Khan?"

"I really am," Richard replies.

"Then it lies between the last Duke of Devonshire but sixteen and Abd-el-Kader: I do hope it wasn't Abd-el-Kader; I had a better opinion of Abd-el-Kader—I had indeed."

Richard looks rather puzzled, but says nothing.

"There has evidently," continued his friend, "been some malignant influence at work to prevent your appearing amongst us before this. You have been a member of this society for, let me see, three hundred and sixty-three years—be kind enough to set me right if I make a mis-statement—three hundred and—did I say seventy-twelve years?—and you have never yet joined us! Now, there is something radically wrong here; to use the language of the ancients in their religious festivals, there is 'a screw loose.' You ought to have joined us, you really ought! We are very social; we are positively buoyant; we have a ball every evening. Well, no, perhaps it is not every evening. My ideas as to time, I am told, are vague; but I know it is either every ten years, or every other week. I incline to thinking it must be every other week. On these occasions we dance. Are you a votary of Terp—what-you-may-call-her, the lady who had so many unmarried sisters? Do you incline to the light fantastic?" By way of illustration, the Emperor of the Waterworks executed a caper, which would have done honour to an elderly elephant taking his first lesson in the polka.

There was one advantage in conversing with this gentleman. If his questions were sometimes of rather a difficult and puzzling nature, he never did anything so under-bred as to wait for an answer. It now appeared for the first time to strike him, that perhaps the laws of exclusiveness had in some manner been violated, by a person of his distinction having talked so familiarly to an entire stranger; he therefore suddenly skipped a pace or two backwards, leaving a track of small open graves in the damp gravel made by the impression of his feet, and said, in a tone of voice so dignified as to be almost freezing—

"Pray, to whom have I the honour to make these observations?"

Richard regretted to say he had not a card about him, but added—"You may have heard of the Emperor Napoleon?"

"Buonaparte? Oh, certainly; very frequently, very frequently: and you are that worthy person? Dear me! this is very sad. Not at your charming summer residence at Moscow, or your pleasant winter retreat on the field of Waterloo: this is really distressing, very."

​His pity for Richard was so intense, that he was moved to tears, and picked a dandelion with which to wipe his eyes.

"My Chelsea property," he said presently, "is fluctuating—very. I find a tendency in householders to submit to having their water cut off, rather than pay the rate. Our only plan is to empty every cistern half an hour before tea-time. Persevered in for a week or so, we find that course has a harassing effect, and they pay. But all this is wearing for the nerves—very."

He shook his head solemnly, rubbed his eyes very hard with the dandelion, and then ate that exotic blossom.

"An agreeable tonic," he said; "known to be conducive to digestion. My German Ocean I find more profitable, on account of the sea-bathing."

Richard expressed himself very much interested in the commercial prospects of his distinguished friend; but at this moment they were interrupted by the approach of a lady, who, with a peculiar hop, skip, and jump entirely her own, came up to the Emperor of the Waterworks and took hold of his arm.

She was a gushing thing of some forty-odd summers, and wore a bonnet, the very purchase of which would have stamped her as of unsound intellect, without need of any further proof whatever. To say that it was like a coal-scuttle was nothing; to say that it resembled a coal-scuttle which had suffered from an aggravated attack of water on the brain, and gone mad, would be perhaps a little nearer the mark. Imagine such a bonnet adorned with a green veil, rather bigger than an ordinary table cloth, and three quill pens tastefully inserted in the direction in which Parisian milliners are wont to place the plumage of foreign birds—and you may form some idea of the lady's head-gear. Her robes were short and scanty, but plentifully embellished with a species of trimming, which to an ordinary mind suggested strips of calico, but which amongst the inmates passed current as Valenciennes lace. Below these robes appeared a pair of apple-green boots—boots of a pattern such as no shoemaker of sound mind ever in his wildest dreams could have originated, but which in this establishment were voted rather recherché than otherwise. This lady was no other than the damsel who had suggested an elopement with Richard some eight years ago, and who claimed for her distinguished connections the Pope and the muffin-man.

"Well," she said to the Emperor of the Waterworks, with a voice and manner which would have been rather absurdly juvenile in a girl of fifteen,—"and where has its precious one been hiding since dinner? Was it the fat mutton which rendered the most brilliant of mankind unfit for general society; or was it that it 'had a heart for falsehood framed?' I hope it was the fat mutton."

​"It's precious one" looked from the charmer at his side to Richard, with rather an apologetic shrug.

"The sex is weak," he said, "conqueror of Agincourt—I beg pardon, Waterloo. The sex is weak: it is a fact established alike by medical science and political economy. Poor thing! she loves me."

The lady, for the first time, became aware of the presence of Richard. She dropped a very low curtesy, in the performance of which one of the green boots described a complete circle, and said,

"From Gloucestershire, sir?" interrogatively.

"The Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte," said the proprietor of the German Ocean. "My dear, you ought to know him."

"The Emperor Nap-o-le-on Bu-o-na-parte," she said very slowly, checking off the syllables on her fingers, "and from Gloucestershire? How gratifying! All our great men come from Gloucestershire. It is a well-known fact—from Gloucestershire? Muffins were invented in Gloucestershire by Alfred the Great. Did you know our dear Alfred? You are perhaps too young—a great loss, my dear sir, a great loss; conglomerated essence of toothache on the cerebral nerves took him off in fourteen days, three weeks, and one month. We tried everything, from dandelions"—(her eyes wandered as if searching the grounds for information as to what they had tried)—from dandelions to chevaux-de-frise—"

She stopped abruptly, staring Richard full in the face, as if she expected him to say something; but as he said nothing, she became suddenly interested in the contemplation of the green boots, looking first at one and then at the other, as if revolving in her mind the probability of their wanting mending.

Presently she looked up, and said with great solemnity—

"Do you know the muffin-man?"

Richard shook his head.

"He lives in Drury Lane," she added, looking at him rather sternly, as much as to say, "Come, no nonsense! you know him well enough!"

"No," said Richard, "I don't remember having met him."

"There are seventy-nine of us who know the muffin-man in this establishment, sir—seventy-nine; and do you dare to stand there and tell me that you——"

"I assure you, madam, I have not the honour of his acquaintance."

"Not know the muffin-man!—you don't know the muffin-man! Why, you contemptible stuck-up jackanapes——"

What the lady might have gone on to say, it would be difficult to guess. She was not celebrated for the refinement of her vocabulary when much provoked; but at this moment a great stout man, one of the keepers, came up, and cried out—

​"Holloa! what's all this!"

"He says he doesn't know the muffin-man!" exclaimed the lady, her veil flying in the wind like a pennant, her arms akimbo, and the apple-green boots planted in a defiant manner on the gravel-walk.

"Oh, we know him well enough," said the man, with a wink at Richard, "and very slack he bakes his muffins." Having uttered which piece of information connected with the gentleman in question, the keeper strolled off, giving just one steady look straight into the eyes of the lively damsel, which seemed to have an instantaneous and most soothing effect upon her nerves.

As all the lunatics allowed to disport themselves for an hour in the gardens of the establishment were considered to be, upon the whole, pretty safe, the keepers were not in the habit of taking much notice of them. Those officials would congregate in little groups here and there, talking among themselves, and apparently utterly regardless of the unhappy beings over whom it was their duty to watch. But let Queen Victoria or the Emperor Nero, Lady Jane Grey or Lord John Russell, suffer themselves to be led away by their respective hobbies, or to ride those animals at too outrageous and dangerous a pace, and a strong hand would be laid upon the rider's shoulder, accompanied by a recommendation to "go in-doors," which was very seldom disregarded.

As Richard was this afternoon permitted to mix with his fellow-prisoners for the first time, the boy from Slopperton was ordered to keep an eye upon him; and a very sharp eye the boy kept, never for one moment allowing a look, word, or action of the prisoner to escape him. The keepers this afternoon were assembled near the portico, before which the gardens extended to the high outer wall. The ground between the portico and the wall was a little less than a quarter of a mile in length, and at the bottom was the grand entrance and the porter's lodge. The gardens surrounded the house on three sides, and on the left side the wall ran parallel with the river Sloshy. This river was now so much swollen by the late heavy rains that the waters washed the wall to the height of four feet, entirely covering the towing-path, which lay ordinarily between the wall and the waterside.

Now Richard and the Emperor of the Waterworks, accompanied by the gushing charmer in the green boots, being all three engaged in friendly though rather erratic conversation, happened to stroll in the direction of the grounds on this side, and consequently out of sight of the keepers.

