Sixty Years Hence
Author: Charles Frederick Henningsen
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SIXTY YEARS HENCE,

A NOVEL.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE WHITE SLAVE,"
&c. &c.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

LONDON:
T. C. NEWBY, 72, MORTIMER STREET,
CAVENDISH SQUARE.
——
1848.

VOLUME I.

SIXTY YEARS HENCE.

CHAPTER I.

THE LADY CALLIROË.

It is early in the month of December, of the year of our Lord one thousand, nine hundred and six.

In the uppermost chamber of the loftiest tower of a baronial castle, the Lady Calliroë reclines upon the silken cushions of her ottoman. The apartment overlooks the sea upon one side, and through the opposite casement displays an extensive land view. A vast park occupies the foreground, studded with old trees, whose scanty foliage, reduced to a few leaves which linger, sere and withered, on the boughs, discovers a distant view of copse and covert, hill and dale, white farms, green fields, and village spires.

The sun shines brightly—though the air is dry and chill, and the soil still wet with recent rain. The sea, which is open and unbayed, extends its placid surface in glassy smoothness, showing its pulsations only by the occasional gleam of some light-refracting ripple in the distance.

The land presents the same aspect of repose as the water; and the very deer, who give life to the landscape, having browsed their fill, sun themselves listlessly in the dry fern, whose rich hues harmonise so well with the mossy trunks of the venerable oaks.

This scene is English.

Where is there any other land, than England, home of the oak, which can exhibit that full and massive arboreal structure—rivalised only by the chesnut-tree—not of nature, but of Claude Lorraine?

England, where the majestic oak and the lowly underwood look more complete and shapely, when stripped of all their leaves, than the woods of more highly vaunted climes in their full foliage—where this luxuriancy of vegetation is not the partial result of an intolerable sun, which, favouring one form of vegetable life, scorches up others from the arid soil—but, on the contrary, allied to eternal freshness. There is only England where the meadow relieves with its deep green, the woodlands, and the trees, when the wintry mist lingers about their base in hues of blue or purple, whilst the dense boughs and sapless leaves of their summits are bathed in sunlight.

It is one of the few days of her mild winter, when the winds are hushed and the sky—whose habitual humidity generates this freshness—blue and clear, so that the landscape seems glowing in the beams of a bright spring day, if seen without feeling that chilliness precursive, probably of coming frost.

And so it is seen from the apartment of the Lady Calliroë, through the crystalline purity of the plate-glass, which, filling alike the open window spaces and the fretted stone-work of the gallery surrounding her apartment, shuts out the bleak air and incloses not a spring temperature only, but a tropical climate.

A tropical climate, with all its products, most costly, rare and fragrant, cooled down to pleasantness by artificial draughts which envelop the dweller in its atmosphere, whose weight—moving, standing, or reclining—whether on the gorgeous cushions, or on the floor tiles—carpet-covered, or glittering in mosaic brilliancy—disengages, by its pressure, currents of air alternately charged with varying perfumes or in all the purity of the mountain breeze.

If we were to open a little volume amongst the gold-clasped tomes which lie upon that ivory cheffonier, we should find that it treats "of an art unknown to our forefathers—even half a century back—though, by its means, not only gratifications are secured, which they can never have tasted, but even health and life prolonged. Not but that some inkling of the existence of these arts had dawned upon them, though being ignorant of the harmonies of fragrance—of inspiration and of aspiration—their rude attempts were hurtful or discordant, as the use of artificial sounds by the first savage who bellowed through a wild bull's horn—sounds which we blend and mingle now into such soul-entrancing melodies.

"Where, not quite ignorantly or rudely, they were mischievously used, as in the memorable instance of that Doctor Reid, whose effigy in our children's bonfires has supplanted that of the traditionary and once popular Guy Fox. To expiate the attempt made by this personage, to destroy by gunpowder the Parliament of Great Britain, and which attributed to the instigation of the Jesuits, if not wholly fictitious, was assuredly never put into execution, he was strangely enough held up to obloquy by the very generation destined (in 1848) to witness not the attempted, but the actual destruction of a British House of Commons, by the malignant Doctor, who, after torturing that legislative body, for several years, eventually extinguished it (obviously, at the revengeful suggestion of the baffled protectionist party,) as we see cruel children suffocate mice in an exhausted air-receiver."

"Dr. Reid" continues the note at the bottom of the page,

"Being arraigned and convicted in the autumn of the same year, was sentenced to solitary confinement for the term of his natural life; being the first criminal condemned after the final abolition of the punishment of death.

"Nevertheless, a special act was passed by the new Parliament to meet so unparallelled a crime by some peculiar infliction, and it was provided, as a proportionate aggravation of punishment, that his confinement should take place in a building ventilated on his own principle."

Thanks to this art, in that chamber, whose pilasters are wreathed with exotic fruits and flowers—its fair occupant reclines inhaling and surrounded by, an atmosphere so temperate that the many hued humming birds fluttering about this bower, quit frequently the congenial vegetation of their native clime to hover round her, and that the gazelle crouches at her side; all, as if enamoured of her fair person, with proximity, to which they have learned to connect the refreshing coolness which they once sought in the shade of their tropical woods, and now find by approaching her.

The Lady Calliroë is an inmate meet of such a bower.

Young, precocious, and fragile, she is as much an exotic as those plants and animals surrounding her, which would wither or perish in the northern air of the climate they are dwelling in.

Like the rare flowers, which half the world has been ransacked to bring together, her beauty if not positively greater, is of a kind more striking, because more unusual than the loveliness of our own land.

Not that its character is southern—on the contrary—her aspect rather denotes a northern origin.

Her hair is what is termed dark in the north and in the south of Europe fair—her complexion what both agree to be so.

She has eyes of that rare hue termed blue conventionally, but which are really of a deep violet, such as we see without its varying tints in the pansy, without its transparency in the changing plumage of the bright birds flitting round her.

Though her complexion is almost Teutonic in its fairness, the least emotion of an exquisitely sensitive nervous organisation, renders the arteries visible through her transparent skin, and throwing into some of her features a subdued half tint of purple gives them more than the character and expression of oriental beauty.

In temper and in years—a child; in passion and in form—a woman:—no Hindoo maiden on the Ganges' banks has grown to earlier maturity. If not robust, at least no sickly rapidity of growth has marred the perfection of her figure; and if her fragile charms are destined to fade early, they blend just now childhood's spring freshness with the impassioned loveliness of woman's summer.

At a first glance one might be tempted to compare the Lady Calliroë to a tender plant of the temperate zone whose seed some wind had wafted—some bird carried—to a torrid clime where, sheltered by the shade of a protective palm, whilst losing nothing of its freshness, it had derived from the inclement sun rapidity of growth, vividity of perfume, and peculiarity of hue.

But this comparison would be inapt, for she resembles rather some of those foreign flowers which curious botanists (who value more a new variety of the nettle than the sweetest rose) bring into our hot-houses from over sea.

Here, in a factitious soil and artificial atmosphere, the humble flower which bloomed in native insignificance, gathers, through culture, gorgeous colouring, or surpassing fragrance, queening it over the fairest produce of our fields in which, untended by man's care, its actual vitality would be withered up. So the very life of the Lady Calliroë is artificial. She owes to human ingenuity and science that she breathes, and lives, and blooms.

An organic malady without such aid would long since have rendered fatal alike the hot blast of the south or the keen air of her native land. If she had been a poor man's child, or if she had been born half a century back, those delicately rounded limbs might lie fleshless in their mouldering shroud; that fair brow which emulates the purity and softness of the marble might glare in the ghastly whiteness of the coffined skull; and the worms crawl slowly through those apertures whence now the soul radiates from her beaming eyes in looks of liquid love.

The Lady Calliroë is the only daughter of a senator and magnate of the united monarchies, a merchant prince, like all his class. His mines, lands, fisheries, factories, and banks were once scattered over both hemispheres; but he has now concentrated them into lands, villages, and manufactories, for the purpose of acquiring political influence. He has long been, and is still, one of the most powerful members of the most powerful party in existence; though his credit is said to be diminishing with his party, and the credit of his party with the world.

As far as the eye can reach, even taking in the distant church spire and the factory chimneys of that distant town on the horizon, and the lighthouse of that harbour round the headland, with all the broad acres, villages, and farms, which intervene, own him as their lord;—the Lady Calliroë as their heiress.

There lives no man in real rank above her father, who may write M. M., or many millioned, after his name. His position is not a thing of yesterday, still redolent of the vulgarity of recent acquisition. This baronial castle—the princely demesne, surrounding it has descended to him by inheritance; and even half a century ago his family were wealthy; so that he claims priority of fortune over all his fellow senators; a fact which perhaps detracts from his popularity, in an age in which most men plume themselves, first, on the amount of their wealth; and secondly, on the rapidity of its acquisition.

If you had lived sixty years ago (in 1846) you might have seen in a linen-draper's shop, on the left hand side, in Oxford Street—which was even then a great thoroughfare of the modern Babylon—old Samuel Lofty palming upon his customers gents' cheap gloves, cravats and half hose with all the zeal and more than the assurance of his shopmen. In that year he closed his shop and went abroad. He was ruined by the railways; that is to say, he shortly after started as a capitalist. In 1850, he was dead; but the house of Lofty, carried on by his son, was as well known in the commercial as now in the political world.

In 1860, John Lofty purchased this Castle, and was refused a baronetcy.

In 1865, he refused an earldom.

In 1870, he bought the imperial jewels of the proscribed house of Romanoff, and generously set up the last scion of the house of Hapsburg in trade as a sugar baker.

In 1880, his son, the present senator, succeeded him. When the civilised conservative states of Europe united into the Federative monarchies, on the establishment of the senatorial order of millionaries, he was one of the first upon the roll; and when, at the happy termination of the war waged with the Democratic Union, the honourary distinction of M.M., or many millioned was decreed, he again assumed the first place in the new order.

There is, therefore, no woman breathing whose position in the age in which we live is more enviable than that of the Lady Calliroë.

Sixty years ago, when duchies and earldoms were not mere empty titles,—when they had not become ridiculous, by constant association, during a quarter of a century subsequently, with corns, sore legs, pulmonary complaints, and all the ills and inconveniences that man is heir to,—when, in short, the peerage indicated power and fortune, and that all the names in it had not been converted into pegs on which to hang the puffs of empirics, till some ingenious quack began to recommend his pills by disclaiming all connexion with the aristocracy—in those golden days the Lady Calliroë might have occupied the position of that young Duchess who smiles from one of Chalon's sketches in the Castle gallery, and still have seen reason to envy her present condition. The delicate state of her health during so many years, and the tender solicitude of her father have, however, retarded her entrance into that society of which she has yet seen but transient glimpses, and in which she longs to mingle and to shine.

The Lady Calliroë hence knows less than most other women of her years and station of politics, not that her nature is unambitious, but that her girlish ambition is still confined to a longing for the admiration of the brilliant throng which has dazzled her from a distance—to the homage of all whose homage can confer distinction, and to the envy of all who should dispute with her the apple. Yet this vision is not the mere aimless dream of a coquette, because it blends, in her imagination, into a little romance of love, of which her cousin Julian is the hero, she the heroine. When she has gathered at her feet all those who will bow to fortune, power, and broad-lands, and driven her lover to despair, she thinks that then it will be passing sweet, in defiance of usage and the disapprobation of the world, to say to him:—"Julian! here is this hand, which statesmen, senators, and millionaires covet;—this hand with all this hand can give, I place in thine, asking only in return that heart surrendered to me long ago."

How comes it then that she reads through with such deep attention that closely written political epistle? Because love and politics are blent in that artful missive—the sweet that lures so many petticoated politicians deep into the bitterness of its unprofitable lore—and which prompts the Lady Calliroë to ask for the morning papers, so unusual a demand as to astonish the Greek and Hindoo women, who wait upon her in their national attire as formerly it was worn, and as it still glitters in costume books; for all the world knows that now-a-days the Asiatics wear nothing but Manchester striped cotton goods, and straw hats—that the Greek mountaineers array themselves in wideawakes, and Chesterfields; and that the dresses of their women correspond. The letter which the lady Calliroë perused ran as follows.

CHAPTER II.

THE LETTER.

"You affect indifference to politics, my dear Calliroë, but I am determined to make you a politician in spite of yourself. Considering your position and your prospects, your abilities and your seductive powers, it would really be a sin for you to abstain from participation in public affairs. Politics afford to our sex a pursuit offering far more variety, interest, and amusement than the ordinary occupations of our lives without their frivolity.

Men may indeed rule the world, but we govern the men. Think only what it is when every tribute which female beauty elicits, every mark of homage woman receives—every smile she deigns to smile, has a marked agency upon the destiny of man, that Lord of the creation—sometimes of men by millions—instead of being wasted like the sweetness of the flower, or the warbling of the bird to glad the eye and ear, and be forgotten.

"Think what it is when you can trace the fate of whole communities to the zeal of a convert you have made, or to the success of plan you have concerted, and—if all these considerations fail to influence you think—what it is to build up magnificently the fortunes of those whom you have judged worthy of your friendship—who love and admire and appreciate you as I do, and who, like myself, would feel eternally grateful for your intercession in my favour. Or I should say rather in favour of one near and dear to me—one on whom the brightest eyes of beauty beam encouragement in vain, though I believe he would really give up all the world contains to bask in the sunshine of your own. Need I name my brother, your cousin Julian.

"Poor Julian! whose thoughts waking or dreaming are of you, and who, notwithstanding my pity, seems so happy in that contemplation—poor Julian seems long to have excluded all but your fair image from his thoughts.

"Instead of endeavouring to relieve the fallen fortunes of his house, he has remained apathetically indifferent, allowing opportunities and events to flow past him like an unconcerned spectator.

"If he is now aroused from that apathy it is because the same object which led to his indifference serves as a spur to his ambition—because he has suddenly become conscious that a chasm divides him from his cousin, the heiress—poor and powerless as he is with nothing but the memory of his family's greatness in a sordid age which would value a live farm-yard bird, for the egg it gives, above the ashes of a dead phoenix.

"This chasm he has however resolved to overleap or perish, as we have so often seen him light-heartedly urge his iron-grey Selim over a desperate leap. There lies indeed but one path open to him—the federative service, and he had once interest with the minister. I trust indeed that he has some still, but this interest has been long diminishing, pretty much in proportion, as my brother has required it, both because it requires it, and because the number of candidates for such offices as he covets is continually increasing.

"Our Sir Jasper is a great minister, and a great man, but he is inscrutable and unapproachable. He has long since half passed his word in our favour, but without any limitation of time for the fulfilment of his promise.

"Now Julian's necessities are urgent, and his love born ambition cannot brook delay. In the next place, the rationalist party—but hold! I forget that when last we met, you did not and would not understand even the broadest party distinctions. Let me, therefore, explain to you the chief cards of the political game, beginning with the rationalist party, of which I must premise by telling you that you are a member, though this piece of information may cause you as much astonishment—but, I trust, less indignation—than was evinced by the very celebrated Lady Cash, who, aware of her deficiencies, commenced a tardy course of instruction under the village school-master, and was outraged past expression, when told that she belonged to the animal kingdom, to a viviparous class and biped genus, and breathed atmospheric air, through the agency of her respiratory organs—insinuations which her ladyship most wrathfully and abusively rebutted declaring, 'that if she had not always been genteel and fashionable, she was come of honest parents, and a christian woman, who had been baptised, vaccinated and confirmed, and breathed through the mouth and nose like her neighbours.'

"Heigho! with all her ridicules I wish I were Lady Cash. I should not be long in obtaining an interview with Sir Jasper then, nor would our poor Julian be lingering on vague promises, instead of starting in that race in which he considers power and honours only as a means—the necks of rivals and competitors only as a footpath along which he would hurry to the goal—the feet of his fair cousin, the Lady Calliroë.

"To continue with my exposition then, you and I, and your father, and everybody, who is anything are rationalists. All who can write M. M. after their name, or who are bound by any sort of tie to any one who can belong ipse facto to the rationalist party, or can only be influenced by motives most unnaturally sinister if they do not.

"All that we rationalists wish is to maintain the legitimate influence of wealth, as the good sense of the age has established it in the federative monarchies. We recognise—as all others do in their hearts—the extent of an individual's possessions as the most unerring qualification for entitling him to the exercise of power, since the acceptation of this basis allows us to measure the extent of this fitness with mathematical accuracy from thousands down to units. But there is another opinion which our party hold in common, (though some think fit ostentatiously to disavow it,) which is simply, that—whilst we acknowledge the right of admission which the accumulation of wealth gives to the patrician body;—whilst we allow such a person as Lady Cash at once to take precedence of your fastidious friend—we are by no means anxious to afford facilities to the vulgar to gather any large amount of capital together, even though once acquired, in spite of our efforts, we recognise legally and socially the claim, and absorb its fortunate possessor into our ranks. What can be more rational, since every addition to our number diminishes the distinction of our position, and that even if the rising family only replace another fallen, it is detrimental to that process of social refinement which the perpetuation of power and capital, in certain families, are sure to produce?

"Of this party Sir Jasper is the leader. Of Sir Jasper's followers your father is one of the most distinguished. Its ascendancy is, however, disputed; and—between you and me—is perilled by the moderates. I need not tell you that the Federative representation is composed of the house of millionaires in which sit the M's and M.M's, and of a house consisting of the representatives of that vulgar mob of petty capitalists who call themselves T.T's, or ten thousand men, though many of them, I am told, can only boast that sum in business credit.

"This party is decidedly hostile to us; and its members even broach among them the absurd doctrine 'that a certain amount of wealth in the hands of a hundred men should give that hundred the same authority as if concentrated in the possession of one individual'—indeed even raise an outcry for some laws to limit the combination of the great capitalists against them.

"Hitherto the common-sense men—as they term themselves—and God knows everything about them is common enough—men who would make the united monarchy such another den as the Democratic Union,—of which you may judge by its ambassador, once brought to my boudoir to be exhibited, and redolent of the vile smell of tobacco! These common-sense men—who are all for the rights of labour, and who hate T.T's rather worse than M.M's—have hitherto kept the moderates in awe.

"The rationalists have still great majorities. In the eyes of the world we are still triumphant, and Sir Jasper a tower of strength. But I have a terrible secret to confide to your discretion. A hidden but powerful combination menaces our party with expulsion from office after thirty years' enjoyment of the sweets of power.

"Great, general, and repeated losses have embarrassed the affairs of our most valuable supporters, and a very powerful neutral party, who have some time kept neutral—are either joining or mean to join the moderates, and, if so, sooner or later we must fall. Now with the moderates we have no interest; and before this untoward event comes to pass, every effort must be made to obtain for Julian the fulfilment of Sir Jasper's promise. There is at this moment unoccupied the military secretaryship to the vacant governorship of Japan; it will be kept long open as usual by the minister, to play off many candidates. Now I have set my heart, with all the energy of a woman's will, on obtaining this office for my brother. And I come to you, dear Calliroë, to aid me in an enterprise hopeless without your succour.

"Your father is one of Sir Jasper's most valuable partisans; you must leave him no repose till you have secured his interest."

"Poor Julian," said the Lady Calliroë, as her colour came and went, "I would do anything for him in the world, but how speak of him to my father, who I know has even taken his intimacy here unkindly? If I had not been kept in such seclusion—if my introduction to society had not been so long protracted, I might have had opportunities of seeing Sir Jasper himself. He is accessible to my father—why should he not be so to me, and how could he refuse me this boon for my cousin?"

At this moment the door of the boudoir opened and Lord Lofty stood in the presence of his only child. He was a man middle-aged, cold, and a little haughty in his aspect, with a high brow—unintellectual although charged with thought. The frigidness of his demeanour warmed for a moment as he kissed his daughter's eyes and forehead, and sat down beside her on her ottoman.

CHAPTER III.

"My child," said the senator, "I have come to hold a long conversation with you."

"It is not often that you hold long conversations with your daughter lately."

"No, in truth;" replied her father, passing his hand impatiently over his forehead, as if by that mechanical action to remove a painful impression; "but the duties of my station and a world of cares have lately harassed me."

"And is not that the time, when cares harass you, to seek solace here?"

"No, my Calliroë. Why sadden your young heart with an old man's perplexities? You are a thing fitted only for joy and sunshine; and, therefore, I choose rather, when I come, to be the harbinger of good tidings than to impress you with the gloom of my forebodings."

"And if your tidings are so bright, how comes it, my father, that your manner is so solemn?"

"Because the object of my visit, though glad, is solemn, dear Calliroë?"

"Glad yet solemn?" echoed Calliroë, whose curiosity was not the less vividly piqued by this exordium, because two dusty carriages had driven through the park that morning, bearing mysterious visitants,—a circumstance not in itself remarkable, considering the political relations of the senator, but which became so in connexion with the fact that this arrival had caused her father—immutable in his intentions, as the Medes and Persians in their laws—to abstain from attending a public meeting, for which he had been many days preparing.

"Yes, my child, listen to me. If for some time I have appeared neglectful towards you, believe that I have not been unmindful of your happiness. I see that you look around you as if to say, these birds—these gems—this fairy bower—my Arab palfrey—and my hawks—my castled home in England—and my villa on the Ægean sea;—these are mere toys that pall as childhood ripens; but all this is not happiness. I know that it is not happiness. I feel, and I always have felt, that this would not suffice to youth, with its disquieting curiosity and flattering hopes—and, may be, with a consciousness of a social station, at which I rejoice, and of personal attractions, in which I take a father's pride. I have always felt that it was natural that you should seek to mingle in the world; but your precarious health, less than your tender years, obliged me to withhold you from it. If it had not been for this consideration,

I should have deemed the gratification of your desire a duty of my station. For it is one of the duties we owe to our order, and, indeed, to society, to maintain that station in its dignity; and a house without female presidency is shorn of half the attractions of its splendor, and of all the graces of its hospitality."

"My father," said the Lady Calliroë, a little disdainfully, "do not waste your eloquence upon me, I do not care a straw for the duties of my station; but I am weary of being secluded from the gay world, in which I long to mingle like others of my age and birth. Six months ago, the greatest of all living doctors told you that my health depended more upon keeping my mind amused than on repose or care; and here I am dying of ennui. I know what you have come to tell me—that you are called to town, and going to leave me in my solitude."

"Not so, my child," replied the senator, "I believe that you have outgrown the perils which threatened your childhood. I long to see you the cynosure of all eyes; and I think the time arrived for your introduction to the world."

The air of weariness and langour with which the Lady Calliroë pushed aside her gazelle, as the senator commenced speaking, suddenly gave way to an undisguised expression of joyous satisfaction, as she threw her arms round her father's neck.

He kissed her kindly, but somewhat coldly, on the forehead; for he was not a man of warm effusions, and continued:—

"Yes, my child, the time is come for you to play your part on the great stage of public life."

"And when—this season?" asked his daughter, in a tone in which a wild delight was childishly mixed with eager anxiety.

"That," replied the senator, "depends on circumstances. If at all, directly—in a week, or even in a day, for we may start for town to-morrow; but if it is to be I must protest against the frivolous spirit in which you seem to regard an act so serious as your entrance into life. That act, considering your position, becomes a political event. If on the one hand, your rank gives you singular advantages, on the other, it entails serious charges; and, considering the interests of the order you belong to—of your house, and of the perilous times in which we live, it would be unworthy of your station to embark on a mere frivolous career—on a mere life of fashion, without connecting it with those political aims to which you show such marked distinction."

"Now, in truth, my father, you misunderstand me. Launch me into the world, like a bird fresh winged—give me a life of pleasure and of action, and I care not what aim I seek by a path so sweet. As for political aims I may relish their pursuit, though I object, as a spectator, to the prosiness of politics. I do not even know how far I may not become interested by personal acquaintance with the chief actors in the great game of parties: for their leaders, since you see them, will be all accessible to your daughter?"

"All who shine either in the rationalist or the moderate party," replied the senator, with undisguised satisfaction at this triumph over the indifference of his child.

"Even the celebrated Sir Jasper?"

"Even the great and good Sir Jasper, the head of our party, and the powerful premier of the federate monarchies. He is not, indeed, a man who courts society like his rival, but Sir Jasper himself, my personal friend, will be always accessible to her who represents the house of Lofty."

"Never mind the rival," laughed the beauty, "unless he became a minister."

"That must never be, my little politician; for though right in the abstract that one minister in esse is worth twenty in futuro, we are, by our position, placed above that commonplace truth, and must stand or fall, like our whole order, by Sir Jasper."

"And I am, therefore, really to be introduced to the great world immediately? and why do you qualify that promise by a doubt?"

"You are really to be introduced to the great world, to preside over my festivals and banquets, and to uphold the state and dignity befitting the chief supporter of the most powerful of all human beings; but," added the father, taking his daughter's hand, "now for the more serious part of my communication, for which, indeed, you are better fitted than I had hoped in this respect—that there lurks beneath a graceful frivolity which I had never penetrated—a degree of good sense and creditable ambition which will inspire you, I am sure, with resolution and decision equal to the emergency. Listen, therefore, my child:—On the one hand, you are ushered into society with prospects such as all your sex might envy—rank, power, wealth, and fortune, will be the heralds of your advent into life; but, at the same time, I must confide to you that we live in critical times. It is impossible to say whose fortunes are not undermined—whose social existence is not threatened. We have reached a crisis which will determine for ever the stability of our whole body, and the perpetuity and increase or the overthrow of our wealth, influence, and power. Are you prepared to play a great part at this critical juncture?—do you feel yourself equal to great sacrifices?—to pass at once from childhood into resolute womanhood, overstepping the transition of girlish years?—do you feel that you are equal to the magnitude of the occasion?—that you are capable of taking a decision which will secure the fortunes of your house, the gratitude of your party, and open to you a career of pleasure and of power?"

The Lady Calliroë opened wide her deep liquid eyes of violet-blue, in which there sparkled the expression of a new sensation, self-undefined. Such, in the breast of a cage-bred bird, responds to the wild note of a free mate. Such the young colt, reared on the desert sands, with camel's milk and corn, feels at the sight of a green pasture. Such agitates the heart of a young maid when it flutters in the first palpitations of unacknowledged love. It is the expression of a newly awakened instinct or passion destined perhaps to sink into quiescence, but living though latent.

The words of her father had disturbed in the bosom of the Lady Calliroë a thrill of ambition, which strongly and unconsciously troubled her, though this unwonted sensation subsided again into a feeling more natural to her sex, and defined itself in the hope of furthering the fortunes of her cousin, Julian, through the influence prospectively held out to her.

"After such an appeal, my father, I must answer you decidedly. I say, therefore, open me the world, and you will not find me wanting in courage, or decision. I fear nothing, excepting solitude, and ennui. Give me the prospect of power—the hope of ready intercourse with those who rule the masses—let me have access to such statesmen as Sir Jasper, and I will dare any peril, make any sacrifice——"

"Scarcely a sacrifice, my child."

"Well, whatever can further any end you may have in view—unless, indeed, it were, a marriage," replied the Lady Calliroë, laughing, "though my eloquent and dignified sire would never have introduced such a subject like the guardian or the uncle of an old French comedy."

The senator bit his lip and was silent for a moment—he then abruptly rose and quitted the apartment, and a few minutes after returned with a stranger, to whom he presented her, saying, "This is the Lady Calliroë," and then retired without further comment from the presence of his astonished daughter.

CHAPTER IV.

THE INTERVIEW.

The Lady Calliroë was a few instants before she could recover her surprise at this singular introduction and strange tête-à-tête.

The personage so unaccountably ushered into her presence, was a man who, in point of age, might have been her father. His countenance was open, and his manner frank and urbane, without either being expressive of absolute sincerity. He was distinguished by an expression rather of sarcasm acquired in self-defence than of exuberant or native wit, and his whole aspect bore more the impress of perceptive acuteness and plausibility, than of genius. His costume was neat, and such as might have befitted a man within ten years either way of his time of life, his manner was urbane and unpretentious.

The first thought of the Lady Calliroë, when she coupled the apparition of this personage with the mysterious hints let drop by her father, was to divine that he came in the character of a suitor—for she could find no other probable solution to the mystery.

Now, both the age and person of such a candidate, and the mode of his introduction, were so preposterous in her estimation, that an uncontrollable sensation of the ludicrous came over her, and if she restrained herself from open laughter, its mirth played unequivocally about the expression of her lips and eyes.

"I am proud to make the acquaintance of the daughter of my dearly valued friend," said the stranger, who saw, at a glance, that he was unknown; "and if I have unceremoniously invaded this retreat, besides the temptation of paying her my respects, I can plead a special motive."

The Lady Calliroë, whose matrimonial thoughts had only wandered from the image of her cousin, Julian, to dwell upon the quick eyes and the lithe limb of youth—on its flowing locks and silky moustache of gold-shot chesnut or of raven black—the Lady Calliroë would have laughed outright at the pretensions of a suitor whose head was growing bald, and whose unsymmetrical rotundity of figure, the restraint of a tight-fitting waistcoat could no longer conceal—only that as she satirically scrutinised his face and figure, it gradually struck her that both were familiar to her eye, though she could not recall having ever seen the personage before her—unless in a dream, or, as a moment's further reflection suggested, in a picture, and almost simultaneously with this thought, the truth flashed upon her—and the truth was almost startling.

That picture in which her eye had grown accustomed to the lineaments of the face before her, was a portrait that hung in the state-room the full-length size of life, besides being reproduced in busts, engravings, and miniatures in every apartment of the Castle—it was the portrait of the Sir Jasper, the celebrated premier, and consequently the great minister—Sir Jasper stood before her.

Her heart fluttered, for a moment, at finding herself thus, without preparation, in the presence so great a celebrity, but she possessed that presence of mind, peculiar to highly susceptible nervous organisations—and consequently more common in women than in men—which may fail in ordinary times, but is roused by a sudden emergency and great occasion.

She might have felt embarrassed in the presence of any of the political chiefs of whom he was the supreme leader, and her courage might have failed if her recent wishes had been realised according to her anticipations. If she had sought and found an interview with him in the ordinary course of events, prepared to plead the cause of her cousin, Julian, she might have remained tongue-tied in the great man's presence, but thus brought suddenly in juxta-position with him, she so rapidly recovered her self-possession—that when saying, "Your father has forgotten to name his old friend," he held out his hand with an appearance of cordial frankness destined to put her at her ease, or to modify that awe which the discovery of his real character was calculated to inspire, she met his proffered salutation with graceful ease, and replied with perfect self-possession—

"Both my father's friend, and Sir Jasper, are above the formalities of introduction."

The statesman was somewhat puzzled. He had dreaded too much timidity, and he found an ease and coolness no less untoward in this young girl, who had not yet even picked up assurance by intermixture with the world.

The man whose persuasive powers guided, or whose combinations influenced classes and masses—whose words were listened to with interest throughout the civilised world, and to whom, at that very moment, despatches from every quarter of the globe were hurrying over land and sea—that man found it necessary to his purpose to convert an inexperienced child to his views, and to obtain her accession to a proposition which even her father had hesitated to make.

This singular necessity was obvious from his being then in her boudoir, hundreds of miles away from the scene of action, where, at the same hour, a political storm was brewing up, which would probably burst that very night, or certainly the ensuing one, in the senate. In this emergency, when his party was waiting for its leader, that leader found himself far away, face to face, with a young girl whom it was necessary to win over to his views, and to win in the only one brief interview which the pressure of time afforded!

He had been prepared to find her spoiled, and self-willed, and he dreaded the impossibility of placing her, in so brief an interval, sufficiently at her ease, to induce her to listen to his arguments; but he had not contemplated such a reception, marked by a satiric scrutiny, which he, at first, attributed to ignorance of his identity—an idea which her words dispelled, and which had next quickly merged into a quiet self-possession very disquieting to the minister. He had, perhaps, rather have faced the whole opposition in full cry, with nothing but an array of mishaps and disasters to set off against their grievances, than the fulfilment of his present mission.

"Your welcome is gratifying to the friend, and flattering to the statesman," replied Sir Jasper, adding with assumed bonhommie,

"though, if you judge me to be placed, by my public services, above the formalities of common intercourse, I, using an old man's privilege, may observe, even to yourself, that the Lady Calliroë is equally beyond the pale of ordinary conventionalities, by her beauty and acquirements."

The senator's daughter cast an involuntary glance at the glass opposite to her, as she answered, a little disdainfully:—

"My acquirements exist only, I fear, in the partial belief of a father; and if I am what the world calls fair, I have seen in our great cities far greater beauty unnoticed—because in rags."

"That is true; but never united to your talents."

"My talents! I fear they have no being but in your courtesy."

"I repeat your talents and your station—or perhaps rather, I should have said, your station and your genius. To speak frankly; I, the premier of the "Federative Monarchies," would hardly be just now conversing with the youthful daughter of my friend, if much was not in her power, and I should not speak so unreservedly if I had not recognised in her an intellectual superiority self-unrevealed perhaps but abundantly manifest to me, accustomed by my avocation, so to say, to read the human character as I run. You are beautiful, my fair child, though I take little heed of beauty; your station is exalted; and in your eyes I see the flash of genius and the restless light of aspiration, though indeed you may not feel it; for some one must discover the gem beneath its crust. I may be mistaken, but I cannot look upon you and believe that you are made to dwell in such insipid retirement—amidst birds and flowers—in a sort of valetudinarian nursery."

Sir Jasper, who had been watching the countenance of the young girl intently, as he spoke, to seize some indication of the effect of his words, paused for a moment; and hereupon she interrupted him, saying:—

"Really, Sir Jasper, I can hardly think that all this is not a dream, when I find myself conversing familiarly with so renowned a statesman; but can the genius of the legislator, like the ennui of a captive girl, only lead him to the natural conclusion, that it would be agreeable to be set free? or did your penetration lead you to divine that the chief object of my wish to be launched into the world was to find there this very opportunity which has come to seek me?"

"How so?" said the minister, inquiringly; for he could gather from her manner no indication of her meaning, since she spoke half in pleasantry and half in earnest.

"I was longing ardently only an hour ago to be ushered into life; but is it possible that could you have divined that my chief motive was the hope of an interview with you?"

