Innocent

CHAPTER III.

THE FAMILY.

A bright spring morning, sharp and cold, but with floods of sunshine everywhere—sunshine on the grass, turning the delicate rime into a network of pearls, and glittering along all the bare branches, where the brown buds were beginning to swell—colder than autumn, almost colder than winter, but with a different sentiment in the air. Spring cold is like the poverty of a poor man who has had a fortune left him—better days are coming; the trees felt this already, though their buds were pinched, and Nelly felt it as she went out with her garden gloves on, and a pair of scissors. What did she expect to find in the garden, do you ask? Nothing in the garden, where the crocuses had scarcely awakened to the fact that the sun was up and calling them; but away at the end of the lawn, among the roots of that transept of lime trees which crossed the avenue of big elms, there were hosts of hardy little snowdrops peeping up among the half-frozen grass, and growing in handfuls as Nature bade them. By what sweet piece of good fortune this came to be, I cannot tell; but so it was. Nelly herself, in a jacket trimmed with white fur, was too bright to be like her snowdrops. She ran up and down the long avenue to warm her delicate little toes. It was a better way than sitting over the fire. In the little open space before the garden door, Dick, with a book in his coat pocket, was doing what he could to inform the mind of Winks. Dick was supposed to get up at seven to improve his own mind, and, I presume, he believed that the book in his pocket did him some good by mere contact, if nothing else. He had read, at most, one page of it, at the expense of I don’t know how many yawns, but now his soul was set on the more congenial task of teaching Winks to carry a musket and stand on guard. Winks looked at the stick which had fallen from his unwilling paws, sniffing at it with a certain cynical disbelief in the supposed weapon. He was a very dark-coloured Skye, almost black, and had a way of grinning at Dick with all his white teeth displayed from his black lips, in a satirical smile which incensed his instructor greatly. Winks had as great objections to being instructed as Dick had himself, but, being above those prudential reasons which induced his young master to smother his feelings, the four-footed neophyte had distinctly the advantage. He did not believe in the feigned firearm, and words could not have expressed the good-humoured disdain with which he wagged his tail. “You think this is a gun, I suppose,” Winks’s tail said; “but I who am your intellectual superior am not to be taken in. Take up that bit of wood in my paws as if I was a mountebank! Not if I know it.” “Sit up, sir, sit up,” said Dick in a passion. Winks only smiled the more and wagged his tail. But the lesson, though it amused his cynical humour, began to bore him. All at once he put his head on one side, and pricked up his ears, responding to some imaginary call. The pantomime was far cleverer than anything Dick was capable of. “I think I hear my mistress calling me,” Winks said in the plainest English; but he was too clever to escape at once. He paused, contemplative, consulting heaven and earth. “Did I hear my mistress call?” Then suddenly once more came the imaginary summons. “Distressed I am sure, beyond all measure, to leave you,” the polite dog said, with a final wag of his tail, triumphant, yet deprecating. “Confound the little brute!” cried Dick, indignant; and Winks chuckled as he ran off on three legs, pretending to be all eagerness. “Confound the little beast!” repeated the boy; “Nelly, come here, and don’t dance about in that aggravating way;—just when I thought he had got hold of a new trick!”

“Winks is a great deal too clever to do tricks,” said Nelly.

“Yes, he is as knowing as I am,” said innocent Dick. “I wonder now if there is any truth in that stuff about transmigration. He must have been an actor, that brute. I don’t believe my mother called a bit. I don’t believe she is down-stairs yet—cunning little beast! What a jolly lot of snowdrops, Nelly! Are you going in? It’s not nine yet. Come round the walk, I want to speak to you. Oh what an awful bore is this exam.!” said Dick, with a deep sigh. “Now I put it to you, Nell, in the spirit of fairness, how can a fellow be expected to do mathematics before breakfast? It is bad enough when you have been worked up to it, and supported; but at eight o’clock in the morning, without so much as a cup of coffee! What are men supposed to be made of? I am sure it never was so in the old times.”

“Much you know about it,” said Nelly. “When I was at school, and much younger than you, I had to get up and practise for an hour and a half before breakfast—cold fingers and cold keys—and not even a fire.”

“Oh, as for that,” said Dick, “of course I never minded getting up at Eton; all the other fellows did it, and for one thing, the masters were punished just as much as we were, and looked just as blue. But when you are all of you in your comfortable beds, and only me at work!”

“If that was all, I should not mind in the least getting up and sitting with you,” said Nelly; “but then we should only chatter, and no work would be done. And if you work hard, you know it will soon be over.”

“Soon over? yes, till the next one,” said Dick the disconsolate; “and then India at the end. There’s Frederick now, a lazy beggar, comes down at ten o’clock, and everybody thinks it quite right. Why should there be such a difference between him and me? You’re a girl, and don’t count; but why should he be in clover at the Sealing Wax Office, while I am to be sent to India?”

“Frederick will never get rich in the Sealing Wax Office, but you may in India. Besides, you know,” said Nelly, who was impressionable on this point, though she did not altogether trust her elder brother, “he would have been in the Church had he not been too conscientious. Quantities of men go into the Church without thinking what they are doing; but Frederick had scruples—he had doubts even on some points——”

“Much anybody would care if I had doubts,” said Dick; “if I were to set up opinions, Nell——”

But this was more than Nelly’s gravity could stand. The idea of Dick having opinions, and the injured look with which he announced the probable indifference of the world to them, sent his sister off into that fou rire which no one can stop. “I will race you to the end of the walk,” she said, trying to subdue herself; and, undismayed by the indifference thus shown to his metaphysical difficulties, Dick accepted the challenge. He allowed her to dart past him with all a boy’s contempt. He regarded her, indeed, with something of the same sentiment with which Winks had regarded him. “Girls spend all their strength at the first outset,” Dick said composedly, going steadily on with his squared elbows. “They’re like greased lightning for ten yards or so, and then they’re done—like you, Nell,” he said, passing her when she paused, panting, to take breath. She had made a hard fight for it, however. She had run to within a few yards of the goal before she allowed herself to be beaten. Dick immediately began a lecture to her upon the deficiency of feminine performances, which was perhaps too technical for these pages, but so like many lectures on the same subject that the reader will have little difficulty in imagining it. “You never can ‘stay,’” was the conclusion, made with much patronizing good-humour. Altogether, it was apparent that Dick’s general opinion of his sister coincided wonderfully with Winks’s opinion of himself. Great wits jump.