The boy from Slopperton was, however, close upon their heels. This young gentleman had his hands in his pockets, ​and was loitering and lounging along with an air which seemed to say, that neither man nor woman gave him any more delight than they had afforded the Danish prince of used-up memory. Perhaps it was in utter weariness of life that he was, as if unconsciously, employed in whistling the melody of a song, supposed to relate to a passage in the life of a young lady of the name of Gray, christian name Alice, whose heart it was another's, and consequently, by pure logic, never could belong to the singer.

Now there may be something infectious in this melody; for no sooner had the boy from Slopperton whistled the first few bars, than some person in the distance outside the walls of the asylum gardens took up the air and finished it. A trifling circumstance this in itself; but it appeared to afford the boy considerable gratification; and he presently came suddenly upon Richard in the middle of a very interesting conversation, and whispered in his ear, or rather at his elbow, "All right, general!" Now as Richard, the Emperor of the Waterworks, and the only daughter of the Pope all talked at once, and all talked of entirely different subjects, their conversation might, perhaps, have been just a little distracting to a short-hand reporter; but as a conversation, it was really charming.

Richard—still musing on the wild idea which was known in the asylum to have possessed his disordered brain ever since the day of his trial—was giving his companions an account of his escape from Elba.

"I was determined," he said, taking the Emperor of the Waterworks by the button, "I was determined to make one desperate effort to return to my friends in France——"

"Very creditable, to be sure," said the damsel of the green boots; "your sentiments did you honour."

"But to escape from the island was an enterprise of considerable difficulty," continued Richard.

"Of course," said the damsel, "considering the price of flour. Flour rose a halfpenny in the bushel in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane, which, of course, reduced the size of muffins——"

"And had a depressing effect upon the water-rates," interrupted the gentleman.

"Now," continued Richard, "the island of Elba was surrounded by a high wall——"

"A very convenient arrangement; of course facilitating the process of cutting off the water from the inhabitants," muttered the Emperor of the German Ocean.

The boy Slosh again expressed his feelings with reference to Alice Gray, and some one on the other side of the wall coincided with him.

​"And," said Richard, "on the top of this wall was a chevaux-de-frise."

"Dear me," exclaimed the Emperor, "quite a what-you-may-call-it. I mean an extraordinary coincidence; we too have a chevaux-de-thing-a-me, for the purpose, I believe, of keeping out the cats. Cats are unpleasant; especially," he added, thoughtfully, "especially the Tom-sex—I mean the sterner sex."

"To surmount this wall was my great difficulty."

"Naturally, naturally," said the damsel, "a great undertaking, considering the fall in muffins—a dangerous undertaking."

"There was a boat waiting to receive me on the other side," said Richard, glancing at the wall, which was about a hundred yards distant from him.

Some person on the other side of the wall had got a good deal nearer by this time; and, dear me, how very much excited he was about Alice Gray.

"But the question," Richard continued, "was how to climb the wall,"—still looking up at the chevaux-de-frise.

"I should have tried muffins," said the lady.

"I should have cut off the water," remarked the gentleman.

"I did neither," said Richard; "I tried a rope."

At this very moment, by some invisible agency, a thickly knotted rope was thrown across the chevaux-de-frise, and the end fell within about four feet of the ground.

"But her heart it is another's, and it never can be mine."

The gentleman who couldn't succeed in winning the affections of Miss Gray was evidently close to the wall now.

In a much shorter time than the very greatest master in the art of stenography could possibly have reported the occurrence, Richard threw the Emperor of the Waterworks half-a-dozen yards from him, with such violence as to cause that gentleman to trip-up the heels of the only daughter of the Pope, and fall in a heap upon that lady as on a feather bed; and then, with the activity of a cat or a sailor, clambered up the rope, and disappeared over the chevaux-de-frise.

The gentleman outside was now growing indifferent to the loss of Miss Gray, for he whistled the melody in a most triumphant manner, keeping time with the sharp plash of his oars in the water.

It took the Emperor and his female friend some little time to recover from the effects of the concussion they had experienced, each from each; and when they had done so, they stood for a few moments looking at one another in mute amazement.

"The gentleman has left the establishment," at last said the lady.

​"And a bruise on my elbow," muttered the gentleman, rubbing the locality in question.

"Such a very impolite manner of leaving too," said the lady. "His muffins—I mean his manners—have evidently been very much neglected."

"He must be a Chelsea householder," said the Emperor. "The householders of Chelsea are proverbial for bad manners. They are in the habit of slamming the door in the face of the tax-gatherer, with a view to injuring the tip of his nose; and I'm sure Lord Chesterfield never advised his son to do that."

It may be as well here to state that the Emperor of the Waterworks had in early life been collector of the water-rate in the neighbourhood of Chelsea; but having unfortunately given his manly intellect to drinking, and being further troubled with a propensity for speculation (some people pronounced the word without the first letter), which involved the advantageous laying-out of his sovereign's money for his own benefit, he had first lost his situation and ultimately his senses.

His lady friend had once kept a baker's shop in the vicinity of Drury Lane, and happening, in an evil hour, at the ripe age of forty, to place her affections on a young man of nineteen, the bent of whose genius was muffins, and being slighted by the youth in question, she had retired into the gin-bottle, and thence had been passed to the asylum of her native country.

Perhaps the inquiring reader will ask what the juvenile guardian of Richard is doing all this time? He has been told to keep an eye upon him; and how has he kept his trust?

He is standing, very coolly, staring at the lady and gentleman before him, and is apparently much interested in their conversation.

"I shall certainly go," said the Emperor of the Waterworks, after a pause, "and inform the superintendent of this proceeding—the superintendent ought really to know of it."

"Superintendent" was, in the asylum, the polite name given the keepers. But just as the Emperor began to shamble off in the direction of the front of the house, the boy called Slosh flew past him and ran on before, and by the time the elderly gentleman reached the porch, the boy had told the astonished keepers the whole story of the escape.

The keepers ran down to the gate, called to the porter to have it opened, and in a few minutes were in the road in front of it. They hurried thence to the river-side. There was not a sign of any human being on the swollen waters, except two men in a punt close to the opposite shore, who appeared to be eel-spearing.

"There's no boat nearer than that," said one of the men; ​he never could have reached that in this time if he had been the best swimmer in England."

The men took it for granted that they had been informed of his escape the moment it occurred.

"He must have jumped slap into the water," said another; "perhaps he's about somewhere, contriving to keep his head under."

"He couldn't do it," said the first man who had spoken; "it's my opinion the poor chap's drowned. They will try these escapes, though no one ever succeeded yet."

There was a boat moored at the angle of the asylum wall, and one of the men sprang into it.

"Show me the place where he jumped over the wall," he called to the boy, who pointed out the spot at his direction.

The man rowed up to it.

"Not a sign of him anywhere about here!" he cried.

"Hadn't you better call to those men?" asked his comrade; "they must have seen him jump."

The man in the boat nodded assent, and rowed across the river to the two fishermen.

"Holloa!" he said, "have you seen any one get over that wall?"

One of the men, who had just impaled a fine eel, looked up with a surprised expression, and asked—

"Which wall?"

"Why the asylum, yonder, straight before you."

"The asylum! Now, you don't mean to say that that's the asylum; and I've been taking it for a gentleman's mansion and grounds all the time," said the angler (who was no other than Mr. Augustus Darley), taking his pipe out of his mouth.

"I wish you'd give a straight answer to my question," said the man; "have you seen any one jump over that wall; yes, or no?"

"Then, no!" said Gus; "if I had, I should have gone over and picked him up, shouldn't I, stupid?"

The other fisherman, Mr. Peters, here looked up, and laying down his eel-spear, spelt out some words on his fingers.

"Stop a bit," cried Gus to the man, who was rowing off, "here's my friend says he heard a splash in the water ten minutes ago, and thought it was some rubbish shot over the wall."

"Then he did jump! Poor chap, I'm afraid he must be drowned."

"Drowned?"

"Yes; don't I tell you one of the lunatics has been trying to escape over that wall, and must have fallen into the river?"

​"Why didn't you say so before, then?" said Gus. "What's to be done? Where are there any drags?"

"Why, half a mile off, worse luck, at a public-house down the river, the 'Jolly Life-boat.'"

"Then I'll tell you what," said Gus, "my friend and I will row down and fetch the drags, while you chaps keep a look-out about here."

"You're very good, sir," said the man; "dragging the river's about all we can do now, for it strikes me we've seen the last of the Emperor Napoleon. My eyes! won't there be a row about it with the Board!"