"Good Heavens!" said Sir Jasper to himself.

"This is awkward. Does the girl think that I am making love to her?"

"Such an avowal," he replied at length, as paternally as possible, "is flattering, my dear child, it would have been dangerously flattering made by such lips as yours before you were born—before I had become dead to all sense of female grace, and had learned to estimate women only by the standard of their political value. If you really wished this interview with one whose exceptional position is far above his merits, it argues I am glad to see at least political curiosity."

"I have none," said the Lady Calliroë. "I sought this interview with the premier, for I did not then know Sir Jasper."

"From an intuitive curiosity, which was ambition."

"I had no curiosity, I sought to ask a favour."

"Frankly spoken," said the minister "so we shall understand each other. I too seek a favour, which, if accorded will leave nothing which you may not rather command than ask. Nevertheless let me have the grace of ministering to one of your desires whilst my aid may still avail you."

"Your meaning is a mystery to me. My inexperience of the world tempts you into a vein of pleasantry, Sir Jasper; but I shall not hold you the less to your promise."

"Pleasantry, my dear girl?" exclaimed Sir Jasper, glancing anxiously at his watch; "my character ought to guarantee that I am serious. Tell me how I can have the happiness of serving you, and let us dismiss the subject, to proceed into those graver matters for which I crave your ear."

"You are very powerful?" said the Lady Calliroë, musingly.

"You know my office. I have some slight power."

"Though politics are a sealed book to me, I know that you are the leader of the moderate party—I know that you are possessed of colossal power, which I trust may not speedily depart."

The premier started and turned very pale. For thirty years he had been the idol and the chief of the Rationalists;—for thirty years he had held the reins of power. The sarcasm of his foes, and the taunts of a vindictive enemy, during this period, had rebounded innocuously from the triple armour of his self-possession; why does he, therefore, betray such profound emotion at the accidental misnomer of his party by a mere girl, and at the doubt which her words imply of his continuance in office? Because his mind is haunted with the phantoms of the conscience-stricken. The minister feels that his fortunes hang by a thread, and, though his name had grown identified with the championship of the Rationalist party, he is at that moment meditating a desertion to the opposite camp.

To find his plans divined—his apostacy prematurely known, filled him, therefore, with terror. His first impression was that her father had imprudently confided these dangerous facts to the Lady Calliroë; but an instant's reflection taught him that this was impossible—at least, as regarded his defection—because he had not yet confided his intentions even to the senator. But though this conviction flashed through his mind instantaneously, it did not reassure him; for he asked:

"Where did you hear that I belonged to the Moderate party?" with such increased agitation, that the Lady Calliroë, astonished at the vehemence of his manner, picked up the letter she had laid down beside her on the ottoman.

The sight of this letter so much further alarmed the minister that, either believing or feigning to believe it to be offered for his perusal, he tore it open, and, having glanced hurriedly at the signature, proceeded to devour its contents. The first impulse of the Lady Calliroë was to snatch back the epistle really ravished from her; but then remembering that the request she had to make was specified in it, and that this perusal would spare her the embarrassment of an avowal, she allowed him to read on.

"I see no mention here of my reported secession to the Moderates," said the minister.

"Pardon my error," replied the Lady Calliroë, "I perceive now that I have confounded Moderates with Rationalists—I feel that I have said something hurtful to your political susceptibility; but consider that my whole knowledge of politics is derived from that letter."

The minister turned his penetrating eye upon her; there was truth and candour in her accent, and his brow gradually cleared.

The letter he had perused had relieved his anxiety, and given him some data on which to proceed in his negotiation with the senator's daughter; but on the other hand he had become at once acquainted with the certainty of an obstacle on which he had not calculated.

"We must do something for this cousin Julian," said the premier, at length, with a smile, which brought a blush to the cheeks of the Lady Calliroë. "He has a sister who is neither discreet nor modest in her demands. It was impossible that she could know, when she solicited your advocacy, that the combinations of a few hours should raise her fair friend from the seclusion of the nursery to a station of high political importance. Yet, even thus, it does not lie in my power to confide to him such a post as the military secretaryship of Japan! the idea is preposterous."

"Why so?"

"Because it would be without all precedent—because I should outrage a host of my supporters. The military secretaryship, like the governor-generalship, has been months unfilled for fear of indisposing disappointed candidates—I cannot bestow it on a person without plausible claim or qualification."

"He is connected with my father."

"What of that connexion? Your father scarcely owns him; the very husband of your modest correspondent, his sister, regards him with coolness. We do not live in an age when relationship to those in power confers it; I myself have nearer relatives in obscurity. Your cousin Julian is a dashing, reckless youth, who might still, as an enfant de bonne maison, have played his part gallantly half a century since, but now-a-days his follies and his ruined fortunes—which he has no talents to retrieve—have sunk him deep in the public estimation."

"And when those near and dear to us are sinking, should not that hour of need command our sympathies—call forth our best exertions?"

"You are right, my child; but we must keep within the bounds of the possible. I could as soon make him governor general as military secretary. Nevertheless, we will do something, for his plight is sufficiently pitiable; but now I recollect," added Sir Jasper, affecting the utmost indifference in the world, "it is probable that your cousin would neither thank his sister, nor yourself, nor me, for removing him so far. All the world knows—and all the world, excepting myself, would at once have remembered—that he could not and would not live one day beyond the reach of that fairest, most talented, least scrupulous, and to him most fatal of women—Myrrah."

"It is a calumny!" exclaimed Calliroë, with flashing eyes—"at least to say so now."

"Perhaps," replied the minister, coldly, "it is a week since I saw him in her box—it is a week, indeed, since I was at the opera."

The countenance of the statesman's victim underwent all the sudden and startling change of a southern sky and a summer sea—one moment sunny, calm, and almost lifeless, and the next awakened to an expression of storm and menace, as the lurid clouds darken and the surface of the water gathers into waves. But in a very brief space her woman-like pride so far triumphed over her emotion, that she made a desperate effort to conceal it. Sir Jasper had, meanwhile, averted his eyes in a manner so natural, that he had not increased her embarrassment by noticing the tear which rose and glistened, and fell burning from her own, though after a brief interval of silence, he resumed—

"Excuse me if I have made an allusion which you may deem indelicate—but it was necessary frankly to expose the motives of my objection—and at any rate such scruples would be absurd in addressing you—as I must do—not as the budding belle of a drawing—room, but as the ally to whom a grey headed politician confides the secrets of his cabinet. Will you now give me your undivided attention?"

"Speak on—I listen," replied the Lady Calliroë, with assumed composure, and the minister proceeded.

"I was observing then, my fair child, that you are fitted for a very different existence, and that a singular chance destines you to play a distinguished part, not merely in fashionable life, but in the world of politics. In the days of childhood we are apt to indulge in dreams of first love, just as, at a still earlier age, we long to handle and appropriate the colours of the prism, but when with more matured experience, a woman seeks the practical enjoyments which pre-eminence and the possession of power afford; she sometimes struggles through years to attain that position, which offers itself to you on the very threshold of your career. You have intellect, you have beauty, and you have station, which is, to these, like the polish and setting to the brilliant; your father has political influence and rank—but that rank, station, and influence, are dependent upon wealth; and unhappily, his fortune is sapped to its foundation—so that with all the external signs of opulence, utter ruin menaces your house."

"Good Heavens—my poor father!" ejaculated the Lady Calliroë; "but he has friends."

"He has true and faithful friends, but alas! the fearful pressure from which he suffers, is general. To be frank with you, I myself, at this moment, require the full aid of his influence. It is, indeed, just now the key-stone of my power. If his fortune fail him, that influence is gone; and, with the loss of its assistance to me—after a struggle of thirty years—I must succumb. Some rash hand, unskilled to steer amidst the shoals and breakers of the times, will seize the helm, impel our class to ruin, and wreck the vessel of the State. Judge therefore, whether I and they would neglect any effort to save his grey hairs from humiliation? Nor have we—"

"All this is to me so strange and startling; do you not jest—do you not exaggerate? Is not my father still possessed of countless villages, farms, parks, manors, harbours and factories?"

"Nominally, he still possesses them, but he has been one of the chief victims of the great financial struggle. For the real struggle between the Rationalists and the Moderates has been financial. You have heard no doubt how, within the last few years, a strange disease spread universally, destroying, in succession, the nutritive principle of every farinaceous kind of food; you have heard how nations were threatened with famine, till science discovered remedies to stay the vegetable contagion. These remedies were monopolised by our great capitalists. We thought, by possessing ourselves occultly of the sources, whence all human food was derived, to consolidate our power for ever, whilst enlisting in our favour the sympathies of the masses against the clamouring Commons—the minor capitalists—who pressed so hard on our exclusivism. It was a great idea, but through unforeseen chances it has failed We were a few hundreds who banded our millions of money against the incalculable wealth of hundreds of thousands—but in our body was unity—in theirs, no common purpose. We all partially involved our property (as your father did too ardently and extensively) with almost the certainty of a hundred-fold return. We should have triumphed—One season more would have repaid us amply, both in wealth, which is power—and in power, which is wealth—had there not been at work some influence more subtle or more fortunate than our own—playing with us the game that we were playing with the people. In the belief that we were only struggling with an adverse fortune, which would change, we were led to the verge of ruin. In truth, that great and glorious body, whose cause I have battled so arduously for a quarter of a century to uphold, bears in itself—I care not to avow it—the seeds of dissolution. Like Milo, a party strove to rend the oak, and the rebound has cramped its power for ever. So much for the apotheose of our order—but a daring intellect outlives the ruin of parties; and when one kind of material fails, still manages with another to build up greatness.

"You may find me tedious, but I must explain. The Moderates are on the verge of triumph. The best of my followers crippled or ruined, like your father. Their lands, their ships, their factories, their stores, are partly, or—like his—entirely mortgaged. A man who has risen from the dust—a man without education, eloquence, or, as was long believed, even common ability—heads a party, into whose hands unaccountably have accumulated these vast gains which we were to have made, and the property so rashly ventured. Even you, no doubt, have heard of the famous Cash, for his celebrity grows every hour. This domain, this castle, the very luxuries that surround you, dear Lady Calliroë, are not your own—they are not your father's—they are pledged to this child of Mammon, whose inconceivable success appears like a resistless fate. This new power—this man of gold has long kept neutral with his adherents and confederates in the political struggle. At this hour the Moderates believe that they have won him over. They know our weakness, they know that our party can never rally—but, beaten by an inexorable fortune, as they thought—I have yet devised a scheme to baffle their leader, and to snatch the crown of triumph from his brows. I have discovered a means of increasing the power and fortune of my friend, your father, instead of sharing in his ruin; but to effect this purpose I must have the co-operation of his daughter."

"Mine?" said the Lady Calliroë.

"Yours," echoed the minister, and he took her hand, tremulous with a vague apprehension. "All that I ask of you is this——"

"My hand!" exclaimed the Lady Calliroë, in unutterable astonishment. "Your lady—is she dead then?"

"No, Heaven be praised!" replied Sir Jasper, with a smile; "I should have said, the disposal of that hand—give me but that, and I will place a sceptre in it!"

The beautiful eyes of the senator's daughter flashed as she opened them wide in wonderment, and then she shook her head mournfully without reply.

"Four-and-twenty hours since," continued the minister, "matters were still desperate. The man of fate held in his hand cards with which I would pledge myself to establish again an individual and dynastic sovereignty as of old. I saw him, my eloquence prevailed; I have attached him not to a falling party, but to my individual fortunes, and to those of my faithful friends. As a hostage for his fidelity he agrees that his only son shall lay his prospective wealth and honours at your feet; and he agrees to surrender his mortgages on your father's property, settling it upon yourself; and promising us besides the full support of all his wealth and influence.

"One word of acquiescence from your lips, and to-morrow John Cash and your father join me in the newly constructed cabinet;—we startle the House, by proposing the very measure at which the Moderates have laboured during years—overturning confusing, annihilating parties and by that step—rearing up from this chaos a new, and unshakable, edifice of power, wherein the beautiful and gifted daughter of my friend will throne as a presiding deity."

"If I have solemnly promised that I would never give my hand to any but one, Sir Jasper?"

"To one unfaithful and unworthy—to one who loves another—which unbinds your promise.—Reflect that at this moment the Moderate party slumbers in the belief, that it has monopolised this man of fate—at this moment beauty, youth, and fashion are plotting to secure the heir to his colossal wealth. I have won them both. I have brought them to your feet, in time to save the grey hairs of your father—in time to save us all—in time, by that one word of consent, which you can speak, to give life to a mighty combination—to stir to its foundations the very frame-work of society, and to fill the civilised world with wonderment."

The Lady Calliroë looked up, and her eyes flashed with an expression of elation which a moment after subsided into sadness—"poor Julian."

"Poor Julian!" echoed the minister, "to whom you will show, in all its brilliancy, the pearl he cast aside to toy with a worthless shell—poor Julian whom your generosity will save from ruin."

A flush of colour rose again to the tempted beauty's brow, and her eye sparkled with another flash, like the beam reflected from a dark, blue billow. Her ambition and pride were not less roused than her pity; but deeming herself only a victim to her duty and magnanimous compassion, she drew from this self-deception a feeling of enthusiasm.

"If I were to say yes—if I were to yield to this necessity, I must make one stipulation in favour of my cousin Julian."

"Noble girl," said the minister, "he shall be cared for. I will pledge myself to satisfy him with some post less embarrassing to confer than that military secretaryship."

"Listen, Sir Jasper," said the Lady Calliroë, with solemnity, "either you have deceived me and Julian loves me, or you speak truth, and he loves another. In the one case, he has all the sympathy of my soul; in the other, my forgiveness. In one, I must strive that he does not curse the memory of her who abandoned him to his poverty and ruin; in the other, I shall pray that he may be happy, and provide that he shall bless the memory of her whom he deceived. I am ready—the statesman's victim is ready for the sacrifice—but the price of this sacrifice shall be Julian's happiness. I will discard the romantic dreams of my girlhood to enter on the cold realities of life; but the last act of that transition—its inexorable condition shall be to shape out a magnificent destiny for Julian. Did you not say that the governor-generalship of Japan was vacant?"

"It will not be so long. It is to be the dowry of the Lady Calliroë's husband."

"It is a great office?"

"One that your father might covet."

"Then you must give it to my cousin Julian."

"Impossible!" exclaimed the minister.

"Then my answer to your proposal is a negative."

"That answer, rash girl, would be ruin."

"Ruin will only bring me where I leave him. All barrier will be levelled then, I will seek him out and hear from his mouth whether his heart be mine or the actress Myrrah's."

"This is sheer madness," said Sir Jasper. "I cannot entertain the matter now, but we will hold council on it afterwards."

"No; you have no consent of mine, unless you pledge your honour to confer the post in question on Julian."

"He shall have the military secretaryship."

"You told me that you could as easily make him governor-general. "

"A figure of speech. I must have thought I was addressing the Commons. It is impossible!"

"Then in the name of my departed mother I declare that I reject your suitor."

The minister looked at his watch again. Time pressed.

"It is a matter I cannot alone decide."

"Then farewell," said the Lady Calliroë, rising to withdraw. "If the victim be not worth its price—you have my refusal now and for ever."

"Stay," said the minister; "if it must be, I will brave the world, I will make your cousin governor. You have my word of honour, and I have your consent?"

"Yes; but before the irrevocable act takes place his commission must be signed, that I may forward it with the farewell which I take of him and of my woman's heart for ever."

"Your compliance is noble!" said the minister, carrying her hand respectfully to his lips.

"To-morrow's sun will see a tottering house re-established; a perilled monarchy redeemed; a veteran minister still the most powerful of its subjects. And this he owes to the greatness of your soul, and for this he will ever yield to you the tribute of his homage. I can only observe that time presses and that events tread fast upon our heels."

"I am ready," said the Lady Calliroë. "The sacrificial wreath is round my temples—where the advantage of delay?"

"This is too prompt," thought the premier, and he added aloud, "preliminaries once arranged, we may expect your future father-in-law every hour. The bridegroom will be here this night. But lest you should judge of the son by the father I have his portrait here."

She took the portrait, but laid it down beside her without bestowing on it a look.

The minister pressed her hand in his and said, paternally:—

"God bless you, my child," then carrying it again to his lips, he added, with solemnity, "and Heaven prosper you, Madam, in your greatness!"

When he was gone, the Lady Calliroë buried her face in the cushions and sobbed aloud, pushing aside her gazelle, which, named after her cousin, insinuated its head under her white hand, as she said, audibly:—

"Julian, Julian, what have I done? Where are you, Julian?"

CHAPTER V.

THE TRAVELLING COMPANION.

The fortunes of Julian Beauvoir were very desperate. He could not venture to show himself in any of the capitals; and, though there was no prospect that delay would better his affairs, his only thought appeared to kill the present hour. In fact, he had always lived in the present, and, reckless of the future, sought chiefly some occupation which might drown reflection. Such had been, during weeks past, his pursuit,—such it was now, only that there mingled with it a vague and indefinite hope, which he dared only indulge in his most sanguine moments, that ruin might still be retrieved through an alliance with his wealthy cousin.

Originally received with kindness by her father as the child of a near and dear relative, he had for many years access to the Lady Calliroë; but as the power of the senator rose, and as his nephew declined in the social scale—though still received in the retirement of the country, it was no longer on a footing of equality, and as the period of the introduction of the heiress into society approached, his reception had grown gradually more chilling.

If the senator had any suspicion that the sisterly affection of his daughter had ripened, as it grew, into first love, he took little more account of this circumstance than to consider it as a slightly untoward event, which might give her some childish pain, but of which the impression would be rapidly obliterated on her entrance into life.

Nothing, in truth, could exceed the wild improbability of such a plan in the estimation of Julian's scheming sister, and even sometimes in his own; but he had renewed with such success the gallantries of a past age, and had found his follies popularly received with such unaccountable indulgence as to be sometimes led to imagine that the ardent temperament of the Lady Calliroë, and the paternal affection of the senator for his only child might be worked upon to produce a social result in his favour, exceptional to its present spirit. His sister had encouraged the prosecution of his suit not with any belief in its success, but because she foresaw in it a means of interesting the uncle in favour of his nephew, whether through the importunities of his daughter, or through the necessity of relieving himself from his presence.

Julian was at this moment meditating a decisive visit to the Lady Calliroë.

It was the year in which, in due rotation, the parliament of the Federative Monarchies assembled in the capital of France.

The impending debate would necessarily call thither all the supporters of the premier, and hence it was probable that he should find his cousin alone, a circumstance infinitely desirable in itself; but then it was just possible that a visit in the absence of his uncle might have been provided for by his orders, and would prove a bar not only to the projected but to any future interviews.

In this perplexity Julian Beauvoir looked out of his carriage down the diverging railway lines, passing his long slender fingers—pinkly transparent like the inside of a shell—through the long ringlets of his raven locks, and then pressed abstractedly to his lips and against his no less pearly teeth, the large pearl which formed the handle of his taper horsewhip.

His page seemed waiting the decision of his capricious master, as he held back, with some difficulty, by a silken rope, a pair of enormous but beautifully symmetrical greyhounds, straining the richly chased links of their golden collars, as they strove to attract the notice of their owner.

The eyes of the bystanders were however diverted from him by the arrival of a fresh train, from which three equipages, bearing on their panels the distinctive sign of the son of a millionary, and filled with his suite, were shifted to another line. The owner of these equipages meanwhile alighted to stretch his legs. He was a young man of middle stature. His face was round, his features not uncomely, and their expression, both as to intellect and distinction, that of literal mediocrity. In fact everything about him—mind, person, stature, and bearing, might have been characterised by the same term. But this monotonous level—alike without salient points of superiority or the inequality of deficiency—formed a very solid substratum, whereupon the addition of rank and wealth sufficed, in the estimation of the world, to constitute a most dignified superstructure.

This personage, Eustatius Cash, at once exchanged signs of friendly recognition with Julian; and in a few seconds they were strolling arm in arm upon the platform.

Julian observed, that he half meditated an invasion of his uncle's seat. His companion replied, that, by a singular coincidence, he too was about to pay a passing visit thither. He therefore pressed him to decide and share his carriage. Julian consented, and a few minutes afterwards the pair were whirling and rushing or rather projected, at the rate of a hundred and fifty miles an hour, towards their destination.

It must not be hence be deduced that Julian and young Cash were friends, at least in any other sense of the word than that which implies familiar intercourse; on the contrary, the reminiscences of that intercourse were marked by the recollection of ill-will and rivalry. The sight of Julian conjured up in the mind of his travelling companion three distinct scenes very far from grateful to his memory, and little calculated to inspire him with anything but aversion.

It recalled to him the time of his first entrance into fashionable life, when his father was emerging from obscurity to take his place amongst the wealthy of the land.

It recalled his reception when still timid and inexperienced, by a circle of whom Julian was the oracle, and he the butt, together with all the pleasantry heaped upon him by those who sought to make him expiate his prospective millions through their sarcasm.

As there was nothing prominently ridiculous, or even prominently marked about him, this feeling had gradually subsided, and friends, parasites, and admirers had gathered round him; but then he became an unsuccessful rival of Julian's, who was dissipating the capital of his heritage against the annual allowance, doled out somewhat parsimoniously for his means, to Eustatius by his father.

Another phase had followed. His experience grew, and so did the world's respect, as his father's colossal wealth accumulated and his power increased. Julian's influence, on the contrary, had declined; he had even quitted the field, and was, indeed, only returning from a sojourn in the East, when once more they came in contact.

Julian was then penniless; Eustatius Cash the most discreetly magnificent magnate of the Federative Monarchies.

At this period (1905), in the full zenith of her popularity, of her glory, and her charms, still bloomed the celebrated Myrrah, of whom all the world remembers that she united the gifts, the frailty, and the beauty of an Aspasia, a Siddons, a Julia Grisi, and a Ninon de L'Enclos.

Long success and unceasing adulation had made this woman so impatient in the gratification of her wishes, that a whim, if thwarted, became a necessity of existence in her estimation. She made the fortunes of managers, scattered the fortunes of admirers, and, as usual, neglected to secure her own.

On the occasion in question, this self-willed and reckless personage had drawn her vast salary, in anticipation, binding herself by a heavy penalty to the manager to perform during the Paris season. No sooner, however, was her contract signed than she was seized with an irresistible longing to spend that winter in the south; but the manager was inexorable: he claimed the restitution of the salary she had anticipated, and enforcement of the penalty she would incur; and the salary alone was in itself a fortune. A half century back it would have sufficed to fee two hundred subalterns or curates, or sixty generals, or a brace of bishops, or one agitator. In this dilemma none of her many admirers were forthcoming, and in her necessity she found only Eustatius Cash—whom she had treated with contumely—who would aid her; but Eustatius, only allowing himself to be won over by degrees, made his own stipulations. The actress found it necessary to play to him from the stage in the eyes of the whole capital—to exclude those who displeased him from her suppers, and to wear his bouquets in her bosom and in her hair; nay, he farther imposed the hard condition, that, if she wintered in Madrid or in Italy, she should spend that season in retirement, and not appear, as she had meditated, on the stage; and lastly, he made the odious stipulation of inflicting on her his distasteful company. On these terms only did he consent to relieve her from the thraldom of her tyrannical creditor.

When all was arranged, and that she had yielded to these conditions, the manager was sent for and ushered one morning into the presence of Eustatius and the lady in her boudoir. But he did not come unaccompanied—Julian was with him. Though Julian had been a favourite once, nothing could be more provoking at that unpropitious moment than his presence, but the vexation of the actress was quickly dispelled—for the manager at once introduced Julian as the present proprietor of his lease, contracts and engagements.

Julian had been on his return from the east, two thousand miles away when he received, at the same time, the announcement of an inheritance, and an account of the persecution of his quondam friend. In forty-eight hours he had traversed the space dividing them—he had bought with his whole heritage the rights of the manager, and he came in the very hour of need to restore her liberty to Myrrah, by throwing the receipts and contracts she had signed into the fire.

The actress, so graciously set free, turned maliciously to her would-be protector, and pressed him to join herself and Julian, and make a fourth with the manager at the very breakfast-table, originally spread in his honour. This affair was universally bruited, and not the less impressed upon the dilettanti, that it was the means of securing the charming vocalist to them for the season—for no sooner was Myrrah freed from her odious contract, than—whether through waywardness or through gratitude to Julian—she lost all longing for the south, and performed steadily throughout the season.

All these recollections rankled in the bosom of Eustatius beneath an exterior placidly cordial. As for Julian, he almost assumed credit to himself for having forgotten and forgiven these passages of their mutual history, as he would assuredly have done had the case been reversed—so incapable was he of bearing ill-will to any human being. Though he had never been at any time on terms of cordiality with his present companion, he had greeted him with sincere satisfaction, because too delighted to meet so unexpectedly with one of his own station, and because an involuntary deference had succeeded to the contempt with which he once professed to regard the heir to the millions of old Cash. Julian, indeed, once idolised by a set now dispersed and broken up, was an outcast of humbled fortunes, who could not even aspire to a seat in the Lower House; whilst Eustatius had gradually conquered a place in all men's estimation, by sheer weight of metal, as it was said, and had risen to the Lower House of T. T.'s, and from the Lower House to the House of Millionaires—in fact, from insignificance to importance, whilst Julian had been declining from importance into insignificance.

Nevertheless, as they proceeded towards their destination, the vanity of Julian was gratified by the idea of showing this interloper how well he stood in the good graces of his fair cousin, and Eustatius took a malicious pleasure in leading him to compromise himself upon this subject, thereby to heighten the mortification which discovery of the real purpose of his visit would occasion—a discovery by which the young millionaire proposed suddenly to prostrate his rival, and to avenge upon him so many former triumphs and indignities. And in truth, nothing could be conceived more incredibly astounding than an explanation that the purpose of his visit was a hurried marriage with the heiress of the house of Lofty, with whom her cousin seemed to believe that he would not even be allowed an interview. Both the travellers were therefore in high spirits. Towns, fields, and stations seemed to fly rapidly past them, and at length their carriages were landed upon terra firma; and, with a bright sky and shining sun overhead, they drove rapidly to the castle.

The avenue through which the horses galloped was not in the best condition: the deep ruts were filled with recent rain and mud, and the footpath presented one series of little pools.

Their attention was attracted as they drove along by the somewhat slender figure of a man, habited in professional black, and endeavouring with the utmost care to pick his way amidst the scanty patches of dry gravel on the path. He appeared, indeed, to study with minute interest, the hydrography of a whole system of puddles—sometimes advancing his foot along a narrow isthmus, or stepping on to a peninsula or island, and then cautiously receding to attempt a different passage. The garments of this individual, which were rusty and threadbare, were somewhat scanty. His coat cuffs betrayed several inches of the wrist, and his trousers too short and too tightly strapped down, occasioned an almost ludicrous restraint in his movements.

"What queer figures one does unearth from holes and corners in the country," said Julian.

"Romeo and Juliet's apothecary, or a strolling player all ready for the part," observed his companion; and at this moment, as he raised his glass to his eye to take a minute survey of the stranger, the postillion urged his horses, and the carriage-wheels sank splashing into a deep rut, and covered the passer-by from head to foot with mud.

There was something so comical in this sudden and overwhelming frustration of the hopes of an individual so assiduously bent on traversing without spot or stain that very ill-conditioned road, that Julian and his fellow-traveller burst into a loud fit of laughter, which, together with the rattling of the carriage-wheels, drowned any exclamation which the sufferer might have made.

"Poor devil," said Julian, at length, when he had ceased laughing, "give him a lift in one of your carriages."

"In his present condition," replied Eustatius—"what would my people say to such a proposal? No—I have no pity for a fellow of that sort—his rusty black speaks volumes. Why should one class be ever treading on the heels of another? Why is he not in highlows and fustian, and a smock frock?—he need not then have picked his way so daintily."

As they turned the base of the hill the castle rose majestically in view, and here again the Lady Calliroë became the subject of conversation. "So because the senator is absent, you think there is no chance of seeing your fair cousin?"

"How should there be?" replied Julian, "at least in the ordinary course of things. She is not out, and therefore how could she receive a stranger? but," he added, with some fatuity, "I am one of the family you know, and I will take care that you are not entirely disappointed;—if I cannot obtain you admission to her boudoir, you shall see her ride. We always take a canter in the park in the absence of old Lofty, a collation will be served you in the oak rooms, and we will mount under your window."

By this time they had reached the lodge of the park, which stretched invitingly before them. Situated on an eminence, and admirably drained, it was perfectly dry, and they alighted. At this moment, the man in the threadbare suit presented himself at the gate. He had reached it at the same time as they, because having been rendered reckless by his accident, he had taken a short cut across the brow of the hill, regardless of the wet and mud in which he was now embrued to the ankle, to say nothing of the stains yet undried on the upper part of his garments. He was sternly refused admission into the park by the gatekeeper, on account of his appearance even after having said something to the man in an under tone, which somewhat mollified him, for he replied more civilly, but quite as resolutely.

"It is more than my place is worth—besides, if you reach the castle, I tell you that to-day you cannot see him."

"This is hard, on a matter of life and death," said the stranger, about to turn away, when Julian accosted him.

"They refuse you admission? then come with me. It is through our fault that you are in this disarray—we owe you some compensation. Whom do you wish to see at the castle?"

"The senator."

"The senator is absent," said Julian.

"No—he is here," replied the stranger, and the porter, by a respectful nod of the head, corroborated his assertion. The nephew felt a little disconcerted at this announcement, but his word was passed, and he turned to his protégé, and said—

"Well, I will introduce you into my uncle's presence—follow me."

"I will accompany you," said the stranger, resolutely and with emphasis, whereupon, the son of the millionaire, for the first time, paused to direct upon this personage a scrutinising look, but he was met by a glance which made him speedily withdraw his own—so full it was of depth and determination, and of a disquieting kind of haggardness which involuntarily troubled him.

He then first perceived that this personage was young, and bore about him that rare and peculiar stamp which rendered all possible connexion between him and the ridiculous, utterly incompatible. Eustatius Cash passed his arm into that of Julian, and they proceeded in silence, the stranger not following, but accompanying them, as he said, for he walked in a parallel direction, a few paces distant from their side.

CHAPTER VI.

THE INTERVIEW.

The seneschal of the senator's household received the new comers. He was a courteous man of middle age, with all the discrimination fitting to his office, whose duties, indeed, he in everything was eminently calculated to fulfil, even to the minute particulars of manner and personal appearance.

One glance sufficed to show that he was as peculiarly adapted to that baronial castle, once a Ducal residence (of which he did the honours), as the heron to its heronry, the falcon to its mew, the snail to its shell, or the bird to its nest.

He moved about amidst its long galleries and gothic chambers with speech and bearing half-courtly, half-chivalric, and his very features, from their strong resemblance to the coroneted portraits on the walls seemed to render him a living impersonation of the statesmen, warriors and dames, who frowned in dignity or smiled in grace upon you from their canvas. This likeness is not imaginary, because Hugh Fitz-Stephen Upland (entitled to the Marquisate of that name if his family had not in his person outlived the abolition of these feudal titles), is one of the last lineal descendants of the former owners of the castle and domains of Upland. He is said to regard this circumstance with secret pride and satisfaction, though possessing too much knowledge of the world to treat with any thing but affected pleasantry the old title by which he is sometimes banteringly addressed, and which it would be as absurd to assume at the present day, as to have sported the style of Knight of Malta, or Grand Prior, half a century since. Statistics and fashion, indeed, have perhaps had more share than other social causes in any the change of feeling, which has caused society to regard with so much contempt all pretensions to family antiquity.

When, for instance, in England, statistics proved that out of every hundred registered voters, eighty-eight were descended from William Rufus, or Edward the Crusader, and ten more from the followers of William their progenitor, the Herald's office would have been exploded, and the Garter King-at-Arms might never have pocketed another fee, if, from this very circumstance, a fresh impetus had not ingeniously been given to the thirst of distinction natural to all ambitious races—for it is needless to repeat what large sums are expended at the present time to obtain from that very Herald's office vouchers that a family is not descended from the Norman Conqueror, or what fees are added for authentication of the fact that a house is so far distinguished from the vulgar herd as not to have had an ancestor amongst the Doomsday Barons. It is true that these vouchers are now becoming so common even in the Democratic Union, that in another twenty years there will perhaps remain none but the Papuans, the Hottentots, and the inhabitants of Cochin China, who will not be possessed of authentic proofs that they are none of the Conqueror's seed, and none but they who will consequently go down to posterity as his descendants.

The seneschal, Hugh Fitz-Stephen Upland, had received his cue, concerning Eustatius Cash but with regard to the unexpected apparition of Julian, he had no instructions, and at any other time he would, without hesitation, have courteously expulsed the seedy stranger, but he had tact enough to discern that something unusual was passing in that mansion, whose proprieties he had never seen so singularly violated during thirty years that he had presided over his department. He had learned or divined that there was, under that ostentatiously ceremonious roof, a cabinet minister incognito, a Bishop in petto, and an ex-Lord Chancellor, who had alighted under the disguise of a tartan shooting-jacket, and from a branch-railway-omnibus-conveyance. He had farther seen the Lady Calliroë in tears—her favourites impatiently set aside—her palfrey dismissed without its customary lump of sugar—and her father, the most dignified, and self-possessed of men, plunged into such profound abstraction that he had actually shaken hands with the astonished groom of the chambers, who came in white kid gloves, to present him with a letter on the salver of jewelled gold, subscribed by the faithful city of Moscow at the coronation of that last of the Romanoffs, whose birth-place is recorded now by a gigantic knout of bronze on a granite pedestal, adorned with alternate skulls and medallions of brass, illustrative of the family murders of this house, which are beautifully executed in relief on this monument, doubly raised to the infamy of that Imperial race, and to the folly of preceding generations, which endured its rule.