“Miss Ellinor, your mamma has been a-waiting breakfast this half-hour,” said Brownlow solemnly, addressing them from the end of the walk. Brownlow was large and stout, and filled up the vista formed by the branches. They had known his sway all their lives, and they laughed at him between themselves; but the young Eastwoods had not yet learned to disobey Brownlow. They put themselves in motion with the utmost docility. “We are coming directly,” said Nelly, running to pick up her basket with the snowdrops. Even Frederick did instinctively what Brownlow told him. The brother and sister went on to the house, following the large black shadow which moved with dignity before them. “What an awful old bore he is,” said Dick: “look here, Nell, what will you bet that I couldn’t hit that big red ear of his with this chestnut? One, two, three——”

“Oh, don’t, Dick, for heaven’s sake!” said Nelly, catching his hand; “though he is an old bore. I wonder how it is that we have none but old servants? Mamma prefers them, I suppose; though Frederick, I know, would like another cook, and I,—oh, no, I couldn’t part with old Alice. What a wretch I am to think of it! But she never can help one to a new way of doing one’s hair.”

“I always do my hair exactly the same,” said Dick. “I never require any one to help me.”

“Oh, you!” said Nelly taking her revenge; “who cares how a boy looks?” And thus they went in, breathing youth, and fun, and nonsense, and mischief. Mrs. Eastwood stood warming her hands by the fire, but Dick and Nelly put themselves on the other side of the table. Their young blood was dancing, their young limbs too light to be touched by the cold.

“I wonder where Frederick will be by this time; I wonder when he will reach Pisa,” said the mother. “I suppose it is not to be expected that a young man would go right through Paris without stopping. But when I think of that poor little thing all alone——”

“The wind blew nice and strong last night,” said Dick; “it would be pleasant in the Channel. I say, mamma, I hope Frederick liked it. How queer he would look this morning! What a thing it is not to be able to stand a breeze at sea! You should have seen us off the Needles in the last equinoctial, in old Summerdale’s yacht.”

“Don’t tell me about it,” said Mrs. Eastwood, closing her eyes and setting down her tea-cup. “Some of these days you will hear that Mr. Summerdale and his yacht have gone to the bottom: and I am sure, though I would not be uncharitable to any man, I think he deserves it: carrying boys away in a storm without the knowledge of their people. I thought I should have died.”

“I was a good bit more like dying, and I did not mind,” cried Dick. “It was glorious. The noise, so that you couldn’t hear yourself talk, and the excitement, and the confusion, and the danger! Hadn’t we just a squeak for it? It was gloriously jolly,” cried Dick, rubbing his hands at the recollection. He looked so wickedly pleased with the escapade that his mother could not help snubbing him on the spot.

“I hope you have got a great deal of work done this morning. Alice tells me you got up directly when you were called. And you must remember, Dick, how very short the time is getting,” she said, in her softest tones. “I would not for the world deprive you of a single advantage; but seven-and-sixpence an hour is a very great deal to pay unless you take the full advantage of it. And now I shall have another child to provide for,” Mrs. Eastwood added, sighing faintly. Poor Dick’s random mood was over. He said something about mathematics in general which was not complimentary to that lofty science.

“If it was to be of any use to a fellow after I should not mind,” he said. “It is the doing it all for no good that riles one. If I were to be mathematical master somewhere, or head accountant, or even a bookkeeping fellow——. You need not cry ‘Oh, oh!’ You ain’t in Parliament, Nell, and never can be; that’s a comfort. Girls ought to talk of things they understand. I don’t interfere with your fiddle-de-jigs. That’s what discourages a fellow. Besides, mathematics are horribly hard; ladies that never opened a Euclid,” said Dick, with dignity, “are quite incapable of forming an idea.”

“They tell the best in the examination,” said Mrs. Eastwood. “When you have passed you will have no more trouble with them. But we must not forget how many marks there are for mathematics; and you must not be discouraged, Dick. But you know, children, if we are to have a new member in the family, we shall require to think of economy more than ever. I do not see anything we can actually put down,” the mother said, with deliberation, and a sigh to the memory of the carriage. “The only thing I could think of was the fires in our bedrooms, and really that would not be good for your healths. But we must be generally economical. And the very first principle of economy is making the best use of what we have. So recollect, Dick.”

“I’m going, mamma,” he said, and pulled the book out of his coat pocket which had been keeping him company all the morning. Mrs. Eastwood followed him to the door with her kind eyes.

“I really think, though he is such a harum-scarum, that he is doing his work, poor boy,” she said, with that fond maternal confidence which is often so indifferently deserved.

“Yes, yes, mamma,” cried Nelly, with some impatience, not feeling all the interest in the subject her mother did. “But never mind Dick, he’ll do very well, I daresay. Come and see what I want to have done to the little room.”

The Elms was an old-fashioned house. It was built, as houses in England are rarely built now-a-days, in those suites of rooms which are so general on the Continent. Mrs. Eastwood’s room occupied the whole width of the wing. It had an alcove, which was like an inner room, for the bed, and abundance of space for reading tables and writing tables, and sofas and book-cases in the rest of the spacious chamber, which was like a French room in every way, with its dressing-closet opening from the alcove, and all the less beautiful accessories of the toilet kept well out of sight. Ellinor’s room opened from her mother’s, and opening from that again was the little room which was to be prepared for the new-comer. Already it was all pulled to pieces by Nelly’s commands, and under her supervision; and a brisk little workwoman sat in Nelly’s own chamber surrounded by billows of bright new chintz, with a running pattern of rose buds and fern leaves. A tall old woman, in a black gown and cap, stood beside this artist, advising it seemed and disapproving. Ellinor stopped with the anxious and indeed servile politeness of fear to speak to this personage. “How kind of you, Alice, to come and help,” she said; “I hope you like the chintz. Don’t you think we shall make the room look nice after all, when it has been papered and cleaned?”

“There’s nothing to be said against the room,” said Alice, in a Scotch accent, and with a solemnity of tone that spoke more than words.

“And then we shall all be together. It will be very handy for everything,” said Nelly, with a sickly smile, trying to bear up; “all the ladies of the family——”

“I would like to speak a word to your mamma about that,” said Alice. She pronounced the word “Mammaw,” and somehow those broad vowels added ten-fold weight—or so, at least, Ellinor thought—to the speech.

“Mamma has gone into the little room,” said Nelly, with an effort. Mrs. Eastwood was a very persuadable woman, and she looked still more persuadable than she was. Most people thought they themselves could influence her to anything, unless, indeed, some one else had forestalled them; and, to tell the truth, even her own family attributed to Mrs. Everard, or failing her to Alice, everything in their mother’s conduct which was not attributable to their own sage advices. It required a more subtle observer than Nelly to make out that her mother had in reality a great deal of her own way; therefore she was deeply alarmed by Alice’s unfriendly looks, and followed her into the little room with but slightly disguised terror.