"Here we go," says Gus; "keep a good heart; he may turn up yet;" with which encouraging remarks Messrs. Darley and Peters struck off at a rate which promised the speedy arrival of the drags.

Chapter IV.
Joy and Happiness for Everybody.

Whether the drags reached the county asylum in time to be of any service is still a mystery; but Mr. Joseph Peters arrived with the punt at the boat-builder's yard in the dusk of the autumn evening. He was alone, and he left his boat, his tridents, and other fishing-tackle in the care of the men belonging to the yard, and then putting his hands in his pockets, trudged off in the direction of Little Gulliver Street.

If ever Mr. Peters had looked triumphant in his life, he looked triumphant this evening: if ever his mouth had been on one side, it was on one side this evening; but it was the twist of a conqueror which distorted that feature.

Eight years, too, have done something for Kuppins. Time hasn't forgotten Kuppins, though she is a humble individual. Time has touched up Kuppins; adding a little bit here, and taking away a little bit there, and altogether producing something rather imposing. Kuppins has grown. When that young lady had attained her tenth year, there was a legend current in little Gulliver Street and its vicinity, that in consequence of a fatal predilection for gin-and-bitters evinced by her mother during the infancy of Kuppins, that diminutive person would never grow any more: but she gave the lie both to the legend and the gin-and-bitters by outgrowing her frocks at the advanced age of seventeen; and now she was rather a bouncing young woman than otherwise, and had a pair of such rosy cheeks as would have done honour to healthier breezes than those of Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy.

Time had done something, too, for Kuppins's shock of hair, ​for it was now brushed, and combed, and dragged, and tortured into a state not so very far from smoothness; and it was furthermore turned up; an achievement in the hair-dressing line which it had taken her some years to effect, and which, when effected, was perhaps a little calculated to remind the admiring beholder of a good sized ball of black cotton with a hair-pin stuck through it.

What made Kuppins in such a state of excitement on this particular evening, who shall say? Certain it is that she was excited. At the first sound of the click of Mr. Peters's latchkey in the door of No. 5, Little Gulliver Street, Kuppins, with a lighted candle, flew to open it. How she threw her arms round Mr. Peters's neck and kissed him—how she left a lump of tallow in his hair, and a smell of burning in his whiskers—how, in her excitement she blew the candle out—and how, by a feat of leger-de-main, or leger-de-lungs, she blew it in again, must have been seen to be sufficiently appreciated. Her next proceeding was to drag Mr. Peters upstairs into the indoor Eden, which bore the very same appearance it had done eight years ago. One almost expected to find the red baby grown up—but it wasn't; and that dreadful attack of the mumps from which the infant had suffered when Mr. Peters first became acquainted with it did not appear to have abated in the least. Kuppins thrust the detective into his own particular chair, planted herself in an opposite seat, put the candlestick on the table, snuffed the candle, and then, with her eyes opened to the widest extent, evidently awaited his saying something.

He did say something—in his own way, of course; the fingers went to work. "I've d——" said the fingers.

"'One it," cried Kuppins, dreadfully excited by this time, "done it! you've done it! Didn't I always say you would? Didn't I know you would? Didn't I always dream you would, three times running, and a house on fire?—that meant the river; and an army of soldiers—that meant the boat; and everybody in black clothes—meaning joy and happiness. It's come true; it's all come out. Oh, I'm so happy!" In proof of which Kuppins immediately commenced a series of evolutions of the limbs and exercises of the human voice, popularly known in the neighbourhood as strong hysterics—so strong, in fact, that Mr. Peters couldn't have held her still if he had tried. Perhaps that's why he didn't try; but he looked about in every direction for something cold to put down her back, and finding nothing handy but the poker, he stirred her up with that in the neighbourhood of the spinal marrow, as if she had been a bad fire; whereon she came to.

"And where's the blessed boy?" she asked, presently.

Mr. Peters signified upon his fingers that the blessed boy was ​still at the asylum, and that there he must remain till such time as he should be able to leave without raising suspicion.

"And to think," said Kuppins, "that we should have seen the advertisement for a boy to wait upon poor Mr. Marwood; and to think that we should have thought of sending our Slosh to take the situation; and to think that he should have been so clever in helping you through with it! Oh my!" As Kuppins here evinced a desire for a second edition of the hysterics, Mr. Peters changed the conversation by looking inquiringly towards a couple of saucepans on the fire.

"Tripe," said Kuppins, answering the look, "and taters, floury ones;" whereon she began to lay the supper-table. Kuppins was almost mistress of the house now, for the elderly proprietress was a sufferer from rheumatism, and kept to her room, enlivened by the society of a large black cat, and such gossip as Kuppins collected about the neighbourhood in the course of the day and retailed to her mistress in the evening. So we leave Mr. Peters smoking his pipe and roasting his legs at his own hearth, while Kuppins dishes the tripe and onions, and strips the floury potatoes of their russet jackets.

Where all this time is the Emperor Napoleon?

There are two gentlemen pacing up and down the platform of the Birmingham station, waiting for the 10 p.m. London express. One of them is Mr. Augustus Darley; the other is a man wrapped in a greatcoat, who has red hair and whiskers, and wears a pair of spectacles; but behind these spectacles there are dark brown eyes, which scarcely match the red hair, any better than the pale dark complexion agrees with the very roseate hue of the whiskers. These two gentlemen have come across the country from a little station a few miles from Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy.

"Well, Dick," said Darley, "doesn't this bring back old times, my boy?"

The red-haired gentleman, who was smoking a cigar, took it from his mouth and clasped his companion by the hand, and said—

"It does, Gus, old fellow; and when I forget the share you've had in to-day's work, may I———may I go back to that place and eat out my own heart, as I have done for eight years!"

There was something so very like a mist behind his spectacles, and such an ominous thickness in his voice, as the red-haired gentleman said this, that Gus proposed a glass of brandy before the train started.

"Come, Dick, old fellow, you're quite womanish to-night, I declare. This won't do, you know. I shall have to knock up some of our old pals and make a jolly night of it, when we get ​to London; though it will be to-morrow morning if you go on in this way."

"I'll tell you what it is, Gus," replied the red-haired gentleman, "nobody who hadn't gone through what I've gone through could tell what I feel to-night. I think, Gus, I shall end by being mad in real earnest; and that my release will do what my imprisonment even couldn't effect—turn my brain. But I say, Gus, tell me, tell me the truth; did any of the old fellows—did they ever think me guilty?"

"Not one of them, Dick, not one; and I know if one of them had so much as hinted at such a thought, the others would have throttled him before he could have said the words. Have another drop of brandy," he said hastily, thrusting the glass into his hand; "you've no more pluck than a kitten or a woman, Dick."

"I had pluck enough to bear eight years of that," said the young man, pointing in the direction of Slopperton, "but this does rather knock me over. My mother, you'll write to her, Gus—the sight of my hand might upset her, without a word of warning—you'll write and tell her that I've got a chance of escaping; and then you'll write and say that I have escaped. We must guard against a shock, Gus; she has suffered too much already on my account."

At this moment the bell rang for the train's starting: the young men took their seats in a second-class carriage; and away sped the engine, out through the dingy manufacturing town, into the open moonlit country.

Gus and Richard light their cigars, and wrap themselves in their railway rugs. Gus throws himself back and drops off to sleep (he can almost smoke in his sleep), and in a quarter of an hour he is dreaming of a fidgety patient who doesn't like comic songs, and who can never see the point of a joke; but who has three pretty daughters, and who pays his bill every Christmas without even looking at the items.

But Richard Marwood doesn't go to sleep. Will he ever sleep again? Will his nerves ever regain their tranquillity, after the intense excitement of the last three or four days? He looks back—looks back at that hideous time, and wonders at its hopeless suffering—wonders till he is obliged to wrench his mind away from the subject, for fear he should go mad. How did he ever endure it? How did he ever live through it? He had no means of suicide? Pshaw! he might have dashed out his brains against the wall. He might have resolutely refused food, and so have starved himself to death. How did he endure it. Eight years! Eight centuries! and every hour a fresh age of anguish! Looking back now, he knows, what then he did not know, that at the worst—that in his bitterest despair, there was a vague undefined something, so vague and undefined that he did not ​recognise it for itself—a glimmering ray of hope, by the aid of which alone he bore the dreadful burden of his days; and with clasped hands and bent head he renders up to that God from whose pity came this distant light a thanksgiving, which perhaps is not the less sincere and heartfelt for a hundred reckless words, said long ago, which rise up now in his mind a shame and a reproach.