In this state of things, the seneschal felt so much at sea that he hardly knew what course to pursue, and doubtful whether the stranger might or not be an authorised performer in these singular proceedings. He consequently begged them all to be seated. The son of the millionaire, with a deference of which the dignified formality was flatteringly respectful—the unexpected Julian, with polite urbanity—and the seedy stranger with a frank, off-handed kind of hospitality. A moment's reflection taught him however, that as regarded Eustatius Cash, his instructions were definite; and he therefore led him to the apartments prepared for his reception, profiting by this opportunity to learn the pleasure of the senator respecting his nephew Julian.

Lord Lofty, on hearing of this unexpected arrival, betrayed unusual indignation and impatience, proceeding straightway into the presence of the intruder. Nothing, he thought, could be more impertinent than such a visit at that particular crisis, and he consequently resolved most unceremoniously to dismiss his scapegrace relative.

"Julian," said the uncle, coldly, extending two fingers in return for his nephew's proffered hand—"this visit is unexpected; and, notwithstanding the deep interest I take in your welfare, I must plainly tell you, uncalled for at such a moment."

"I should not have intruded," replied Julian, somewhat crest-fallen, "if I had not accidentally met with young Cash, an old acquaintance, coming to pay you a flying visit. He offered me a seat in his carriage, and I could not resist the temptation of enquiring after you and my fair cousin Calle."

"This is embarrassing," said the senator to himself. "You are not then aware of the object of that visit?"

"If it be political," answered Julian, "I should grieve to prove any obstacle or interruption—and in that case, I will not prolong my stay—or I will repair to my cousin, whom I have not yet greeted, without farther tax upon your valuable time."

"Julian," said the senator, "the object of that visit is at once political and more than political; in one sense, indeed, it personally interests yourself. For you, too, will be indirectly and beneficially affected by the event to which I am alluding. But whilst not unmindful of your future, I must, at the same time, frankly confess to you, that I consider it a duty incumbent on me to mark my profound regret at your neglected opportunities, and my unqualified reprobation of your conduct, by requesting that you will spare me the pain of your presence at my daughter's marriage."

"At Calliroë's marriage!" exclaimed Julian, who was flattering himself a moment before that he should play an indispensable part in that ceremony, whenever it took place.

"At my daughter's marriage," repeated the senator. "A great alliance—she weds the only son of the great millionary, Cash.

"Eustatius Cash!" ejaculated the staggered Julian, who could hardly falter out—"when?"

"To-morrow," said the senator, "Sir Jasper gives away the bride. The Bishop of Manchester performs the nuptial ceremony; and the civil authority will be represented—the marriage contract overlooked, by the ex-chancellor, Lord Besom and Variable.

Julian changed colour and fell back in his chair, so overpowered by this astounding communication as to be deprived of utterance.

At this moment the senator first perceived that they were not alone, for his eye caught, in the recess of a window, the pale, anxious features of the stranger, contrasting so strikingly with his patient and immoveable attitude.

"Who is your companion?" asked the host of Julian, without averting his gaze from the youth in black, who answered for his protector.

"One whom your nephew has helped into your presence on an errand of life and death."

"What is your pleasure?" asked the senator, looking in astonishment from Julian to the mud bespattered stranger.

"Life is departing," replied the youth. "I come to seek your aid."

"I am not the dispenser of life. Whom am I addressing?"

"One of your own tenants."

"Your name?"

"I inhabit the last cottage on the Burnside hill," replied the youth, evasively.

"Have I not got a steward?" said the senator, and then he added, shortly, and as if some circumstance suddenly recurred to his memory. "Ha, I see—you are one of the people who have squatted on my property. I can encourage no tenants in the parish, who cannot prove ostensible means of livelihood. You are over bold to intrude into my presence. What do you want with me, or from me?"

"For myself, nothing—"

"Young man, go to my steward, or to my almoner."

"It would be useless; it is to you, my lord, that my request must be made. I come to beg of you a bunch of grapes."

"This is strange;—and not a little presumptuous."

"I seek this favour for a dying man."

"I have no grapes, if I were disposed to humour the fancies of all invalids, the crop has failed here as everywhere."

"I have heard so from your gardener; but I know from your gardener, too, that you have preserved one magnificent bunch in your hot-house—let me have that."

"A modest request, upon my honour!"

"I ask it not to gratify a caprice, but as a remedy—a remedy by which a life may be prolonged."

"And who tells you that a bunch of grapes will prolong life?"

"Science."

"Are you a physician?"

"I am literally a physician; and appreciation of the human frame is one branch of my knowledge."

"Then, my young doctor, you must study more deeply before your word suffices to convince me that health or life can depend on a bunch of grapes."

"Good God!" said the stranger, "unless I had that conviction, would I have besieged your gate as I have done, subjecting myself to mortification and refusal? and can you weigh a bunch of grapes against even a chance of the life of a fellow creature?"

"Enough," said the senator; "I refuse you upon principle. Even if it were true that a bunch of grapes—being a rarity for my table—could save the life of a child of the people, it would be not only a political inconsistency, but an injustice towards its fellows, to give that bunch of grapes; and I have too much paternal love for the people to commit such an injustice. Now mark me, young man, Providence, for its own inscrutable purposes, has made a distinction between the poor and the rich. In its all-wisdom the poor of to-day are the rich of to-morrow; the rich of to-day are poor; but whilst Providence allots to man a state of poverty—in all countries and in all ages, the bread of sorrow has been his portion. It is our duty, and it should be our chiefest pleasure, to alleviate his condition as far as practicable without diminution of our own enjoyments; but moral and economical considerations fix this alike as the limit of such endeavours. Now I am perfectly aware that in every hamlet—in every factory—in every lane of crowded cities, there linger innumerable wretches, any one of whose individual lives I might save by substituting rich diet, generous wines, and wholesome air, for their meagre fare and pestilential atmosphere.

"There are as many more on whom consumption preys in the north, or panting in the south for the bracing breezes of the north, whose health I might restore, by costly transference to a more congenial clime. I might, indeed, benefit some hundreds, perhaps some thousands, if I were to sacrifice the roof that covers me—the lands that stretch around—the elegancies which surround me; but these I should only select invidiously to leave millions more to perish; and how much more invidious then would be an individual preference?"

"And if all your class were to contribute?" asked the stranger. "Yet, my lord, I appeal not to your reason, but to your heart. There are cases in life where impulse only guides us—how otherwise would the mother give her milk to rear a child which she knows may prove ungrateful and will certainly divide her scanty morsel of bread? Nature, which has given the mother milk, has implanted in the breast of man a kindly feeling towards his fellows. To this feeling I appeal. Give me that bunch of grapes, of which the fruit cannot but taste bitter on your table connected with the thought that its price has been a human being's life."

"Impulse is for the people; forethought and it may be pain for those who watch the fold," replied the senator; and then he added, peremptorily, "enough. You have surprised this interview. My time is precious, young man. You have my answer;—may it prove a moral lesson."

"It shall prove a moral lesson," haughtily replied the stranger, whose pride had all along been ill-repressed by his solicitude. "When the hour of reckoning comes—when the poor and the oppressed are triumphing—when their only impulse is hate of their oppressors—then they shall listen only to that impulse and leave to these oppressors pain and regret of the irrecoverable past!"

"Come! Come!" said a groom of the chambers, whom the senator had summoned, to cut short the stranger's importunities, hurrying him out, just as Julian and the senator were startled by the sudden intrusion of his daughter.

Julian's greyhounds, escaped from their leash, had found their way to the Lady Calliroë. On inquiry she had learned that he was with her father, and, knowing how irritating this circumstance might prove—how painful the disclosure to Julian, of the event to which she had consented—she forced her way into their presence, and stood before them as the stranger was led away and hurried to the castle gate through rows of grinning lacqueys, who were rapidly being marshalled in their state liveries and holiday array.

CHAPTER VII.

THE REJECTION.

The Lady Calliroë was pale and self-possessed, though her compressed lip, the fevered animation of her glance, and the dilating veins, showed that this external calm resulted from a resolute and painful effort.

Her eyes met those of her cousin; but neither spoke.

Julian felt then, as he had felt before, ready to sink into the earth. Vexation, wounded pride, and awe of the great personages—whose sanction invested the astonishing event with so much circumstance and pomp—still kept him speechless. Julian, though reckless of his person, and singularly daring in his sphere, was yet little calculated for antagonism with overwhelming superiority; and his demeanour did not show to advantage when contrasted even with the glance of hostility and defiance with which the poor stranger returned the contemptuous looks of that inhospitable household, as he strode away.

"Calliroë," said the senator, at length, "has Sir Jasper left you?"

"Sir Jasper has left me—resigned to your wishes; but I come to confess to you, my father, that if you bartered my hand before consulting me, I, your daughter, committed the error of promising that hand without your knowledge. None, but I, should announce the violation of my promise; and I was writing now to Julian—"

"Ha!" said the father, directing a stern and penetrating glance on Julian. "This, indeed is new to me. My child, dismiss the memory of such folly. Your affianced bridegroom is beneath this roof; you must see the propriety of retiring."

"Not so, my father. I obey you—I wed another; but until then I will be my own mistress. I have always been determined. Imagine whether I am less so now, with so brief a period of freedom before me. You must leave me with Julian: he must unbind me from my promise, or I will die unmarried."

"Julian must quit these walls at once. The prosperity of our house depends on that marriage, and in its prosperity our kinsman Julian shall not be forgotten."

"It is true that I have my cousin's promise," said Julian, gaining courage, "though little account is taken of a woman's heart when her hand is made the subject of a bargain."

"Leave us," said the Lady Calliroë, "alone ten minutes and Julian shall quit us."

The senator hesitated, and then, knowing his daughter's wilfulness, thought it best to put an end to this painful scene by compliance.

When they were alone the senator's daughter addressed her cousin bravely. "Julian, this is a sad meeting—it was rash to come," and then burst into tears.

"My own Calliroë!" said Julian, in whose mind the only defined sensations were pity and admiration of the weeping girl, and a burning wish to thwart and mortify his rival. "My own Calliroë. Thank Heaven you are not yet another's. Be resolute as you are true—be firm as you are beautiful, and we may yet be happy."

He seized her hand and attempted to carry it to his lips, but she pushed him back.

"I am not Myrrah!"

"Fiends!" said Julian, "they have poisoned your mind against me."

"Heaven knows how truly, Julian; but be this as it may, I have yielded to my fate."

"But that compliance you may still recall. You are the inheritress of power and wealth—why need you seek power or wealth in marriage? Oh, my Calliroë—my love—my own—it is not too late;—be faithful to your vow, and the future is our own."

"Not even the present," said the Lady Calliroë, shaking her head mournfully. "Listen to me, Julian. All this has been as sudden as a dream. At this time yesterday I may have doubted of your truth, but I had no idea of anything beyond. To-day I discover that I am heiress only to a father's ruin. To-day, statesmen and ministers track me to my boudoir, making me the propitiatory offering for their and his salvation. What would you have had me do?"

"What did your heart dictate?" asked Julian. "Did it not occur to you to share poverty with me?"

"No!" replied Calliroë—"I thought it better to accept splendid misery—I thought of my father's ruin—of yours Julian—I doubted of your love—and I made your future a stipulation of compliance. Sir Jasper offered at last the vacant military secretaryship."

"My noble cousin!" said Julian, "it was worthy of you; to speak frankly, yesterday I loved you well, and for such a post—to be again somebody and something—I would have removed into another planet, but at this hour my feeling is changed. You shall not be the sacrifice to my fortune; fling back their gifts and offers with disdain, and come to love and me."

"One moment," answered Calliroë; "there was a governor-generalship vacant—I demanded it."

"It was madness!"

"So said the premier—but he yielded; there was ruin in my refusal."

"Impossible!" said Julian.

"Yet true—as you shall hear from his own lips. You are the governor-general of Japan, the hour that sees me Lady Cash."

"I, governor-general!" exclaimed Julian. "I! by common accord, condemned to an eternally frivolous existence! I, whom they have contemned, raised at one step immeasurably above the heads of those who had toiled past me whilst I was loitering to gather flowers by the way—I, governor-general of Japan!—but you refused, Calliroë?"

"No, Julian—I accepted; I was about to enclose your commission with my farewell—you came in person—I have seen you—it was better so—and now Heaven prosper you, Julian—for we part for ever!"

Julian had fallen on one knee and kissed the fair hand of his cousin—tears were in his eyes—thanks on his lips—and a little scorn in hers, for she heard no more of "Love in a Cottage."

* * * *

As the Lady Calliroë retired to her boudoir, a letter was put into her hand; it ran,

Dearest Calliroë,

The political crisis I foreshadowed in my last is arrived. I have reason to know, that skilful as is Sir Jasper, our pilot, we cannot weather the storm—it is indeed time for every one to look out for a plank against the approaching shipwreck. Do not forget, Julian, or it may soon be too late—now or never, we must secure for him some office which does not change with the administration. Whilst thus urging you, dearest Calliroë, I hasten to correct an error, into which, on reference to the copy of my letter, I find that I had inadvertently fallen. I asked your interest to obtain the military secretaryship of Japan for Julian. This was an absurdity—it could not be conferred upon him; it is the under-secretaryship that I meant."

CHAPTER VIII.

Sir Jasper, though elated with his success, still felt painfully anxious. The bridegroom was there, indeed, and he had the full authorisation of the father to negotiate the marriage in question, yet the father, without whose signature nothing could be done, was not arrived. The pressure of events was imminent, the time of the minister incalculably valuable, his occupations harassing and urgent, and yet he could not venture to leave the castle till he has seen this alliance sealed, on which depended now the combinations of his policy. Even at the eleventh hour his rivals might outbid him. Old Cash, who did not hesitate to shock the decorum of the senate by sitting in his shirt-sleeves, was not the man to weigh even formalities the most compromising against solid interests.

"No tidings of him yet," said the minister, reading rapidly the intelligence conveyed in his own cipher by the electric telegraph, of which a branch ran to the senator's residence. "They are clamouring for me now at the private meeting of our friends. The funds are going down—once, twice, thrice, they have been down within these two hours. Here are four-and-twenty waverers absent through sickness—ah! and traitors too amongst them—watched to the levee of my rival. The owls fly out and hoot, the rats and vermin quit their holes—there are all the signs of a crumbling house, and of a falling ministry."

Lord Lofty listened to the words which fell from his patron's lips with deferential and intense attention. He had followed where that patron had led—he had moved forward where he had pointed out the way—but, like the Israelites in the desert, had despaired and doubted in his heart, and cursed his stars, at times, that he had not worshipped other Gods. When, at length, there seemed nothing but ruin and a waste before him—like Moses, who miraculously drew the water from the rock—this man of inexhaustible expedients came to save him; snatching him from bankruptcy to place him again on the pinnacle of prosperity. The senator rejoiced, therefore, to see his leader wear a smile of confidence, and asked, more in wonderment than in doubt,

"But though the re-establishment of my influence and the magnificent but tardy accession of our party will give us majorities to-morrow, and the next week and the next, how shall we carry on the government beyond? Is not the sense of the monarchies strong against our order? Is not our order weakened, and is not the impression abroad that its time is come?"

"And that impression is full of truth—its fate is sealed. No man can any more stem the flood of circumstance than re-ascend the stream of time; but the bold and skilful may float with its tide and steer happily down its rapids. I grant you that the rationalist party will be a wreck before another session, but yet you and I will be ministers."

The senator looked dubiously.

"Yes, farewell to the wreck of our estate; we steered it gallantly and sailed it well; but men like you and me are not made to perish with it. The spirit of the time has changed—we must move with the spirit of the time—we must head the moderate party."

"Our deadly enemies!"

"I shall have followers from our camp, and find partisans in theirs. I will not even ask whether I may count on you."

"But how join them in the excitement of the measures they press us with so hard—The measures we have opposed so long and bitterly?"

"We do not join—we crush our enemies—we raise a banner loftier than their own, and, drawing after it their followers, leave the Moderate leaders hostless. With all those devoted to me—with all the party of old Cash to back me—we go down to the senate and hurl upon them, like a thunder-bolt, a proposition more popular than they ever dreamed of. What say you?"

"A bold and appalling step; but the master mind reveals itself, and I defer," replied the senator, rivetting his eyes with admiration on his chief.

"Yes, in truth, it will be to them appalling in the hour of anticipated triumph when we come upon them—sudden, resistless, unexpected—a political avalanche. Still, I wish this marriage were concluded—the contract signed. Where is our new ally—why does he tarry?" The minister looked again to his telegraph.

"A report spreads that the minister is ill. The mob are cheering the Moderate members.—No; it is the Moderate leader, who is ill and absent."

"My friend, we must hasten this marriage, every hour is precious."

"It is impossible to proceed till old Cash arrives."

"Listen," said the minister, earnestly, "this whole arrangement is so peculiar, that if events have justified a precipitation thus far novel and unusual, I cannot see why we should not anticipate the event by a few hours. The Lady Calliroë will listen to reason, supposing we further hasten the ceremony, and cause it to take place within a short time of his arrival."

"But my daughter has not even seen her future husband."

"The acquaintance of a day, or of an hour—what matters? It is time for me to make them known to each other—suppose I introduce him to the bride—that we run through the contract, and fix the marriage for midnight."

"This is sharp work—brief notice to give up a darling child; but after all it is for her incalculable advantage."

"To make the bankrupt's child the most powerful woman in the world."

CHAPTER IX.

THE BRIDE AND BRIDEGROOM.

Eustatius was left alone with his affianced. When told by his father that he must marry, he prepared to obey implicitly and without comment. It was an agreeable surprise when he found that the wife provided for him was young, high-born, wealthy, and widely famed for her beauty. He had, indeed, seen the Lady Calliroë on one of the few occasions on which she had appeared in public, and—like all the world—often, in graceful portraits and the prints of boudoir books.

The Lady Calliroë had never seen Eustatius. When Sir Jasper was gone she had given one glance at his miniature, and had almost experienced a feeling of disappointment, when, enthusiastically bent on self-sacrifice, she found that he was so comely. This feeling was heightened when he stood before her, and that she was forced to acknowledge that his portrait had not done him justice.

"Our position is a strange one, Lady Calliroë" he said at length, "the sport, as we are of social and political exigencies, which roll remorselessly over our predilections and affections. How then shall I describe to you my delight when being deprived of all free will—when yielding blindly to my fate, I find a choice made for me exactly where I should have paused to admire and render homage, if I had ranged the wide world through."

"Hush!" said the Lady Calliroë, "we are two puppets in the hands of those who play us off. We have each, no doubt, our part assigned to us—but why weary each other with it?"

The suitor looked annoyed for a moment, and then he answered:—

"Something similar I must have said, if you had been like the old fairies in the nursery tale instead of resembling the imprisoned beauties whom gallant knights deliver. Yet why doubt truth when more probable than insincerity? One glance at your mirror will prove that you are beautiful; one glance into your eyes will prove them full of soul—the sound of your own voice—the reflection of your own person, must teach you better than the tongue of man, that you are formed to inspire love in his bosom. I do not for a moment dream that one tithe of that impression can be mutual; but I am sure that I shall love you tenderly, and believe me, that a woman cannot be so loved and remain for ever indifferent."

"You have learned your lesson well," said the Lady Calliroë, "but let us rather strive to be friends, since we are to be partners through life. They have chosen for you a wife very self-willed."

"What matter" replied Eustatius, with a smile, "when she finds a husband who will have no will but hers?"

"That is a consideration in the price of a wife, where a wife is purchased, for we have as much will in this matter as the thing bought and sold by the trader."

"If it be too distasteful to you?" said Eustatius, who was growing embarrassed, "yet Sir Jasper said that you were not unwilling."

"I am resigned, as you must needs be in this bargain."

"Madam, the mode of this marriage is the curse of our position—yet in substance it will prove, I trust, the blessing of our lives—the glory and the pride at least of mine. You must consider that formerly, when Princes ruled, their children were disposed of as your hand has been to me. They were bought and sold, but the price was provinces and kingdoms. The age of Princes is passed away. We replace them, and this reminds me that I have an offering to make."

The bridegroom went to the door, and two of the Lady Calliroë's women entered with a casket of malachite and gold.

"These jewels are unworthy of you—but I believe there are few finer—all are historically curious. This emerald adorned the Sultan's turban; this pearl was pledged by Charles the Second to the States of Holland; this brilliant the Empress Catherine purchased by a title and pension; this gem belonged to Mary, Queen of Scots; for this ruby a pitched battle was fought, a province desolated."

The Lady Calliroë took them one by one, and cast them carelessly aside.

"This necklace, if you examine it minutely through your glass, contains on each stone, exquisitely graven views, of seven once royal palaces; this is Sans Souci—this is Fontainebleau. My father purchased the domains with the necklace from their owner—they go together—they are part of my offering."

The Lady Calliroë exhibited no surprise at the Imperial magnificence of these presents.

"Jewels and palaces! It is well; you are colossally rich, I know, but how inhabit more than one dwelling, wear more than one of these suits at a time?"

"Yet these are things that the beautiful and high-born covet."

"I loved jewels yesterday, but not to-day. When it suits man's purpose he appeals to woman's reason—suppresses the inspirations of a woman's nature—he leaves out of consideration her hopes, her delicacy, her antipathies, her predilections—and then, when she has taken an irretrievable step into the path he wishes, he would make her the woman and the child again. These are the signs of wealth, and of power which wealth purchases, but they are not power. I do not exactly know all that constitutes power; but votes in the National Parliaments—votes in the Federative Assembly, teeming populations and devoted clients are evidence of power, I know; and these, for my husband and myself, I prefer to gems and palaces. What is your offering of these?"

Eustatius felt cruelly embarrassed.

"You are wise and prudent as you are beautiful. I am an only son—I have nothing but the prospective inheritance of my father's wealth—its extent is great—I do not precisely know it—it would be difficult, they tell me, to compute. These jewels are the richest in the united monarchies—the other particulars of our fortune correspond."

"Enough," said the Lady Calliroë. "We are yet but two automatons, whom others move—a boy and a girl, who do as they are bid. You were instructed to see and compliment me—you have done so; I was told to receive you—I have fulfilled my part. Now, take my assurance, that I will be to you a faithful wife, and allow me to retire."

"And I will be a loving husband," said the bridegroom, seizing, with a show of eagerness, and carrying to his lips, her hand, which she made no hasty effort to withdraw, but which was cold as marble.

"Will you promise me that it will not rain at noon to-morrow?"

"Not rain! How can I promise you?"

"How can you promise then to love me?—the signs of the skies are easy to be read, compared with the mind or temperament of man or woman. No, if we are to be yoked together through our lives, do not let us begin with falsehood and deceit—we may come to that too soon. Adieu, till we meet again."

And with this the Lady Calliroë rose, and left the disconcerted Eustatius, saying to himself,

"This is a girl! What will she be when a great lady and a wife?"

CHAPTER X.

ADIEU TO GIRLHOOD.

The Lady Calliroë stood in the centre of her boudoir, surrounded by her favourite women. The opened doors showed through on either side a long suite of apartments, in which presses, chiffoniers, and caskets of carved wood, ivory, ebony, or tortoise-shell, were opened too and rifled of their contents—the treasures of a wealthy maiden's wardrobe.

She had dismissed, from her service, all her attendants who were weeping round her as she divided amongst them her trinkets and her raiment, as these were piled into a heap at her feet. Here a Hindoo woman beat her breast, and uttered loud lamentations as she gathered up costly shawls and glittering trinkets—there her faithful Highland girl collected the gold coins, which she called the siller. A dark-eyed Florentine, appealing to the virgin, took nothing but a jewelled crucifix; and the Greek maid, Zoë, prostrated on the ground, disdaining all these gifts, declared, in the accents of her passionate grief, that she would not go away. All kissed the hands or garments of their mistress, and implored that she would not dismiss them, but their mistress was inexorable. She would be left alone—she was obeyed.

Even to Zoë she was almost harsh, though she kissed her on the forehead, and gave the weeping girl her dear gazelle, the only token the devoted islander would accept.

The Lady Calliroë then hastened to take a last look at her palfrey. She bade them take off his bridle, and loose him in the park. The horse came up at her well-known voice—he neighed his recognition—but, in a moment, finding he was loose, he galloped off, describing circles round her, till at last, exulting in his freedom and his swiftness, he snuffed the breeze and sped away.

The Lady Calliroë watched him, until—lost amongst the old oak trees—his mane and tail were only seen at intervals, flashing in silver, above the fern, amidst which he disappeared, startling the deer in his impetuous career. She then called for her falcons, Timur and Attila. She ordered them to remove their hoods, unbind their jesses, and let them soar.

The hawks, no more faithful than the steed, flew away—one out of sight, and then the other followed in his track through the clear atmosphere, till both were hidden by the tall trees.

She returned to her boudoir to take a last look at her flowers, and at her birds. In bright and uniform, or blended hues of purple, azure, gold and scarlet, now mingled like the rainbow's tints, now varying with every movement and with each reflected beam, as they fluttered from flower to flower, or hung with vibrating wings suspended in the air, the captives attracted by the sun without, beat their gorgeous breasts against the crystal that imprisoned them.

The Lady Calliroë touched a spring, and the windows slid open. It was the impulse of the moment, for an instant's reflection taught her that she was wrong—but it was too late—she could not close the casement readily, and one by one her birds flew past her out, and she remained alone.

CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER OF HISTORICO-POLITICAL ECONOMY.

Dread of the wild communistic doctrines triumphant in the Democratic Union, had united by a common bond all in the Federative Monarchies, who had property to lose, or the hope of ever acquiring any.

The last prejudices of caste—the last vestiges of lingering nationalities were dispersed by the common danger, when the propagandist spirit of this society began to manifest itself, threatening, through its restless energy, the existence of the old.

Recollections of a common origin and language no longer bound nations together. A Frenchman was no longer a Frenchman, an Englishman no longer an Englishman; but all merged into one of two great classes, into which the civilised world became divided. One consisted of those who had accumulated property, or who, though not possessing any, looked forward to its acquisition and could appreciate institutions which maintained the rights of individual possession, and of a large number still influenced by custom or timidity. The other comprised all who were content to forego the prospect of opulence—with the accompanying chance of misery—for the certainty of competence, and who preferred a humble equality, where none could overtop them, to the possibility of social pre-eminence. Thus the civilised world came to be separated into two great states, in each of which the disjointed fragments of castes and nations were mingled and amalgamated into a mass—homogenous—though its original elements were still as distinguishable to the eye of investigation as the antediluvian remains of animals and vegetables assimilated by fossilization with the strata in which they are found embedded.

In the United Monarchies especially, forms and styles, remained, though changed in essence. National Chambers, Parliaments, and Diets existed still, but altered in constitution and dwindled down to local importance.

Lords, Counts, and Peers survived in name but not in substance; and the forms of hereditary monarchies were still preserved in the former subdivisions of the Federative Kingdoms, though royalty had really sunk into a mere state of beadledom.

These Federative Monarchies formed of so many elements of wealth, constituted naturally the most powerful of the three great states, into which (with the Bokarian despotism) the whole world was divided. It was the most peaceable as well as the most powerful, and could only be roused by the determined aggression of the Democratic Union to defend itself in the sanguinary struggle which ensued between them.

In this struggle, as all the world knows, the wealth and organisation of the Federative Monarchies triumphed, and the Union, humbled, weakened, and threatened in its very existence, was obliged for many years to refrain from further molestation.

At the commencement of this struggle the capitalists became classed into two grades of aristocracy, and wealth became the exact standard of representation land of power. All possessed of more than ten thousand pounds voted in one chamber; the fortunate owners of a million in another.

At first these major and minor capitalists formed one united body against the Democratic Union without, and their own penniless fellow subjects within; but on the fortunate issue of the war, the great capitalists divided into two orders—the millionaries and the many-millioned; and by degrees found themselves in opposition with the minor capitalists, whom they attempted to keep down. These parties assumed the name of Rationalists and Moderates, and through their dissensions, the sons of toil, whose sympathies were in a great measure with the foreign Democratic Union, were again enabled to raise their heads, under the name of Commonsense men.

Rationalists and Moderates were equally opposed to the Common-sense men, in this respect, that they estimated the claims of that accumulated labour, called capital, so high above those of living labour as to render the rights of the one the wrongs of the other. Amongst themselves they differed on its influential proportions, and in the quarrel which ensued not unfrequently coquetted with their common adversaries.

For thirty years after the great struggle the rationalists kept the ascendancy. The millionaries indeed might have succumbed to the numbers of their adversaries, but for the fact that every minor capitalist lived in the hope of becoming himself a millocrat, and that they passed a law limiting every public association to a hundred members. It thus happened that every great undertaking fell naturally into the hands of the rationalist millionaries, because, notwithstanding the aggregate wealth of the moderates, the limitation of number left them no chance of rivalry.

But this powerful body, like many others, not contented with present stability, sought to extend both the amount and duration of its power.

It chanced that a disease spread amongst all roots and breadstuffs, like that which banished the solanum tuberosum* from use, in the middle of the last century. It went through different phases; sometimes it increased—sometimes it diminished, and at others seemed vanishing to break out the next harvest with fresh violence.

[*Called also murphy or potatoe in the speeches and writings of that day.]

Famine for a long time threatened humanity, till science discovered a means of neutralising the effects of the contagion by a peculiar preparation of the seed. This preparation required several seasons, and in the different stages of the disease, varying agents to destroy the pernicious principle; but the process by which these agents were employed, always the same, had been indirectly secured by patents to the principal millionaries.

It thus appeared inevitable that the dependence of society for the chief article of its food upon these potentates, must have eventually placed at their mercy all classes of their fellow citizens. This combination which Sir Jasper had devised, was long successful. The millocrats, like Pharaoh in the land of Egypt, hoarded up the seed corn, and all were obliged to purchase of them. So that being the absolute lords of the staff of life, they would have been enabled to tax, the remainder of the people, without other limit than their ability to pay, if it had not happened that the wealth which flowed into the coffers of the millionaries on one side had always ebbed out at another. When the corn had been stored for several years, it always chanced that some one of the ever changing ingredients of disinfection had been bought up by some equally remorseless speculator, who levied on them a larger toll than they were levying on the people.

To retrieve such coincident mishaps the millionaries speculated more deeply, but never in a new stage of the disease did they discover a modification of the remedy, but that they had been forestalled, and were obliged to purchase at ruinous prices the chief ingredient of their disinfecting process. They raised their prices; but this both occasioned dangerous discontent and soon found its limit. They were forced to give vast credit, and their irresponsible debtors failed, whilst their wealth was inexorably mulcted by their creditor.

Under these circumstances the star of the rationalist millocrats was waning fast, notwithstanding all the expedients of Sir Jasper. The moderates, backed by the people, hourly gained strength and clamoured for the abolition of the law which limited the numerical extent of association.

Meanwhile, however, a personage had sprung up, who had become in himself a power. No man could be more solicitous to hide—more skilful in concealing the amount of the money he had made, but yet it became known that he was the possessor of incalculable wealth, and at different intervals chance had revealed riches far exceeding the wildest speculations of the vulgar.

The extent of his fortune gave him accession to the body of the millionaries; but he in nowise identified himself with their order. Though without any ostensible effort on his part to unite them, clients, partisans and imitators gathered round him, expressing their eagerness to vote as he voted, and following his example by remaining strictly neutral.

Both the Rationalists under Sir Jasper and the Moderates under Middleman Cautious had in vain used every effort to gain him over to their respective parties, till a period arrived when John Cash, who refused to express even the shadow of an opinion, obviously possessed the power of inclining the balance either way.

At length, as the reader has been shown, Sir Jasper flattered himself that he had succeeded in attaching to his fortunes this man, who epitomised a whole host in his person.

Meanwhile the moderate leader indulges in a like belief. Let us take a peep into his camp.

Middleman Cautious is walking up and down a long room, at one end of which he pauses to whisper orders or make suggestions to a secretary whose pen travels over the paper with marvellous rapidity, and then apparently reflecting as he moves along, he comes to converse in a subdued and earnest tone with a group of politicians to whom he is giving audience at the other end.

Middleman Cautious, is, in point of years, in the prime of life. His bald forehead is high and broad. His eye, wonderfully piercing, is a truthful index of his singular penetration, which an insatiable curiosity excites, and to which an inexhaustible patience ministers. Years back he would probably have been a rationalist notability if he could, but thrown by circumstances, into the moderate party, he became its leader, till at length, though aware of its comparative insignificance, he began, like Cæsar, to prefer playing the first part in a hamlet, to being second at Rome.

This party had, however, progressed from weakness and inferiority to equality and strength, and it was now rapidly assuming predominance. If its chief had never ventured upon one combination for the future, or created one of the circumstances which favoured its development, he had dissected and laid bare the combinations of his adversaries, and profited unerringly by every circumstance which arose. He had inspired his party with courage when it wanted heart, he had restrained its rashness when it grew impatient, till at last it became the fashion to reproach him with over prudence. The announcement, therefore, of a decisive and definite attack upon the rationalists produced an immense sensation, and it was in the midst of the excitement occasioned by this intelligence, on the eve of the approaching battle, that we have introduced him to the reader.

"Those who are not with us to-morrow, my lords, I shall consider against us. Let us understand each other," said the Moderate leader, addressing himself to five individuals who tacitly allowed themselves to be represented by one spokesman, and who were the waverers spoken of by Sir Jasper.

"Let us, as you say, briefly understand each other," replied the man addressed; "our absence may be remarked—it is dangerous. That we are animated by liberal sympathies and personal friendliness of feeling is obvious by our being here, but we have a great stake in the country, Sir—we cannot compromise ourselves rashly, and without seeing our way clearly. It will be a toss up between you and Sir Jasper if you bring in that bill to-morrow, without the aid of Cash and his tail. They have never yet taken any side, and unless we have some more positive proof that they mean to join you, than your mere assurance that they will co-operate, we owe it to ourselves to step back into the rationalist ranks which, after all, have been for thirty years triumphant."

"We are full of sympathy with the masses," added one of the waverers, "but, as practical men, we conceive that we can serve our country better in that party, unless its strength be shaken, and of this we must have some better security."