“Alice is in a bad humour,” she whispered to her mother; “You won’t mind what she says? She thinks the new paper and the chintz are extravagant. Don’t listen to her, mamma.”

“So they are,” said Mrs. Eastwood, shaking her head. She was fond of pretty paper and pretty chintz, and of change and novelty. She liked furnishing a room almost as well as her daughter did, and she thought she had “taste.” Therefore she had defences against any attack on that side of the question, which Ellinor had not dreamt of. However, even Nelly was startled and taken aback by the unexpected line taken by Alice, who looked as if she might have something very important to say.

“You remember Miss Isabel, mem?” was what she said, looking her mistress full in the face.

“Dear me, Alice, what a question! Remember my sister?” cried Mrs. Eastwood, turning abruptly away from the paper and chintz.

“It’s a queer question to ask,” said Alice, with a grim smile; “but dinna go too fast. You mind your sister, and yet you are going to put her child—her only child—here in a room next to your own, next to Miss Ellinor’s? Between mother and daughter? That’s where you place Miss Isabel’s bairn?”

“Alice!” cried Mrs. Eastwood, almost angrily. She looked at Nelly’s wondering face and then at her maid with a half-frightened, half-threatening gesture. She was annoyed, but she was startled too.

“I say it before Miss Ellinor that you may not do it with your eyes shut,” said Alice. “I’m only a servant, with no right to interfere; but I cannot stand by, and no say a word. I’m no in favour of it,” she cried, turning round. “It would be best to provide for her, and no bring her home; but if you will bring her home—and, mem, you are always wilful, though nobody thinks so—put her in any place but here.”

“You are dreadfully prejudiced, Alice—dreadfully prejudiced!”

“Maybe I am; and, mem, you like your own way. We are none of us perfect. But your sister Isabel’s bairn, the child of an ill father to the boot, should never come into my house. Maybe you think, mem, that the features of the mind are no transmitted? Poor leddy! Poor leddy! There’s enough of her in your blood already without searching out of your way to find more.”

Mrs. Eastwood grew crimson to her hair. “If you think any of my children resemble my sister, Alice, I can assure you you are very much mistaken,” she said, walking up and down the little room in her agitation. “Nelly, look here, you would think she meant something very dreadful. Your poor aunt Isabella was very secret in her way, and liked to make a mystery. She got me into some trouble when I was a girl through it. That was all. Why it should be remembered against her child, or change my natural affections, I can’t imagine. Oh, I know you mean well, Alice, you mean well; but that does not make it a bit more pleasant. Put down those curtains and things, Nelly, put them down. I hate so much fuss. There is plenty of time. You are always so hasty and premature in everything. I am going to speak to cook. Don’t trouble me about this any more.”

“It is all your doing, Alice,” said Ellinor, as her mother went away.

CHAPTER IV.

THE FRIENDS OF THE FAMILY.

This speech was received with so much applause by her daughter, that Mrs. Eastwood immediately plunged into all the preparations which she had checked the day before; and the ladies had a shopping expedition that very morning, and bought a great many things they had not thought of to make the room pretty. When people have “taste” and set their hearts upon making a room pretty, the operation is apt to become rather an expensive one; but this I must say, that mother and daughter most thoroughly enjoyed the work, and got at least value for their money in the pleasure it gave them. You will say that this was done more with the view of pleasing themselves than of showing regard to the poor little orphan who was to profit by all the luxuries provided; but human nature, so far as I know it, is a very complicated business, and has few impulses which are perfectly single and unmixed in their motives. They cudgelled their brains to think what she would like. They summoned up before them a picture of an art-loving, beauty-mad, Italian-born girl, unable to live without pictures and brightness. They went and roamed through all the Arundel Society collections to look for something from Pisa that would remind her of her home. They sacrificed a Raphael-print which had been hung in Mrs. Eastwood’s own room, to her supposed necessities. Nelly made a careful selection of several morceaux of china, such as went to her own heart, to decorate the mantelshelf. I don’t deny they were like two overgrown schoolgirls over a bigger kind of doll’s house; but if you can be hard upon them for this admixture, I confess I cannot. When the room was finished, they went and looked at it three or four times in a day admiring it. They did not know anything about the future inmate, what sort of soul it might be who was coming to share their nest, to be received into their most intimate companionship. They decked the room according to a preconceived impression of her character; and then they drew another more definite sketch of her character, in accordance with the room. Thus they created their Innocent, these two women; and how far she resembled the real Innocent the reader will shortly see.