Perhaps it was such a trial as this that Richard Marwood wanted, to make him a good and earnest man. Something to awaken dormant energies; something to arouse the better feelings of a noble soul, to stimulate to action an intellect hitherto wasted; something to throw him back upon the God he had forgotten, and to make him ultimately that which God, in creating such a man, meant him to become.

Away flies the engine. Was there ever such an open country? Was there ever such a moonlight night? Was earth ever so fair, or the heavens ever so bright, since man's universe was created? Not for Richard! He is free; free to breathe that blessed air; to walk that glorious earth; free to track to his doom the murderer of his uncle.

In the dead of the night the express train rattles into the Euston Square station; Richard and Gus spring out, and jump into a cab. Even smoky London, asleep under the moonlight, is beautiful in the eyes of Daredevil Dick, as they rattle through the deserted streets on the way to their destination.

Chapter V.
The Cherokees take an Oath.

The cab stops in a narrow street in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane, before the door of a small public-house, which announces itself, in tarnished gilt letters on a dirty board, as "The Cherokee, by Jim Stilson." Jim Stilson is a very distinguished professor of the noble art of self-defence; and (in consequence of a peculiar playful knack he has with his dexter fist) is better known to his friends and the general public as the Left-handed Smasher.

Of course, at this hour of the night, the respectable hostelry is wrapped in that repose which befits the house of a landlord who puts up his shutters and locks his door as punctually as the clocks of St. Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes strike the midnight hour. There is not so much as the faintest glimmer of a rushlight in one of the upper windows; but for all that, Richard and Darley alight, and having dismissed the cab, Gus looks up and down the street to see that it is clear, puts his lips to the keyhole of the door of Mr. Stilson's hostelry, and ​gives an excellent imitation of the feeble miauw of an invalid member of the feline species.

Perhaps the Left-handed Smasher is tender-hearted, and nourishes an affection for distressed grimalkins; for the door is softly opened—just wide enough to admit Richard and his friend.

The person who opens the door is a young lady, who has apparently being surprised in the act of putting her hair in curl-papers, as she hurriedly thrusts her brush and comb in among the biscuits and meat-pies in a corner of the bar. She is evidently very sleepy, and rather inclined to yawn in Mr. Augustus Darley's face; but as soon as they are safe inside, she fastens the door and resumes her station behind the bar. There is only one gas-lamp alight, and it is rather difficult to believe that the gentleman seated in the easy-chair before an expiring fire in the bar-parlour, his noble head covered with a red cotton bandanna, is neither more nor less than the immortal Left-handed one; but he snores loud enough for the whole prize-ring, and the nervous listener is inclined to wish that he had made a point of clearing his head before he went to sleep.

"Well, Sophia Maria," says Mr. Darley, "are they all up there?" pointing in the direction of a door that leads to the stairs.

"Most every one of 'em, sir; there's no getting 'em to break up, nohow. Mr. Splitters has been and wrote a drama for the Victoria Theayter, and they've been a-chaffing of him awful because there's fifteen murders, and four low-comedy servants that all say, 'No you don't,' in it. The guv'nor had to go up just now, and talk to 'em, for they was a throwin' quart pots at each other, playful."

"Then I'll run up, and speak to them for a minute," said Gus. "Come along, Dick."

"How about your friend, sir," remonstrated the Smasher's Hebe; "he isn't a Cheerful, is he, sir?"

"Oh, I'll answer for him," said Gus. "It's all right, Sophia Maria; bring us a couple of glasses of brandy-and-water hot, and tell the Smasher to step up, when I ring the bell."

Sophia Maria looked doubtfully from Gus to the slumbering host, and said—

"He'll wake up savage if I disturb him. He's off for his first sleep now, and he'll go to bed as soon as the place is clear."

"Never mind, Sophia; wake him up when I ring, and send him upstairs; he'll find something there to put him in a good temper. Come, Dick, tumble up. You know the way."

The Cheerful Cherokees made their proximity known by such a stifling atmosphere of tobacco about the staircase as would have certainly suffocated anyone not initiated in their mysteries. Gus opened the door of a back room on the first floor, of a much ​larger size than the general appearance of the house would have promised. This room was full of gentlemen, who, in age, size, costume, and personal advantages, varied as much as it is possible for any one roomful of gentlemen to do. Some of them were playing billiards; some of them were looking on, betting on the players; or more often upbraiding them for such play as, in the Cheerful dialect, came under the sweeping denunciation of the Cherokee adjective "duffing." Some of them were eating a peculiar compound entitled "Welsh rarebit"—a pleasant preparation, if it had not painfully reminded the casual observer of mustard-poultices, or yellow soap in a state of solution—while lively friends knocked the ashes of their pipes into their plates, abstracted their porter just as they were about to imbibe that beverage, and in like fascinating manner beguiled the festive hour. One gentleman, a young Cherokee, had had a rarebit, and had gone to sleep with his head in his plate and his eyebrows in his mustard. Some were playing cards; some were playing dominoes; one gentleman was in tears, because the double six he wished to play had fallen into a neighbouring spittoon, and he lacked either the moral courage or the physical energy requisite for picking it up; but as, with the exception of the sleepy gentleman, everybody was talking very loud and on an entirely different subject, the effect was lively, not to say distracting.

"Gentlemen," said Gus, "I have the honour of bringing a friend, whom I wish to introduce to you."

"All right, Gus!" said the gentleman engaged at dominoes, "that's the cove I ought to play," and fixing one half-open eye on the spotted ivory, he lapsed into a series of imbecile imprecations on everybody in general, and the domino in particular.

Richard took a seat at a little distance from this gentleman, and at the bottom of the long table—a seat sacred on grand occasions to the vice-chairman. Some rather noisy lookers-on at the billiards were a little inclined to resent this, and muttered something about Dick's red wig and whiskers, in connection with the popular accompaniments to a boiled round of beef.

"I say, Darley," cried a gentleman, who held a billiard-cue in his hand, and had been for some time impotently endeavouring to smooth his hair with the same. "I say, old fellow, I hope your friend's committed a murder or two, because then Splitters can put him in a new piece."

Splitters, who had for four hours been in a state of abject misery, from the unmerciful allusions to his last chef d'œuvre, gave a growl from a distant corner of the table, where he was seeking consolation in everybody else's glass; and as everybody drank a different beverage, was not improving his state of mind thereby.

​"My friend never committed a murder in his life, Splitters, so he won't dramatize on that score; but he's been accused of one; and he's as innocent as you are, who never murdered any thing in your life but Lindley Murray and the language of your country."

"Who's been murdering somebody?" said the domino-player, passing his left hand through his hair, till his chevelure resembled a turk's-head broom. "Who's murdered? I wish everybody was; and that I could dance my favourite dance upon their graves. Blow that double-six; he's the fellow I ought to play."

"Perhaps you'll give us your auburn-haired friend's name, Darley," said a gentleman with his mouth full of Welsh rarebit; "he doesn't seem too brilliant to live; he'd better have gone to the 'Deadly Livelies,' in the other street." The "Deadly Livelies" was the sobriquet of a rival club, which plumed itself on being a cut above the Cherokees. "Who's dead?" muttered the domino-player. "I wish everybody was, and that I was contracted with to bury 'em cheap. I should have won the game," he added plaintively, "if I could have picked up that double-six."

"I suppose your friend wants to be Vice at our next meeting," said the gentleman with the billiard-cue; who, in default of a row, always complained that the assembly was too quiet for him.

"It wouldn't be the first time if he were Vice, and it wouldn't be the first time if you made him Chair," said Gus. "Come, old fellow, tell them you're come back, and ask them if they're glad to see you?"

The red-haired gentleman at this sprang to his feet, threw off the rosy locks and the ferocious whiskers, and looked round at the Cherokees with his hands in his pockets.

"Daredevil Dick!" A shout arose—one brief wild huzza, such as had not been heard in that room—which, as we know, was none of the quietest—within the memory of the oldest Cherokee. Daredevil Dick—escaped—come back—as handsome as ever—as jolly as ever—as glorious a fellow—as thorough-going a brick—as noble-hearted a trump as eight years ago, when he had been the life and soul of all of them! such shaking of hands; everybody shaking hands with him again and again, and then everybody shaking hands with everybody else; and the billiard-player wiping his eyes with his cue; and the sleepy gentleman waking up and rubbing the mustard into his drowsy optics; and the domino-player, who, though he execrates all mankind, wouldn't hurt the tiniest wing of the tiniest fly, even he makes a miraculous effort, picks up the double-six, and magnanimously presents it to Richard.