"You are patriotic men, I know—who feel it a duty to vote with the strongest," replied Middleman Cautious; "I have pledged myself to you, that John Cash has promised me his support. You are not satisfied with that promise; I now declare to you, always under seal of secrecy, that to me it is perfectly satisfactory. To-morrow will decide the matter. You wish to side with the strongest—his support will render me the strongest—reserve your votes, therefore, till his party has pronounced itself. If I be myself deceived, you will not then be compromised. Can I give you better security of my good faith?

The deserters looked at each other, and consented with a common accord,

"It is then agreed, that directly the neutrals have pronounced for us in the senate, you show our colours, and vote with us."

"Agreed!" replied the spokesman. "It would have a better effect for us to be prepared with effective speeches the moment Cash has pronounced himself, so as not to follow at the tail of all his party. On that eventuality depends in fact our concurrence."

"We part on that understanding," said Middleman Cautious, shaking each man by the hand. "If old Cash does not come forward, you may have speeches ready to use the other way, if you choose it."

"It would, indeed, disarm suspicion," replied the spokesman, "and render our cooperation more valuable, on some more auspicious occasion. Good day;—success attend your plans."

"God speed you, my lords," and the waverers, after each one had grasped his hand convulsively, retired.

"Is it then true that you really depend upon

Cash?" exclaimed, in utter dismay, Dick Tystem, the Editor of the Moderate Organ, and chief confident of the Partisan leader.

"I do depend upon him—I do trust implicitly to his co-operation in the approaching struggle," replied Middleman Cautious. "We might perhaps have conquered without him, but time was fighting our battles, and I would never have risked the strife or have precipitated this decisive blow without his aid. John Cash is the man of the age—his aid is worth that of a hundred such auxiliaries as the mob orator, Invective Rabid, who has just left us, or of those vacillating traitors. Political investigation led me to the suspicion, years ago, that John Cash had possessed himself mysteriously of the mainsprings of all social change, and I have made John Cash the object of my unceasing study. You know him to be the very god of wealth—but perhaps you did not suspect that he is what I have discovered him to be—a Genius; a man whom it is impossible to cajole, to intimidate, to touch, to tempt, or to win over, and who was moving on with rapid, though unpretentious strides, to the absolute dominion of the State. But every man has a heel previous to the arrow.

This vulnerable point I discovered in tracing his extraordinary influence to its occult source. John Cash has alone possessed the art of arresting the vegetable pestilence. It is he who, under innumerable forms, has drained from the Millionaries what they extorted from the people, but I have found the talisman of his obedience—John Cash, with all his wealth, and all his power, is at this hour as completely under my control, as the slave of the lamp at the disposal of Aladdin. This fact has indeed determined me to change the Fabian tactics of my party for a sudden and decisive onslaught. To-morrow I bring in my bill for the abolition of restricted association; to-morrow I shall triumph through the aid of this Prince of Gold. He must obey me; he is but a puppet of which I hold the strings in my hand—and what a puppet!—for, so to say, he has the world in his."

The reader will thus perceive, that, at the same hour, the leaders of the two chief parties exulted on confident conviction of the fidelity of their ally. Which was he deceiving?

CHAPTER XII.

A RISING MAN IN 1906.

Lord Lofty had in person proceeded to the next station to receive the guest he was so anxiously expecting, but in vain he passed in review the passengers in the hope of piercing the incognito of the illustrious stranger.

Train after train had come up, when he was telegraphed back to the castle, by the intelligence that old Cash, eluding his vigilance and civilities, had arrived before him.

Old Cash had come by a third class train, and he had started for the castle on foot.

What cared he how he travelled?—for that railway really belonged to him, or at least it was mortgaged to him by one of those companies of millorats who had appropriated steamboats and railways and every means of conveyance throughout the Federative Monarchies.

John Cash was at first refused admittance, but his name acted like an "open sesame." Doors were flung wide with ceremonious eagerness—giants in livery bowed low and humbly before the little man—and Hugh Fitz-Stephen Upland, the seneschal was down upon him with all the celerity of a spaniel rushing to lick its master's feet.

Old Cash, as he called himself, was sixty years of age, and short of stature. Nothing could be more repulsive, or underbred, than his appearance. His forehead was low—his rheumy eyes of a greenish grey—his features coarse and fleshy, and his skin oily in its Esquimaux-like thickness. His broad stunted figure looked still more unshapely beneath a heap of ill-fashioned clothes, and his voice was singularly harsh and unpleasing.

This unprepossessing individual did not even speak any language distinctly. His conversation was at best a singular medley of the idiom, accent and words of many tongues, and of the phraseology of many classes. He had learned to sign his name, but no one had ever seen him write further and, indeed, it was still doubtful whether he could read at all.

These deficiencies, had long induced the belief that he was both wanting in capacity and ignorant; but the world was as much mistaken in this opinion as the clowns who sneer at some intelligent traveller who cannot speak with fluency their village jargon.

Though a physiognomist might have accounted his expression common-place and stolid, a phrenologist would have contemplated with a very different eye the vast development of brain, none the less evidenced by the form and proportions of his capacious skull, because all further index of intellect was outwardly denied. Though Cash could neither read nor write, he possessed a degree and bent of genius which rendered these arts useless to him. He could dispense with reading and writing in the same manner that he managed his extraordinary speculations, without confidant or locum tenens—through his prodigious memory and the wonderful clearness of his head for figures and combinations. For years he had been seen in marts and on exchanges, transacting the most complicated business entirely by word of mouth, and without reference to any other memoranda than such as were furnished by that faithful monitor.

It is as a substitute for memory that three parts of the utility of numbers and of letters exists, and he was enabled to dispense with their use through the singular vigour of his retentive faculties.

As he had no trust in notes or books, every fact or figure that he thought worth remembering was engraven on his recollection, so that far from being ignorant he was possessed of an astonishing amount of that kind of miscellaneous knowledge which is commonly termed "information."

He would not trouble himself to retain anything disconnected with the present state of society, whether science, history, or art, because he sought only to know mankind as it was, and this he had gathered as much as possible from extensive travel and unwearying observation, making others read to him where this had failed to enlighten him.

John Cash, though he could neither read nor write—though he had never heard of the siege of Troy, and was profoundly ignorant of the planetary system, had in fact become the most learned man of his time; that is to say, if learning simply imply amount of knowledge.

No man living was so deeply versed in the statistics of the world—of its surface and inhabitants, and of the classes and races into which these were divided.

No man was as completely master of its political and financial secrets, and of the strength, spirit and condition of the governing and the governed.

Supposed to be a native of the Bokarian despotism, though his origin was avowedly obscure, he had risen so gradually and unobtrusively that it became difficult to trace back his career to the lowest step from which he had ascended.

Some remembered this man—at whose bidding the funds now rose and fell, and now notoriously influenced peace and war—always as a capitalist; others, whose memory stretched beyond, recognised in him a mere humble speculator, who was formerly whispered to be richer than he appeared; whilst a few recalled the peddling trader in the mighty lord of millions, who was every day discovered to be the owner of fresh and unsuspected sources of wealth, and whose invisible agents seemed like a net-work to overspread the globe.

Old Cash entirely eschewed the dignified magnificence of his fellow millionaires, amongst whom he had never yet chosen to take his seat; but his affected humility—besides rendering him popular—was really full of pride.

As far as he ever allowed his feelings to influence his actions, which was until the point where they interfered with his interests, there lurked a feeling of profound resentment against the class of which he had virtually become a member. He had not forgotten the trials of his early and humble life, and now that his equality was incontestible, and his superiority widely recognised, he took pleasure in mortifying those who were once his betters, by affecting all the coarseness of those from whom he had sprung.

He loved to scandalise the ceremonious aristocracy of the day, by the incongruities of his costume or behaviour; and he found it sweet to sin, by rude vulgarity of phrase, against the proprieties of the drawing-room, which dared not banish him from its precincts, just as he took delight in defiling with the mud of his plebeian highlows the velvet carpets which he trampled.

Old Cash had started in life as an itinerant vendor of rhubarb, roots, and sponges. This business he abandoned for a stationary trade in marine stores, or in other words, as a dealer in rags, bones, and bottles. This shop was in its turn abandoned for a less ostensible mode of speculation, and from this period his fortunes rose in a manner inexplicable to the world at large.

John Cash in reality united all the boldness of Ouvrard with more than the cautious hardihood and good luck of Rothchild. No scheme was ever framed so daring and ingenious that he could not have bettered it; but if he knew how to convert a few thousand pounds into millions he knew how to secure and handle millions without the unnecessary loss or risk of an infinitesimal fraction of their value.

The celebrated Poyais scheme held somewhere betwixt 1820 and 1830 an historical place between the Mississippi and South Sea bubbles of a preceding century, and the railway mania of 1846.

A knot of speculators devised the ingenious expedient of hoaxing, with accounts of an imaginary nation and territory, a royal personage—of course it was a Bourbon—a Prime Minister of France, and a whole public, which need not be mentioned as the British. They caused maps to be engraven, and books of travel to be written by authors who contradicted each other in a few details, to agree in main particulars, respecting an El Dorado, whose primitive inhabitants longed only for some foreign people, to share with them their riches—for a constitutional sovereign to rule over them—for a colony of officials to fill their vacant offices—and for a loan. Nobody could contradict these writers;—no one else had ever been there, for the best of reasons. Each dupe was served to his taste. The Bourbons furnished a sovereign in the person of Don Francisco de Paulo; France found commanders-in-chief and aides-de-camp, and John Bull was gratified by permission to supply the loan.

When all was arranged to the general satisfaction, unluckily no one could discover this populous country, which was at length conjectured to be a facetious allusion, on the part of the originators of the loan and constitution, to a wide district of that name, inhabited by bull frogs and alligators, and covered in the day season with two feet of water.

John Cash had carried out, unaided, a scheme quite as ingenious, and of which, furthermore, he only secured the profits, whilst keeping personally out of sight and obloquy. He was already a capitalist when he judged it adviseable to make large purchases of diamonds. Once having come to this determination,

"nothing," he argued, "would be fairer than to buy them at the lowest price." From time immemorial bears on the Stock Exchange had resorted, for the purpose of lowering the funds, to every species of report which might cause their prices to decline.

John Cash did not speak evil of the intent or conduct of ministers and governments, nor alarm the public confidence by the insidious announcement of imaginary mishaps; he only slandered brilliants, and spread the rumour that they were worthless common stones.

A learned professor lectured publicly upon the diamond, "long known," he said, "as pure carbon, and which scientific men had now discovered the means of crystalising in any quantity, at an expense little exceeding its weight in charcoal. A patent," added the learned Doctor, "is being taken out for the manufacture of vases, vessels, and window-panes of this once precious and most durable material; and, indeed, I am authorised to state that a company will shortly open extensive premises, where orders will be received and duly attended to. Price, as a matter of science, is immaterial; but it is gratifying for me to be able to inform my hearers, that the cost of a diamond, the size of a brickbat will not more than four times exceed it in value. The mere manufacture of the material was the first step—the second, and most important, has been its fusion into useful forms, and this object is nearly attained. I will, however, herewith submit a few specimens for your inspection," and so saying, the lecturer took handfuls of brilliants from a canvas bag beside him, and distributed them amongst the spectators. "These are, as it were, but a sort of diamond gravel—the fruit of our first crude attempts, but though small, they are, as you will perceive, of fine water. The contents of this bag, with which we may now afford to scatter our garden footpaths, would itself have been worth a hundred thousand pounds at the previous market price. You need not trouble yourselves to return them, gentlemen, they are valueless now." Men of science and jewellers examined the stones with doubt or incredulity—they were found to be perfect and real diamonds, and his auditory, themselves convinced, carried about conviction with the specimens of the lecturer.

Far and wide spread the report—it was printed, it was written, it was borne by word of mouth, it was authenticated, and all over the united monarchies the possessors of brilliants hurried with them for sale, still glad to get something above the value of the settings. In every town and district some old sober-sided purchaser of reversions and contingencies was found, still willing to buy them for a trifle. These individuals were the agents of old Cash, who, by presenting the public with one bag of brilliants, was enabled to secure all the finest in the world for a mere song.

Let us now imagine a man of such speculative boldness and unscrupulous ingenuity, suddenly possessed of a secret which made him Lord of the bread of nations, but which was so dangerous, from its very magnitude, that to another it might have proved ruinous and fatal. The community, in fact, was so much more powerful than the individual, that when its aggregate interests came in competition with his, undoubtedly he would have been sacrificed, through some law framed to meet the occasion. Now, his avidity would not allow him to risk the forfeiture of any part of the prospective advantages to be derived from his secret, and his foresight taught him the safest means of enjoying it. He made one portion of society—its powerful millocrats without their suspecting it—his accomplice against the remainder, and worked out his own designs by interesting their cupidity.

John Cash was possessed of the true secret how to stay the vegetable contagion. Sulphur, which was then supposed to be a pure body, just as water was formerly held to be a primitive element, really contained a principle which was the true antidote to the germinating poison.

Sulphur could furthermore be so prepared that this principle acquired affinity for any given substance, with which it then became necessary to combine it to draw forth its disinfecting virtues.

Though this material had been long used so extensively in arts and manufactures before a direct and simple mode had been discovered of procuring an acid more powerful than that which it forms by combination with oxygen, it had no longer any commercial value at the period to which allusion is made, excepting as a specific for the cure of mange in dogs.

The only mine in which it still abounded, was consequently almost abandoned, and the first step of John Cash was to become its purchaser.

He next compounded a recipe of many ingredients, in which he included sulphur and the peculiar material with which its anti-contagious principle had been prepared to combine. These were introduced, (after the fashion of the beef added "to the stone soup," which the hungry traveller taught his stingy hostess how to make) into a prescription which recalled the Rosicrucian nostrums, by which, alike in the dark ages, the falconer restored health to his hawk, or the leech administered an emetic to his patient, and which might consist of such ingredients as the following:

"The pinions of a bat's wing calcined—two heads of dandelion, gathered on the second night of the full moon—a raisin, touched by the finger of a dead man, buried during a thunder-storm, and dug up on the stroke of midnight—the first egg of a bittern—the eye of a newt and down from the breast of an owlet, pounded together—three drops of blood from the tip of the tail of a black cat, without a single white hair, in a spoonful of the milk of a sow, who had devoured her own farrow—the roasted liver of a fox—a sprig of mistletoe—the tail of a snake—the gall of a badger, and four grains of ipecacuanha."

A recipe, compounded in this spirit, together with a process of wholly imaginary utility, he caused to be offered to the ruling capitalists. They tried it—they experimented on it—they grew keenly sensible to the importance of a discovery which made them masters of every man's bread, and whilst bargaining with the negotiator, he died suddenly, and they remained possessed of his supposed secret. They patented and kept concealed the process of this new discovery—they combined their wealth, as usual—they laid up stores of corn, and flattered themselves that they had found a means of securing their dominion alike over the labouring masses, and the petty capitalists jealous of their power.

At first these hopes were realised, but, in the course of time, the changes in the vegetable disease rendered it periodically imperative to add some fresh ingredient to their disinfecting process to render its virtue efficacious. One season it was naphtha; a second, arsenic; a third, the juices of the poppy. Now, it always happened, that notwithstanding all the precautions taken by the millocrats to buy up simultaneously the material required, that, in some unaccountable manner, its newly acquired value had got wind, and that they had been forestalled by speculators, who, possessing themselves of this ingredient, raised their prices in proportion to those which, in time-bargains, was set on corn and breadstuffs.

The truth was, that old Cash, whilst never raising the price of sulphur, prepared it periodically so as only to combine with some new material, of which he had anticipated the wholesale purchase, and which he sold at his own price—not only mulcting the great speculators of their gains, but luring them to their ruin. Thus, whilst leaving the millionaries to incur all the odium, Cash had been gathering in the prodigious harvest they thought to reap—weakening their authority, drawing them into his power, and collecting round him clients and a party. Though endeavouring, by every means in his power, to retire from public notice, rumours of his amazing wealth got spread abroad; he was pressed by the millionaries themselves to take his seat amongst them, and at length both the millocrats, the minor capitalists, and the people, conceived so great an esteem for one who possessed the merit of being so very rich, that they, one and all, united to vote him a testimonial, which it was deemed would be most appropriate in money, and which was subscribed to the amount of a hundred thousand pounds. Such was the man who, though not a tithe of his means, views, and ambition, were divined, had still risen to such importance, that he was known to hold the balance of parties.

As the ceremonious senator, and the inaccessible premier came forward to receive him, with a malicious affectation of respect, he returned the salutations of the obsequious lacqueys, who offered to take his hat and umbrella, addressing them as Sir, and assuming the awkwardness as he had donned the garb of one of the people.

"Welcome to Upland Castle," said the senator; "I missed the pleasure of receiving you at the station."

"You came by the Branch Upland line?" asked the minister.

"I did—by the last mixed train."

"How could I have missed you! I examined every passenger!"

"The passengers alight on different platforms; I came by the third class train."

"And you walked alone to the castle!"

"Not alone—I picked up three companions—two ratcatchers, and a sow gelder—we came together."

The grooms of the chambers bit their lips—the lacqueys were on the broad grin, though the seneschal frowned on them with all the severity of that De Bracy, who was dying in his war-harness beneath a tree upon the canvas on which a few streaks of paint pictured the field of Flodden in the distance.

Lord Lofty, who felt unspeakably annoyed, hastened to conduct his guest into further privacy, pitying and vexed at the uncouthness of his new ally, which he little thought to be ostentatiously paraded.

It was the pride of John Cash to make the old millocrats blush at the man with whom they were obliged to fraternise, or on whom they were base enough to fawn.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE GALVANIST.

In the ruined chamber of a decayed tenement an old man shivered over the burnt out ashes which had grown cold and white upon the hearth. The mouldy paper hung in shreds from the wall, and the wind whistling through the broken window panes disturbed the fitful flame of an expiring lamp. There was no furniture in this room, except two wooden settles, a table and some shelves; but though crowded with miscellaneous articles, their dilapidated condition and the disorder in which they were heaped together gave it an aspect more cheerless than absolute vacuity. Books, minerals, jars, crucibles, and various portions of the apparatus used in chemistry and galvanism were scattered about or piled together, torn, broken, cracked, or mouldering on the cobwebbed shelves, or in the dusty corners. The room beyond, into which the rain habitually poured through the inhospitable roof, held nothing within its damp, bare walls but two pallets in a corner, a few cooking utensils, and writing implements upon a barrel reversed, which served instead of table. Everything in this habitation denoted poverty and decay; and the aged man who sought impossible warmth from the cold embers appeared as complete a wreck as everything surrounding him. His frame was bowed and broken; his hair and beard of snowy whiteness; his cheek hollow; and his eyes blear. His bony hands appeared almost transparent as he stretched them tremulously out with the palsied motion of extreme senility, and his voice had dwindled to a cracked and feeble treble.

The whole scene was more sombre even than those dark pictures of Rembrandt which frown in tints of bistre and of sepia, because here imbecility with its lack lustre eye appeared allied to old age.

Suddenly there approached light footsteps, and a female figure stood before him—frail but so fairy-like that it seemed typical of youthful grace in contrast to his decrepitude.

"Oh! Tempest, Tempest!" muttered the old man querulously, "even you abandon me—come, Tempest, blow the fire; I am very cold—what isn't it Tempest! Ah, it is you, Dame Slowman. Bad times—bad times! How is your rheumatism, neighbour Slowman?"

"Are you suffering?" inquired the young girl advancing a step that he might discover his error; but he looked her full in the face and continued.

"Ah, Dame Slowman, it is kind of you—you have brought me a little tea. I have got a teapot there too," added the old man, and feeling for one embedded in the ashes, he fumbled at its broken lid; "but there is no tea in it! no tea—no tea! and no money to buy more; though, poor mad old soul, I might have all the gold in the world if I choose it. I—I am the man of the age, Dame Slowman; but I wish you had brought me a little warm gruel. We have fasted a good deal lately;—it is cold of nights, and the fire does not burn brightly."

"Have you no food?" asked the young girl.

"No food, and few teeth," said the old man, rather soliloquising than in answer to her question, and then he continued garrulously, "He is a good lad though, Dame Slowman; but he grows weak through scanty fare and watching. He has eaten but little these three days, and not much for weeks before; but do not say that I told you so. The fact is he could get little to do; and if we did not pay up the rent they would commit me to the Union; for we have no sufficient means of livelihood, and I am sick and silly; and if I were to plead that I have not long to live, they would pack me off by the next pauper train; for who, they say, is to bury me? And then Tempest sold his cloak to purchase stuff to feed the galvanic current, so that I am cold at nights, for he does not cover my feet with it now. If you leave me faint, and cold, and hungry, you shall never have my secret, Tempest—you are too weak and ungrateful. I will never teach you to humble the great ones of the earth; but they will rouse the wolf in your heart at last; and I think you are almost ready to put the knife to their throats now?"

And so the old man continued to mutter on, whilst the blood of the young girl began to curdle, for at that moment a gleam of the expiring lamp fell steadily athwart a glass vessel on the chimney piece, exposing its transparent contents—a human hand suspended in some liquid, and which seemed to tremble in the flickering flame which glared on its cadaverous whiteness. A few minutes before, a feeling of profound pity had filled her breast, at the sad spectacle of misery and drivelling idiotcy before her, rendered the more melancholy by the morbid illusion of power and importance in which the aged schemer and his young companion seemed to indulge alike. But as it now struck her that this mania might have merged into ferocious insanity, a cold shiver came over her, and she was about to retire, when the latch of the outer door moved, and she mechanically took refuge in the corner, remaining unnoticed, alike by the old dotard and the new comer.

The personage who entered was the same who has been introduced to the reader in the chapter which brought Julian Beauvoir and Eustatius Cash to Upland Castle.

His aspect was so peculiar, that he could not readily be forgotten, and seen even amid thousands, it arrested the attention and impressed the beholder at once with the conviction that there was something strange about his character or history.

It required to observe him minutely before you could determine whether he were young or middle aged.

The deep lines of thought, the sunken eyes, and the full voice, might indicate forty, whilst his figure, the elasticity of his tread, the profusion of his hair, and other signs of juvenility, scarcely denoted twenty summers.

His features were noble, his brow was high and ample, his eye was full of intellect, his frame proportioned for agility and vigour—but his cheeks were hollow, his countenance emaciated, his complexion sallow, and his limbs fleshless.

Privation had evidently preyed upon his man-like vigour, and there was a dreamy expression about his eyes, sometimes awakening into haggard restlessness, at others, flashing into fitful brightness, which led you to doubt whether that intellect, outwardly evidenced by so many signs, was not neutralised by insanity.

Perhaps, rather, his expression was that of the opium eater, when the reaction of the fatal stimulant in which he indulges, leaves mind and nerves unstrung, and in truth he was addicted to a terrible kind of stimulant, which was not only preying upon his youth, but had worn down to the last faint spark, the mind and vitality of his companion.

"Ah, Dame Slowman, there is nothing like a bit of cheerful fire," said the old man, looking wistfully into the face of the youth, who, without answering him, seized his hand, and, with the other, disengaged the magnetic fluid.

Flashes of flame, like that of the aurora borealis, broke from his body, and shot living from his eyes. During the expulsion of this ethereal fluid by one more subtle still, his features, glowing in their self-emitted light, wore an expression of inconceivable agony. But this was only momentary—for, in an instant, the young man and the grey-beard were enveloped alike by the magnetic current, and filled with the intensity of life which it imparted. Of this discovery, men dreamed in the days of Lavoisier—of this discovery, half a century back, the animal magnetists were the impostors and the prophets—having been then presentient of its undefined existence, just as before the discovery of America, by Columbus, land was conceived to be beyond the main, though the billows of the Atlantic were supposed to wash the shores of Cathay.

The effect of this magnetic current was startling. The old dotard sprang to his feet, the youth awakened as if from stupefaction, and they stood forth like gods of the Greek mythology—one the primeval Saturn, with all the wisdom gathered through all time in every furrow of his brow, and on his lips the bitterness of him pre-doomed to be dethroned by his own offspring; the other, Latona's son when full of youth and thought, and daring, he drew his radiant arrows to the head to pierce the Python.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE MESMERIC STATE.

The young girl, spectatress of this transformation, was equally affected by the strange influence which had produced it.

She, too, felt that she stood within its mysterious cycle, as a novel and undefinable sensation stole over her, keeping her spellbound to the spot, without power of speech or motion, but at the same time endowing her with an unaccountable insight into the very minds of the old man and his companion.

Every feeling and every recollection, as each arose, and became interwoven and fashioned into thought, appeared distinct to this new sense of mental and psychological clairvoyance with which she suddenly found herself gifted, as the external aspect and motions of their bodies to her corporeal eye. Of this faculty were possessed in a far higher degree, the young man and the greybeard, who stood in the very focus of the magnetic disk, which, revealing its form and intensity by a glow of light, had caught her figure only in the pale refulgence of its outermost circumference.

They conversed without words as without power of concealment or deception, but at the same time—so absorbed in this inter-communion—that they had no perception that their hearts were laid bare, like an open book, to the scrutiny of a witness. This singular interchange of thought, which did not reveal itself by translation into language, was nevertheless distinctly intelligible to these three personages, and might in substance have been rendered into words as follows, though—comprising, as it did, sweeping recollections of the past, and yet being expressed without resort to the slow process of interpretation—it exhibited simultaneously and vividly, whole passages, which the pen can only tediously impart.

"You are come back, Tempest," thought the old man, "heart-sick, world-weary, and almost disposed to contemn and hate with me; but pride and obstinacy will not let you yield. You have felt that you were an intellectual giant, inheritor of my knowledge, who have journeyed to the brink of discoveries the most startling which genius and research have ever revealed to man. Your heart has dilated in self-consciousness of the magnitude of your mission and the purity of your intent; and thus you have come in contact with a race—pigmies in heart, and soul, and mind. You who know the long and terrible years of self-denial—of agony and of exhaustion, by which I have purchased knowledge—you who have had—not faith to believe—but penetration to discern my truth, and courage to follow in my track—you whose expansive heart pants to devote and utilise these gifts and acquisitions to the happiness of your kind—you have seen me pass through life scorned as the visionary—shut in the maniac's cell, or regarded with scornful pity as the driveller and the pauper.

"I—I, who have exhausted a mind and body more capacious in its grasp and its endurance than the bodies and the minds of half a score of men—I, who, when the worn out principle of vitality and thought is declining, still concentrate their energies, and to the last live for a few hours an intellectual life at the expense of idiotcy and moral torpor, the remainder of the day!

"I, who have been despised, oppressed, and trampled into obscurity—the Archimedes who could not speak the barbaric soldier's tongue—the

Columbus, novice in the pedant's formula—the Newton, ignorant of some common-place—I have been therefore condemned to live in penury, contempt, and fear; and to die unappreciated and unknown upon the bourne of mighty secrets; whilst others with stolen fragments of my mind have moved society to its foundations.

"I, whose long life is drawing to a close, and you who have seen into its past and borne witness to its present, how stands our reckoning with humanity?

"It is but a few days since that, wan with watching our experiment, and faint through feeding it with the food that should have fed your body, you were called away to waste your eloquence on the steward of our landlord. We owed him nothing—our rent was paid—but he told you that his master, like the other lords of the earth, had made a rule that they would not shelter those who could not prove direct and ample means of livelihood for the living or of burial for the dead. You gained—not from the master but from the servant—a little respite, nothing further.

"It is but a few days since that you went to seek employment of the castle librarian—did not this man, pampered into drowsy plethora by indulgence, covetous of your services, yet envious of your acquirements—did he not, humble you by the array of his diplomas against the irregularity of your studies—did he not leave you to be turned repeatedly away on account of the sordidness of your attire, and then reproach you with dissolute idleness in not earning more speedily that bread which you had earned, and for which you were famishing in heart, in body, and in mind. In heart because that delay was want to me; in body because it was hunger to yourself; in mind, because the fruit of long vigils and irrecoverable time was being wasted from want of oil to feed the lamp of experiment, thus trimmed so assiduously and long in vain.

"All this was bitter, when you knew that your wan cheek was pale with superhuman effort—when you knew that day by day in your privation you were rejecting certain opulence and power to struggle for the problematic glory of being a benefactor to your kind—when you knew that the very cloak, whose absence discovered the thread-bare poverty of your garments, had been sold in your necessity, and that out of its divided price, half having been devoted to my malady, you had defrauded the hunger of your body to assuage a mental thirst; that, being without bread, you chose rather to purchase what was requisite to solve a chemical problem—and that, on your way to make this purchase, an impulse of humanity made you devote this little, an inestimable all to you, to relieve the misery of a stranger.

"Yet these, you argued, are but menials, whom servility has debased; to-day you came in contact with their masters. Your art had taught you that one thing only could prolong my life. This fact, self-confident ignorance not only called in question, but the great and wealthy master, surrounded by all the luxuries that affluence can give, denied your boon deliberately.

"These are the rich, and the servants of the rich. What are the poor?—are not their words even now ringing in your ear, as they jeered at your mud-bespattered garb? No! believe me, and you are disposed to share in my conviction at this hour—mankind, in the mass, deserves its ignorance and its misery. There may be, indeed, individual merits, and to these exceptional enjoyments may be given, but under pain of forfeiture, if extending them to the undeserving herd in violation of that eternal law which restricts them to the exception."

"Never till now," replied the youth, "have emotions so contending racked my bosom, for at this moment I doubt not only of others, but of myself. I have recognised the extent of your intellectual power, none the less comprehensive because in everything incomplete—none the less great because resembling the imperfect ingenuity of the mechanist, whose constructions—wonderfully devised in every part—are wanting in a single screw. I have fathomed the magnitude and profundity of that Promethean genius which might have contrived the human frame, and have gathered from the elements the principle of life to animate it, forgetting after all an orifice to the lungs.

"I have not judged with the vulgar, for whom a gulf divides failure from success even when trenching on it within a hair's breadth—for whom these creations, wanting completion, would be a mere mass of iron or of matter confused and wasted. I, therefore, have listened to you always with wonder, always with profound curiosity, yet never with thorough confidence or unlimited conviction.

"I knew that if in some things gifted beyond other men, you were in some deficient below the average of your kind.

"I knew that in your hate of man you were not constant; I knew that in the vindictiveness cherished through years, you wavered and you doubted, whilst I obeyed the one unchanging impulse—the voice which never faltering or wearying, inspired me with the longing to benefit humanity, and to redeem rather than avenge the crime of those who had sinned against it.

"You prepared me for the reception of your mighty secret, in the belief that time would change this feeling—you offer me the means of power on condition that I employ it to humble and confound, but not to save; you are ready to put into my hands the torch, so that I consent to use it not to enlighten but to destroy; and, in the hope of that change in my sentiments, you have withheld it till the last faint flame is flickering in the lamp of life. And I am changed yet not as you could wish me; for if my opinion of mankind is shaken I have lost all confidence in myself."

"Ay," replied the old man, "first indulgent ignorance; now, knowledge and disgust; next hatred of your kind—the true progression. You deified your own heart in your secret thoughts, and created that of your whole race in its image. Reality has tried it. You have found it wanting.

"Hear me, Tempest! Long since persuaded that the knowledge which penetrates the arcana of the universe, compassing its secrets, can never be the fruit of one single life, or of one unaided intellect, I looked amongst my fellows for a disciple who should have length of years before him beyond mine, and qualities of heart and brain which I was not possessed of.

"It was you whom I selected out of thousands whose dispositions I had read. I remember well how, wearied with the search, I was seeking shelter from a storm, when your infantine daring attracted my attention. The blackness of the clouds had turned the day to night; and yet the earth was radiant with the lightning. It struck the oak before us charring and shivering its trunk. Your young companions trembled and wept with terror; but you stood boldly forth, looking upon the electric flashes like a young eaglet peering into the sun. When they shrieked 'It will destroy us!' you replied 'I stand between it and you;'—when they said 'Do not look at it,' you answered 'I must see whence it comes and whither it goes.'

" 'But it will blind you!'

" 'Not before I have seen.'

" 'It will kill you!'

" 'Not before I know.' It took not long for me to discover that I had lighted on the one amongst millions whom I sought. You were a poor neglected child, without even a name. I called you Tempest in memory of that day. Since then we have traversed strange lands together, and wandered over paths of science no less strange and dreary. In you I found a thirst of knowledge and organisation of intellect fitting you to follow my most subtle abstractions together with a daring and endurance in which even I was wanting.

"Our life together was one of terrible adventure, intensity, and pain. The taper removed from common air into an atmosphere of oxygen, which rapidly devours it, is not submitted to an agency more rapidly consuming. In mastering the laws which govern the vital principle, have not our researches led us to the bed of death with its delirious horrors—to the charnel house with its disgusts—to the experience of every kind of horror which can rack the mind—of every agony that can wring the body?

"In you indeed I always recognised a spirit less comprehensive, though more complete, and bold, and practical, than mine; in fact, more human, and as such I had hoped that it would prove the conducting link betwixt me and those whom I would wither—those to whom I came the prophet and high priest of science; but who baffled me by vulgar fraud and repulsed me with their base contumely. My nature has indeed only a partial development; but yours is that of man in the full completion of all his attributes, with every sense of mind and body—with every propensity and passion in all the prominent proportions of the antique Hercules. As there is amplitude of brain, so was there vast capacity of heart alike to love or hate; and it was natural that the love of man should fill it enthusiastically, till mankind became known to you as it is to me. Then I believed, and still believe, that cynical disdain will succeed to your philanthropy. But death is overtaking me before you have acquired that fatal knowledge; for if your precocious youth has become initiated into things unrevealed to the most learned, in others you are ignorant as a child. Step by step I have led you by the hand along the paths of every human science; but time has failed me, and torn me from your side midway.

"Thus we have plunged together, age by age, deep into the lore of history, gathering from its contradictory falsehoods truth; but—though the past is familiar to you—though none is more profoundly versed in the records of bygone generations down to the last half century—you know nothing of the present; it is a chapter I had once hoped we should peruse together, but which you have never opened.