Their life, however, in the meantime was not all engrossed in this occupation. The Eastwoods were a popular family. They “went out” a good deal, even in the dead season of the year, when fashion is not, and nobody, so to speak, is in town. There are a very tolerable amount of people in town even in November and December. There are all the law people of every degree; there are all the people in public offices, especially those who are married. Among these two classes there are, the reader will perhaps not be surprised to hear, many, very many, excellent, highly-bred, well-connected persons who actually live in London. I am aware that in fashionable literature this fact is scarcely admitted, and everybody who is anybody is believed to visit town only during the season. But the great majority of the English nation consists of people who work more or less for their living, and of these a large number are always in London. The society of the Eastwoods consisted of this class. To be sure, Nelly had appeared at Lady Altamont’s ball, in the very best of society, the year she came out; and invitations did still arrive now and then during the season from that supernal sphere. But these occasional flights into the higher heavens did not interfere with the natural society which surrounded the Eastwoods for at least nine months of the year, from November, say, to July. Here were Nelly’s young friends, and Mrs. Eastwood’s old ones; the advisers of the elder lady and the lovers of the younger. As for advisers, Mrs. Eastwood was very well off. She had a great many of them, and each fitted with his or her office. Mrs. Everard was, as it were, adviser-in-chief, privy councillor, keeper of the conscience, to her friend, who told her almost, if not quite, every thing in which she was concerned. Under this great domestic officer there was Mr. Parchemin, once a great Chamber counsel, noted for his penetration into delicate cases of all kinds, who had retired into profound study of the art of investment, which he practised only for the benefit of his friends. He was for the Finance department. The Rector of the parish, who had once been a highly successful master in a public school, was her general adviser in respect to “the boys,” selecting “coaches” for Dick, and “keeping an eye” upon him, and “taking an interest” in Jenny during the holidays. Mrs. Eastwood’s third counsellor had, I am sorry to say, interested motives. He was a certain Major Railton, in one of the Scientific Corps, and was handy man to the household—for a consideration, which was Nelly. He had the hardest work of all the three—advice was less wanted from him than assistance. He never went so far as his club, poor man, or entered Bond Street, without a commission. He recommended tradespeople, and superintended, or at least inspected, all the repairs done on the old house, besides suggesting improvements, which had to be carried out under his eye. Lastly, there was Mrs. Eastwood’s religious adviser, or rather advisers; there were two of them, and they were both ladies,—one, a sister belonging to one of the many sisterhoods now existing in the English Church; and the other an old lady from the north of Ireland, with all the Protestantism peculiar to that privileged region. With this body of defenders Mrs. Eastwood moved through life, not so heavily burdened after all as might be supposed. She had a ready way of relieving herself when she felt the yoke. Though she religiously asked their advice on all their special topics, and would even go so far as to acquiesce in their views, and thank them with tears in her eyes for being so good to her, she generally after all took her own way, which simplified matters amazingly. Since this was the case even with her privy councillor, the friend of her bosom, it is not to be wondered at if the others were used in the same way. Mr. Parchemin was the one whose advice she took most steadily, for she was deeply conscious that she knew nothing of business; and Mr. Brotherton, the clergyman, who was the patron saint of the boys, was probably the one she minded least, for an exactly opposite reason. But the curious thing was, that even in neglecting their advice, she never alienated her counsellors—I suspect because our vanity is more entirely flattered by being consulted than our pride is hurt by having our counsel tacitly rejected. So much for the elder lady’s share. Nelly, on her side, had a host of friends of her own age, with whom she was very popular, but no one who was exactly Pythias to her Damon, for the reason that she was old-fashioned enough to make her mother her chief companion. Let us clear the stage, however, for something more important than a female Pythias. Nelly had—who can doubt it?—or her right to admission into these pages would have been very slight, a lover, for whom the trumpets are now preparing to sound.

Let us pause, however, for one moment to note a fact which is certainly curious. We all know the statistics that prove beyond possibility of doubt that there are more women than men in the world—or, at least, in the English world—and that, in the natural course of events, only three-fourths, or four-fifths, or some other mysterious proportion, of Englishwomen can ever attain the supreme glory and felicity of being married. Now, I do not dare to contradict figures. I have too much respect—not to say awe—of them. I only wish to ask, in all humility, how does it then happen that a great many women are offered the choice of two or three husbands, and that almost every nice young girl one knows has to shape her ways warily in certain complications of circumstances, so as to keep every thing smooth between some two, at least, who devote to her the homage of their attentions? I do not expect that any statistician will take the trouble to answer this question, but it is one deeply calculated to increase the mingled faith, incredulity, terror, and contempt with which I, like most people, regard that inexorable science. Nelly Eastwood was one of these anomalies and practical contradictions to all received law. She had no idea that she was flying in the face of statistics, or doing her best to stultify the most beautiful lines of figures. Major Railton, of whom we have already spoken, was over thirty, which Nelly, not quite twenty, thought rather old; but the other pretendant for Nelly’s favour was not old. He was one of the class which has taken the place now-a-days of the knights and captains, the heroes of the period. Not a conquering soldier or bold adventurer—a young barrister lately called to exercise that noble faculty, and prove black to be white and white black to the satisfaction of a British jury; tant soit peu journalist, ready with his pen, ready with his tongue; up, as the slang goes, to anything. His name was Molyneux, and his position as a briefless barrister was much modified by the fact that he was the son of the well-known Mr. Molyneux, whose fame and success at the bar had already indicated him as one of the next new judges as soon as any piece of judicial ermine fell vacant. This changed in the most wonderful way the position of Ernest Molyneux, upon whose prospects no mother could frown, though indeed he had nothing, and earned just enough to pay his tailor’s bills. Major Railton, too, was somewhat literary, as indeed most men are now-a-days. When anything was going on in the military world, he was good enough to communicate it to the public through the medium of the Daily Treasury. He had even been sent out by that paper on one or two occasions as its special correspondent. Naturally, he took a view of professional matters entirely opposed to the view taken by the correspondent of the Jupiter. The Major’s productions were chiefly descriptive, and interspersed with anecdote. The barrister’s were metaphysical, and of a very superior mental quality. He was fond of theology, when he could get at it, and of settling everything over again on a new basis. These were the two gentlemen who happened to meet in the drawing-room at The Elms, on one of these chilly afternoons, at the fire-light hour. This fashion of sitting without lights was one which both of them rather objected to, though they dared not express their sentiments freely, as on a former occasion Frederick Eastwood had not hesitated to do. On a little table which stood before the fire was the tea-tray, with its sparkling china and little quaint old silver tea-pot, which glittered, too, in the ruddy light. This was the highest light in the darkling scene. Major Railton was seated quite in the shadow, near Mrs. Eastwood, to whom he had been discoursing, in his capacity as out-door adviser, about the state of the coachhouse. Young Molyneux was moving about the centre of the room, in the way some men have, talking to Nelly, and looking at any chance book or curious thing that might fall in his way. They had been hearing the story of the new cousin with polite interest, varying according to the nature of the men, and the intimacy and interest in the house which their respective positions enabled them to show.

“The stables are the worst,” said the Major. “In one corner the rain is positively coming in; not to speak of the uninhabitable nature of the place, if you should want to use it, the property is positively deteriorated. It really must not be allowed to fall out of repair.”

“There is no chance of my wanting to use it, Major; but, of course, if, as you say, the property is injured——. I am sure,” said Mrs. Eastwood, “it is a great nuisance to be your own landlord; other people, I find, have all these things done for them.”

“But other people pay rent, and may be turned out at a year’s notice,” said the Major.

“Oh, indeed, nobody is so foolish as to turn out a good tenant. Indeed, it is a very equivocal advantage to live in your own house. Constant taxes, constant repairs, and though everybody knows I have put down my carriage, obliged to spend money on my stables! That,” said Mrs. Eastwood emphatically, “is what I call an irony of fate.”

“It is bad, it must be allowed,” said Molyneux bursting in; his ear had been caught by the last words, which she pronounced more loudly than usual, with a true sense of the injury done her. “It is like a story I heard the other day of an unfortunate Austrian whose chateau was destroyed in the war. Just about the time the last fire smouldered out, he got his bill from the great furniture man at Vienna for the redecoration. It had just been finished before the Prussian guns went at it. There’s irony for you! I don’t suppose your friend Bismarck, Railton, will be so civil as to pay the bill.”