"Take it—take it, old fellow, and may it make you happy! If I'd played that domino, I should have won the game." Upon which he executed two or three steps of a Cherokee dance, and relapsed into the aforesaid imbecile imprecations, in mixed ​French and English, on the inhabitants of a world not capable of appreciating him.

It was a long time before anything like quiet could be restored; but when it was, Richard addressed the meeting.

"Gentlemen, before the unfortunate circumstance which has so long separated us, you knew me, I believe, well, and I am proud to think you esteemed and trusted me."

Did they? Oh, rather. They jingled all the glasses, and broke three in the enthusiastic protestation of an affirmative.

"I need not allude to the unhappy accusation of which I have been the victim. You are, I understand, acquainted with the full particulars of my miserable story, and you render me happy by thinking me to be innocent."

By thinking him to be innocent? By knowing him to be innocent! They are so indignant at the bare thought of anybody believing otherwise, that somebody in the doorway, the Smasher himself, growls out something about a—forcible adjective—noise, and the police.

"Gentlemen, I have this day regained my liberty; thanks to the exertions of a person to whom I am also indebted for my life, and thanks also to the assistance of my old friend Gus Darley."

Everybody here insisted on shaking hands over again with Gus, which was rather a hindrance to the speaker's progress; but at last Richard went on,—

"Now, gentlemen, relying on your friendship" (hear, hear! and another glass broken), "I am about to appeal to you to assist me in the future object of my life. That object will be to discover the real murderer of my uncle, Montague Harding. In what manner, when, or where you may be able to assist me in this, I cannot at present say, but you are all, gentlemen, men of talent." (More glasses broken, and a good deal of beer spilt into everybody's boots.) "You are all men of varied experience, of inexhaustible knowledge of the world, and of the life of London. Strange things happen every day of our lives. Who shall say that some one amongst you may not fall, by some strange accident, or let me say rather by the handiwork of Providence, across a clue to this at present entirely unravelled mystery? Promise me, therefore, gentlemen, to give me the benefit of your experience; and whenever that experience throws you into the haunts of bad men, remember that the man I seek may, by some remote chance, be amongst them; and that to find him is the one object of my life. I cannot give you the faintest index to what he may be, or who he may be. He may be dead, and beyond the reach of justice—but he may live! and if he does, Heaven grant that the man who has suffered the stigma of his guilt may track him to his doom. Gentlemen, tell me that your hearts go with me."

​They told him so, not once, but a dozen times; shaking hands with him, and pushing divers liquors into his hand every time. But they got over it at last, and the gentleman with the billiard-cue rapped their heads with that instrument to tranquillize them, and then rose as president, and said,—

"Richard Marwood, our hearts go with you, thoroughly and entirely, and we swear to give you the best powers of our intellects and the utmost strength of our abilities to aid you in your search. Gentlemen, are you prepared to subscribe to this oath?"

They were prepared to subscribe to it, and they did subscribe to it, every one of them—rather noisily, but very heartily.

When they had done so, a gentleman emerges from the shadow of the doorway, who is no other than the illustrious left-handed one, who had come upstairs in answer to Darley's summons, just before Richard addressed the Cherokees. The Smasher was not a handsome man. His nose had been broken a good many times, and that hadn't improved him; he had a considerable number of scars about his face, including almost every known variety of cut, and they didn't improve him. His complexion, again, bore perhaps too close a resemblance to mottled soap to come within the region of the beautiful; but he had a fine and manly expression of countenance, which, in his amiable moments, reminded the beholder of a benevolent bulldog.

He came up to Richard, and took him by the hand. It was no small ordeal of courage to shake hands with the Left-handed Smasher, but Daredevil Dick stood it like a man.

"Mr. Richard Marwood," said he, "you've been a good friend to me, ever since you was old enough—" he stopped here, and cast about in his mind for the fitting pursuits of early youth—"ever since you was old enough to give a cove a black eye, or knock your friend's teeth down his throat with a light backhander. I've known you down stairs, a-swearin' at the barmaid, and holdin' your own agin the whole lot of the Cheerfuls, when other young gents of your age was a-makin' themselves bad with sweetstuffs and green apples, and callin' it life. I've known you help that gent yonder," he gave a jerk with his thumb in the direction of the domino-player, "to wrench off his own pa's knocker, and send it to him by twopenny post next mornin', seventeen and sixpence to pay postage; but I never know'd you to do a bad action, or to hit out upon a cove as was down."

Richard thanked the Smasher for his good opinion, and they shook hands again.

"I'll tell you what it is," continued the host, "I'm a man of few words. If a cove offends me, I give him my left between his eyes, playful; if he does it agen, I give him my left agen, with a meanin', and he don't repeat it. If a gent as I like does ​me proud, I feels grateful, and when I has a chance I shows him my gratitude. Mr. Richard Marwood, I'm your friend to the last spoonful of my claret; and let the man as murdered your uncle keep clear of my left mawley, if he wants to preserve his beauty."

Chapter VI.
Mr. Peters relates how he thought he had a Clue, and how he lost it.

A week after the meeting of the Cherokees Richard Marwood received his mother, in a small furnished house he had taken in Spring Gardens. Mrs. Marwood, possessed of the entire fortune of her murdered brother, was a very rich woman. Of her large income she had, during the eight years of her son's imprisonment, spent scarcely anything; as, encouraged by Mr. Joseph Peters's mysterious hints and vague promises, she had looked forward to the deliverance of her beloved and only child. The hour had come. She held him in her arms again, free.

"No, mother, no," he says, "not free. Free from the prison walls, but not free from the stain of the false accusation. Not till the hour when all England declares my innocence shall I be indeed a free man. Why, look you, mother, I cannot go out of this room into yonder street without such a disguise as a murderer himself might wear, for fear some Slopperton official should recognise the features of the lunatic criminal, and send me back to my cell at the asylum."

"My darling boy," she lays her hands upon his shoulders, and looks proudly into his handsome face, "my darling boy, these people at Slopperton think you dead. See," she touched her black dress as she spoke, "it is for you I wear this. A painful deception, Richard, even for such an object. I cannot bear to think of that river, and of what might have been."

"Dear mother, I have been saved, perhaps, that I may make some atonement for that reckless, wicked past."

"Only reckless, Richard; never wicked. You had always the same noble heart, always the same generous soul; you were always my dear and only son."

"You remember what the young man says in the play, mother, when he gets into a scrape through neglecting his garden and making love to his master's daughter—'You shall be proud of your son yet.'"

"I shall be proud of you, Richard. I am proud of you. We are rich; and wealth is power. Justice shall be done you yet, my darling boy. You have friends——"

"Yes, mother, good and true ones. Peters—you brought him with you?"

​"Yes; I persuaded him to resign his situation. I have settled a hundred a year on him for life—a poor return for what he has done, Richard; but it was all I could induce him to accept, and he only agreed to take that on condition that every moment of his life should be devoted to your service."

"Is he in the house now, mother?"

"Yes, he is below; I will ring for him."

"Do, mother. I must go over to Darley, and take him with me. You must not think me an inattentive or neglectful son; but remember that my life has but one business till that man is found."

He wrung her hand, and left her standing at the window watching his receding figure through the quiet dusky street.

Her gratitude to Heaven for his restoration is deep and heartfelt; but there is a shade of sadness in her face as she looks out into the twilight after him, and thinks of the eight wasted years of his youth, and of his bright manhood now spent on a chimera; for she thinks he will never find the murderer of his uncle. How, after eight years, without one clue by which to trace him, how can he hope to track the real criminal?

But Heaven is above us all, Agnes Marwood; and in the dark and winding paths of life light sometimes comes when and whence we least expect it.

If you go straight across Blackfriars Bridge, and do not suffer yourself to be beguiled either by the attractions of that fashionable transpontine lounge, the "New Cut," or by the eloquence of the last celebrity at that circular chapel some time sacred to Rowland Hill—if you are not a man to be led away by whelks and other piscatorial delicacies, second-hand furniture, birds and bird-cages, or easy shaving, you may ultimately reach, at the inland end of the road, a locality known to the inhabitants of the district of Friar Street. Whether, in any dark period of our ecclesiastical history, the members of the mother church were ever reduced to the necessity of living in this neighbourhood I am not prepared to say. But if ever any of the magnates of the Catholic faith did hang out in this direction, it is to be hoped that the odours from the soap-boiler's round the corner, the rich essences from the tallow manufactory over the way, the varied perfumes from the establishment of the gentleman who does a thousand pounds a week in size, to say nothing of such minor and domestic effluvia as are represented by an amalgamation of red herrings, damp corduroy, old boots, onions, washing, a chimney on fire, dead cats, bad eggs, and an open drain or two—it is to be hoped, I say, that these conflicting scents did not pervade the breezes of Friar Street so strongly in the good old times as they do in these our later days of luxury and refinement.