"The last and most important study to which I thought to urge you, was that of man, read in the book of actual intercourse, and when you had ran through some of its bitter pages, I would have trusted you with power—content that I should be avenged. But it is not so, and I must die, either allowing my spirit to be extinguished like a meteor, which, traversing the air innocuously, goes out with unimparted flame, strewing with its detritus the earth it might have scorched—or else I must trust it into hands, from which some worldly, cunning, will entice it, and to one whose heart will betray himself and me!

"Yet why should I despair?—your profound faith in yourself is shaken, and you are not one to remain midway. You know that my hours are numbered—science might for a brief space have prolonged them, had selfish arrogance allowed. You know that we have reached that bourne, which, overstepped, will leave, dividing us, the difference betwixt life and death, and you are startled at yourself to find so many mixed and contradictory sensations qualifying your regret on the verge of that eternal separation. Inextricably blending in your bosom, there is mingled a longing for the power I can bequeath—doubt of your own convictions—reproach of me, as the author of that doubt—and self-reproach at such a feeling towards me. You are not indeed prepared to play the avenger yet, but you are shaken in your devotion to mankind, and the thought has flashed across you that irrespective of good or evil to others; there lies a middle path of self-gratification between the devotion of power to my cynicism or your expansiveness.

"You have discerned that there may be charms—in humbling the proud—in frustrating the wary, and in the common-place pre-eminence of success—and with these there mingles and obtrudes the vision of a fair girl, with eyes of liquid violet, and lips whose expression speaks without sound or motion. There is about her an ideal beauty, a magnanimity, and restlessness of aspiration, which added to the interest of her fate, has strangely troubled you, and made you feel, if only for a moment, that with such a mate it would be sweet to wander through the world's common-place ways, abandoning alike the path which your enthusiasm had shaped out so perseveringly, and that to which I inexorably point the way. You reject the thought. She is the daughter of the very man who in the full pomp and circumstance of success and wealth, deliberately denied the trifling boon you asked—the medicine to my malady.—Do you not long when you think on that to play the desolator!

"This is one of the earth's great ones—he was bartering his own child when he gave you that refusal. Your own ears heard it. And to whom? Oh, mercy! to his son the son of my arch foe and persecutor! What has it come to this, that even the mightiest struggle irremediably in his toils, and has this man become so far the idol of his fellows that his successes follow me into this corner of the earth to disturb my dying hour?

"Mark! Tempest, mark the difference betwixt him and me! Mine was diffusive benevolence and the light of genius; he had but sordid thoughts and vulgar cunning. Through me he rose yet me his foot kept down—and now how stand we with the world? To my penury are denied the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table, who for him has no refusal—decking even with a bridal wreath the blushing temples of his virgin child, to drag her to his feet a voluntary offering!

"It was that man, Tempest, opened first my eyes to human baseness—He filled my heart with gall; he cowed and broke my spirit. To find refuge from him I have cowered into obscurity; but now there is a haven more secure—the grave, which opening for me, gives me the daring, which has always failed me, to hurl defiance at him.

"Even now, Tempest, I would humble him to the base man he has humbled, if there were only time."

"Wretched creature!" thought Tempest, referring to the senator, "of that time which might be salvation to him, his cold-hearted denial has deprived you. This agitation wastes life terribly."

"Aye," continued the old man, "life is wasting—let us once more lay bare the vital action."

"Consider," said Tempest, "that every time we augment the intensity of life and of perception, it is at the expense of the little that remains to you."

"Nevertheless, I will it. "

"Then I obey you." And the youth gradually increased the power of the magnetic spell.

This exalted stage of clairvoyance was frightful even to the maiden who stood partially within its influence, for not only was thought conveyed with indescribable rapidity from brain to brain, but all the most hidden properties of matter, with all the psychological phenomena which enter into the being of that wondrous creature—man, became to the mesmerised distinctly and intelligibly perceptible, The innermost secrets of the human frame, with the mysteries of its organisation and vital principle, were rendered visible to the eye as the workings of the coloured fluid, which through transparent tubes of glass ingeniously simulates the circulation of the blood, to illustrate its action in the human body.

"It draws to a close," said the old man, reading his companion's thoughts, "without exceeding the span allotted to common—place mortality; for if, on the one hand, I have discerned and baffled those maladies to which the ignorant fall a prey, on the other, the mind had preyed upon the body—If on one hand, science has enabled us to distinguish the evil and pointed out the cure, our poverty and man's avarice, or incredulity, forbids the medicine.

"Nature in its organic products presents in a thousand forms the remedy for every malady; and to these the appetites which we denaturalised so often, afford a general index. That art which soars above this perverted sense of animal perception, teaches us that there are moments when a drop of dew, or a grain of wheat, or a draught of the sea's brine, may change, divert, or influence in the germ the causes of decay. Thus months and months have we baffled dissolution; but now the remedy which might still for weeks have protracted the progress of decay, is beyond our reach. The want of one single berry of the grape is fatal—and my hours are numbered."

The youth with a sigh relaxed the exhausting intensity of the magnetic current till it had reached a point at which the maiden lost her perceptive power, but at the same time was freed from the restraint of speech and motion which she had suffered. She stepped forth up to the Galvanists, who now became for the first time cognisant of her presence. It was the Lady Calliroë holding in her hand the fruit the old man coveted, which she had come to offer.

When she had dismissed her women and parted with her favourites and her flowers, she had resolved to take a last look and adieu of scenes that she should no more revisit with the feeling of her girlhood.

She had wandered through the long galleries, the orangery, the artificial gardens. Here hung obtrusively one bunch of grapes amongst its decayed and mouldering fellows large and tempting as the enchanted fruit of the subterranean gardens into which the magician ushered Aladdin. It recalled the haughty supplicant, his strange request and the unfeeling answer of her father. A sudden impulse urged her in this last hour of her freedom to minister even to the morbid longing of a dying man. She reached the burnside cottage, raised the latch, and, entering, had been witness to the scene described.

The grey-beard clutched at her offering with all the eagerness with which old age clings to life.

A ray of more kindly feeling chequered for a moment his misanthropy; but the reaction of the exhausting influence to which he had been subject, and the suddenness of this reprieve overpowered him for the moment. Meanwhile the shades of night had darkened, and the sound of the castle bell was heard tolling as if in hurried anxiety across the park; for the Lady Calliroë had been missed, and it was hoped that this signal might recall her. Tempest, with brief thanks for her benevolent intervention, offered to lead her across the park. The night was cold; the Lady Calliroë not in attire to brave the external atmosphere.—The youth looked for his cloak to throw around her, and then as he recalled that he had parted with it, and stammered an excuse, a blush rose to his brow, and another to her cheek; for she remembered that with its price he, hungering, had ministered to the necessities of a stranger; whilst she contrasted her father's conduct with this generous devotion. They walked on both in agitation and in silence. The Lady Calliroë appearing to Tempest an ideal being beautiful as good, whose apparition had restored him to confidence in human nature; and her thoughts filled with wonder at the occurrences of the day, which had called into being sensations and given her an insight into things she had not dreamed of a few hours before, and in this reverie she made strange comparisons between Julian, her future husband, and the youth beside her.

Meanwhile the galvanist was left alone; his thoughts gradually cleared from their torpor. There was before him a reprieve of life, and his mind returned to one of the oscillations of doubt to which it had ever fitfully been subject.

"After all," he mused, "why should I dread to shrink into obscurity—what matter if my individuality merge into eternity unnoticed as a rain-drop in the mass of waters? Have I not merited that which has happened to me—if I had never followed the dictates of revengeful feeling would despair and doubt be upon me now? Should I, like the imprisoned Afrit, who vowed through centuries to recompense his deliverer, and then to destroy whoever should free his captive spirit—should I have alternated between the wish to curse or bless my kind? perhaps in man evil is not unredeemed. Age, both in man and in society, may render them corrupt and harsh; but is there not in youth an ever freshening fount? Age has denied me even a few brief hours, but youth has wiped out its delinquencies."

Thus musing, the old man raised to his lips the grapes. Never was mouthful more alluring, since Eve tasted of the fatal apple which, in exchange for happiness and ignorance, was to bring death and knowledge into the world,—never since the freshening draught the angel of the desert brought to Agar's child.

He raised the fruit with the bloom on its deep purple, and lo! like the apples of the dead sea's shore, on his lips it turned to ashes. A dust, black and loathsome as that which fills the grains of blighted corn, fell from the fair husk; and at this sight the old man fell back and sickened to his very soul. He knew and recognised his slave and master.

CHAPTER XV.

THE SECRET OF THE GALVANIST.

Thus while Sir Jasper believed that he had secured for ever his own ascendancy through the projected alliance between the daughter of his follower and the son of old Cash, and whilst the Moderate leader was equally assured that he could command the all-powerful co-operation of so important a confederate, this personage himself regarded the intrigues of both these politicians with the contemptuous confidence of one who felt that he held in his own hands the trump cards of the game, besides possessing the self-proven art of playing it with inexhaustible patience and unequalled skill.

But though the fate of the "United Monarchies" thus appeared to rest between the combinations of these two popular statesmen and the modern Plutus, we have seen that an old man—an outcast in his dotage—arrogated to himself the power of far superior arbitration, and threatened, as he shivered over his cheerless hearth, by an occult agency, so to convulse society as to reduce them all to insignificance.

So while in the dark ages the gloomy foresight of tyranny was erecting blood-cemented strongholds intended to perpetuate through centuries their dominion—a monk in his lonely cell was compounding from three vulgar substances a grain, like a mustard seed, which by its explosive power was destined eventually to change the whole art of war, destroying for ever the security of these once impregnable fortalices, and rendering ineligible for all martial purposes the very sites on which they had been reared.

So whilst the ambition of churchmen—pressing into its service the learning and experience of the past, and the sagacity and prescience of genius—was labouring to complete and fructify a system of traditionary and intellectual coercion which would have insured the perpetuity of priestly domination—a humble artisan was contriving those little pieces of metal which in the form of types were progressively to banish ignorance from the world, and to annihilate all monopoly of knowledge.

In a like manner the old galvanist in the depth of his obscurity had called into existence a new power, which endowed his decrepitude with a tremendous faculty of which he was at once the author and the victim.

This self-created influence had snatched from him the last brief hours of life to which old age clings so tenaciously, and though in the person of Tempest he left after him one gifted with courage, enterprise, and intellect sufficient to fructify the opportunities he had wasted, this inheritor of his discoveries, though qualified for successful antagonism with the colossal abuses of society, had, in the very power to which allusion has been made, a terrible and perhaps fatal adversary.

Who and what was this mysterious agency the creature and destroyer of the galvanist, and future rival of his successor's triumph?

This rival was an insect.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE HISTORY OF THE INSECT.

The wide world teems with life—life assuming in endless succession inexhaustible varieties of form.

If we refer to the past, the geologic traces of those gradual or convulsive changes which by means of water or of fire our earth has undergone, are known to be filled with organic remains indicative of the existence of whole vegetable and animal systems which have flourished, decayed, and passed away to give place to novel combinations of vitality with matter.

If we confine ourselves to one of these series—that contemporaneous with ourselves, we find that each extension of our visual or perceptive powers discovers life where it had never been suspected.

Philosophers of antiquity had conjectured our globe itself to be but an enormous animal, and pantheism, which forms the unacknowledged foundation of so many creeds, resolves itself into a supposition that the whole universe constitutes one mighty existence of which our world is a component, but infinitesimal atom.

Natural philosophers, of modern date, have suspected that in some form of hopelessly imperceptible minuteness, life was every where occasioning the various properties of matter.

Rocks and islands growing into continents. have risen from the deep, and seas are being filled up by a worm. The sands on which the Prussian Capital stands are discovered to be living.

The plague and cholera are suspected of organic life, which is distinctly visible in a disease more loathsome, though less dangerous.

Life, indeed, when scattered, appears to be reproduced in some fresh combination, as in the myriad of crawling things which swarm from a carcass, or the grass which springs from a grave—and its dispersion resembles that of the rust, or oxide, which, driven off in the furnace from a bar of iron, rises in the form of a gas and readily settles on other pieces of the same bright metal rusting or oxidising them.

The principle of life was once held to be the same with soul, and the power of thought in man, or of instinct in animals, and it was held blasphemous to suppose that science could ever resolve its mysteries.

Intolerance and incredulity at that day forgot that a time had been when—alike to the meditations of the sage and the perception of the most vulgar understanding—water had appeared incontrovertibly a pure and simple element, and light and heat identical.

They forgot that those who first argued that the sun was stationary were charged with impiety, or that Rome and Oxford branded the early Geologists with infidelity. They forgot—when stigmatising as blasphemous the mere conjecture that man, who had called down lightning from the clouds, should ever learn to animate matter—that unless we deny him all free will, Providence had, in its natural order, endowed him with a certain limited control over animal and vegetable life. It is the volition of the farmer which fills his fields with living kine, his yard with poultry; it is the will and foresight of the silkworm breeder which collects myriads of insects which but for him would never have had existence, and it was once at the option of both to determine that they should or should not have been.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, when the pretended knowledge of the day consisted, as regards galvanism, in the discovery of a few electric phenomena, and was limited to the recognition of certain effects of which the causes remained utterly mysterious—at that period already we read that chance had enabled experimentalists to give accidental life to certain animalculæ.

The fact was disputed at the time, and the discovery denied with all the vituperative zeal of envy disguised as godliness and presumptuous ignorance in the mask of learned humility.

These experiments were, indeed, afterwards successfully repeated at long intervals, but the results originating in chance and not in combination, were so clamorously denied and malignantly decried, that they remained apocryphal in the popular estimation.

There was, however, one individual who, having witnessed this accidental creation of animal life—encouraged by its proven practicability—devoted days and nights to the study of its mysterious principles.

When the first glimmering of truth, bewildering because incomplete, broke in upon him, in the exultation of his heart he published his discoveries, to the world, but the world, strong in the opinion of its wise ones, laughed to scorn his pretensions, ridiculing them as a delusion worthy of the credulity which could accept as true the fact on which his anticipations were founded.

Nevertheless, through discouragement and contempt he still pursued his way, till at length his efforts were rewarded. He obtained a result which, though imperfect, differed as much as light and darkness from that which his predecessors had attained. His was an invention or combination, theirs had been a mere discovery.

Minute, misshapen, and organically incomplete—a creature grew beneath his hand and palpitated for an instant in transient vitality. It was but for an instant, and no eye but his own was witness to his hard earned triumph, but he derived irrepressible hope and energy from that proud moment in which, with the profound conviction of Galileo addressing his inquisitors through his prison bars, he too could utter "Still it moves."

Years more of labour passed away, but at length his object was accomplished, and he had called into existence a creature not only endowed with momentary life, but gifted with an organisation sufficiently perfect, to enable it both to live and propagate its species.

As every product of the animal and vegetable kingdoms may be classified, this insect belonged to the genus of Acari.

A half century ago the Acarus was known to comprise more than sixty varieties—the tick in sheep, the mite in cheese, the wonderfully minute animalculæ discovered in wax, and those occasioning a skin disease once nationalised beyond the Tweed—belong to the tribe of Acari.

The new variety created by the galvanist was a thousand fold smaller than the mite. In the long process of its formation myriads of shapes had grown beneath his plastic hand, hideous and strange as those first living works of nature which in the early stages of her labour peopled the earth's surface—weltering in its tepid slime—the pleiosauri, ichyosauri, and those shapeless and cold blooded things which were replaced by creations more perfect in serial succession down to man.

But nature in the most crude of her attempts had ever been complete, even when imperfect. She brought forth no abortions like those of the galvanist's creation in his long enduring trials—no fragmentary bodies half limbed and wanting the organs of digestion, respiration, and secretion, or incapable of renovation and increase. Yet these were all errors which had to be amended as he proceeded with his task, and the last, but most important of the obstacles surmounted had been the difficulty of conferring on his creature the faculty of assimilation with any natural substance, (thereby to recruit the exhaustion of body which life inevitably occasions) and secondly of propagation.

So deeply had the galvanist been engrossed with these last problems, that in solving them he shot beyond his mark, endowing the new Acarus with this power to an extent which made the insect, though invisible even to the microscope, a fearful monstrosity.

The venomous animalcule, supposed to occasion the Djuma, or black plague, owes its chief terrors to its contagious and infectious character, which is nothing but the faculty of fearfully rapid increase, under given circumstances happily rare—the favouring conjunction of miasma in the air, or of predispositions. in human bodies.

But this new Acarus created by the galvanist was possessed of a power of multiplication which a thousandfold exceeded in rapidity that even of the insect of the plague, and furthermore it did not depend on the casual combination of putrescent exhalations from the earth, or of morbid emanations from animal bodies for a congenial element in which to exist, but was fitted to live, find nourishment, and develop its horrible prolificness in any medium through which its creator chose that it should propagate its being.

Having mastered the great secret by which nature adapts the organs of its creatures to the pre-existent substances on which it intends that they should feed, he too could modify the animalcule he had made, so that according to his pleasure it could find sustenance in a seed, or fluid, or animal matter, increasing to an extent so fearful as entirely to change their properties and nature.

The galvanist—still in his youth—had paused after his long labours. Though immatured and partial he had made varied and great discoveries, but the very necessities of science now recalled his thoughts from the world of speculation and experiment in which they had been absorbed to the realities of common life.

Great means were requisite to prosecute his investigation, he was steeped in penury and decried as a visionary.

But thus aroused from his long abstraction, he recalled the gentle cause of that ambition which had urged him in his strange pursuits, whilst at the same time he became acquainted with a fact which filled his breast with hope.

Though in earlier years, his wild and incoherent genius had occasioned disgraceful failure—succeeding to the most flattering promise in his studies—and though contemptuous indignation had replaced the sanguine expectations of his relatives, there was still one fair kinswoman whose looks were always tender and whose faith in him had still remained unshaken.

He had, besides, a friend tried and true, who through every failure had rendered homage to his merit, regarding all his words as oracular, and retaining the fervency of his belief in the galvanist's eventual success.

This friend, indeed, had been the medium of communication betwixt him and his sweet cousin Anna when denied her father's door.

For some months he had indeed lost sight of both, when driven back upon the world by his necessities, he learned that the death of a relation had bestowed a vast fortune upon his friend.

Chance seemed thus to have crowned his wishes. His friend possessed that wealth which now was the only requisite of success, and success would unite him to his cousin. Under these circumstances he proceeded without delay to seek him out.

He found his friend, but altered in temper as well as circumstances.

He had succeeded to his uncle, a great contractor in the last war waged between the United Monarchies and the Democratic Union, and the enthusiastic and confiding youth had become the abrupt-mannered and supercilious man of business.

He expressed pithily and distinctly that the ideas and feelings of his earlier years had undergone considerable modification, he confessed his present disinclination to every thing speculative beyond the sphere of his present occupations, and pleading the pressure of his numerous engagements, bowed the galvanist out before the latter could recover the power of utterance, or bring himself to make one appeal to the memory of the past.

"My best wishes will always attend you," said the contractor with his hand upon the door, "but I have now a credit and a business character at stake, and cannot consequently with any prudence allow my name to be associated with that of visionary schemes and not very practical projectors. I regret, therefore, that I cannot with sincerity express any desire to renew our former intimacy, even though you have become a connexion."

"A connexion!" echoed the galvanist.

"A very remote connexion," replied the contractor, "since I have married your cousin Anna."

On this startling intelligence of the treachery of his friend and the inconstancy of his inamorata, the galvanist felt stunned and overwhelmed, and staggered to the gate without remark or exclamation.

But at night he wandered back to the spot. Lights glittered from the casements, and the sounds of festivity broke upon his ear. He cursed alike the woman, who had deceived, and the friend, who had betrayed him: but as he walked away, asking himself whether that curse should remain for ever barren, he passed the vast rows of warehouses beside the harbour in which even at that hour vessels were unloading to fill up these magazines with stores of corn, the contractor's property.

One sack, as the porters were removing it, had burst. The galvanist gathered up a handful of the corn, he took it home, he adapted to it the vital organisation of the insect he had created, and thus innoculated with this living venom, he restored the grain to another heap.

Months after, the contractor, in the place of his hoarded store, found only husks and ashes, but from this poisonous germ the contagion eventually spread through every land, and thus the galvanist let loose upon the world his creation from the glass vial in which he had so long imprisoned it.

It was only after a lengthened interval that he became conscious of the full effect of that intended retribution.

Then like a child who having produced a mighty conflagration by the ignition of a straw, surveys with amazement and alarm the progress of the devouring element and the extension of the fire in which whole edifices crumble—so he found that disease, alarm, and famine were threatening or consuming tens of thousands.

His first thought was to frame a remedy for the evil he had occasioned, and he who had contrived that fatal combination knew enough of nature's secrets to contrive the antidote.

His second was to apply it unreservedly.

But meanwhile he discovered that the contractor himself, though he had suffered temporary embarrassment, had in the long run derived an accession of prosperity from the general calamity.

The baffled malignity of the galvanist now knew no bounds, and as he brooded over his projects of revenge, it struck him that he held in his own hands the means of power and fortune which would help in its achievement.

But in the first steps he took to utilise the important knowledge of which he was possessed, he failed through utter ignorance of the world. The excitement of his manner, and the magnitude of his pretensions causing him to be universally scouted as an impostor, or neglected as a madman.

No one would listen to him, or entertain his project, till at last, embittered against all mankind, he retired to his garret a confirmed misanthropist, seeking consolation in the thought that at least all humanity would suffer for baulking him, through its incredulity, of his revenge.

His landlord, a dealer in marine stores, a hard featured and hard fisted man, who had turned a deaf ear to what he thought his lodger's ravings, grew, however, suddenly respectful.

The fact is, that the realisation of certain minute prognostications made by the galvanist had furnished his host with that proof of his guest's superior knowledge which the latter had neglected to adduce when seeking to obtain credit in his wildly improbable assertions.

The galvanist, whose phrenological acquirements had given him an insight into the salient points of individual character, from want of which he had suffered so bitterly in his choice of mistress and of friend, was struck with the qualifications which, in his estimation, peculiarly fitted this personage for participation in his secret, and co-operation in his plans.

The characteristics of John Cash, the rag and bottle merchant, were an insatiable thirst of gain, combined with unscrupulous energy, deep foresight, and profound astuteness in its pursuit. These qualities never degenerated into impatient avarice or desultory cunning, but had assumed the form of the most comprehensive avidity, boundless in its desires, but blent with a practical ingenuity which taught him without endangering the future how best to secure the present.

This man by degrees extracted from the galvanist his secret, on the double condition that he should, in the first place, compass the ruin of the contractor, and in the second, divide his gains with the originator of them.

John Cash fulfilled the first of these stipulations, but as to the second he found the temper of his partner dangerous to his plans, and soon learned to regard the pretentions set forth by him as so incompatible with his own views, that the day on which the contractor died a bankrupt, the galvanist himself was carried off to a lunatic asylum.

Every thing connected with this arbitrary incarceration had been legally and plausibly contrived, and the incoherence of the victim, together with the apparent wildness of his assertions, lent readily to the deception practised.

Here in solitude the galvanist spent several years.

During the first period of his captivity he had proposed, amidst all his animosity to his persecutor, to signalise his liberation by the devotion of his discoveries to the benefit of mankind, like the genius in the Arabian Nights Tales, with whom he had compared himself, who punished for rebellion, by imprisonment in a sealed vessel cast into the deep, had, during the first ages of his captivity, vowed eternal gratitude to whoever should deliver him.

But time passed on, and this feeling changed to one of profound aversion towards his fellow-men, a frame of mind on which he effected his escape, and which ever after influenced his actions.

The coercion he had undergone, had inspired him, however, with so much dread of the author of his sufferings, that he could neither recover his self-possession nor muster even the slender courage he formerly possessed.

The hare cowering in its concealment, and startled at every falling leaf, lives not a life of more unceasing apprehension. At length self-conscious that this deficiency would doom his malevolence to perpetual sterility, he resolved to find out an accomplice, with vigour, youth, intelligence, and daring, which he might fashion into an instrument of retribution. With this view he had chosen and brought up his young companion.

His task was not yet done, his aim yet unachieved, when, worn out with the exhausting nature of his studies, old age, and decay, too rapidly gained upon him. His latter years, embittered by premonition of eventual failure, if sometimes chequered by the suspicion that his misfortunes had not been undeserved, and by resolves more charitable, had yet been characterised by deepening misanthropy. So fretful became his temper that his malignity was roused as readily as that of the weird women of legendary tales. The jeers of children—the mere contrast between his own privation and the superfluity of others—or the contumelious treatment to which his insignificance and penury were exposed in an age which respected only wealth and station, were sufficient to draw forth his curse, and sometimes that curse proved far more portentous than even the malediction of the witch of old was once believed to be.

Some weeks before he had wandered—sunning himself in the welcome beams of an autumnal noon—across the park, up to the Castle gardens.

The old man looked wistfully through the glass into the grapery, where the fruit hung in luxuriant bunches, here green and ripening, there darkening into purple or lightening into amber. At this moment a surly voice warned him away with a vehement execration—"What business had he in the park? why was he loitering there?"

The old man tottered home, but as his fear subsided, his malignity was raised. He did not rest till he had escaped from his companion, and picked his trembling way back to the spot from which he had been driven so harshly.

Here, his palsied hands sought out the root of the vine amongst its protecting straw; he scraped an incision with his nail, and innoculated the tree with living venom. The poison spread—and if the vine had been a plant annually propagated from seed, like corn, the same contagion which had threatened the staff of life would, far and wide, have destroyed the vintage.

This act had been committed during his hours of imbecility—planned with the cunning, carried out with the tenacity, and forgotten with the readiness of a weakened or disordered intellect.

There remained of his angry feeling and malignant purpose no trace in his recollection but a longing for the fruit which had tempted him to his revenge.

Whether this desire had grown into an idiosyncracy so powerful as to affect his physical frame or whether instinctively indicative of its requirements, Tempest soon after discovered that use of the grape could alone preserve his expiring vitality a little longer.

This was the reason why he had humbled his proud spirit to beg it of the Senator, and why the glowing fruit, brought by that magnate's daughter had turned to ashes as the old galvanist raised it to his lips.

Self-baffled—the venom he had instilled had poisoned—the insect to which he had given life had devoured its core.

He recognised its presence—he knew the mark of his own suicidal hand, and in that hour of anguish obtruded vividly the desolating thought that he had been through life, even to its closing scene, the author of his own undoing.

The retrospection of the past showed nothing but a waste of blasted hopes, keen miseries, and opportunities misapplied.

He felt that frittered away in petty vindictiveness his vast discoveries had died abortive through narrowness of heart. He felt that his own creation, the slave of his own thoughts had in truth become his master—the arbiter of his destiny, leading him only into the madhouse cell—the fugitive's retreat, the pauper's pallet, and the grave at last.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE LEGACY OF THE GALVANIST.

But that remorse and doubt gave way before he thought that departing life and consciousness allowed no further meditation.

Approaching dissolution threatened to snatch from him that hope of retribution on the authors of his wrongs, over which he had brooded for so many years, and which had sustained him through so many trials. A day, an hour, a minute might plunge him in the impotence of death. All awe of the grave into which he was descending vanished before the idea that it would bury in a common oblivion his name and sufferings, discoveries and projects, and his habitual misanthropy arose, like a giant refreshed, in all its gloom, in the dark recesses of his heart, at the thought of dying forgotten and unavenged.

This hatred, though embracing all humanity, distinguished two objects, one his old persecutor—the other society at large, which baffling his revenge had become, in his estimation, the tacit accomplice of his arch enemy.

Now it was still in the power of the galvanist to arrest or to extend the contagion which he had spread; but in one case he felt that he would favour the individual, in the other, the race he hated.

He could not brook the thought that his old foe should profit by the extension of his curse upon mankind, and he grew frenzied at the idea that society which had spurned and scorned and trampled him whilst living should after his death derive impunity from his persecutors' punishment.

Reflection showed him that if he destroyed the contagion mankind would be benefitted and the source of his enemy's prosperity drained dry, but how should he thus affect the immense wealth which old Cash had already accumulated? On the other hand if he punished his fellowmen, by leaving the disease to prey upon their food, his enemy would remain possessed of an irresistible source of power; and thus it seemed that in any case the sole effect of his attempts at retribution would prove beneficial to one or other of those on whom he thirsted for revenge.

In this dark hour he concentrated by a desperate effort of volition all the last energies of his mind, and conjured to his aid the most terrible secrets of his art.

Thus enlightened he devised a plan which reconciled the contradictory exigences of his double hatred.

"If," thought the galvanist, "I cannot deprive this man of power I may crush him by increasing it a hundred-fold, and I may bequeath a curse to man which shall prove a seed of such deadly animosity between the individual and the race, that like scorpions girt by fire, the narrowing circle shall inevitably bring them into fatal contact."

With palsied hands the old man seized the vessel which contained the insect germ in the last stage of incomplete formation preparatory to infusion of the principle of life. He had often intended to adapt its organisation so that it should prove an antidote to the contagion he had spread, by fitting this new creation to prey upon the old in imitation of nature which renders one species of living creature destructive of another to limit the increase of animal life.

But now on the contrary he was about to disseminate through completion of the embryo a venom more widely diffusive than before; because he meditated its adaption not only to corn—which admitted counteraction of the poison in the seed, or substitution of roots as a staple article of food—but, successively to every article which could be converted into food for man, by means of a serial transmutation of form common to insect life, and such as we witness in the change which makes the caterpillar, moth or butterfly. Before breathing animation into the inert matter, he paused, however, and there rose before him the vision of future generations suffering for his crime. Gaunt multitudes, pale with famine and ghastly with disease, seemed to flit past, upbraiding him with hungry looks. The mother drew and held up the dead babe from her withered, milkless breasts. The young snatched ravenously from the aged the last bone against which their carious teeth were crumbling. Hollow cheeked men tottered past with knees giving way beneath their slender weight—the child shrieked feebly for its parent, and the parent's voice was too faint to answer to the child's appeal. Ague with chattering teeth—consumption's hectic flush—the plague's black spots and cholera's lived blue were all discernible amongst that crowd which flowed past the old man—a living stream of pestilence and famine, to sink into the earth whose surface skeleton-covered imaged a mighty Golgotha.

He shuddered; but the vision changed. He lay motionless in his shroud, and the heedless feet of a laughing multitude trampled the sod above him as if he had never been, cheering his persecutor who passed smiling by upon his grave.

The vision changed again. From out the earth re-appeared the ghastly crew and gathered round his enemy with hideous gibbering and famished looks, and cannibal ferocity.

They seize him by his garments, they twine their bony fingers into his grey locks—they clasp their skeleton hands about his throat and drag him back into the graves they had quitted.

At this sight the galvanist gave a shout of exultation, his mind was made up and he proceeded with what might be termed alike his process or his spell.

The new variety of the insect started into life. Immeasurably smaller than the minutest atom discernible even through the microscope which magnifies the hair on a fly's leg to the thickness of a human body, it was only visible to magnetic eyes; and fearful was the sight as joyously sentient of existence, it rolled its hideous form in grotesque gambols, continually emitting—like the dark clouds of sepia with which the angry cuttle-fish tints the water—in one unceasing stream myriads upon myriads of its larvæ, each in the space of a single second reaching a stage of maturity which enabled it in turn to develop an equally horrible prolificness. The thought struck the galvanist that he could still keep this plague imprisoned in the vessel in which he had given it life, but quelling this better impulse, he opened the cottage door and, kneeling beside the brook that ran before his dwelling, plunged the insect into its waters, thus letting loose a fresh plague on the world.

Henceforth he knew that whithersoever that poisoned current made its way it would bear contagion with it—whether by tainting the broad river, or raised up as a mist into the clouds and descending on the earth in the form of rain or dew, or whether filtering through its strata to reappear in the bubbling spring and irrigate its surface.

The minutest globules into which the fluid could be divided by heat or pressure, or filtration still constituted each a sphere in which these fearful animalculæ could live and thrive, eventually penetrating wherever the liquid atoms combined with any substance, and poisoning as they penetrated all organic bodies requiring moisture as a component element of their being.

The old man shook back his hoary locks which streamed in the night wind, and his dim eyes sparkled feverishly as he thus uttered his last denunciation.

"When the success of the statesman is forgotten—when the feuds of party are buried—when the strife of nations is hushed in the general desolation—this deed of the nameless and unremembered dead will fill the world with terror. This is my legacy to mankind!"

* * * * *

The galvanist then staggered back to his chair by the cheerless hearth and into his former torpor, and this man, who in satanic majesty of power for evil had just been scattering abroad a curse perhaps destined to react on generations yet unborn, stretched out his shivering hands again over the cold ashes, exclaiming in querulous and piping treble:—

"Dame Slowman! is that you Dame Slowman? You borrowed my last pinch of snuff—where is the pinch of snuff you borrowed, neighbour Slowman?"

"Poor mad old soul go to your bed, that was six months agone," said Dame Slowman, who this time really was beside him; and then the old man, resting his elbows on his knees, buried his face in his bony hands and spoke no more.

"Aye," said Dame Slowman, putting down in some embarrassment, as Tempest entered, the empty teapot whose broken spout she had raised to her withered lips.

"Only think, Master Tempest, he is dead and cold,—deary, deary me! gone without priest or bell. He was not a very bad man, so I will get my thimble and go fetch Dame Gabble to lay out the body and sew up those sheets into a shroud for old acquaintance sake."

Tempest seized the old man's hand, but found that his limbs were already rigid. He stood in the dreary world alone—disinherited of the dead man's secret.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT.

Whatever might be the peculiarities of old Cash he was of all men living the least inclined to waste time in idle formalities or to hesitate in coming to the point.

The preliminary arrangements of the intended marriage having been briefly recapitulated, he readily acknowledged the expediency set forth by the minister of hastening the nuptial ceremony; and all parties being thus agreed it was decided that the Lady Calliroë should be at once introduced to her future father-in-law, whilst the task of preparing her for the exceeding precipitancy of the event was cheerfully assumed by Sir Jasper, whose persuasive powers had already proved so effective with the senator's daughter.