“Nobody will pay my bill, I am sure,” said Mrs. Eastwood, not quite relishing the introduction of a misfortune which overshadowed her own. “What a comfort it is, to be sure, that there is no more fighting in Italy. Frederick, I think, ought to be in Pisa by this time, and next week I hope we may have him back. What a difference in travelling since my day! Then we went in our own carriages from Marseilles, going round the coast, and taking weeks to it. Nelly, don’t you think we might have lights?”

“Presently, mamma; don’t you want to know about my new cousin, a new young lady coming out of the unknown?” said Nelly. “If I visited in a house where any one so very new was about to appear, I should be dying of curiosity. Mr. Molyneux, you are full of imagination, or at least so the newspapers say; help me to make out what she will be like. Born in Italy; sixteen; named Innocent. Here are the facts. Now tell me what you think, and then you shall have my idea.”

“I hope she will be like her relations, whom we know,” said Major Railton gallantly: “and then the firmament will have another star.”

“That is pretty, but it is vague,” said Nelly, “and I have heard something like it before. Mr. Molyneux——”

“Who said I was full of imagination?” said Molyneux, feeling entitled to draw a chair near her. “Now if there is one thing I pride myself on, it is that subordination of fancy to reason which is characteristic, Miss Eastwood, of a well-regulated mind. Girls of sixteen are of two classes, so far as I have observed: honest bread-and-butter, which I rather like on the whole—or the shy and sentimental, which, when it is not too thin, has its attractions also. Miss Innocent, being Italian, &c., will probably belong to the last class. Now for your idea. I have said my say.”

“My idea,” said Nelly solemnly, turning her face towards him in the glow of the fire-light, which lighted up the soft round of her cheek, and fluttered about her pretty figure as if caressing her, “is this: I have been reading up ‘Aurora Leigh.’ Have you read ‘Aurora Leigh’? Perhaps you do not condescend to anything merely English, and written by a woman——”

“Pardon, this is criticism and accusation, not your idea.”

“I will send Birkson to-morrow,” said the Major in his corner, “he is the man I always employ. He can give an estimate at least, and I will cast an eye over it the next time I see you. I fear you must do it, though I hate all expense that can be spared.”

“And such unnecessary expense,” sighed Mrs. Eastwood.

“Well, then,” resumed Nelly, flushing with excitement, “this is how it will be—it is constantly so in books, and I suppose you writers ought to know. She will be beautiful, she will be clever, far cleverer than anybody here. She will flash upon us in our dull little house like a princess. Mamma and I will be quenched altogether. She will be the centre of everything. When you come to call, you will all make a circle round her to hear her talk, or to hear her sing, or just to look at her, she will be so lovely. Probably she will sing like an angel,—everybody does who comes from Italy. Her father will have taught her all sorts of out-of-the-way things,—Greek and Latin, and astrology, and I don’t know what. Poor mamma and I will try to keep her down, you know, and be something still in our own house.”

“Why, Nelly, what wild nonsense are you talking? Do stop your romancing, and ring for the lights.”

“Presently, mamma! We will be unkind to her, we will leave her at home when we go out, we will make her sit up in the old schoolroom. I hope we will have strength of mind to give her enough to eat. But whatever we do she will shine like a star, as Major Railton beautifully says. She will outshine us in goodness as well as in everything else. She will cast us into the shade; we shall feel ourselves the meanest, and the wretchedest, and the stupidest, and the ugliest——”

“Nelly, Nelly, are you going crazy? What can you mean?”

“There’s imagination for you!” cried Molyneux; “invention, the most daring fancy. I did not know you were a poet. ‘Aurora Leigh’ is nothing to it, nor even ‘Cinderella.’ Now, I confess my curiosity is awakened. When is this course of cruelty to begin?”

“Yes, mamma, it is getting quite night,” cried Nelly, springing up. “We have been left long enough in the dark, haven’t we? Have you settled about the stables? Oh, Major Railton, if you would be so very good! It is only a book I want. A book is a simple sort of commission. Now please tell me if it is troublesome, for of course I could order it at Clarke’s; but then it would not come for a week. We are supposed to be in London here, but it is a week’s post to Regent Street.”

“What is the good of me but to run errands?” said the gallant Major, changing his seat in the corner for another chair more near to Nelly. “I like it. Good heavens, I beg your pardon, Winks, how was I to see you were there?”

Winks jumped down out of the chair on which he had been lying, in the highest dudgeon; he took no notice of the criminal. Too much a gentleman to say anything uncivil beyond the momentary snap and snarl which betrayed his disinclination to be sat upon, a thing abhorrent both to dogs and men, he hobbled to the rug, holding up one paw with a demonstration of patient suffering, which might have melted the hardest heart. It was Winks’s favourite paw which he never ran upon under any circumstances; but this was a little fact which he did not mention. He took it to the matting, and licked it, and made much of it, with a heroic abstinence from any complaint. The Major went down on his knees, and felt the injured limb carefully, with every expression of penitence. “The bone is not hurt, I assure you,” he said tenderly, half to Winks and half to his mistress. The sufferer turned his head aside during this examination, to conceal, I believe, the smile upon his countenance.

“He is a little humbug,” said Mrs. Eastwood, but she was relieved to know there was not much the matter. As for young Molyneux, he took a base advantage of the incident.

“Railton is getting rather stout,” he whispered aside to Nelly, “I don’t wonder Winks did not like it. He is broadening, one can’t deny it. Look what a shadow he throws, blotting out you and me together.” And, indeed, the excellent Major, foreshortened by the firelight, did throw a portentous shade up to the very ceiling. And Nelly laughed out like a foolish girl, unable to restrain herself, and could give no account of her laughter; but declared it was because of Winks, who was an accomplished actor, and had taken the Major in. “Winks, come, I am going up-stairs,” she cried; upon which the invalid bounded from the rug, nearly upsetting the Major. And then Brownlow came in with the two lamps, and the hour of reception was over. Major Railton, however, lingered still for a last word about the stables, while young Molyneux was forced to go away. To have a settled appointment, so to speak, about the house in which dwells the young lady of your affections is an unquestionable advantage. It secures the last word.

“Nelly, how could you talk in that wild way?” cried Mrs. Eastwood when both were gone. “There is nothing men like so much as to think that women are jealous of each other. It flatters their vanity. They will think you meant every word of all that nonsense, and a pretty account they will give of us to all our friends.”