​Mr. Darley's establishment, ordinarily spoken of as the surgery par excellence, was perhaps one of the most pretending features of the street. It asserted itself, in fact, with such a redundancy of gilt letters and gas burners, that it seemed to say, "Really now, you must be ill; or if you're not, you ought to be." It was not a very large house, this establishment of Mr. Darley's, but there were at least half-a-dozen bells on the doorpost. There was Surgery; then there was Day and Night (Gus wanted to have Morning and Afternoon, but somebody told him it wasn't professional); then there was besides surgery, day, and night bells, another brilliant brass knob, inscribed "Visitors," and a ditto ditto, whereon was engraved "Shop." Though, as there was only one small back-parlour beyond the shop into which visitors ever penetrated, and as it was the custom for all such visitors to walk straight through the aforesaid shop into the aforesaid parlour without availing themselves of any bell whatever, the brass knobs were looked upon rather in the light of a conventionality than a convenience.

But Gus said they looked like business, especially when they were clean, which wasn't always, as a couple of American gentlemen, friends of Darley's, were in the habit of squirting tobacco-juice at them from the other side of the way, in the dusky twilight; the man who hit the brass oftenest out of six times to be the winner, and the loser to stand beer all the evening—that is to say, until some indefinite time on the following morning, for Darley's parties seldom broke up very early; and to let the visitors out and take the morning milk in was often a simultaneous proceeding in the household of our young surgeon.

If he had been a surgeon only, he would surely have been a Sir Benjamin Brodie; for when it is taken into account that he could play the piano, organ, guitar, and violoncello, without having learned any of those instruments; that he could write a song, and compose the melody to it; that he could draw horses and dogs after Herring and Landseer; make more puns in one sentence than any burlesque writer living; make love to half-a-dozen women at once, and be believed by every one of them; sing a comic song, or tell a funny story; name the winner of the Derby safer than any prophet on that side of the water; and make his book for the Leger with one hand while he wrote a prescription with the other; the discriminating reader will allow that there was a good deal of some sort of talent or other in the composition of Mr. Augustus Darley.

In the twilight of this particular autumn evening he is busily engaged putting up a heap of little packets labelled "Best Epsom Salts," while his assistant, a very small youth, of a far more elderly appearance than his master, lights the gas. The ​half-glass door that communicates with the little back parlour is ajar, and Gus is talking to some one within.

"If I go over the water to-night, Bell—" he says.

A feminine voice from within interrupts him—"But you won't go to-night, Gus; the last time you went to that horrid Smasher's, Mrs. Tompkins's little boy was ill, and they sent into the London Road for Mr. Parker. And you are such a favourite with everybody, dear, that they say if you'd only stay at home always, you'd have the best practice in the neighbourhood."

"But, Bell, how can a fellow stay at home night after night, and perhaps half his time only sell a penn'orth of salts or a poor man's plaster? If they'd be ill," he added, almost savagely, "I wouldn't mind stopping in; there's some interest in that. Or if they'd come and have their teeth drawn; but they never will: and I'm sure I sell 'em our Infallible Anti-toothache Tincture; and if that don't make 'em have their teeth out, nothing will."

"Come and have your tea, Gus; and tell Snix to bring his basin."

Snix was the boy, who forthwith drew from a cupboard under the counter the identical basin into which, when a drunken man was brought into the shop, Gus usually bled him, with a double view of obtaining practice in his art and bringing the patient back to consciousness.

The feminine occupant of the parlour is a young lady with dark hair and grey eyes, and something under twenty years of age. She is Augustus Darley's only sister; she keeps his house, and in an emergency she can make up a prescription—nay, has been known to draw a juvenile patient's first tooth, and give him his money back after the operation for the purchase of consolatory sweetstuffs.

Perhaps Isabel Darley is just a little what very prim young ladies, who have never passed the confines of the boarding-school or the drawing-room, might call "fast." But when it is taken into consideration that she was left an orphan at an early age, that she never went to school in her life, and that she has for a very considerable period been in the habit of associating with her brother's friends, chiefly members of the Cherokee Society, it is not so much to be wondered at that she is a little more masculine in her attainments, and "go-ahead" in her opinions, than some others of her sex.

The parlour is small, as has before been stated. One of the Cherokees has been known to suggest, when there were several visitors present and the time arrived for their departure, that they should be taken out singly with a corkscrew. Other Cherokees, arriving after the room had been filled with visitors, ​had been heard to advise that somebody should go in first with a candle, to ascertain whether vitality could be sustained in the atmosphere. Perhaps the accommodation was not extended by the character of the furniture, which consisted of a cottage piano, a chair for the purposes of dental surgery, a small Corinthian column supporting a basin with a metal plug and chain useful for like purposes; also a violoncello in the corner, a hanging bookshelf—(which was a torture to tall Cherokees, as one touch from a manly head would tilt down the shelves and shower the contents of Mr. Darley's library on the head in question, like a literary waterfall)—and a good-sized sofa, with that unmistakable well, and hard back and arms, which distinguish the genus sofa-bedstead. Of course tables, chairs, china ornaments, a plaster-of-Paris bust here and there, caricatures on the walls, a lamp that wouldn't burn, and a patent arrangement for the manufacture of toasted cheese, are trifles in the way of furniture not worth naming. Miss Darley's birds, again, though they did spill seed and water into the eyes of unoffending visitors, and drop lumps of dirty sugar sharply down upon the noses of the same, could not of course be considered a nuisance; but certainly the compound surgery and back-parlour in the mansion of Augustus Darley was, to say the least, a little too full of furniture.

While Isabel is pouring out the tea, two gentlemen open the shop door, and the bell attached thereto, which should ring but doesn't, catching in the foremost visitor's foot, nearly precipitates him headlong into the emporium of the disciple of Esculapius. This foremost visitor is no other than Mr. Peters, and the tall figure behind him, wrapped in a greatcoat, is Daredevil Dick.

"Here I am, Gus!" he cries out, in his own bold hearty voice; "here I am; found your place at last, in spite of the fascinations of half the stale shell-fish in the United Kingdom. Here I am; and here's the best friend I have in the world, not even excepting yourself, old fellow."

Gus introduces Richard to his sister Isabel, who has been taught from her childhood to look upon the young man shut up in a lunatic asylum down at Slopperton as the greatest hero, next to Napoleon Buonaparte, that ever the world had boasted. She was a little girl of eleven years old at the time of Dick's trial, and had never seen her wild brother's wilder companion; and she looks up now at the dark handsome face with a glance of almost reverence in her deep gray eyes. But Bell is by no means a heroine; and she has a dozen unheroine-like occupations. She has the tea to pour out, and in her nervous excitement she scalds Richard's fingers, drops the sugar into the slop-basin, and pours all the milk into one cup of tea, ​What she would have done without the assistance of Mr. Peters, it is impossible to say; for that gentleman showed himself the very genius of order; cut thin bread-and-butter enough for half-a-dozen, which not one of the party touched; re-filled the teapot before it was empty; lit the gas-lamp which hung from the ceiling; shut the door which communicated with the shop and the other door which led on to the staircase; and did all so quietly that nobody knew he was doing anything.

Poor Richard! In spite of the gratitude and happiness he feels in his release, there is a gloom upon his brow and an abstraction in his manner, which he tries in vain to shake off.

A small, round, chubby individual, who might be twelve or twenty, according to the notions of the person estimating her age, removed the tea-tray, and in so doing broke a saucer. Gus looked up. "She always does it," he said, mildly. "We're getting quite accustomed to the sound. It rather reduces our stock of china, and we sometimes are obliged to send out to buy tea-things before we can have any breakfast; but she's a good girl, and she doesn't steal the honey, or the jujubes, or the tartaric acid out of the seidlitz-powders, as the other one did; not that I minded that much," he continued; "but she couldn't read, and she sometimes filled up the papers with arsenic for fear of being found out; and that might have been inconvenient, if we'd ever happened to sell them."

"Now, Gus," said Richard, as he drew his chair up to the fireplace and lit his pipe—permission being awarded by Bell, who lived in one perpetual atmosphere of tobacco-smoke—"now, Gus, I want Peters to tell you all about this affair; how it was he thought me innocent; how he hit upon the plan he formed for saving my neck; how he tried to cast about and find a clue to the real murderer; how he thought he had found a clue, and how he lost it."

"Shall my sister stop while he tells the story?" asked Gus.