Meanwhile the father of the bridegroom was solicited to glance over the marriage contract, which for brevity and conciseness would have astonished our prolix ancestors, though it was, notwithstanding, a complete and valid instrument, having been drawn up by the ex-lord Chancellor, Besom, there present, (having accompanied Sir Jasper) for this paradoxical personage, though avowedly a Moderate and consequently a political opponent, was almost exclusively on terms of intimacy with the leading members of the Rationalist party, into half of whose secrets he was initiated.

Though this document contained nothing but concessions and suggestions previously made by the father of the bridegroom, both the Prime Minister and the Senator watched his perusal of it with profound anxiety; and when at length he paused and hem'd ominously prefatory to an observation, the eyes of the ex-chancellor, who delighted in mischief, twinkled, and the joint of his nose curled nervously, as much as to say "I thought so;"—for this legal dignitary possessed the singular faculty of working his olfactory organ up and down at pleasure.

In fact its stipulations were so advantageous to the Senator that it became difficult to believe that a man as shrewd as old Cash should finally have agreed to an arrangement which offered so little reciprocity.

By the first article of this contract, on the one hand, the Senator (duly styled by all his titles) agreed to the marriage of the Lady Calliroë with Eustatius, only son of John Cash, settling upon his daughter (with reservation of a personal life interest therein) the whole of his possessions, of which the enumeration occupied more space than even the recapitulation of his dignities and honours.

By the second article John Cash, who persisted in being described as a "general dealer," consented to the union of his son Eustatius with the Lady Calliroë, only daughter of the Senator; undertaking at the same time to satisfy and liquidate all debts, mortgages, and charges on the said property; and here followed the gross amount of these liabilities, which rendered it at once apparent that the father of the bridegroom was in reality conferring this vast wealth upon his son's wife, besides giving her father a life interest in the very property of which he no longer held any but nominal and temporary possession.

Could it be credited that old Cash would finally agree to this bargain? Nevertheless when he spoke it was to read through aloud the third article, which stipulated "That the Senator transferred to his future son-in-law,

Eustatius, all other property of which he was possessed, together with all rights and claims to which he might be, or ever had been, entitled."

The ex-chancellor smiled sarcastically and felt it on the tip of his tongue to explain that "The Senator having, in consideration of their full value, given up all his possessions which his creditors were about seizing, liberally endows his son-in-law with the remainder."

But at this moment the Senator was called aside by the seneschal, and grew deadly pale at the communication made to him. He was about to quit the room when the ex-chancellor, who not being bigotted to any social proprieties, had followed at his elbow, turned to the remainder of the party and acquainted them aloud with the cause of their host's agitation.

"She is off, gentlemen!—the bird is flown!"

"No!" said the Premier, whose utter dismay could only be equalled by that of Lord Lofty; whilst old Cash quietly shrugged up his shoulders.

"Gentlemen! my child is indeed missing," said the father of the fugitive; "but it is impossible that she can have fled; she is eccentric in her habits; she has wandered abroad and lost her way: we will cause instant search to be made."

"Search or pursuit, if need be," observed the profoundly vexed Sir Jasper.

"Stay for one moment," said old Cash. "Whether the Lady Calliroë, your daughter, have only temporarily absconded or finally fled, my mind is made up. This alliance was political in its objects, we cannot let them be defeated by the whims of either boy or girl. I am willing, happen what may, to abide by all the conditions of that contract; let us therefore add to it the stipulation—that in the event of any impediment arising to the marriage, whether from the disinclination of any party concerned, or from any other cause that all our promises be equally binding."

"This is an instance of more than Roman magnanimity," said the minister. "And so you will remain bound by the enduring ties of friendship, if not by the frail bonds of relationship."

"I am grateful for the proposition; but I must seek my child," said the Senator.

"Could you insert such an addition briefly and validly?" asked old Cash of the ex-chancellor.

The great legal authority nodded and smiled assent.

"Then suppose it be done and signed before we leave this room."

"I must seek my daughter!" exclaimed the father of the bride hastening anxiously to the door, but he was arrested by the minister who whispered him.

"Be ruled by me, all may be well—all will be well—I doubt not; but do not throw away this chance; if your daughter has fled, pursuit is uncertain; if found, it may prove unavailing, for she may be already married."

"Impossible," said the father.

"I know more than you do," replied Sir Jasper, "of the Lady Calliroë's secrets. Let us, whilst the matter is yet doubtful, at once secure the offer made, which certainty may cause him to retract. You are ruined—she is ruined—I am undone if we miss this opportunity."

"But my child! evil may have befallen her," said the senator aloud.

"If so," replied old Cash, "ten minutes will make no difference—you had better take me whilst I am in the mood."

"The insertion is made," said Lord Besom.

"And strictly valid?" asked the premier.

"Nothing can be more simple to execute," replied the ex-chancellor who took a boyish delight in baiting the trap in which the rich man chose to snare himself.

"There is even the consideration which the law formerly required. Our friend here pays the mortgages on all the property which our host settles on his own daughter and in compensation he cedes to that friend's son the remainder, besides all other rights he may possess."

"It will be intrinsically valuable," said Sir Jasper, as a documentary curiosity if only for the conciseness of that clause, and as a valuable autograph. Does this meet with your approbation, Mr. Cash?"

"Exactly," said the millionary, "let us sign it."

Lord Lofty in the midst of his deep agitation held out his hand to thank his guest for what he called "this noble proof of confidence."

"We can shake hands afterwards," replied Cash; "let us get this over—you write fluently, but not plainly; now look at me, I have not cramped my hand by over writing, I cannot write anything but my name, but every time that I scratch it down, some little value usually changes hands. There it is—J, o, h, n, C, a, s, h! Doesn't it look like money!" exclaimed the old man surveying his work complacently and wiping off a blot with his thumb.

"Let us now each append our names as witnesses," said the premier with an expression of satisfaction which he could not quite repress upon his countenance at the final success of his difficult undertaking.

The anxious senator repaid the glance of his chief by a look of confidence and admiration, and the ex-chancellor slightly arched his bushy eyebrows in wonderment, and then raised the joint of his nose sarcastically.

"This is a great political fact," said the premier sotto voce.

"Faugh," replied the legal dignitary, "I was prepared for Circean wiles; I came to witness the capture of something like a Dragon or a Hippogriffe by means of bird-limed twigs, and lo! I have seen nothing but the immolation of a golden calf. The most absurd part of the exhibition is to mark the gravity with which he examines and appropriates his own copy of the contract which secures that valuable remainder to his son."

"Hush!" said the minister. "He affects to consider it an equivalent—the intuitive delicacy of a noble mind."

"I will not gloss over any man," replied Lord Besom. "I say, the stolidity which, having let drop the oyster, treasures the empty shell. There are men born to greatness, there are men who achieve greatness, there are others who having greatness thrust upon them are smothered and extinguished beneath its weight like a baby under the fur cap of a grenadier. Our friend Cash is one of these. I congratulate you on his accession to your ranks, you will find him perhaps docile—certainly a fool. I have taken his measure. I know width, depth, length and altitude, and I tell you that this much-vaunted individual will sink into that third-rate political insignificance which the crassness of his ignorance and the extent of his stupidity deserve."

The ex-chancellor during his tenure of office had originated the law which rendered his decisions final. Off the wool-sack his dictum was always without appeal, on which account the premier made no answer.

CHAPTER XIX.

A POLITICAL LESSON.

When the disappearance of the Lady Calliroë was investigated, the conflicting testimony of the domestics led to the most serious apprehensions, no tidings could be obtained of the absentee. She had not passed any of the gates—and her palfrey had returned to its stall.

It was therefore evident that she must have crossed the park on foot. The great bell of the castle was tolled and messengers despatched in every direction to search the grounds and scour the adjacent roads.

"Be calm," said the minister to the senator, "we are now insured against all eventualities."

"Good God!" replied the distressed father. "What is all this to me now? You hear, she has taken a long farewell of all her women. We have pressed the matter too rashly on her. The thought of what may be distracts me! She is gone—God grant that it be not for ever."

"Hush! hush! be discreet and calm," replied Sir Jasper. "This must not reach the bridegroom's ears. From the insight this morning's interview gave me into your daughter's character I augur more favourably of the matter. Look here? the casement is open, her birds have flown away, she has but wandered out into the park in search of them and missed her way."

"Clad in her indoor garments in the frosty air!" said the father with a shudder. "She may be lost upon the downs and perishing. Sudden faintness may have seized her, or perhaps in the darkness she has fallen over the cliff," and so saying the senator, deaf to all expostulation, rushed out into the park himself to seek his child.

Sir Jasper left alone descended and paced up and down the castle terrace. Here and there lanterns gleamed and torches flashed amidst the shrubberies and beneath the trees; disappearing gradually in the distance.

"This is agreeable on the eve of a great battle with an impatient party waiting for one," said the minister as he watched the moon rising from a cloud.

Its bright pale orb shone out at length in sudden brightness silvering with its beams the fern and grass and foliage in deep contrast to the sombre shadows of the gigantic oaks; and by this light Sir Jasper discerned two figures which stepping out of the gloom into the moonshine became at once distinct and prominent.

The one was a female figure arrayed in white, which he recognised without difficulty as that of the Lady Calliroë. This was sufficient for the minister, who descended the steps of the terrace and hastened towards her.

The senator's daughter and Tempest had almost simultaneously paused within stone's throw of the castle. Having seen her in safety he appeared unwilling to approach those inhospitable walls, and she, whilst mechanically expressing her thanks for his escort, did not press him further.

"We part, I trust, to meet again," said the Lady Calliroë. "I am a powerless girl to-day, but I may be launched in the great world to-morrow, and all that it lies in my power to do for yourself or your companion you may command, only forgive or judge not too unkindly of one whose heart the perplexities of his position may have hardened."

"I bear no ill will to individuals, but if principles and classes were not beyond the range of individual feeling your intercession, lady, would persuade," replied Tempest with profound emotion, for such words from the lips of such a speaker were new to one whose recollections of social intercourse were so barren of kindness and of sympathy, for though acquainted with the marriage about to be forced upon her, he was not aware that unlike others she had derived a profound but natural interest from the insight which had been so singularly afforded her into his character and story.

"Perhaps," he added, timorously, "even in my humble insignificance I might reciprocate your offer. The rat gnawed through the lion's toils, and gratitude might find a spell to avert misfortune, if so young, so gentle, and so fair you were about to be made unhappy?"

"We are the slaves of circumstance," replied the Lady Calliroë, hurriedly, for at that moment her eye caught the figure of some one watching them from the terrace, and she held out her hand to Tempest repeating the hope that they should meet again, but when this personage advanced towards her she beckoned him to stay.

She was not a little annoyed at perceiving Sir Jasper approach her, and the minister no less so at finding the daughter of his friend at such a juncture and at such an hour accompanied by a male companion, who, though not Julian, was still a stranger to her father's household.

"Thank God that you are found at last. Where have you been, dear Lady Calliroë? Your sudden disappearance has given rise to the most intense alarm."

"I do not know why," replied the Lady

Calliroë. "Was it not with you that I stipulated for a few hours to myself?"

"And this?" asked the minister in a tone paternally interrogative, as he turned to her companion who had made a motion to retire, but upon whose arm she had placed her hand detentively. The question was embarrassing.

Like one of those maidens with whom, in Biblical times, the angels of light descended on the earth to wander, and who knew through their disguise that they were not of the sons of men, at that moment her respect even for the statesman was feeble beside the interest and awe inspired by the preternatural acquirements of the youth beside her.

But how hope to convey her impressions on this subject, or explain the incongruity of her present companionship to the minister?

In this embarrassment she replied resolutely,

"This, Sir Jasper, is Tempest," and then addressing Tempest, added, "Since you have accompanied me thus far across the park you will see me to my own threshold!"

The minister felt somewhat puzzled at the answer, "This is Tempest!" Who and what was this youth Tempest privileged to take moonlight rambles with an heiress in her teens? Was he a foster brother or a poor relation, and what would the intended bridegroom think of such an intimacy? All these questions were to be solved, but as it was obvious that his friend's daughter suffered from the chill of the night air, he suggested that they should accelerate their pace.

"We conjectured that your birds had flown away, and that you had wandered imprudently in search of them."

"No," replied the Lady Calliroë, with a sigh; "I let them fly. We learn the value of freedom when about to lose it, and I have let free all I held in thrall."

"Freedom," said the minister, "is an ideal, and, as commonly understood, an imaginary abstraction. May not these fugitives long for the sweet captivity from which you have released them?"

"At this moment, the fluttering of a wing was discerned upon the ground the Lady Calliroë stooped, it was her falcon, Nero.

The talons of the dying bird were inextricably fastened—in the neck of the dead Attila, his fellow favourite of the perch and hood, whom he had killed at a fell swoop, when loosed by their imprudent mistress, and finding no other quarry, one had pounced upon the other, an accident—which as all acquainted with falconry are aware—occasionally happens where birds, of inferior power to the gerfalcon, are used to hawk the heron, and consequently, flown more than one together.

On endeavouring to disengage the stiffening talons of her falcon—the faint vibration of the pinions—the closing eye and succeeding immobility, showed that all was over.

This was a few yards from the castle terrace; on its first step there lay, with extended wings, one of her bright tropical birds, and on the marble pavement, another, and another, and another, their bright plumage glittering in the moonlight, but stiff and lifeless, as they had fallen numbed by the cold, when perishing in the wintry air, and beating their beauteous breasts in vain against the casements of her turret chamber, the prison house from which she had expelled them.

"Are these more of your liberated favourites?" asked the minister.

"Yes," answered the senator's daughter, haughtily; and as if ashamed of the tear that she could not suppress. "These were the pastimes of my childish hours—but entering on a new phase of existence, I wished to leave no link—even trivial as this—between the past and present. I freed them, thoughtlessly destroying where I would have benefitted. The act was inconsiderate, but is irrevocable. It should be forgotten."

"No my child," replied Sir Jasper. "On the contrary, it should be remembered, and treasured as a lesson in the political career which lies before you. Such, with mankind, is the effect of loosening the social bonds at which those whom they restrain cavil so bitterly, and which youthful enthusiasm is apt to untie as revolting and pernicious, whenever it has the power, removing as you have done, at once a trifling ill and the preventive of a fatal evil. You wished to give your favourites freedom—they have met with an untimely fate, and you with disappointment. Denizens of a southern clime, their life was artificial here, and you gave them up to death when your restored them to a state of nature. So with society, it is an artificial state, and those reforms which appear most natural and rational prove often only sluice-gates to let in anarchy and ruin.

"But pray," interrupted Tempest, "recall at the same time, that you restored them not to the tepid atmosphere of the clime where they were captured, but cast them loose in the chill air—deadly and uncongenial to their nature. There have been alternate centuries, when violence or priestly craft or philosophic sophistry or specious eloquence have ruled the world. This age deifies the rights of property, deducing even individual liberty thence, and in this age, lady, when you are told, that for the multitude, impoverished, brutalised, and hardened into crime—the freedom of a state of nature, would resolve itself into starvation and anarchy, then recollect that it is always supposing that they be not at the same time—as they ought—restored to that warmth and kindliness of feeling natural to man, but which selfishness and long oppression have destroyed and chilled!"

Sir Jasper bent his brows on the presumptuous theorist with an expression of withering sarcasm, but in vain, for the youth with an abrupt and ungainly salutation, took his leave, and hastened back to the old galvanist's cottage, where the reader is already acquainted with the scene awaiting him.

CHAPTER XX.

THE NUPTIALS.

It was nine o'clock in the morning. The small Gothic church which stood adjacent to the castle within the precincts of Upland Park, had been during the night fitted up with all the magnificence which such brief notice would allow. It was at that hour already known that by ten o'clock of the same day the marriage of the Senator's daughter would be celebrated within its walls.

Vehicles were upset into ditches, wheels driven off, and nags' knees broken in the anxiety of the village gossips to spread this astounding intelligence amongst their neighbours, and yet be back in time to witness the event they had announced.

Nothing, to all appearance, could be more irrevocable than this sudden marriage. Julian had quitted the castle the preceding evening. If without even the simulation of mutual attachment the bridegroom was obedient and the bride resigned. Lord Lofty and old Cash had signed a binding contract, and the Prime Minister himself stood sponsor to this hasty alliance.

The brows of the Lady Calliroë were already wreathed with white; the bell of the old church was about to toll, and that stage of the matrimonial proceedings seemed virtually to have arrived when all who knowing any impediment had neglected to make it known were evermore bound to silence.

At this eleventh hour, when the whole party were assembling in the state room of the Castle, preparatory to the fulfilment of the civil and most important part of the ceremony, old Cash and Lord Lofty were called aside, each by a missive so urgent as to command immediate attention. Mutual excuses "for a few minutes of inevitable absence" came to their lips simultaneously, and a short time only had elapsed when Sir Jasper was summoned away; whilst the bride, who had just made her appearance through the opened doors, again retired.

The ex-chancellor, who was remarkable for the inaptness and eccentricity of his proceedings, had seized this opportunity to fasten a fierce theological dispute upon the Bishop, a mild and unargumentative prelate, whose temper and acquirements led him alike to eschew discussion, but who could not elude the fierce onslaught of this unscrupulous and subtle adversary, who was pleased hypothetically to advocate the Buddhist theory in opposition to the Christian dispensation.

Now in all this it struck the bridegroom that so little account was taken of him that he resolved to resent the neglect with which all parties seemed to treat him. He too therefore retired, and, after rambling through the gallery, finally ensconced himself in a nook of the library, where he was likely to remain long undiscovered, being determined that his absence should at length recall them to a due sense of his importance in the approaching ceremony.

As he had anticipated, just as Lord Besom had entangled the Bishop in a maze of sophistries, and badgered him into attributing the opinions of Confucius to a father of the church, and confusing the Vedantas with the Zendavesta, the absentees reappeared, together with the bride.

But every brow was thoughtful and clouded, and it was obvious that even during that brief absence some fact must have transpired, or some occurrence taken place to modify the feeling of all these personages respecting the forthcoming event.

This change was evidenced by marked embarrassment and unusual taciturnity, interrupted by a few monosyllables which resembled the rare drops of rain which before a storm fall from a lurid sky through the oppressive atmosphere.

At this moment the prolonged absence of Eustatius broke the spell and gave vent to the approaching tempest.

"I am not young," said the Chancellor gallantly to the bride, glancing at his person the glass, as much as to say, "though devilish well-favoured;" "but I should never look up again if I had had the misfortune to have kept the Lady Calliroë waiting one second upon such an occasion."

The observation if not mischievous was unfortunate, for the blue veins swelled on the temples of the Senator's daughter: her beautiful lips moved scornfully, and she burst into a flood of tears.

They were those tears, not of distress or pain, but of passion and of pride, by which a woman resents and avenges an indignity and urges man alike to espouse her right or to assert her wrong. Such Helen wept before old Priam and his sons, and such Lucretia may have shed to Brutus.

"My child!" said the father tenderly, approaching her, and then turning to John Cash he apostrophised him a little haughtily.

"I fear all this has been too sudden. The behaviour of your son and my daughter's agitation render it, I think, necessary that we should postpone the ceremony."

"Or abandon it altogether and no harm done," replied old Cash bluntly. "We are, so to say, between four walls; you and I, the minister, the lawyer, and the priest, and there is therefore no reason why plain truths should not be spoken in a plain way. This match was made up like a bargain at a fair to suit your book and mine; and the lass and lad were no more consulted in the matter than the pig bought, sold, or higgled for. But since she frets about it I will not see her made unhappy. Look here, my good girl," added the old man, taking the Lady Calliroë kindly by the hand, "dry your blue eyes—a blessing on 'em.—This match was made up because I was rich and ready, and your father proud and poor; but though I have settled on you what buys him out and out, there is no call to take my son unless you like him. I don't know that I should if I were a woman, though, thank God, since he belongs to me, he is not the ugliest man in the united monarchies (here he looked point blank at the ex-chancellor who muttered 'And thank God I am not the greatest fool.') Nor even if you are taking on after any other spark. I can afford to do a handsome thing if need be, and therefore wish to make it plain that what I have promised is promised whether you become my daughter-in-law or not, which you never shall without your free consent."

"The law," replied Lord Lofty, almost contemptuously; "renders that contract already binding, but I beg leave to waive it for myself and daughter."

"At least," interfered Sir Jasper, "you will limit to temporary use of his signature, the rights acquired under it—an accommodation which will no doubt be gratifying to our generous and straight-forward friend."

"I should like to hear your daughter's answer," replied old Cash, drily; "come my girl, speak up and tell the truth and shame the devil."

At this moment, the return of the bridegroom, who had been hunted out in his nook in the library, added not a little to the embarrassment of the scene; but before the Lady Calliroë's answer is recorded, it is necessary to the development of the story, to give the reader a peep behind the scenes, and explain the causes which had led to so remarkable a change in the conduct or opinions of all these personages.

The written communication received by the senator simultaneously with that which called old Cash away, was hastily scribbled in pencil—

"My Lord,

"I have travelled hither, by my husband's permission, without a moment's delay, to seek you out. I implore to see you, for a few minutes—instantly—before this marriage has taken place. I come to avert ruin and disappointment.

"In haste,

"Your affectionate cousin,

"Julia de Fougeres.

"Blue chamber in the moorish library—twenty-eight minutes to ten."

Julia de Fougeres was Julian's sister, and well-known to the senator as a political intriguante of the most incorrigible stamp, but this long journey—the consent of her formal husband—her knowledge of this mysterious marriage, and the denunciations contained in her letter, determined him, at least, to hear what she had to say.

Madame de Fougeres had not her husband's consent, she had only become acquainted with the projected marriage beneath the senator's roof, and she did not come to save him from ruin, but only to prevent his being over-reached in a bargain, and to make her own; but as she had journeyed direct from Paris, for that express purpose, her note contained one literal and another partial truth, a great deal more than she usually infused into so brief an epistle.

She startled the senator, however, by announcing at whose instigation—for what purpose—and armed with what secret she had come.

Julia de Fougeres was actually despatched by Middleman Cautious, the moderate leader, to gain over Lord Lofty to his party! Wildly chimerical as such an enterprise might seem she declared herself mistress of a truth so incredibly important, that it would at once reverse the relative positions of John Cash, and the senator as to fortune.

The spirit of intrigue, and a certain political prescience which whispered to Madame de Fougeres, that the long reign of the Rationalists was drawing to a close, had led her insidiously to cultivate an interest with the Moderates.

When Middleman Cautious their chief was introduced to the reader, he was chuckling in the discovery of a secret which made him master of the co-operation of old Cash, and enabled him to appropriate all the influence derived by that celebrated capitalist from his enormous wealth. This discovery consisted in having traced the source of his prosperity to the possession of the sulphur mines whose produce constituted the really effective ingredient of the disinfecting medium of the contagion affecting every kind of grain—and secondly, to his having, through indefatigable exertion, ascertained that the title to this property was invalid, and that the right to work the mines—having, together, with many other obsolete rights, been duly purchased by Lord Lofty's father, and never subsequently sold by him—was according to the local law, which allowed of no prescription, really vested in his son. To this fact, held in terrorem over old Cash, he had abjectly surrendered in all the pride of his independent indifference. He promised his influence and co-operation to the Moderates, but instantly caused the possibility of an alliance between his son and the daughter of the senator to be suggested to Sir Jasper who was led to pursue and conclude the negotiation in the delusive belief that its successful termination was due to his own persuasive powers.

Middleman Cautious had, however, caused the movements of old Cash to be narrowly watched, and though the utmost promptness and secrecy had been used by the minister and the millocrat, it was still ascertained by him that old Cash and his son had started for the residence of the senator, and coupling this suspicious circumstance with the unaccountable absence of Sir Jasper, the Moderate leader, jumped to the conclusion that his victim intended to elude his coercion by some compromise with the senator—which, ignorant as the latter still was of his rights, he might effect on his own terms.

It was at the moment that this conviction flashed across his mind, impossible for Middleman Cautious to absent himself—to say nothing of the difficulties of obtaining sufficiently prompt access to the senator to prevent the mischief.

Under these circumstances, fully aware of the risks he ran, he determined to employ the unscrupulous, but bold and able Julia de Fougeres, to attempt to detach Lord Lofty from the Rationalist interest.

To trust her with his secret was indeed to confide to one who might betray him, a weapon of offence which by any further delay would certainly be rendered useless in his hands.

On her arrival at Upland Castle, though startled at discovery of the marriage then actually proceeding—as she still derived confidence and energy from the key which she possessed to the motives of the "high contracting parties," she resolved even at that stage to interrupt it, and for this purpose had despatched to the senator the hasty note just given to the reader.

The difficulty of the negotiatrix was to persuade her relative of the reality of her pretensions without showing him her cards, and disarming herself of her secret, as Middleman Cautious had done by her.

The senator, if, for the best of reasons, he had no objection to the change of party, had unshakable confidence in his chief, and he was growing pompous and incredulous when it struck his cousin that as far as her personal advantage was concerned matters might be quite as satisfactorily solved by throwing overboard the moderate leader and making terms with Sir Jasper.

Sir Jasper was then summoned. His rapid perception soon enabled him to fathom the affair in all its bearings, he agreed to the terms of the fair traitress and became master of the astounding revelation which appeared almost magically to place the senator in the envied position of old Cash.

"It is not too late," were the first words of Lord Lofty, "my daughter shall never wed that churl's son."

"Hush," said the minister, "we must proceed with caution. We may find some pretext to delay or evade this marriage, but we dare not break it off yet, for remember that this man's adhesion to-morrow is of vital importance. Leave it to me."

The habitual deference of the senator to his chief led him to acquiesce though as we have seen the elation of his sudden fortune prompted him afterwards to interfere inopportunely.

The missive which had been at the same time transmitted to John Cash had narrowly escaped delivery, which was only secured by the accidental presence of one of his son's attendants, who declared that at all times the old man insisted on all papers being put into his own hands, a habit far less harassing than would be supposed to a man who could not or would not read.

He glanced at it hastily, and was about depositing it in his capacious pockets when his eye caught the seal, and he hurried from the room to enquire how and when that letter had been forwarded, and to give instructions instantly to trace the messenger.

There was no need, he was loitering at the gate, and was ushered into a private apartment—it was Tempest.

"This," said old Cash, with a mixture of ferocity and trepidation, "is from—"

"It is from Him," answered Tempest, gloomily.

"Then you know where the maniac hides—you know where he is?" said the old man, eagerly.

"His body is in the grave I have dug for it—the vitality once animating it, floats free from matter through the wide range of creation, and his soul, disengaged from both, is with his God."

"Dead!" ejaculated old Cash, whose knees tottered, and whose unimpressionable features seemed convulsed with agitation. "Dead!! Where and how did he die? and who and what are you?"

"His disciple and companion from the cell in which you shut—to the grave in which I have laid him."

"And did he leave nothing for me?" asked the old man still in profound anxiety. "No message—no curse—no blessing?"

"I know not which," replied Tempest, "he wavered unhappily between his hatred of mankind and you, and his sudden death has left me the depository of his last will which I had sworn to deliver into your hands if he died without other testamentary disposition."

"Where is it?" asked old Cash, with a stout voice but a faint heart.

"I have a condition to make."

"A condition; we must become better acquainted. All the world knows I am rich. I can be liberal—you may find a friend in me."

"Friendship requires reciprocity. I was his friend—I am your enemy, but charged with that which may prove a curse or set at rest the anxieties of years. I know not which."

"Do you want gold?" asked old Cash.

"Not yours; I require a nobler price. You have bought a bride for your son, the bell is tolling now for the priest to consecrate that sacrifice. Have you her free consent, for on that condition only do I discharge my trust?"

"What is she to you?"

"Like the first or last of womankind—a sister."

"I have no wish to force her inclination."

"Then," said Tempest, "go now and put the question to her, if you will promise so, and keep your promise, within one hour I will perform mine, if not I withhold his momentous legacy."

"Do you not admit that it is mine?"

"Did you never keep back fame, wealth, and liberty that was another's?"

"He had fearful secrets," mused the old man.

"And they have died with him, unless they be contained in that bequest."

"If I consent, where is it?"

"Comply, and, for good or evil, it is yours on your return; go, be prompt and remember that you cannot deceive me."

Old Cash reflected for a few moments. The unceasing cause of his anxiety was removed—the suspended sword of Damocles had fallen or was unhung, and certitude was about to replace vague apprehension, but he was prepared to find the confident of the man whom he had persecuted, wild, eccentric and intractable by ordinary means, and therefore made up his mind to fulfil upon the spot the condition imposed, which was not, as will be subsequently explained, at that moment particularly onerous.

With this determination he had returned into the presence of the marriage party, where, as it has been shown, his son's absence led to the proposition to defer the ceremony, and afforded him the opportunity of bluntly consulting the inclinations of the bride, a point of the story from which digression was made to explain to the reader the change operated in the feelings of Lord Lofty, Sir Jasper, and old Cash by the episodes which have just been. narrated.

All eyes were turned on the senator's daughter, and Lord Besom, who had thrown himself upon an ottoman, resting his chin upon his hand and his elbow upon his knee, surveyed her with all the critical attention which he usually devoted at the opera to certain passages or steps in the début of a choral star or nymph of the ballet.

The Lady Calliroë, after a moment's pause, cast her still humid eyes, with a glance of unequivocal scorn upon the bridegroom, and then turning to his father, she answered in a voice whose tone at first respectful, grew at length almost imperious.

"This marriage, planned without my knowledge, was forced upon my inexperience and timidity. Dragged from my maiden retirement without breathing-time into the broad glare of publicity, to serve political interests—I may not now retrace my steps. To answer you and my father and Sir Jasper, you will find in me, sir, a dutiful daughter-in-law, mindful both of the honour and the interests of my adoptive family. This step has not only my full concurrence, but—as at this time I have the right—I insist that it shall take place."

"My child," said the senator, as soon as he could recover his surprise, and notwithstanding the signs made by the minister to whose admonitions he was already far less docile—"my child, it is at least well that you should know that as regards your father, the causes which rendered this alliance eligible have ceased to exist. It was in fact only an error—I had almost said a fraud—which prevented, but now no longer hinders us from the possession of that wealth which this contract was to have secured."

Old Cash, without comment on this speech, took out the contract from his pocket and having remarked, "You remember that we have made these stipulations binding whether the marriage takes place or not," he read aloud the third article, by which, in consideration of the mortgages cleared by old Cash in favour of the Lady Calliroë, her father ceded to Eustatius all rights and claims whatever of which he might be possessed.

"Good God!" said Sir Jasper, "that forgotten clause is fatal."

"It cannot be binding!" gasped the senator as he sank upon the seat, at this overwhelming disappointment, whilst the ex-chancellor exclaimed energetically,

"Safe as the law can make it, I pledge you my professional reputation!" And then he asked with eager curiosity, "But what has occurred to give it point just now?"

"You knew of this!" said the senator fiercely.

"Of course I knew it," replied the old man quietly, and then he continued in the same tone pointing to his son, "you will hence perceive that according to this agreement that lad would be just now the owner of the goose that lays the golden eggs, but as I would not trust the young Absalom, his right has been duly conveyed over to me, and therefore, as he is not worth a crown-piece, I command him to fall down upon his marrow-bones to beg pardon, for his unmannerly absence, of his wife that is to be, for he would not readily find one richer than I am bound to make her, nor I a daughter who would please me better."

"My father," replied Eustatius, "you should not interfere in lovers' quarrels; there is nothing in the world I will not do to propitiate the Lady Calliroë; but this is no scene of a melodrama."

"It will end like one, in a speedy marriage, for if I had not a wife already I would have the girl myself."

The Lady Calliroë turned with winning cordiality to old Cash, who kissed her on the forehead, and then extending her hand in reconciliation to her future bridegroom, with an air of humiliating patronage, she allowed him to carry it to his lips, rebuking his fatuity by the unequivocal manner in which this action expressed, that she forgave his discourtesy for the sake of his father, and by the inference to which her bearing led that she would as soon have wedded the old man as his son.

Lord Lofty and the minister, who fully understood, and were so deeply interested in this scene, quite inexplicable to the ex-chancellor and the Bishop, were still speechless with surprise, for even Sir Jasper was awed by the successful duplicity of this man, who had triumphantly worked out his own designs by the very act into which the statesman thought that he had cajoled him.

As John Cash had everything now his own way, it was agreed that the marriage should proceed, and having been joined by Madame de Fougeres, and the bridesmaids, twenty minutes after, they were on their way to the Gothic chapel.

"After all," said the minister—who had hitherto been somewhat crest-fallen—to the senator, "all is well that ends well."

"You will not forget," whispered the elated Julia, "that you promised me the secretaryship for my brother."

Sir Jasper smiled Jesuitically and blandly.

"Assuredly, but do you think he would accept it?"

"In his position how can you doubt it?"

"Because he has just left this as governor-general."

"Impossible—a jest."

"The truth, upon my honour."

"Then my pains have been for nothing!" exclaimed the lady, who, till reflection brought her consolation in the fact per se of her brother's prosperity, felt as much overwhelmed as that traitress of Roman history, who having sold the secret of her countrymen to the enemy for his trinkets, was crushed beneath their weight as the price of her treachery.

As the marriage party advanced up the aisle of the chapel, a quiet smile of self-gratulation played about the features of old Cash. Scarcely yet recovered from their emotion and surprise, the other actors in this scene, with the exception of the Lady Calliroë, looked like people whom the solemnity of the occasion had sobered into seriousness.

She trod with a firm step and a brow serene and haughty. Were her thoughts then of the past or of its hopes, or did she indulge in illusions of self-sacrifice? No; a newly-awakened passion had grown to sudden maturity in her heart and filled it with aspirations of the future, and if her step is proud as she moves along, and if her eye sparkles as she glances round, it is with gratified ambition.

CHAPTER XXI.

REFORM IN 1906.

Paris which half a century before was a place of cosmopolitan rendezvous, had in 1906 become a cosmopolitan city.

Who that lounged along the broad pavements of its scrupulously clean streets—thronged with a crowd of passers by, jostling each other in all the seriousness of business-like abstraction and hurry, which can neither brook detention nor waste words to make or to receive apology—who that looked on its shop signs recording, beside the name and occupation of its tenant, almost invariably the address of its branch establishment in Manchester or London and sometimes in Calcutta and New York—who that witnessed the tawdriness and filth replaced by comfort and the elegance to which smugness had succeeded—could believe that he stood in the Paris which a generation past was noted for the foulness of its narrow streets, its dissolutely lounging throng and deep national antipathies!