“I did mean it,” said Nelly, “I was quite in earnest. If you will read ‘Aurora Leigh’ as I have been doing——”

“Aurora Fiddlestick,” cried Mrs. Eastwood, which, after all, was no argument; “don’t let me hear any more such nonsense. As if any girl that was ever born could alter one’s position in one’s own house! I am surprised at you, Ellinor. Make haste now and dress; we are much later than usual in consequence of your foolish talk. I suppose I must go to this fresh expense about the stables after what the Major says,” she added, with care on her brow; “though I am sure Frederick will no more be able to keep horses when I die than I am now. And I don’t see why I should keep them up for remote posterity—my great grandson, perhaps, who, if he is able to afford it at all, should be able to build stables for himself. I don’t think I will do it, Nelly. I will send for old Sclater to-morrow, and have the roof looked to. These men talk as if we were made of money, especially men who have the public money to fall back upon. It is very pleasant, I don’t doubt, to see work done and places kept up when you never have any bills to pay.”

This little speech was delivered partly on the stairs as Mrs. Eastwood went up to dress, followed by her daughter. Nelly, I am afraid, was not much interested about the stables, and made no reply; but she put her head into the little room before she began to dress, and contemplated it, admiring yet doubtful. She had been reading “Aurora Leigh” all the morning, and the poetry had gone to Nelly’s head, as poetry is apt to do when one is twenty. She wondered if English nature, as represented by the elms and the lime trees, with no hills at all, not even a green slope for a background, would seem as tame to her cousin as English scenery in general had done to Aurora. Nelly herself had never yet been farther than Paris, and had seen no scenery to speak of. The blue spring sky and the primrose-covered grass,—the play of sunshine and shadow further on in the year through the silken green of the limes—the moonlight pouring down the avenue—filled her own heart with a flood of soft delight. That was because she knew no better, she argued humbly with herself; but the other, who had seen Alps and Apennines, and snowy peaks and Italian skies! “I wonder if she will think us tame too,” Nelly said to herself with a little shiver, as she went back to her own room and applied herself to the work of dressing. She reflected that in books the stranger, the orphan, the dependent, generally has it all her own way; but that, at the same time, there was something to be said on the other side for the tame, stay-at-home people, who did their best to satisfy the poetic nature, even if they did not succeed. Perhaps Miss Leigh herself, Aurora’s aunt, who had not bargained for a poet, might have had her story too. On the whole Nelly, having completed the little room, was somewhat depressed about its inmate. It was pretty, but she had not been able to give quite the ideal effect she had intended. In furnishing and decoration, as well as other matters, the highest ideal is not always the one that succeeds best.

CHAPTER V.

FREDERICK’S WAY.

Frederick shut up his pocket-book, as in other days men used to button their pockets. He went out of the house hastily, resolving to do neither one thing nor the other. They closed the door upon him tranquilly, feeling that it was Frederick’s way, and that they knew precisely how he would conduct himself on this expedition. But the truth is that no soul more utterly unknown to that excellent family went out of all London that day. They knew absolutely nothing about him. The anticipations which made his eyes glow as soon as he was safe in his Hansom, and could look as he liked, would have been absolutely incomprehensible to his family. Could they have seen into his mind, they would have refused to believe in the reality of what they saw. I hope it may be in my power to reveal to the reader with less difficulty what Frederick Eastwood really was. He had a fine exterior—dainty, and delicate, and refined. To see him you would have imagined his faults to be faults of the mind; high temper, perhaps, irresolution and weakness in critical circumstances, intentions which were fundamentally good though often mistaken, and a wrong-headed obstinacy and self-opinion when he did decide upon any thing, which is quite compatible with irresolution in great matters. This is what the cursory observer would have supposed him to be; and this is what his family thought of him. He was not clever in managing his own affairs, they knew; he was undecided about matters which required firmness, and obstinate about trifles. He had no idea of the magnitudes of differing objects, but would insist upon some trifling point in an argument while he yielded the great ones. All these faults, real or supposed, were in harmony with his looks, and with the impression he made upon most people who met him. A Charles the First sort of man—wrong-headed, melancholy, virtuous, meaning the very best but not always able to carry out his meaning, and now and then betrayed into subterfuge by very indecision. This was the manner in which he was regarded by his friends.

I am afraid this was not, however, at all the real state of affairs. It is difficult to describe the true condition of his mind without using what the newspapers call vulgar expressions, and without venturing upon ground little known to or studied by the writer of this history. I do not know after what fashion the artisan enjoys himself when, after a long spell of respectability, his wife informs me, weeping or indignant, that he has gone off “on the spree;” and still less do I know what experiences are gone through by a young gentleman of quality when, obeying the same impulse, he also breaks loose from decorum and plunges into occasional dissipation. There are other pens in plenty which can inform the curious reader; but for my part, though I may guess, I do not know. Frederick Eastwood, however, though he was rather a fine gentleman than otherwise, was as much subject to this influence as any undisciplined working man with good wages and rampant senses. This was the secret, the mystery, and, by consequence, the centre of his life. His training, his wishes, his pride, all the traditions of his own and his family’s history, bound him to the only career which is not ruin for men in his condition—a life in accordance with the ordinary rules of virtue and respectability. He had not any of the great qualities which make society pardon an occasional aberration; nor was he rich enough to be vicious decorously, even had that been possible. Besides, he did not want to be permanently vicious, nor, indeed, to sin at all if he could have helped it. He felt the importance of character as highly as any man could feel it, and clung to his good repute with a tenacity all the more desperate that he alone was aware how much he now and then put it in peril. But that other impulse was as a fire within him—that impulse to burst away from all routine and self-control—to throw every restraint to the winds, and follow for a brief delirious interval only the wild suggestions of the senses, wherever they might lead him. Where they did lead him I have no intention of following. But this was the key to the somewhat strange and incomprehensible aspect which he presented to his fellows. He never got into mischief sociably with his contemporaries. They thought him on the whole rather a Puritan; though there were inevitable echoes of something against him wandering vaguely about his club and among the men who had been with him at the University. But all that was known and seen of his life was so spotless and respectable that the whisper of hostility was hushed. The question why a young man so blameless should be often so moody, and always so uncommunicative, had been solved in the feminine world in the most romantic manner, by the theory that he was like Charles the First. But men did not take up this notion so readily. There were various strange “ways” about him which were very mysterious to his friends: a certain secrecy, in itself carefully concealed, and watchfulness, as of a man about whom something might some day be found out. When his fever fit was coming on, he would grow restless, shifty, anxious, declining his ordinary engagements, shutting himself up in his own room, morose with his family, and impatient of all usual intercourse. A headache, or a cold, or some other slight ailment, was the reason easily accepted by the innocent people about him—and at the very nick of time some invitation would arrive for a week’s shooting, or other agreeable occupation, which would “set him up,” everybody thought. Whether he was resisting the devil at these preliminary moments, or merely concocting plans by which he might get free and secure the opportunity of self-indulgence, I cannot tell. I believe, strange as it may seem to say it, that he was doing both.