"She is your sister, Gus," answered Richard. "She cannot be so unlike you as not to be a true and pitying friend to me. Miss Darley," he continued, turning towards her as he spoke, "you do not think me quite so bad a fellow as the world has made me out; you would like to see me righted, and my name freed from the stain of a vile crime?"

"Mr. Marwood," the girl answered, in an earnest voice, "I have heard your sad story again and again from my brother's lips. Had you too been my brother, I could not, believe me, have felt a deeper interest in your fate, or a truer sorrow for your misfortunes. It needs but to look into your face, or hear your voice, to know how little you deserve the imputation that has been cast upon you."

Richard rises and gives her his hand. No languid and lady​like pressure, such as would not brush the down off a butterfly's wing, but an honest hearty grasp, that comes straight from the heart.

"And now for Mr. Peters's story," said Gus, "while I brew a jugful of whisky-punch."

"You can follow his hands, Gus?" asks Richard.

"Every twist and turn of them. He and I had many a confab about you, old fellow, before we went out fishing," said Gus, looking up from the pleasing occupation of peeling a lemon.

"Now for it, then," said Richard; and Mr. Peters accordingly began.

Perhaps, considering his retiring from the Slopperton police force a great event, not to say a crisis, in his life, Mr. Peters had celebrated it by another event; and, taking the tide of his affairs at the flood, had availed himself of the water to wash his hands with. At any rate, the digital alphabet was a great deal cleaner than when, eight years ago, he spelt out the two words, "Not guilty," in the railway carriage.

There was something very strange to a looker-on in the little party, Gus, Richard, and Bell, all with earnest eyes fixed on the active fingers of the detective—the silence only broken by some exclamation at intervals from one of the three.

"When first I see this young gent," say the fingers, as Mr. Peters designates Richard with a jerk of his elbow, "I was a-standin' on the other side of the way, a-waitin' till my superior, Jinks, as was as much up to his business as a kitting,"—(Mr. Peters has rather what we may call a fancy style of orthography, and takes the final g off some words to clap it on to others, as his taste dictates)—"a-waitin,' I say, till Jinks should want my assistance. Well, gents all—beggin' the lady's parding, as sits up so manly, with none of yer faintin' nor 'steriky games, as I a'most forgot she was a lady—no sooner did I clap eyes upon Mr. Marwood here, a-smokin' his pipe, in Jinks's face, and a-answerin' him sharp, and a-behavin' what you may call altogether cocky, than I says to myself, 'They've got the wrong un.' My fust words and my last about this 'ere gent, was, 'They've got the wrong un.'"

Mr. Peters looked round at the attentive party with a glance of triumph, rubbed his hands by way of a full-stop, and went on with his manual recital.

"For why?" said the fingers, interrogatively, "for why did I think as this 'ere gent was no good for this 'ere murder; for why did I think them chaps at Slopperton had got on the wrong scent? Because he was cheeky? Lor' bless your precious eyes, miss" (by way of gallantry he addresses himself here to Isabel), "not a bit of it! When a cove goes and cuts another cove's ​throat off-hand, it ain't likely he ain't prepared to cheek a police-officer. But when I reckoned up this young gent's face, what was it I see? Why, as plain as I see his nose and his moustachios—and he ain't bad off for neither of them," said the fingers, parenthetically—"I see that he hadn't done it. Now, a cove what's screwed up to face a judge and jury, maybe can face 'em, and never change a hue of his mug; but there isn't a cove as lives as can stand that first tap of a detective's hand upon his shoulder as tells him, plain as words, 'The game is up.' The best of 'em, and the pluckiest of 'em, drops under that. If they keeps the colour in their face—which some of 'em has got the power to do, and none as never tried it on can guess the pain—if they can do that 'ere, the perspiration breaks out wet and cold upon their for'eds, and that blows 'em. But this young gent—he was took aback, he was surprised, and he was riled, and used bad language; but his colour never changed, and he wasn't once knocked over till Jinks, unbusiness-like, told him of his uncle's murder, when he turned as white as that 'ere 'ed of Bon-er-part." Mr. Peters, for want of a better comparison, glanced in the direction of a bust of the victor of Marengo, which, what with tobacco-smoke and a ferocious pair of burnt cork moustachios, was by no means the whitest object in creation.

"Now, what a detective officer's good at, if he's worth his salt, is this 'ere: when he sees two here and another two there, he can put 'em together, though they might be a mile apart to anybody not up to the trade, and make 'em into four. So, thinks I, the gent isn't took aback at bein' arrested; but he is took aback when he hears as how his uncle's murdered. Now, if he'd committed the murder, he'd know of it; and he might sham surprise, but he wouldn't be surprised; and this young gent was knocked all of a heap as genuine as—" Mr. Peters's ideas still revert to the bust of Napoleon—"as ever that 'ere forring cove was, when he sees his old guard scrunched up small at the battle of Waterloo."

"Heaven knows, Peters," said Richard, taking his pipe out of his mouth, and looking up from his stooping position over the fire, "Heaven knows you were right; I did feel my heart turn cold when I heard of that good man's death."

"Well, that they'd got the wrong un I saw was as clear as daylight—but where was the right un? That was the question. Whoever committed the murder did it for the money in that 'ere cabinet: and sold agen they was, whoever they was, and didn't get the money. Who was in the house? This young gent's mother and the servant. I was nobody in the Gardenford force, and I was less than nobody at Slopperton; so get into that house at the Black Mill I couldn't. This young gent was walked off to jail, and I was sent about my business—my orders ​bein' to be back in Gardenford that evenin', leavin' Slopperton by the three-thirty train. Well, I was a little cut up about this young gent; for I seed that the case was dead agen him; the money in his pocket—the blood on his sleeve—a cock-and-a-bull story of a letter of introduction, and a very evident attempt at a bolt—only enough to hang him, that's all; and, for all that, I had a inward conwiction that he was as hinnercent of the murder as that 'ere plaster-of-Paris stattur." Mr. Peters goes regularly to the bust for comparisons, by way of saving time and trouble in casting about for fresh ones.

"But my orders," continued the fingers, "was positive, so I goes down to the station to start by the three-thirty; and as I walks into the station-yard, I hears the whistle, and sees the train go. I was too late; and as the next train didn't start for near upon three hours, I thought I'd take a stroll and 'av a look at the beauties of Slopperton. Well, I strolls on, promiscuous like, till I comes to the side of a jolly dirty-looking river; and as by this time I feels a little dry, I walks on, lookin' about for a public; but ne'er a one do I see, till I almost tumbles into a dingy little place, as looked as if it did about half-a-pint a-day reg'lar, when business was brisk. But in I walks, past the bar; and straight afore me I sees a door as leads into the parlour. The passage was jolly dark; and this 'ere door was ajar; and inside I hears voices. Well, you see, business is business, and pleasure is pleasure; but when a cove takes a pleasure in his business, he gets a way of lettin' his business habits come out unbeknownst when he's takin' his pleasure: so I listens. Now, the voice I heerd fust was a man's voice; and, though the place was a sort of crib such as nobody but navvies or such-like would be in the habit of going to, this 'ere was the voice of a gentleman. I can't say as I ever paid much attention to grammar myself, though I daresay it's very pleasant and amusin' when you enter into it; but, for all that, I'd knocked about in the world long enough to know a gent's way of speakin' from a navvy's, as well as I know'd one tune on the accordion from another tune. It was a nice, soft-spoken voice too, and quite melodious and pleasant to listen to; but it was a-sayin' some of the cruelest and hardest words as ever was spoke to a woman yet by any creature with the cheek to call himself a man. You're not much good, my friend, says I, with your lardy-dardy ways and your cold-blooded words, whoever you are. You're a thin chap, with light hair and white hands, I know, though I've never seen you; and there's very little in the way of wickedness that you wouldn't be up to on a push. Now, just as I was a-thinkin' this, he said somethin' that sent the blood up into my face as hot as fire—'I expected a sum of money, and I've been disappointed of it,' he said; and before the girl he was a-talkin' ​to could open her lips, he caught her up sudden—'Never you mind how,' he says, 'never you mind how.'

"He expected a sum of money, and he'd been disappointed of it! So had the man who had murdered this young gent's uncle.

"Not much in this, perhaps. But why was he so frightened at the thoughts of her asking him how he expected the money, and how he'd bin disappointed? There it got fishy. At any rate, says I to myself, I'll have a look at you, my friend; so in I walks, very quiet and quite unbeknownst. He was a-sittin' with his back to the door, and the young woman he was a-talkin' to was standin' lookin' out of the winder; so neither of 'em saw me. He was buildin' up some cards into a 'ouse, and had got 'em up very high, when I laid my hand upon his shoulder sudden. He turned round and looked at me." Mr. Peters here paused, and looked round at the little group, who sat watching his fingers with breathless attention. He had evidently come to a point in his narrative.