The streets of that most commercial and methodical of cities Amsterdam, where never brick was laid without Mercury's inspiration, where no man ever walks abroad either hurriedly or idle, and where even the black Friesland horses, harnessed to their trucks, pick their way soberly and busily on iron pattens—the streets even of Amsterdam thus filled, give only the idea of an exclusively acquisitive city, but without any of that feverish eagerness for gain and entire absorption in its pursuit once only to be seen in Hull or Manchester, or east of Temple Bar, but in 1906 distinctive of the Parisian population.

That its Anglophobia had as completely vanished as its former horror of Jews, Saracens and Sorcerers, and that intercommunication had connected the former capitals of rival kingdoms as intimately as neighbouring cities of a common province, was abundantly testified by the superscriptions which told that the inmate of number thirty Rue Richelieu, carried on business at 16 Regent Street, and 124 Cornhill; that the dress-maker of Rue de la paix had a branch establishment in St. James's Street, and that the wholesale offices of the grocer of the Rue St. Honoré were in Mincing Lane.

It was further evidenced by the prevalence of the English language—which, like the French in London, had become within a shade as common as the aboriginal tongue, reminding one of those towns which, like Brussels or Strasburg, once formed the boundary where two races mingled, and where French and Flemish, and French and German were in a like manner indiscriminately spoken.

This paradoxical change in the Parisian or rather in the French character—for Paris epitomises France—was a natural consequence of its national conformation, which the progress of civilisation had yet but slightly modified, even long after its final triumph over the rivalry and prejudice of barbarous nationalities.

There was always an imitative aptitude in the French character, which periodically made contagious some peculiar impulse, and rendered the national tendency definite, complete and—in contradistinction to Anglo-Saxon universality—exclusive. Religious intolerance and political oppression had always enemies in England. She brought forth contemporaneously, during centuries, the resolute dissenter, the bold metaphysical speculator the sturdy freemen, ardent soldier and eager merchant. The French people in the aggregate, assumed successively, each of these characters. The whole nation in the days of Voltaire and Rousseau, was an infidel and cynical philosopher—in the ensuing revolution a Republican theorist. Under the consulate and the empire it was a soldier, and with the expulsion of the elder Bourbon branch it became a trader.

The substitution in the arms of France of the domestic cock for the bold bird of rapine, was already emblematic of this change, which became less surprising in the subsequent period which witnessed such an extension of the influence of property in all surrounding countries as to level before the fraternisation of its possessors, the old barriers of nationality.

A half century back the idea would have been scouted as preposterous—even with the historic example of Scotland's buried feuds and thorough assimilation—that France and England could ever be united under one government; but nevertheless in 1906, amongst many stranger things which had come to pass, London and Paris were joint capitals of the United Monarchies, under which title, the two countries—together with the greater part of Europe—were federatively united.

The general parliament, congress, chambers, or diet, for by all these names the great federative assembly was called—met in due rotation in December 1906 in Paris, a circumstance which drew all the visitors of a London season to Paris just as all Paris was poured into London on similar occasions; for amongst other changes in the character of the inhabitants of the once gay city, the Parisian was no longer satisfied that, with the exception of a forest and the sea, Paris contained everything worth seeing, or content in his most adventurous mood to live and die in it, if he had passed a day at Fontainebleau, or once peeped from Dieppe pier at the broad ocean;—and then too it must be borne in mind that in 1846 the passage between the two cities actually occupied four-and-twenty hours instead of four, besides the chances of an evil against which no remedy had in those rude days been provided—that painful and prostrating sickness of the sea, whose ridicule few Parisians of the Nineteenth Century would willingly have encountered, and which at that period was so formidable to the nervous susceptibility of French vanity, and to its keen sense of the ludicrous that a daguerreotype of Guizot, or of Louis Phillippe in that peculiar predicament would in three months have sufficed to expulse the one from political life, and the other from the throne for ever. History teaches us that such an hypothesis was of impossible realisation, because recording that all political caricature was forbidden by a law so stringent that it actually degenerated into a mosaic or moslem in prohibition of the reproduction of fruits by pen or pencil; lest any fanciful likeness to political characters might offend those in authority. The writings of the day inform us that after a celebrated trial, the mere design of a pear was considered libellous and treasonable on account of its supposed resemblance to the physiognomy of the French King, We may therefore judge whether animal painting was tolerated by the law, and in this circumstance, perhaps, discern the origin of the taste at that day prevalent for the gorgeous arabesques transmitted to us in lithographic collection, and no doubt inspired by political restriction as those of the Moorish Alhambra were by Saracen intolerance, interpreting literally the prohibition contained in the commandment which forbids to make the graven image of anything created.

The Paris of 1906—if like London in the same year, it differed from the Paris and London of sixty years preceding—bore now sufficient resemblance to its sister capital to have been taken for a portion of the same city.

It was the close of December, and in its squares and streets the hum of business had given way to the feverish agitation of popular excitement, not a little increased by the vast affluence of strangers bent only on political pursuits; and who both outnumbered and carried away by their undivided earnestness the Parisian population.

It was one of those occasions on which vast changes were foreshadowed, not by the tumultuous brawl of local discontent or partial clamour, ruffling ephemerally the surface of society—but by those indications rather deep than loud, which growing and gathering, image the portentous heaving of the ocean's bosom when stirred by a heavy ground swell.

Thousands upon thousands who had never before entertained an opinion or idea on politics, now felt strongly on the subject, and were urged by prejudice or passion.

Men, who during a great portion of their lives had been incredulous or indifferent, began to take a deep interest in passing events. Old gentlemen who for years had skipped over politics to seek the police reports, or the horticultural column, now devoutly read the leading article of their paper. The exclusive speculator turned from the price of stocks and shares to the account of the monster meetings and important demonstrations. The very habitué of the Parisian club, or coffee house, who for a quarter of a century had sought refuge from the discussion of public affairs in his quiet game and glass of absinthe, now swallowed down instead of sipping his favourite beverage, and abandoned his thumb-worn dominos to hearken with eager attention to the politician of his circle.

It was one of those occasions, in fact, on which nations seemed moved by a simultaneous and almost instinctive impulse, like that which renders bees and swallows restless on the eve of swarming or migration.

Such moved the barbaric tribes which, wavelike, overwhelmed old Rome's declining Empire—such roused the crusading population of the middle ages, such pervaded the French nation before its terrible revolution, and such in 1832, urged the British people to struggle for that parliamentary reform, the first of the long series of changes which have influenced, in their progress, the history of the world.

It was universally felt, that the crisis was arrived which had been months, and, indeed, years preparing.

The prestige with which long uninterrupted success had invested the Rationalists, and the belief in the infallibility of this party—devoutly entertained by millions disavowing it—began to be shaken by the signs of the times. Open desertion and secret treachery thinned its ranks and those, who all their lives had scouted the idea of Moderate ascendancy now gathered round the Moderate banner.

Middleman Cautious had, in the most masterly manner, marshalled and organised the hosts that thronged into his camp.

Hitherto doubtful of his strength, the assaults he had made year after year upon his adversaries, had been mere feints—he was now preparing to thrust home. The cry was fairly up, the contest was accepted as one between the middle classes and the oligarchy of great capitalists. The bulk of the labouring people had banded with the opposition. Rationalists and Moderates had long alike kept down the common sense men; but Middleman Cautious had recently confederated with them, skilfully profiting by the clamorous energy and want of organisation of their first disenthralment, and by the confidence with which this conciliatory conduct had inspired them—to make his final attack upon the Rationalist party. Without the aid of the middle classes, and in the teeth of the encouragement afforded by the opposition, government found itself unable to repress the popular licence so long unknown in the United Monarchies.

As the crisis had drawn near, the Moderate leader had called forth all that was most appalling in popular excitement—like a necromancer conjuring up his confederate spirits from the depths of pandemonium—to paralyse and overawe his adversaries. The millions of the people were stirred—the thousands of the middle classes were agitated—the hundreds of the dominant body were threatened with destruction. The basis and the centre of the social pyramid, were shaken by a convulsion, which threatening the whole edifice, seemed sure to loosen and prostrate its oligarchic apex.

Invective Rabid, the popular agitator, suspending his long enmity to the Moderates, for the purpose of vanquishing one adversary at a time was, according to the terms of the convention he had made, temporarily acting as the lieutenant of the Moderate chief. He had harangued at meetings—he had organised processions of hundreds of thousands, and he had moved the masses in the direction, most propitious to the views of Middleman Cautious.

Now all these facts disseminated by the million-tongued press were known to man, woman and child, throughout the great city, and expectation was raised to its highest pitch by the circumstance that the Moderate leader was about to introduce that night into the legislative assembly, the fatal bill which was to give a death-blow to the long triumphant oligarchy.

Middleman Cautious had that day learned the defection of old Cash, but as he moved towards the houses at the head of a procession of his followers, he found that his star was so much in the ascendancy as to give him, notwithstanding this untoward circumstance, the assurance of a majority, and the certainty of success.

On his right hand moved the spokesman of the waverers who was introduced to the reader when making his accession conditional on the co-operation of old Cash; and who, representing the numerous body of "waiters upon Providence" had since seen fit openly to declare his apostacy.

On his left towered the colossal figure of Invective Rabid, the Democratic chief, as he strid along with a theatrical air, insolently protective of his two companions.

The mob cheered, enthusiastically, the great man of the hour so obviously approved by their champion, and men of high standing who six months since would have thought their respectability compromised by connection with the moderates, now ostentatiously greeted him, or joined the ranks of his triumphal escort.

The municipality of the city itself which had always been actively hostile to his opinion now turned abjectly round, and made a most unconstitutional demonstration by causing the church bells to be rung and preparations to be made for an illumination. Meanwhile the Rationalist party seemed paralysed, and opposed nothing but passive inactivity to the peril threatening it. Sir Jasper had, indeed, held a meeting of his most influential friends, and it was known that he had secured the co-operation of old Cash; but this intelligence, which four-and-twenty hours earlier might have been decisive, now came too late. Hour by hour, and minute by minute, fresh defections took place to the Moderates, even of men who protested "that nothing would ever have induced them to change sides, but the obdurate blindness of leaders who would yield nothing to the fatal tempest, of which the violence might have been broken, without any dangerous concession, by a little pliancy." Such of the Rationalists as did not creep quietly into the senate were greeted by loud hisses and Sir Jasper made his way thither so thoroughly unperceived that the report spread without that he intended to absent himself on this occasion, and decline the combat. It was not so, however. The minister was discerned by those inside the house in his usual place, calm—collected—and though pale, with a complacent smile upon his countenance.

In 1906 it was no longer customary, as it had been half a century preceding, to make extemporaneous appeals to the members of legislative assembly or to waste upon them oratorical graces.

In the days of Pym and Hampden, of Mirabeau and Danton, Pitt and Fox, argument and rhetoric may still have been powerful in persuading, but in the middle of the nineteenth century the veriest parliamentary tyro was aware that to have hoped ever to see an M.P. turned aside from his intended vote even by the eloquence of a Demosthenes, would have been as vain as to have expected the conversion of the Pope to the Wesleyan form of worship by a twopenny tract, or of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Romish faith by the recitation of a litany.

The speeches made in an age already utilitarian were therefore addressed not to auditors whom they were never hoped to influence but to the country at large, through the intermedium of the daily press, which in the fulfilment of its mission not only polished and gave pith to the effusions of the speakers, but commonly (for the credit of its peculiar paper) supplied with them style and grammar, and often with ideas.

This idle form which in the nineteenth century outlived the essence of an obsolete custom—like the cast iron extinguishers still attached to area rails, long after the introduction of gas had consigned the race of link-boys to oblivion—had, in 1906, been long since banished.

Members then read their written speeches, of which copies, in different languages, were handed to the speaker, and electrically transmitted to the public by an office devoted to that purpose.

The tone of their delivery was that of a school-boy reciting his lesson, or of a broker calling over an inventory, and the sole object of reading it at all was to enter a formal declaration that these were the sentiments of the speaker. This ceremony, which, like kissing the book, or placing the finger on parchment, with the words "this is my act and deed," possessed a certain importance, was usually gone through with little more unction or solemnity.

It was hence understood that any answer which a member might wish to make to the speech of another must be conveyed on the following day. Though no legal prohibition established the inviolability of this rule its infringement, except on some most extraordinary occasion, would never for a moment have been tolerated, and indeed so many years had elapsed since it had been attempted that it was not believed that the custom could ever be renewed.

It followed from these facts that in 1906 every one anxious to hear and understand the debates resorted to an expedient already adopted in 1846 by the cognoscenti—that of gathering them in their embellished form beyond the senate walls, instead of listening to the speeches as delivered in all the bald reality of their dishabille.

Indeed the parliamentary veterans themselves, like soldiers in the ranks, who through the smoke know little of the progress of the battle, were in the habit of abandoning their places when solicitous to learn the effect of a parliamentary contest.

Let us therefore briefly recapitulate the events of that struggle as the words of the speakers were transmitted to, and impressed upon, the masses without, by means of a vast dial plate on which every sentence of the orator appeared as soon as spoke in gigantic letters, from which, along a thousand branch lines, it was carried by the electric telegraph to every part of the United Monarchies, and diverted at will, like the gas from a main pipe, into clubs, towns, halls, and places of entertainment.

The long threatened bill brought in by Middleman Cautious was to repeal the fundamental article of the constitution of the United Monarchies, which limited associations or companies to five and twenty members or shareholders. The effect of this enactment had been—as every one knew, to throw into the hands of the senatorial body, the commerce, means of communication, public works, and all other sources of wealth of the whole Federative Kingdom.

It was obvious in an age which recognised the full value of association of capital that when the number of members was thus limited all enterprises requiring a large outlay must remain in the hands of the great capitalists.

Five and twenty millionaries, by clubbing each their million, were in consequence enabled to obtain exclusive possession of canals, railway lines, banking establishments, and branches of commerce, without any possible competition either on the part of individuals or of the aggregate wealth of the people; because a hundred millions, scattered amongst some thousand holders, could never be brought to bear against five and twenty in the hands of as many of their body.

Middleman Cautious fully exposed and explained the unjust and pernicious operation of the existing law in a long and able speech which derived its appositeness and force, like many other celebrated political speeches, not from the fact of its containing any novelty but, on the contrary, from the circumstance that it set forth exactly what the vast majority knew and believed before upon the subject.

To this restrictive law he attributed all the evils afflicting the community, the commercial, manufacturing, and agricultural distress;—the misery of the people—the decline of prosperity amongst the middle classes, and finally—by a providential retribution,—the shaken credit of the great capitalists themselves, for whose sole advantage this state of things had been established.

"This fatal enactment (he said) had in the age in which they lived renewed the old Venetian oligarchy. Vast kingdoms and mighty states, which considerations of economy and common sense had united, had in this manner become the estate of a body consisting of a few hundred capitalists; whilst the middle class had sunk into the condition of its overseers and drudges, and the people had degenerated into its mere serfs. This state of things—so unnatural as to have led even those whom it was intended to favour to the verge of bankruptcy—the nation would no longer tolerate, and the support he had received, led him to believe that in proposing a measure which would give bread to the people, restore to their former importance the middle classes of society, and shield the oligarchs from the consequences of their usurpation—by calling, in short, for the abrogation of so iniquitous a law—he was speaking the sentiments of an immense and resolute majority. In fine, he proposed that an act be passed to allow of the association of unlimited numbers, providing only that the individuals associating be eligible to the lower house."

This proposition was in the highest degree satisfactory to the middle class, since none but those who could prove the possession of ten thousand pounds were qualified to sit in the Commons, and because when allowed to combine its resources this vast body would easily annihilate all the monopolies of the millocrats; it was equally gratifying to the lower orders in this respect, that it was obviously a death blow to the domination of their oligarchic tyrants.

Middleman Cautious was followed by Invective Rabid.

The speech of the popular orator was a long diatribe against the millocrats. Every other sentence was an accusation alternated by an epigram. All the crimes of every species of tyranny which history ever had recorded, he affixed either metaphorically or directly upon the senatorial body. He painted in formidable colours the dark array of popular force, its maddening sense of wrong and energetic resolution. He threatened all classes with a convulsion, which should subvert all present social order, and realise the wildest dreams of communism and equality, as the implied alternative of resistance to the present measure.

The speech of the great democrat was only second in importance to that of Middleman

Cautious, from the assurance which it gave of the thorough sympathy with the proposed measure of that power,—the people—which after so long a torpor in the United Monarchies was awakening to such threatening life. That it had carried dismay into the Rationalist ranks appeared obvious when a senator rose to answer the last speaker, in an extemporaneous speech, in violation of all parliamentary precedent; and the general surprise was not a little increased when its object appeared to be a mere personal attack upon Invective Rabid, without other discernible aim or object.

Lord Lofty, the most dignified of his class, who had never before been provoked into the slightest indecorum or the remotest personality, was most incredibly the person who charged the popular leader "with gross inconsistency of action, and opinion—with glaring treachery towards the popular cause—with certain apostacy and probable venality, since he, contending that the people were entitled to so much, was contented with so trifling a concession!"

There was but one opinion on the impolicy of this malignant and ill-judged outbreak. It was looked upon as the vindictive ebullition into which a despairing party had been betrayed by the hopelessness of its condition, and as the surest proof that it had utterly lost head in its extremity.

What could be more dangerous than for one used only to the routine of parliamentary forms to venture upon extemporaneous controversy with such an antagonist, accustomed to address popular assemblies, what more rash than to call down, in such a contest, upon his head the fervid eloquence of the great agitator.

Thus challenged, Invective Rabid made reply. The provocation given by his adversary,—the indecent violation of parliamentary proprieties, and the presumptuous rashness of the attack made by that personage,—all led his hearers to anticipate his expected castigation with the same feeling that the bystander may experience when a lion is roused to resent the bite of an ill-favoured cur, Lashing himself into fury as he proceeded, the great demagogue turned upon his assailant all the bitterness of his sarcasm—all the vivacity of his biting wit. His unscrupulous tongue legitimately loosened, he showed his accuser in a light alternately ridiculous, contemptible, and loathsome. Like a wolf in the fold, not contented with the demolition of his victim, he left the mark of his fatal fang upon his party, and then—when he had ruthlessly torn and mangled to the full satiation of his impetuous and ferocious temper—he rebutted one by one the calumnies of his accuser, and proceeded in a flow of impassioned eloquence to vindicate his stewardship of the people's interest, concluding by the declaration—"that he accepted this concession as an instalment of the great debt of popular rights withheld."

There was no man unmoved in that unusually impassible assembly as Invective Rabid spoke, and all eyes were turned on his accuser as he winced beneath the terrible recrimination he had drawn down.

But when the triumphant demagogue had ceased and turned to gather the applause which scarce suppressed had seemed ready to burst forth, as he was proceeding—he saw a cloud on the brow of Middleman Cautious. He had been too successful; he had crushed his adversary, but he had proved too much and been betrayed into an avowal alarming to the conservative susceptibilities of his moderate allies.

At this juncture Sir Jasper rose; a bland smile which had played upon his features vanished, but not to give place to any sign of disquietude or vexation. On the contrary his manner was all suavity and equanimity. He first stopped to address a few words to John Cash, who had taken his seat beside him, but this was judged to be only a pantomimic demonstration of the good understanding between the minister and his new adherent, and drew forth from Invective Rabid a slight cheer of ironical defiance.

In reality Sir Jasper was repeating to old Cash the preconcerted signal for the delivery or the postponement of the brief speech prepared for his influential follower. This done, he turned to his auditors and opened his discourse.

No one doubted that it would be eloquent and able; but few believed that in the present state of public feeling it could possibly prove effective, and his auditors were prepared to see him at best succumb with dignity, and—so to say—gather his senatorial robes around him to die decently like Cæsar at the foot of Pompey's statue.

Sir Jasper began—not by attacking, but by lauding his chief adversary. He adduced and praised the arguments of Middleman Cautious upon the present question, and attributed to the moderate leader's able exposition of his views, the present modification of his own. "For he frankly owned, that his opinions were changed, and he stood there boldly to avow that this change had originated in the convictions of a political opponent."

He then gave his auditors a succinct account of his former impressions (a concentration of the prejudices of his party), of his first suspicion that they were erroneous, and of the course of ratiocination which led him to conviction of their fallacy.

But whilst he paid a just tribute to the early discernment of a great political truth by his adversary, he contended "that the conclusions drawn by him from this truth—once established—were lame and impotent, and he exposed the chain of reasoning which had led him not to the same point as Middleman Cautious, but a step beyond into the career of reform.

"He was convinced that to retain inviolate the great principle which acknowledged the rights of property as the first and paramount duty of society to avoid those radical changes to which Invective Rabid had avowed that the present measure was only a stepping-stone, and to render concession final, that a further stride must be taken into it, one which would give more ample security to one portion of the people, and greater satisfaction to the other.

"He had, therefore, with the consent of the most influential of his party come down to the House to give the measure his full support with this amendment, that the right of association be not only unlimited as to numbers, but thrown open without qualification to all the subjects of the united monarchies."

At this announcement, a cheer burst forth simultaneously from the ministerial and opposition benches, and from the followers of Invective Rabid.

It was caught up without—it spread through the streets of Paris, and the astounding intelligence borne by the electric fluid, was conveyed far and wide, convulsing the inhabitants of the whole empire as it had convulsed the astonished capital.

Middleman Cautious felt as if a shot had passed through his heart and paralyzed its action, so profound was his vexation.

He knew that he was vanquished in the very hour of success; and though too game to relinquish the contest, his head, drooped amidst the general enthusiasm, for a moment on his breast in utter hopelessness.

There was only one individual either within or without those walls, who did not, at this moment, envy or admire Sir Jasper as the most successful, able, and profound of living men—it was old Cash, still smiling at the political tutelage assumed over him by the minister, and feeling as the future protector of England may have felt in its wordy parliament when he began to know the weight of his own sword. John Cash—though he had never heard of Cavaliers or Roundheads—knew, as he glanced around him, that the time was inevitably approaching, when he too, might order the speaker's mace to be removed as a useless bauble—for the monetary Cromwell of the age had already satisfied himself from Tempest, that the galvanist had left him sole possessor of the power which must, eventually, make the wide world his property.

THE END OF VOLUME THE FIRST.

VOLUME II.

SIXTY YEARS HENCE.

CHAPTER I.

MRS. CASH.

The first burst of surprise was over at the astounding step taken by Sir Jasper. In the novel combinations and in the utter confusion of parties consequent upon this measure, those, whose belief in the infallibility of their own political sect had been so violently disturbed, were now rapidly ranging under one or other of the two banners.

Such was the state of public opinion that no degree of previous antagonism could make the adverse leaders despair of enlisting any of each other's followers.

In the series of political dinners given and accepted, to which this hope of proselytism gave rise, Sir Jasper and some of the most influential personages in the United Monarchies were invited by John Cash and his lady.

John Cash, though himself still living until recently in plebeian simplicity, had many years since provided for the education and establishment of his son in a manner fitting him to take his place among the magnates of the land.

When therefore he saw fit, as the accepted representative of property and its rights, to make a tardy display of the wealth of which he had hitherto been so unostentatious, the appearance in circles, chiefly political, of one who had become an important political character, and with whose name they had been long familiar, created but little sensation, except such as the more than regal magnificence in which he now indulged was calculated to inspire; for as soon as this man judged it worth while to change his mode of life at all he had thought proper to assume a state commensurate with the prodigious superiority of his fortune.

When however it was understood that a wife, of whose existence no one had ever heard a word before, was to be brought upon the scene, to preside over his princely hospitalities, the most vivid curiosity was excited, and on her first appearance she was pronounced to be so outrageously coarse, vulgar, and arrogant, that every absurd story illustrative of these peculiarities was saddled upon her, till she grew rapidly into such notoriety of ridicule that the chief leaders of fashion magnanimously resolved not to admit into their society a woman calculated to throw so much discredit on their order.

But a few weeks had widely altered the position of affairs. The growing violence of the storm which threatened the Rationalists,—the alliance of the Cash family with the house of Lofty,—the strange revolution occasioned in the political world by the conduct of Sir Jasper, and the vast importance derived by old Cash at this crisis, from the open demonstration of the extent of his personal influence, had fully convinced the haughtiest of his social opponents that he must be conciliated.

Even the most impracticable of the proud dames whose fiat had hitherto been an irrevocable sentence of exclusion from the sphere over which they imperiously presided, yielded at length less to the entreaties of their husbands than to the presence of an inevitable necessity.

Old Cash had found a means of private coercion as well as of public influence; he would not rest satisfied with being himself received—he was not content with the society of his male colleagues, but he insisted on a formal recognition of the social equality of his lady by their wives and daughters; and his demand had been acceded to.

Only that, as might have been expected from personages so politic, their compliance, once determined upon, had been rendered as graceful and natural as possible, instead of being doggedly abrupt, so as to resemble rather a spontaneous impulse than a forced concession.

The wealth and power of the Cashes were loudly bruited—the vulgarity attributed to his wife was softened into eccentricity—and she was represented as a lady much maligned by authorities so high, that the promulgators began to disavow the jokes and stories they had circulated respecting her.

On the occasion in question, the chief political celebrities favourably inclined to Sir Jasper, and the elite of fashion almost exclusively ranged under his banner, had accepted of the hospitality of John Cash and his spouse.

The palace of the millionary—it was still called an hôtel—occupied the site of the former "Opera Comique," opposite to the Bourse, which was then undergoing reconstruction at his private cost.

Beneath this roof had been collected—or rather crowded—all that was most valuable, rare, and beautiful in art, whether of the kind which appeals to admiration of the gorgeous and the costly—to the mere acquisitive instinct and love of hue, fabric and symmetry, which man shares with the bee and magpie—or whether of that higher order, (which, rising above the mere disposition of form and colour constituting taste,) aspires to ideality of beauty, or attains the truthfulness of nature.

The dyer, weaver, and founder—the mosaist, sculptor, and painter, had each done their utmost to complete the work of the architect.

Old Cash knew well that money would procure him taste in all these branches, and had given to the most competent judges, instructions to procure, regardless of expense all that was most beautiful in each. But no presiding genius had combined and harmonised the whole—and hence the upholsterer, weaver, founder, mosaist, painter and sculptor, had struggled each to outvie the other, to the detriment of the whole.

The dazzling light of golden chandeliers of Florentine workmanship, fell in streams upon an exquisitely sculptured marble stair-case carpeted, as it were, by a broad band of the most brilliant mosaic work, and adorned by celebrated statues and pictures, multiplied almost to satiety, and intermingled with a wild profusion of velvet and tapestry, and unheard of mirrors, and amber, and lapis lazuli, and gold—in the apartments through which were ushered the curious guests who came that day to do homage to the power they had so long resisted.

If the taste of this sumptuous mansion—like that of many royal palaces in the past century, did not wholly correspond with its magnificence—there was nothing sufficiently jarring or incongruous, to neutralise the respect inspired by the display of so many treasures.

At least, both the feminine celebrities, to whom that most fastidiously selected company deferred—the two suns shining, notwithstanding Shakspere, in one sphere, maintained a discouraging gravity when appealed to by the satirical glances of those amongst the party disposed to criticise. The Lady Sabina—swan-like and majestic—if we can conceive majesty in the dark swan, was a type of the traditional patrician—such old as Rome and Venice, and proud England once possessed—and as such other countries never witnessed—a peculiar stamp of calm, cold, regal consciousness, which we seek vainly, even in the brilliant nobility of France, or the proud aristocracy of Germany, or in any land or period, chivalrous or courtly, excepting those in which limited oligarchies have shared exclusively the sovereign power.

The Lady Sabina had long been in one sense an impersonation of the spirit of her time, or at least of that recent spirit so rapidly changing—though in another she perhaps sinned against it by too much admixture of the pride of blood, an ingredient of the old patrician character repulsive to the oligarchy of mere wealth which was being now so fiercely assailed by the middle classes.

The vast fortune, great political influence and irreproachable name of a husband, unreservedly pliable to her wishes, but whom she guided with sufficient tact to preserve his character from ridicule—a dignity of speech and manner perfectly unaffected—a figure and features gracefully imposing or irreproachable in their regularity—an ambition determined in its nature and definite in its aim—the classic purity of her taste, and the simplicity of her manners, had all conduced to render her one of the two orbs of light whom the votaries of fashion worshipped.

Her rival—if those could be called rivals who were anxious to disclaim all rivalry, was younger at least in aspect.

The Lady Floranthe looked rather an aristocratic maiden than a patrician matron.

Slender and fair, she recalled those archly smiling beauties whose dimpled charms the painters of the Eighteenth Century have rather idealised than reproduced, surrounding them with loves whose tinted wings seem heavy—flowers whose cerulean blue appears too harsh—beside complexions, with whose softness nothing would harmonise well but the lily of the valley or white jessamine or pale magnolia.

This exceeding delicacy was enlivened by a sparkling wit—a brilliant fluency of language and an inexpressible charm in all she said or did, which never belied the exquisitely feminine expression of her fair features.

If the Lady Sabina impersonated majestic dignity, her tender rival typified grace and wit.

She too had reigned and ruled, but if the Lady Sabina sought, through the culture of fashion to make converts to her political views, the Lady Floranthe, her rival, had long seen in politics nothing but a means of extending the domain of fashion.

The Lady Sabina seemed to glory in an adolescent daughter with whom she was incessantly seen, though too bigotted to etiquette ever to intrude her on society. The Lady Floranthe, on the contrary, now kept out of sight the idolised child, which in violation of all ceremonial forms she had so frequently paraded before its froward growth began to tell tales of its mother's age. Not that she sought to make any allusion to herself upon this subject, or ignored that the July of life, if adding to the attractions of her rival, would be fatal to her own—as the maturity which may become the Juno and Cybele to the graces of an Aphrodite—nor yet that she was unaware that this July was rapidly overtaking her.

Far from it—she was keenly sensitive upon this point, and hence before the rough hand of time had effaced one iota of her youthful bloom, resolved to maintain her Empire in a novel character, and start not as a political but as a social champion.

The Lady Floranthe was nominally a Rationalist, and she had no wish to disturb the present relations of existing classes—it was only between the two sexes that she interfered to advocate the rights of woman, and even feminine pre-eminence, an advocacy she found few disposed to contend with in her person. Now these unimpeachable authorities—whose acquiescence with the exigencies of old Cash rendered it idle for any recusant of the fashionable world to remain rebellious—were tacitly agreed to make the best of their submission, and both affected a warm friendship for Eustatius—long since enrolled amongst their followers—together with an intense interest in his youthful bride, the link uniting with the patrician body this powerful family aspiring to its honours.

The influence of the Lady Calliroë over her father-in-law, the power this influence gave her, and her extraordinary beauty, had in truth made each of these dames hope to meet with a confederate, and dread to find a rival in her.

These, with the husband of the Lady Sabina, the bishop already introduced to the reader, Lord Besom and a few other personages—all of political celebrity—were the guests who had first assembled to do honour to the banquet.

The hall in which they were received—not by the hostess, but the host—bore evidence of far more purity of taste in its decoration than the preceding apartments, and here the agency of a more refined intelligence was already discernible in the unequivocal traces of the Lady Calliroë's interference.

The absence of the mistress of the mansion, whose place was not even supplied by her daughter-in-law, might under other circumstances have been deemed offensive, it was now only suggestive of surprise, and of the thought that perhaps after all she had declined the awful trial; but all incertitude on this point was quickly removed by old Cash, who after a bluff welcome confessed that,

"To be plain spoken, though his wife had been dressed an hour, she was not down because she had promised her son Tat, not to come in till he or his wife were there, for fear she should make a fool of herself. Tat was not come nor his lady neither, so he would order in his better half without any more ado."

The guests glanced at each other, but the Lady Sabina, without the discomposure of a muscle, said soothingly,

"Mr. Cash, your lady is perhaps accustomed to seclusion, but she should not agitate herself to receive her friends."

"Your wife," said the Lady Floranthe, "seems as modest as you are frank."

Old Cash looked hard at the last speaker, and then replied,

"Yes, I am plain spoken, my heart is always on the tip of my tongue, and my wife is perhaps too bashful, as you may judge, for here she comes."

Wide flew a pair of folding doors, opposite to those which the guests had entered—though none too wide as in sailed—like a broad beamed East Indiaman shaving the narrow sluice-gates of a dock—the envied partner of the modern Crœsus, just as Lord Besom was observing as if he had been appealed to,

"A remarkable woman—a distinguished personage—very. "

The wife of John Cash was incontestibly a distinguished personage in the literal acceptation of that term, since there was no society which she would not deeply have impressed.

Mrs. Cash was more than fat, more than forty, and decidedly more than fair, because her complexion rather resembled the deep hues of an angry sunset than the blush of awakening Aurora.

If there be no object in nature more repulsive than a coarse and vulgar woman, it was impossible to find in nature a woman more coarse and vulgar than the heroine of this description.

Mrs. Cash could only be appropriately described as huge. Her bulk was not softened in its outline by any of those mellow curves by which obesity is commonly characterised. She was at once overgrown and angular, because her figure—fresh from the despairing efforts of the ministers of her toilet—might have been likened to those pieces of foreign boulli protruding in all sorts of shapes through the net-work of pack-thread in which "for consistency's sake" it is served upon foreign tables.

The proportions of her build and features would have befitted a gigantic drayman, though exhibiting instead of the plethorically dull expression of the latter the more vivacious characteristics of those mermaids of prosaic life—the shrimp catcher and bathing woman.

Her eyes were deep sunken, her swollen features indicative of a certain amount of good nature united to a hasty disposition, or perhaps it should be confessed to—habitual wrathfulness.

The skin of her throat hung down in a truly vaccine fold, its fiery surface, studded by a few warts,—each bristling with hairs like a desert oasis with its palms, whilst the decidence of her thick under lip, if not exactly resembling, recalled that distinctive beauty of the mastiff and blood-hound kinds—the dewlap,—so many degrees less attractive in a feminine physiognomy.