But the devil got the best of the argument, as he generally does when what are called “the passions” are excited, and the craving for enjoyment, to which some natures are so susceptible, sets in. This curious byeway of the human mind is one which a great many of us have been forced to study much against our will: when all the desires of the mind seem set upon the better way, and sore repentance, religious feeling, and rational conviction of the fatal character of the indulgence, seem certainly to promise victory, but are all upset at the critical moment by that irresistible sense of the pleasure within reach, which overcomes at once all spiritual and all prudential considerations. Frederick Eastwood reasoned with himself, condemned himself, understood the whole situation; he even prayed, with tears, against the besetting sin, about the character of which he could have no doubt. But all the time that hankering after the delight of it lay in the background; with a corner of his mental eye, so to speak, he saw how best to attain the gratification, and with a rush snatched it. Recollections of the sweetness of it last time would flash across his mind, even at the very height of his resolution to avoid it next time. He knew all that could be said about those apples of Sodom, which are so beautiful to look at, but are as ashes in the mouth. This is one of the set things which preachers and sinners are alike ready to say together; but the fact is that a great many people like the taste of the ashes, as Frederick did. The pleasure of anticipating that mouthful had more force upon him than all the arguments which, with hot zeal, he had so often used to himself.

He had been wavering on the very edge of downfall when this mission to bring home Innocent came, as it were, in his way. He accepted it as—we cannot say a godsend, or a gift from heaven—but as an almost supernatural provision for his necessities, a kind of counter-Providence, if we may use the word. So strange are the vagaries of human nature, that Frederick felt a sort of pious thankfulness steal over him when he saw before him this opportunity for a break-out which would be unsuspected by his friends. This time it would require no scheming, no fictitious invitation; which was one of the reasons why he went off with such exhilarated feelings. He bore the Channel far better than Dick could have believed, being supported by his pleasurable anticipations, and arrived in Paris in a delightful turmoil of expectation. He was free! He could do what he liked—go where he liked! He had some money of his own in his pocket, and the letter of credit his mother had given him. Plenty of money, no restraint, and in Paris! He settled himself in an hotel not too much frequented by English, and made up his mind really to enjoy himself, and take the good of his opportunities, for a week at least.

He went into it with a plunge, just as his less elevated contemporary would go “on the spree.” But, fortunately or unfortunately, there is no concealment about the latter process. It is received as a kind of painful necessity by the poor women who suffer most by it; and the record does not put the culprit at any great moral disadvantage. It is otherwise in the higher classes. Frederick went everywhere where he ought not to go; did everything that was most unbecoming and inappropriate. He did not get intoxicated, but he drank a great deal of champagne, and kept himself in a state of reckless excitement from day to day; and he got into the very cream of bad company—the company of people who shocked all his prejudices and revolted his good taste, but yet swept him along on that wild tide of pleasure, which was what he wanted. He had got a fortnight’s leave, to accomplish the journey to Pisa and back, to console his little cousin, and win her confidence, and bring her kindly home. It was, however, ten days after he had left London when he woke up from his wild dream in Paris, his money all but exhausted, his frame worn out, his faculty of enjoyment at an end. That was not a pleasant waking, as may be readily supposed. He came to himself among the husks of his pleasures, and cursed them, and repented. He had done it a great many times before.

This time, however, there were unfortunate complications. He had still a long journey to make, and no time to do it in; and he had heavy expenses of travelling still to encounter, and no money to pay them. What was he to do? Cursing those husks of pleasure is one thing, and re-making them into the gold they represent is quite another. He did not dare to write to his mother, and show her that he was still in Paris. He would rather die, he thought, than compromise the position which was every thing to him, or betray the secret of his life. Yet he must go on somehow, and accomplish his mission. With a racking headache and a despairing heart he began to count up his remaining coins, and calculate the time necessary for his journey. Time and money alike would just suffice to take him to Pisa. He had but realized this fact, without drawing any conclusion from it, when some one knocked at his door. He was in a second-rate hotel, but occupied its best room—a chamber all gorgeous with mirrors and marble tables and bronze candelabra. He hurriedly drew the curtains of the alcove which held his bed, and in a querulous tone bade his visitor enter. To his disgust and confusion he saw, when the door opened, the only Englishman whom he had encountered—a middle-aged man, in sporting costume and with boisterous manners, who had joined Frederick’s party (always against his will) on various occasions, and now came forward with horrible cordiality, holding out a red, fat hand, which seemed to the unfortunate prodigal the greasiest and dirtiest that he had ever shaken. He touched this paw reluctantly, with a repugnance in which some alarm and a sense of the necessity of giving nobody offence was mingled. He did not know who the man was. Had he been in other circumstances he would have repudiated his acquaintance haughtily; but at present he had the painful consciousness upon him that he was in everybody’s power.

“Well, sir, how are you after last night?” said his visitor. “Hope you find yourself tolerably well after p’tey soupey? It’s played the very deuce with me, though I ought to be seasoned. You young ones have all the odds in your favour. Thought you’d feel yourself pulled up hard this morning, after the champagne—and the bill. Ha, ha! the bill; that’s the worst fun of it all; barring that, sir, this sort of life would be too pleasant to be true. The bill keeps us in mind that we’re mortal, hey?”

“I don’t feel myself in any danger of forgetting that fact,” said Frederick stiffly.

He intended to answer with dignity and distance, but his mingled dislike to and fear of his visitor introduced a complaining, querulous tone into his voice. He seemed, even to himself, to be whimpering over a hard fate, instead of uttering a mere morality with the loftiness of a superior. And somehow, as he spoke, he looked at the table, where “Bradshaw” lay spread out beside the unhappy remains of his money, the few miserable gold pieces which he had left. The man gave a suppressed whistle at this sight.

“So bad as that?” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Mr. Eastwood, I’ve been keeping my eye upon you. I mean well, if I’m a little rough; and if you won’t ask me to sit down, I’ll take it upon myself to do so, if you’ll excuse me; for I haven’t yet got over the effects of last night. I know your name?—yes, sir. It’s a good name, and I take an interest in all that bear it. Related to Sir Geoffrey, I don’t doubt, Mr. Frederick Eastwood? There’s how I know, sir. Picked it up the other night, after you’d been dining; and, if you’ll believe me, I’ve taken an interest in you ever since.”