"Now, what did I see in his face when he looked at me? Why, the very same look that I missed in the face of this young gent when Jinks took him in the mornin'. The very same look that I'd seen in a many faces, and never know'd it differ, whether it came one way or another, always bein' the same look at bottom—the look of a man as is guilty of what will hang him and thinks that he's found out. But as you can't give looks in as evidence, this wasn't no good in a practical way; but I says to myself, if ever there was anything certain in this world since it was begun, I've come across the right un: so I sits down and takes up a newspaper. I signified to him that I was dumb, and he took it for granted that I was deaf as well—which was one of those stupid mistakes your clever chaps sometimes fall into—so he went on a-talking to the girl.

"Well, it was a old story enough, what him and the girl was talkin' of; but every word he said made him out a more cold-blooded villain than the last.

"Presently he offered her some money—four sovereigns. She served him as he ought to have been served, and threw them every one slap in his face. One cut him over the eye; and I was glad of it. 'You're marked, my man,' thinks I, 'and nothin' could be handier agen I want you.' He picked up three of the sovereigns, but for all he could do he couldn't find the fourth. So he had the cut (which was a jolly deep un) plastered up, and he went away. She stared at the river uncommon hard, and then she went away. Now I didn't much like the look she gave the river, so as I had about half an hour to spare before the train started, I followed her. I think she knew it; for presently she turned short off into a little street, and when I turned into it after her she wasn't to be seen right or left.

​"Well, I had but half an hour, so I thought it was no use chasin' this unfortunate young creature through all the twistings and turnings of the back slums of Slopperton; so after a few minutes' consideration, I walked straight to the station. Hang me if I wasn't too late for the train again. I don't know how it was, but I couldn't keep my mind off the young woman, nor keep myself from wonderin' what she was agoin' to do with herself, and what she was agoin' to do with that 'ere baby. So I walks back agen down by the water, and as I'd a good hour and a half to spare, I walks a good way, thinking of the young man, and the cut on his forehead. It was nigh upon dark by this time, and foggy into the bargain. Maybe I'd gone a mile or more, when I comes up to a barge what lay at anchor quite solitary. It was a collier, and there was a chap on board, sittin' in the stern, smokin', and lookin' at the water. There was no one else in sight but him and me; and no sooner does he spy me comin' along the bank than he sings out,

"'Hulloa! Have you met a young woman down that way?'

"His words struck me all of a heap somehow, comin' so near upon what I was a-thinkin' of myself. I shook my head; and he said,

"'There's been some unfort'nate young girl down here tryin' to dround her baby. I see the little chap in the water, and fished him out with my boat-hook. I'd seen the girl hangin' about here, just as it was a-gettin' dark, and then I heard the splash when she threw the child in; but the fog was too thick for me to see anything ashore by that time.'

"The barge was just alongside the bank, and I stepped on board. Not bein' so fortunate as to have a voice, you know, it comes awkward with strangers, and I was rather put to it to get on with the young man. And didn't he sing out loud when he came to understand I was dumb; he couldn't have spoke in a higher key if I'd been a forriner.

"He told me he should take the baby round to the Union; all he hoped he said, was, that the mother wasn't a-goin' to do anything bad with herself.

"I hoped not too; but I remembered that look of hers when she stood at the window staring out at the river, and I didn't feel very easy in my mind about her.

"I took the poor little wet thing up in my arms. The young man had wrapped it in an old jacket, and it was a-cryin' piteous, and lookin', on, so scared and miserable.

"Well, it may seem a queer whim, but I'm rather soft-hearted on the subject of babies, and often had a thought that I should like to try the power of cultivation in the way of business, and bring a child up from the very cradle to the police detective line, to see whether I couldn't make that 'ere child a ornament to the ​force. I wasn't a marryin' man, and by no means likely ever to 'av a family of my own; so when I took up that 'ere baby in my arms, somehow or other the thought came into my 'ed of adoptin' him, and bringin' of him up. So I rolled him up in my greatcoat, and took him with me to Gardenford."

"And a wonderful boy he is," said Richard; "we'll educate him, Peters, and make a gentleman of him."

"Wait a bit," said the fingers very quickly; "thank you kindly, sir; but if the police force of this 'ere country was robbed of that 'ere boy, it would be robbed of a gem as it couldn't afford to lose."

"Go on, Peters; tell them the rest of your story."

"Well, though I felt in my own mind that by one of those strange chances which does happen in life, maybe as often as they happen in story-books, I had fallen across the man who had committed the murder, yet for all that I hadn't evidence enough to get a hearin'. I got transferred from Gardenford to Slopperton, and every leisure minute I had I tried to come across the man I'd marked; but nowhere could I see him, or hear of any one answering his description. I went to the churches; for I thought him capable of anything, even to shammin' pious. I went to the theayter, and I see a young woman accused of poisonin' a fam'ly, and proved innocent by a police cove as didn't know his business any more than a fly. I went anywhere and everywhere, but I never see that man; and it was gettin' uncommon near the trial of this young gent, and nothin' done. How was he to be saved? I thought of it by night and thought of it by day; but work it out I couldn't nohow. One day I hears of an old friend of the pris'ner's being sup-boned-aed as witness for the crown. This friend I determined to see; for two 'eds"—Mr. Peters looked round, as though he defied contradiction—"shall be better than one."

"And this friend," said Gus, "was your humble servant; who was only too glad to find that poor Dick had one sincere friend in the world who believed in his innocence, besides myself."

"Well, Mr. Darley and me," resumed Mr. Peters, "put our 'eds together, and we came to this conclusion, that if this young gent was mad when he committed the murder, they couldn't hang him, but would shut him in a asylum for the rest of his nat'ral life—which mayn't be pleasant in the habstract, but which is better than hangin', any day."

"So you determined on proving me mad," said Richard.

"We hadn't such very bad grounds to go upon, perhaps, old fellow," replied Mr. Darley; "that brain fever, which we thought such a misfortune when it laid you up for three dreary weeks, stood us in good stead; we had something to go upon, for we knew ​we could get you off by no other means. But to get you off this way we wanted your assistance, and we didn't hit upon the plan till it was too late to get at you and tell you our scheme; we didn't hit upon it till twelve o'clock on the night before your trial. We tried to see your counsel; but he had that morning left the town, and wasn't to return till the trial came on. Peters hung about the court all the morning, but couldn't see him; and nothing was done when the judge and jury took their seats. You know the rest; how Peters caught your eye——"

"Yes," said Dick, "and how seven letters upon his fingers told me the whole scheme, and gave me my cue; those letters formed these two words, 'Sham mad.'"

"And very well you did it at the short notice, Dick," said Gus; "upon my word, for the moment I was almost staggered, and thought, suppose in getting up this dodge we are only hitting upon the truth, and the poor fellow really has been driven out of his wits by this frightful accusation?"

"A scrap of paper," said Mr. Peters, on his active fingers, "gave the hint to your counsel—a sharp chap enough, though a young un."

"I can afford to reward him now for his exertions," said Richard, "and I must find him for that purpose. But Peters, for heaven's sake tell us about this young man whom you suspect to be the murderer. If I go to the end of the world in search of him, I'll find him, and drag him and his villany to light, that my name may be cleared from the foul stain it wears."

Mr. Peters looked very grave. "You must go a little further than the end of this world to find him, I'm afraid, sir," said the fingers. "What do you say to looking for him in the next? for that's the station he'd started for when I last saw him; and I believe that on that line, with the exception of now and then a cock-and-a-bull-lane ghost, they don't give no return tickets."

"Dead?" said Richard. "Dead, and escaped from justice?"

"That's about the size of it, sir," replied Mr. Peters. "Whether he thought as how something was up, and he was blown, or whether he was riled past bearin' at findin' no money in that 'ere cabinet, I can't take upon myself to say; but I found him six months after the murder out upon a heath, dead, with a laudanum-bottle a-lying by his side."

"And did you ever find out who he was?" asked Gus.

"He was a usher, sir, at a 'cademy for young gents, and a very pious young man he was too, I've heard; but for all that he murdered this young gent's uncle, or my name isn't Peters."

"Beyond the reach of justice," said Richard; "then the truth can never be brought to light, and to the end of my days I must bear the stigma of a crime of which I am innocent."

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.