“You are very good, I am sure—though you have so much the advantage of me,” said Frederick, more stiff than ever, yet afraid to show his resentment; for the fellow, as he called him in his heart, held out in his fat hand a card, bearing his respectable name at full, with the most immaculate of addresses—that of the Junior Minerva Club. Even his home address would have been less terrible. There are dozens of “Elms” about London, but only one Junior Minerva. He looked at the card with a dismay which he could not conceal. He stood upright by his chair, not following the example of his visitor. He would have liked to kick him down stairs, or to thrust him out of the window; but he dared not do it. It seemed to his feverish eyes that this man held his reputation, his character, everything that he cared for in the world within his greasy hands.

“I’m naturally interested,” his visitor went on, “for I was born and bred up on the Eastwood estates, near to Sterborne, if you know it. Very glad to see you, sir, when you come in my direction. To be sure I have the advantage of you. My name is Batty—Charles Batty—at your service. I drive a good trade in the way of horses by times, though I call myself an auctioneer, and don’t refuse no jobs as will pay. Bless you, I’d buy libraries as soon as yearlings, and get my profit out of them, though it’s slower. Mr. Eastwood, sir, knowing the respectable family you come from and all your excellent connexions, and your address at your club, &c., &c., I should not say, sir, but what I might also be of use to you.”

Misery, we are told, makes us acquainted with strange bedfellows. So does that modern form of misery called impecuniosity, which has its agonies more sharp than any primitive form of privation or pain. It is one of the worst penalties of the want of money, that the subject of that fatal want feels such eagerness to anticipate help that he is ready to look for it in the most unlikely places, and in his extremity will stretch his hand out in the dark to meet anybody’s grasp. This rash eagerness of desperation specially belongs to the exhausted state of mind and purse in which Frederick now found himself. He was past all calculation of probabilities, ready to seize upon any shadow of aid, however attained. Insensibly he slid into his chair, and a faint gleam of hope and light seemed to diffuse itself in the dull air around him. He took a rapid survey of the situation. His repugnance for the man who sat opposite to him, watching his movements, was not in any degree lessened; but he reflected that anyhow he had betrayed himself to this man. Stranger and vaurien though he seemed, he held the character of the accomplished Frederick Eastwood in his hands; and every principle of self-preservation, and of that respect for the world’s opinion which was his curse and his punishment, moved him to try what means he could of bringing some advantage out of this now inevitable evil. He seated himself with a sigh of impatience and wretchedness, sheathing his sword, so to speak.

“The truth is, I am in a scrape, and I don’t see my way out of it,” he said.

“Tell me all about it, Mr. Eastwood; I’ll find a way out of it,” said Batty, rubbing his greasy hands.

I suppose they were greasy hands. At all events, it was this particular which dwelt on Frederick’s memory and revolted his fine feelings. Ugh! the thought made him sick years after. In the meantime, however, he had no time to be nice.

“The fact is,” he said, with hesitation, “that I was on my way to Italy on business”—— Here he paused, remembering what Batty had said of an interest in the Eastwoods. “On family business. I had something to do—of importance; and I have been—detained here.”

This euphemism delighted his companion. He gave a horse-laugh, which affected Frederick’s nerves. “Yes; you have been—detained here: I understand. By Jove, you are fun,” said this appreciative listener.

Frederick took no notice of the vulgar outburst. Now that he had business in hand he could be clear enough. He laid bare his necessities to this strange and novel adviser. There is no telling—as men in Frederick Eastwood’s condition easily find out—in what strange regions money, and the inclination to lend it, may be found. Nothing could be less promising than this coarse Englishman, who had thrust himself into the young man’s path so much against his will; and yet in this unlikely quarter salvation was to be found. We need not concern ourselves here about Mr. Batty’s motives.

“I thought you looked too much a swell to be a commercial gent, sir,” he exclaimed later; “but when I picked up that card you might have knocked me down with a feather. Eastwoods has always been the height of quality in my eyes. I have been born and bred on their lands; and as for good-will to serve ’em—here’s a way to prove it.”

Frederick was no neophyte, to put the unbounded confidence of a boy in these fine speeches; but he knew that there are a great many kinds of money-lenders, and that there are people in the world who are to be influenced, even to the supreme length of opening their purses, by a good name and a well-known address. Besides, after all there was no great risk attendant upon Batty’s generosity. A man in a public office—a man with a character—is not likely to allow himself to be ruined for a matter of fifty pounds, especially when he has a mother full of innocent credulity to fall back upon. Thus the bargain was made, which was to Frederick, as soon as it became certain, an insignificant transaction. The moment he had signed the note and got the money, his despair of an hour ago seemed incredible to him, and all his objections to Batty recurred in double force.

“If you are ever down my way, I’ll hope you’ll eat a bit of mutton with me,” said the hospitable usurer: “not salmis and vol-à-vent, Mr. Eastwood, for we ain’t up to that; but sound English mutton, with a glass of good wine to wash it down. And I’ll show you a stable that will make your mouth water.”

Frederick, who had become stiff again, bowed and thanked him from a mountain-top of superiority—and it was Batty’s hope to spend another evening in his society which determined him on the virtuous step of quitting Paris that night.

What was his brain busy about as he rolled out of the wicked, seductive city, where all vice betakes itself with the hope of being tempted, in that chill spring evening, between the lamps and the stars? His head was confused with all he had passed through. The fumes of his “pleasures” were still in it, mingled with the disgust which is inevitable, but which floats away still more quickly than the fumes of the “pleasures.” The thrill of his hairbreadth escape was also vibrating through him; but a man of Frederick Eastwood’s habits soon gets used to that thrill of escape. He was concocting and putting in order a reasonable way of accounting for his acquaintance with such a man as Batty, should it ever become known to his friends. All at once, while he was arranging his bargain with Batty, this had flashed upon his mind. He would not conceal that, having a day or two to pass in Paris, he had determined on going to a purely French hotel, to escape the mass of travelling English who fill up every corner; with the view of seeing Frenchmen as they are, he had gone to this obscure hostelrie; and there, by an odd chance, he had found this rough Englishman stranded, not knowing the language—thrown, as it were, upon his charity. “A scamp, of course, and thoroughly objectionable; but what could one do?” Frederick said to himself, as he made up his story. His story seemed to himself so satisfactory that it really accounted for the acquaintance, even to his own mind. He recalled to recollection that he had been obliged to interpret for his unpleasant compatriot, and the fiction gradually consolidated into fact. He believed it himself long before he had reached the Marseilles steamboat which was the next step in his hurried way.