Mrs. Cash was, besides, still as remarkable for the redness of her arms, the gallinaceous appearance of her fingers, and the energy of her vocal organs, as when fifteen years before she had presided over her "good man's" store awing the whole neighbourhood by her vituperative powers, as she weighed out rags, bones, and bottles.

Let the reader now imagine this personage decked out in a low bodied, short-sleeved dress of the most intense scarlet satin, a gauze turban, of the brightest yellow surmounting that piece of capillary deception which she called her front, and whence descended between two bandeaus a single flaxen curl in the middle of her forehead,—terrifically valuable jewelry—rings ponderous as the seal of Solomon, and gloves turned up and wetted at the finger-ends by a habit in which she commonly indulged of pulling them off with her teeth.

If anything could have added to the ridicule of her appearance this addition was made in the form of a single bouquet of modest white violets on her bosom, typical of retiring simplicity.

Mrs. Cash, leaving her companion a little in the rear, raised up her dress as if about to step across the kennel, till she rendered distinctly visible a splay foot which if not ornamental, was an undeniably useful extremity in as much as it might amply have supported even two bodies,—and advanced bravely into the middle of the apartment at a pace peculiar to herself, and which could only be appropriately expressed in her own idiom in the vocabulary of which she designated it as "trudging."

It would be a great mistake to suppose that she was anything abashed. This worthy lady, like a traveller who goes to sleep at the foot of a mountain, and ignorant of the difficulties overcome, awakens on its summit, had overstepped too suddenly and easily the infinitude of social gradations between its lowest and its highest ranks, to have been inspired with much respect for her present exalted station.

Years after her husband's rise from retail trade of the most vile description, to the possession of vast capital, she had continued still her former mode of life. She had, indeed, consented to the removal of her son, for this most unfeminine of women possessed two most woman-like attributes, her profound maternal affection and vivid conjugal jealousy; but the only result of this sacrifice had been to make her son shun the mother, of whom he had become ashamed.

It was in the hope of enjoying more of his society she had recently resolved to obtain admission to circles which appeared to have so many attractions for him, and where she shrewdly made her account to keep, at the same time, a watchful eye over the seductions to which she doubted not that her spouse was incessantly exposed.

The first glance of this lady, far, therefore, from indicating anything like bashfulness, was one of maternal solicitude, which soon merged into an expression of wrathful anxiety when she perceived the absence of her son.

At this moment, her companion transmitted to her a message from the groom of the chambers at which her countenance cleared, and she advanced towards her company, curtseying low to each as they were named by her husband, for she had no previous acquaintance with any one but Lord Besom.

The resolute, good breeding of her guests, soon placed her at her ease. They talked to her of her daughter and of her son—and they admired her statues, pictures, and objects of virtù.

"This is a lovely Claude," observed the Lady Sabina.

"Clawed?" asked the millionary's wife, with a keen glance; and then she added, critically, "The frame is lovely, but the picture I should rather say was dabbed than clawed. We have some scratchings or etchings by Remembrance, you might call those clawed indeed."

"Madam," suggested her companion, sotte voce: "Claude—C-l-a-u-d-e, is the name of the painter, and you mean Rembrandt's etchings."

"Smithers, speak when you are spoken to," replied her mistress audibly. "I give you your salary and my cast off clothes to supply 'my deficiencies,' as my son says, not to contradict me before company."

Smithers was silent; but the lady was not to be propitiated even by her silence, for she continued in a louder key,

"Teach me to spell, indeed! I wonder you do not bring out the alphabet—you really grow unbearable. I should begin to know something about pictures and statutes too by this time. I have more of them of my own, all bought and paid for, than you ever saw before, I fancy?"

Smithers looked timidly round, but was relieved to find Eustatius absent; because, menaced by him with instant dismissal, if neglecting to correct one of his mother's errors; and often threatened with an equal penalty at the hands of that irascible lady when she did.

"All the world envies you your works of art," observed the Lady Sabina.

"There is that last collection," chimed in Lord Besom, "a few of the most exquisite gems selected for the private gratification of our hostess."

"Aye," said Mrs. Cash, expansively. "You mean those in my boudwaw. You have seen my boudwaw, my Lord? Now Smithers had no fingers in the arrangement of that, neither as regards the making nor the mending. It was fitted up at Tat's desire by a great artist—you said when you saw it that its taste was classical and chaste, and it has been improved since then. Would you like to see my boudwaw, ladies?"

Nothing would delight me more," replied the Lady Floranthe, "I have heard of its treasures."

"Then, come along," replied Mrs. Cash, leading the way. "No, Smithers, you need not look at me—I know what I am about, and we can do without you."

"Not to give the history of your gems?" significantly suggested the companion. "To save you the trouble, madam?"

"Not for any purpose. I learned them all by heart, and can explain all about them, as well as you could do."

"I am sure that any explanation of works so widely celebrated—excepting such as you might condescend to furnish, would be quite superfluous?" observed Lord Besom, maliciously. "And you, my lord bishop—are you not one of us?"

"Come," said the mistress of the mansion to the clerical dignitary, who had joined the group, and whispered, that, at least, Dannecker's famous Ariadne, was amongst the treasures of that boudoir. "Come, on my warranty. There is nothing improper in my collection now, though you being a prelude—"

"A prelate!" said the bishop, blandly.

"You being a prelate, were right to be wary of Lord Besom's invitation, who, I am afraid, is a sad dog, as you once told me."

"As I told you, madam?" said the astonished bishop.

"As you told me. Do you think I would fib about it? If it comes to that, you said he was a wicked man!"

"Oh! madam! You must have misunderstood me strangely."

"At least, you told me that he was once vicious," persisted Mrs. Cash; "You did, as sure as I hope to be a blessed angel!"

"Oh! oh! What is this little touch of Christian charity?" said Lord Besom.

"Never! madam, as a Christian and a man! Never as I live by bread!"

"Here, on this very spot," reiterated the hostess, who was growing irate. "Here as I live on drink and victuals! Last Friday week I asked you if you knew Lord Besom—a pleasant man; and you replied that you had been intimate with him when he was a vicious chancellor."

"Vice-Chancellor!" exclaimed the relieved bishop, with a smothered laugh.

The Ladies Sabina and Floranthe, looked at each other; the cold, lizard-like eye of Old Cash, conversing with a distant group, was upon them. Though inwardly convulsed, each felt, that whoever yielded to the irresistible temptation might incur his enmity and would cede all chance of influence to a rival; and hence the countenance of each remained impassible, only the Lady Floranthe, anxious to give a colour to the laughter threatening to explode, observed,

"You have mistaken each other's meaning—the Vice-Chancellor is a legal dignitary under the Chancellor. It was advantageous both to our friend, Lord Besom, and to the law, when he was enabled to drop the vice from his title—but I do not know, Mrs. Cash, whether he has quite as certainly expunged it from his morals."

"Oh, I am to be the scape goat?" whispered Lord Besom, "well, as you will," and the party proceeded to the boudoir.

It was far too vast in its proportions, though scarcely so perhaps for its colossal inmate.

Dome-shaped—it was covered with a carpet, in which pale blue predominated, representing Amphitrite and her sister Nereids. The satin cushions and hangings were a pale sea-blue. Its walls were encrusted with pure mother of pearl, on which corals were fantastically wreathed; it had no adornments but enormous vases of the most translucent crystal filled with flowers, and some half dozen niches, shell-formed and covered with a pink enamel to imitate, on a gigantic scale, the inside of those habitations of the tenants of the deep. In each of these niches was one of the most exquisite groups of statues which ancient or modern art had ever given to the world, and on which the refraction of pale pink was calculated to shed a roseate tint, giving warmth to that marble which the sculptor seemed to have endowed with life already. Only that this effect was disguised from the beholder's eyes by so incredibly ludicrous a contrivance that the very spirit of woe must have laughed outright at it through its tears. Mrs. Cash had judged the nudity of her statues improper, and, without consulting Smithers, had, through the agency of her lady's maid, clothed them not only 'decently' but 'tastily,' as she expressed it.

The antique Venus Praxiteles was arrayed in a long robe; the famous Antinous slumbered in a theatrical tunic, "for it did not matter," as Mr. Cash informed the bishop, "for him to show his legs;" Dannecker's Ariadne, was covered up in a habit less low-bodied, or short-sleeved, than that of her possessor, who observed dogmatically "that we did not live in the time of Queen Godiva," whom she evidently held to be one of the most popular sovereigns who had ever graced these realms. Love and Psyche—also Dannecker's charming work—were quite as comfortably clothed, the wings of Love protruding through two neatly fitted holes in a sort of Italian Bandit's jacket. There was only the celebrated modern St. Barbara whose marble drapery had rendered unnecessary supplementary garments; but the two cherubin descending with the palm and wreath (more complete in their embodiment than those whom in the holy legend St. Peter vainly requested to be seated) had been complimented with a pair of drawers a-piece.

"Simple, classical, and chaste, I think I may call it," said Mrs. Cash, looking round her self-complacently, and then, as no one could trust themselves to answer, she continued, turning to the St. Barbara:—

"This is the famous statue of a saint who was so good that when she died they cut her out in stone, and sold her to my husband for a swinging price, and these are little cupids frisking over her!"

"These are not cupids," observed the bishop with edifying gravity, "but cherubim, and she became famous in the Romish Church as a martyr."

"Well, you may be right; they may be cherubim; but if they cut her out in stone because she was a martyr, they may do the same some day by me, who am myself a martyr."

"To love?" asked Lord Besom.

"No,—we have all our little ailments,—to shortness of breath, corns, and the tooth-ache. This," she continued, turning to another niche, "is the Harry what's its name, oh, Harry Adney, for she has a man's name—and not amiss for such a hoyden."

"And what," asked Lord Besom "is the history of Ariadne whom Dannecker has seated on an upholsterer's lion?"

"Ariadne was daughter of the King of

Crete, famous for having been abandoned," interrupted the bishop hastily, to forestall some fresh absurdity.

"Very like that she was an abandoned woman," replied Mrs. Cash; "to the best of my knowledge, her husband ran away from her, and little wonder, if she would ride about on rampant beasts without a stitch of clothing."

"And this?" said the Lady Floranthe, who felt suffocating.

"This," replied Mrs. Cash, "this—stop a minute—is Love and Physicky, or rather," she added, correcting herself and looking at the bishop, "this is Physicky and a cherubim. That is the cherubim with the wings."

"Psyche and Love, or Psyche and a cupid," said the bishop.

"When I called it a cupid you said it was a cherubim, now I call it a cherubim you say it is a cupid; you put me out, my lord, I might as well have Smithers with me," replied the hostess petulantly, and then leading them to another niche, where a female figure chained to a rock and quite as fully habited, sat with its marble feet bathed by a marble wave, she said:—

"This is Andromeda."

"The famous work of the same sculptor who carved the Saint Barbara," said the Lady Sabina a little relieved; but Lord Besom, as usual, bent on mischief, asked:—

"I fear that she was not much better than Ariadne, to have taken her ease in such a state of nature that your sense of propriety has obliged you to furnish her with clothing."

"No, I never heard that," replied Mrs. Cash, "you see, poor thing, she was bathing—I forget her story; but they have tied her to a rock and stolen her clothes, I dare be sworn. How could she help it? perhaps she thought those bathing machines, as I used to do, an awful imposition. This lad asleep is much like the others—for your sculptors seem to have brought their figures mostly into the world like their own mothers, without a rag upon 'em—this lad, a king of Sweden paid many thousand pounds for. It is young what's his name—not Anthony—no let me see, my memory was better twenty years ago—stay, I have it, that is young Antimony."

At this misnomer another pause followed; and no one dared look the other in the face, till at length the Lady Floranthe made a desperate effort and said:—

"This is the statue on which—whilst Canova still lived, and Thorwalsden flourished—some seventy years ago, the famous Dannecker placed his hand and said enthusiastically, "It breathes!"

"Why, what a fool!" exclaimed Mrs. Cash, "to expect breath from a stone."

This last sally, though no more absurd than the preceding, proved the crowning feather which, added to so many previous causes, at length triumphed over the gravity of her visitors. The object of the mirth, which they could no longer quite conceal, now faced her guests with a mantling visage and a flashing eye; but at this moment the storm was averted by the appearance of old Cash and the Lady Calliroë, towards whom she turned, on perceiving that she was unaccompanied by Eustatius, with an expression of undisguised solicitude and disappointment.

The Lady Calliroë had to explain that her husband was indisposed, and then in the same breath to reassure his mother.

In reality, she was thus late, because she had been endeavouring, to the last minute, to overcome the repugnance of Eustatius—who, painfully sensitive to the absurdities of his mother, could not bring himself to encounter the exhibition which he dreaded must ensue.

The daughter of the senator saw, at a glance, the cause of the company's merriment and of her mother-in-law's indignation, and felt for a moment, overwhelmed by the stupendous ridicule of the transformation which had occasioned it.

From that boudoir she had striven perseveringly to banish the crimson, purple, gold, and ormolu, with which the outrageous taste of its possessor had gaudily adorned it, substituting for it her own—and yet this substitution had been rendered in the course of a few hours a thousand fold more ridiculous than before.

But, rapidly recovering her self-possession, she repulsed the glance of sympathetic pity with which the Lady Floranthe sought to ingratiate herself.

"Our hostess," said Lady Sabina, deprecatingly; "has been indulging in a practical pleasantry."

"At least," replied the Lady Calliroë, "she has furnished us with a practical moral lesson. When we observe how utterly the ideal beauty of these figures is lost and hidden by the garments covering them, we cannot but reflect how easily a superficial exterior may conceal alike deformity or worth, and may learn from the example of these statues, how readily it may render excellence ridiculous."

"Or rather," said old Cash, sturdily, "not to mince the matter, if you had been bred up like my Bess, you would know more of dips than of works of art; but she will learn more about it in time, for she shall have the finest in the world to practise on. Come, Betty, why don't we dine?" The hostess who had just wiped a silent tear in the corner of her eye at the defection of her son, which the poor mother understood, now drew herself up with as much dignity as she could assume, and replied,

"Mr. Cash! you forget that we are waiting, for Sir Jasper; you would not have us sit down without the prima donna?"

At this mistake the company made another violent effort upon themselves, but the Lady Calliroë looked haughtily impassible, and old Cash, with a humorous twinkle in his small grey eye which travelled searchingly from visage to visage, as much as to say, laugh if you dare, replied,

"You mean the premier, my dear; but I cannot wait dinner even for a minister."

Strange to say in that party the personages most embarrassed, were—with the exception of Lord Lofty—not those who had cause to blush for the vulgarity and ignorance of Mrs. Cash, but on the contrary her guests, who began to feel, in all its humiliation, the necessity of courting such companionship.

The lady herself was shielded in the triple armour of unsuspecting complacency.

Old Cash, whose son had vainly attempted to dissuade him from introducing her into the gay world, though keenly sensible of the figure cut by his wife, was really glorying in its absurdity, because he felt its intensity to be the measure of his own triumph over the proud magnates and their dames, whom he had forced to cultivate her intimacy.

The Lady Calliroë was beginning to divine and share the feeling of her father-in-law.

CHAPTER II.

A POLITICAL DINNER.

At length the guests were duly seated in the dining hall. The bishop had been placed next to Mrs. Cash, and kept her occupied according to his instructions. The mischievous Lord Besom was as far as possible removed from her, and out of deference to Lord Lofty, and awe of old Cash, the conversation was kept studiously from becoming general, an arrangement which enabled this ceremonious repast to proceed without the interruption of any startling impropriety except such as was exhibited in the frequency and depth of the potations of their hostess, or the uncouth manner in which she gratified—for there appeared no chance of her ever satisfying—her enormous appetite.

There exists indeed no word expressive of its animal voracity, unless we borrow from the German the term aufschlucken, applied in that tongue to the boa-constrictor and perhaps only applicable besides to the habitué's of a German table d'hote.

This halcyon serenity was at length interrupted by Mrs. Cash, who having become a shade redder in the face from repletion, and being apparently bored by the charitable efforts of her neighbour to amuse her, addressed herself in a voice commanding general attention across the table to the Lady Sabina.

"Would you not like the temperance of this room lowered a few degrees?"

"Oh yes, pray lower the temperature," said the agonised Lord Lofty, hurriedly, endeavouring by his quickness to cover this mistake.

The Lady Sabina bowed, and on a sign a stream of cooler air enveloped all the guests, whereupon Mrs. Cash complacently remarked in the same key.

"Well, I must say that I do love all that is refreshing. I have even ordered all my servants never to appear without buckets as you see."

Every eye was turned enquiringly on the well tutored footmen, who cast down their eyes respectfully without relaxing one muscle of their features.

"Buckets!" exclaimed Lord Besom in an under tone to Sir Jasper. "Does she take us for white bears watered every fifteen minutes in the dog days?"

"No," softly ventured the Lady Floranthe, alluding to the scarlet satin and yellow gauze, "a precaution against the inflammatory hue of her attire."

"Ah, well a day!" continued Mrs. Cash, leaning back in her chair, and profiting by the general silence to address the company at large. "How times is changed. When I was a lass what posies I did gather when the May was flowering and the corn fields filled with poppies! and though for twenty years I never cast eyes on a green field from June till Michaelmas there was not one blessed summer that I had not my nosegay of stocks or wall-flowers in the broken jug upon my window sill—and now fashion obliges us to give our buckets to our footmen, and be content with a single flower or a tiny bunch like this which looks to my idea as if we couldn't afford larger."

"Mrs. Cash," said Sir Jasper, anxious to cut short this meditative retrospection of his hostess, "let me revive that pleasing ceremony of our hearty ancestors not yet quite obsolete—like so much that is excellent and old—allow me to take wine with you?"

"No, thank you," replied Mrs. Cash, who had reached a stage of jollity, "I have had my jorum. I only hold five pints, and Smithers keeps tale of the measure. I wink at her, and she shows the score upon her fingers. If I take more I become—"

Here Lord Lofty made a desperate but ineffectual effort to interpose, for she added in a voice which rose high above his own.

"I become unpleasant to myself. For as my doctor says, 'beware of all excess, but at the same time keep up the stigma.' "

"The stamina," suggested her companion in a whisper, more audible than her natural voice.

"I mean the stammerer," added Mrs. Cash.

The Lady Calliroë now made a diversion. The dessert was just replacing the last course, and she beckoned for the music which in 1906 was an accompaniment to every formal banquet.

All the first musicians and singers in the world congregated then in Paris had been engaged regardless of cost by old Cash for that occasion, and the manager of the Opera was at that moment vainly endeavouring to calm the auditory, who perforce must wait till the retirement of the ladies from the table of the millionary allowed the artistic stars whom he had corrupted to fulfil their engagement towards the public.

"What is that?" said the Lady Calliroë, as the melodious notes of an unseen vocalist burst upon their ear. "That is not Myrrah."

At this observation, a note was put into her hand, and as it was no longer in 1906 the custom to ask permission to peruse your own letters, she broke the seal and read.

Her cheek flushed crimson, her eye flashed with indignation, and crushing together the note, and the check which fell from the same envelope, she remained mute with anger.

The Lady Calliroë having felt a singular curiosity to hear and see this celebrated Myrrah, had forwarded to her through the seneschal the magnificent donation by which her father-in-law bribed the attendance of her class.

Myrrah had refused—the seneschal had urged the personal wish of the millionary's daughter, whereupon the actress, affecting compliance, had returned the proffered sum direct to the Lady Calliroë with these cutting words.

"The undersigned returns through the intermedium of the Lady Calliroë Cash, the inclosed check to her father-in-law, and begs she will inform him, that as the son could not buy so the father cannot hire her.

"Myrrah."

At this insult—another added to so many humiliations—her spirit forsook her for a moment. At length she reflected:—"Yes, this reckless woman speaks truly—but if bought where is the price paid for me? Do I endure all this for the idle display which only makes more glaring the ridicule and degradation of this marriage. No! since I have been bought the price of my purchase shall not be that wealth which the courtesan refuses—but power.

Somewhat to the surprise of all present the Lady Calliroë soon after turned the conversation boldly upon politics, which had tacitly been reserved till the retirement of the ladies, or till the conclusion of the repast. The Lady Floranthe seized the opportunity with some eagerness, and Sir Jasper was led frankly to express his satisfaction "at the auspicious omen afforded by the presence of the distinguished guests assembled at that table, and especially of those friends whose co-operation a temporary misconception had estranged."

"I think," said old Cash, "that we need dread no further differences of opinion. The great concession made to the people was unavoidable; but—as I learned when I had no other sugar plums—there is a bag of honey next to the sting in every bee. We shall take care, I promise you, on this occasion to obtain the most solemn confirmation of the rights of property. This consideration has satisfied me; and if I am satisfied I don't know who should say nay or who has more to lose?"

"After all," said the Lady Sabina, "as my husband contends, 'we must do the best for the dignity and interests of our order.' Less well informed as to the perils threatening it than Sir Jasper, we judged that he was abandoning prematurely a not untenable position. The expression of public opinion has undeceived us, and he has now our candid support, in the firm belief that he is acting for the best."

The husband of the Lady Sabina, who never contended anything, bowed approvingly in answer to the well acted look of deferential appeal cast at him by his wife.

"For my own part," said the Lady Floranthe,

"I have no defection to acknowledge. If hitherto it has been too much the custom of politicians to use woman's influence, woman's tact, or woman's art to further their designs, and yet ostensibly to repudiate her alliance, Sir Jasper has made the amende honorable, and I am free to avow that in my estimation he was never greater than in that proud moment when, before the representatives of this great monarchy, he ventured on that hazardous expedient which has convulsed the political world with wonderment. I saw him as he rose humiliated, like King Henry, by the multitude's intolerable pity—I marked him overleap at one bound that step dividing the ridiculous from the sublime, like a god raising his footsteps from the slime of earth into the altitude of heaven. I know of no situation more sublime in history than that exhibited by the hero of our present suffrage upon that occasion—unless it be Columbus before the Dominicans, or Galileo before the inquisitors, or Luther when he faced his judges at the Diet of Worms."

"Diet of worms!" here interrupted Mrs. Cash, who had been dozing. "Why, what a filthy diet! I have heard tell of pounded snails and milk, or woodlice taken fasting, but though it may be right enough to keep up the stammerer, the very thought of such intolerable nastiness, as living upon worms, is enough to turn my stomach."

When the laughter occasioned by this sally had subsided, the Lady Floranthe added,

"You may find your female partisans (as I just heard Lord Besom observe) sometimes over-enthusiastic, but believe me seldom wanting in acuteness. It will be midnight before you gain intelligence of your enemies' tactics for to-morrow, if even then your spies do not deceive you. Now I can furnish you already with their plan of action, decided in the council which only broke up half an hour before we met."

"Indeed!" said Sir Jasper, "what is their cheval de bataille to-morrow—financial?"

"No, historical. They have ranged through the annals of the united monarchies before the union, and they pretend to have discovered antecedents strictly analogic in the parliamentary history of Great Britain.

"They quote the hypothesis of a certain D'Israeli, a political poet of that day, and suppose the great, good, ridiculous and infamous characters of history to be reproduced at intervals. He contended that Ulysses lived again in the French King, Louis Philippe; and those who make that quotation pretend to discover in yourself, the Sir Robert Peel Redivivus, in Lord Besom, the Brougham of an earlier day."

"Let me see," said Sir Jasper, "what was their exact career? between the myriads of fictitious memoirs, political and historic novels, and allegoric fictions, we have, perforce, abandoned the domain of history to professional historians."

"Though I have no pretension to historic knowledge I can tell you," replied the Lady Floranthe, "enlightened by the discussion, of this day, as reported to me in its fullest details. The famous Sir Robert was alternately the zealous champion on both sides of every great question during half a century. He opposed every important measure of reform with colours nailed to the mast, and cry of "no surrender," and passed them all but one—the reform of 1832. But this proved a wholesome warning, and he never let a bill steal a march on him again. He was the great opponent of Catholic Emancipation—he carried Catholic Emancipation—he opposed Reform—Reform slipped through his fingers—he was the great protectionist leader, he passed the Corn Laws, damaging Lord John Russell and breaking up the League. He opposed the repeal of the Irish Union, and then killed O'Connell by passing the Repeal Act—Chartism raised its head—he took it up and died like the great Chatham, on his legs in the house, passing a magnificent panegyric upon Frost—to whom he had just offered a seat in the cabinet. His death relieved Feargus O'Connor from the sick bed to which he had betaken himself, and was fatal to D'Israeli the poet-politician I have cited—for when Sir Robert died, he felt his occupation gone, and never afterwards held up his head. He had no more to do in life than Shylock, in the Merchant of Venice, with Antonio's character omitted. He was buried in the same grave with the great minister, like the Ichneumon in the entrails of the crocodile; but his famous hypothesis will revive him in the memory of posterity to-morrow."

"And what was the exact history of that Lord Brougham to whom I am likened," said Lord Besom.

"He was like you, Lord Chancellor—a dignity to which he rose by the force of a reputation acquired, through uncompromising boldness in the people's cause and through the extent and universality of his genius. He was seen at the trial of Queen Caroline, pointing out her royal husband through his disguise, amongst the spectators, and addressing him as "go vile traducer go!" Twenty years later, he had taken to glosing over Princes. The ambition of universality had destroyed him. He had bearded royalty, and so turned courtier for variety sake. In 1846 he had replaced Lord George Bentinck on the turf—in 1847 he was master of the buckhounds—three years later, he had retired to the East where he became successively a Bonze, a Buddhist priest, a Brahmin, and a dancing Dervish. In 1855 he returned to Europe and Christianity, and took up his residence at Rome, where he embraced Catholicism, and died a cardinal, being killed by the blow of an inkstand on the temple at the last conclave in which physical arguments were resorted to for the election of a pope—the dignity to which he was aspiring. His remains were interred in the chapel of the country-house he had built himself in the heart of the Biledulgerid, and they say, my Lord Besom, that his spirit is revived in you."

CHAPTER III.

HISTORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IN 1906.

Middleman Cautious was closeted in his library with a middle aged individual, who had partly entrenched himself with piles of loose volumes, and held in his hand copious notes, which he endeavoured somewhat tremulously to unfold. The retired and studious habits of this man—one of the most renowned historians of his time—had rendered him a little nervous in the presence of such a political celebrity as the Moderate leader; but this feeling disappeared as he proceeded and warmed into enthusiasm.

"Then," said the historian, timorously and with a sigh, "I have deceived myself in the flattering hope I had conceived that so illustrious an example might again have drawn the attention of the public to history—that most noble, most neglected of studies?"

"Utterly," replied Middleman Cautious, "and pray divest yourself at once of the idea that either now or through future, the pursuit of history will ever again be entertained by practical men, or indeed by any but those whose sole attention it absorbs, whether as a profession or a hobby."

"Time was, however," continued the bookworm, "when the historian was reverenced as the high priest of fame. If we take only Hume and Robertson, and Gibbon, the editions on those shelves are filled with their likenesses—the shelves themselves are crowded with their busts. The historian was great and honoured in those days, because he had a public—he was read. I had hoped to see those times revived."

"Impossible," said Middleman Cautious; "none but professional men and fools now occupy themselves with history; and none but men insane will eventually attempt to do so. Time has no limits any more than book-making; but the memory of man, like his stomach, has. In former ages we had scarce one book in a century, then ten, then a hundred, and so on in geometrical progression. Half a century back, by taking the average between the one manuscript of an early age and the ten thousand histories and memoirs of a later century, it was still possible to form some general notion of the history of four thousand years. But it is quite clear that as the number of books increases in this progression it must become eventually impossible for any human mind, or for the labour of a whole existence to compass their contents. For all who do not devote themselves exclusively to the pursuit, that period is already arrived, and an inundation of books already threatens to be more destructive to knowledge than the flames which devoured the Alexandrian library.

"To its extension it is obvious that a limit must at some time come. I consider it, for all practical purposes, come already. Wading only ankle deep in the stream of history and tradition, the historian might still reasonably prosecute his research for truth amongst its shallow waters, who would be carried out of his depth when they had swollen into a river, and irrecoverably lost when they had grown into that ocean on which I for one have no thought of adventuring. My motive for seeking detailed information on the parliamentary history of Great Britain, about the period of those enactments, which led to the universal extension of free-trade, is simply political. With this partial exception, I have not at this moment the remotest interest, nor any very fixed belief in anything ever recorded beyond the time that I can personally recall. The fact is, that in the reputed apostacy of the statesman who passed those measures a point of offensive comparison may be instituted with the actual premier. Historic quotation, applied in the form of prophetic denunciation by reference to the past, still tells amazingly; and history is just in that happy stage of confusion in which its facts, without having become quite apocryphal, may yet be twisted pretty well any how. Now all the world recognise in yourself Mr. Grubout Florid and in Niebuhr St. Thomas, the two first biographers and historians of the age, and, to speak frankly, I should have chosen him, because so much less poetical, if it had not been that unluckily he has just edited some historic notes to prove the corn law repeal to have been a mere allegory, and that he regards Sir Robert Peel himself as a wholly fictitious personage like the imaginary John Doe and Richard Roe, introduced into the law proceedings of that period. Let me now have, as briefly as you can manage them, the particulars you have gleaned on the career of the chief political characters of that era."

"You shall have them," replied Grubout Florid, "though I pique myself more on picturesqueness than on brevity—rather on resuscitating the flowers from the dust of long forgotten tomes than on being curtly erudite. Let me, however, first sorrowfully admit my concurrence in the melancholy view you take of the historic art.

"Even I, who have spent half a life in my researches, feel sometimes overwhelmed with utter doubt as to the reality of the most prominent characters and events. Let us take for instance Napoleon Buonaparte, who played so great a part, and whose name is the only name besides that of Abraham, Solomon, Alexander the Great, Mahomet, and Doctor Morrison, at this day remembered in the East.

Here are four of the most esteemed authentic works referring to his life or to the war in the peninsular so fatal to his power:—Napier's History of the Peninsular War, the Duke of Wellington's Despatches, the History of the Consulate and the Empire, by Thiers, and the Fall of Napoleon, by Colonel Mitchell.

"Napier's history is an epic dramatically conceived, and filled with the most artistic pictures. I do not know whether it is not superior to the Iliad; but it is framed in the same spirit. The English are the Greeks—the Duke of Wellington is his Achilles. To give an adequate idea of their greatness, he paints his imperial adversary, with his armies and his marshals, as the Hector and the heroic Trojans of his poem, depicting them as demigods, to fill our minds with stupendous admiration for the men who triumphed over them.

"Every French leader is painted as a mixture of the hero and the intellectual Titan; and this done, the reader is left to draw his own conclusions as to what "manner of men," his vanquishers must have been.

"More artful than Homer, he never shortens by one inch, the stature of those adversaries whom he has made the standard by which the greatness of their conquerors is judged—he never tarnishes the fame of either by the admission of any sort of error or misconduct—and yet cannot be charged with the omission of a due seasoning of dispraise and blame throughout his epic—but then he saddles it all on the shoulders of a third party—the Spanish people.

"Napier's history of the peninsular war, would have done credit to the golden age of Roman Literature, if it were not wanting (as we find by reference to the Wellington's despatches) in two little requisites—impartiality and truth.

"We are favoured for instance, with a bird's eye view of the military plans of French generals so intricately devised that we are struck with wonder, that such cunning and farsighted combinations could ever have been foiled.

"We turn for confirmation to the Duke's Despatches—and alas! discover, perhaps from the intercepted letters of the adverse chief in question, that he was fairly at his wit's end, and learn from the contemporaneous avowal of the puzzled hero that he had no distinct notion of his position, beyond the consciousness of being in a desperate pickle.

"The tenor of Napier is to show the wisdom of the serpent, and the lion's daring baffled.

"The tenor of the Duke's Despatches, on the contrary, rather indicates unerring advantage taken of an enemy's mistakes and rashness.

"If we now turn to Theirs' History of the Consulate and the Empire; this republican writer in panegyrising the despotic emperor, depicts him not only as of genius super-human; but god-like in exemption from failing and from error.

"All the great and good characters of history, amalgamated into one would fall far short of Thiers' Napoleon.

"Colonel Mitchell, on the contrary, has written a book which quite as clearly proves him to have been the most base, wicked, cowardly, and blundering of all human beings; and whilst Thiers exalts his statue till his laurelled head is lost amid the clouds—the gallant Colonel so reduces his importance, that he might be hidden under a quart pot.

"The truth it will be said, lies between the two extremities—a pretty consolation for the historian, when these are so wide apart that he might as well search for a pebble with the direction, that it lay between the North Pole and the Equator.

"That age has bequeathed to us flowery descriptions, medals and pictures of great actions, such as the crew of the Vengeur refusing to surrender, and going to the bottom with cries of vive la republique! or of Cambronne on his knee with a flag in one hand and a sword in the other, exclaiming, "La garde meurt mais ne se rend pas," yet elsewhere we find some old admiral disturbed in his retirement, who declares with name, date, and particulars, that he captured and carried into port that very heroic crew, and Cambronne in person, who did surrender, lived to deny the words attributed to him.

"What therefore are we to believe in history, whilst any part of it remains unexplored? and what arguments do not its discrepancies afford to the scepticism of such men as Niebuhr St. Thomas!"

"What indeed," replied Middleman Cautious, "but after this dissertation on history in general, which is pre-eminently uninteresting to me, perhaps you will descend to those particulars in which just now I am interested."

"Undoubtedly," replied the historian, "but I must be allowed to treat the subject my own way. If you mean that I am rather picturesquely, and philosophically discursive, than critically brief, I plead guilty to the charge."

"Go on," said the politician.

"To proceed, I was observing then, what can we believe in history if we leave any of its records unexplored—and what labour to explore them! Look at these piles of pamphlets, books, and papers! These are not the tithe of those I have resorted to in the compilation of my notes, and yet how great their number and variety. Here are parliamentary reports, collections of leading articles, to say nothing of pure histories, and fictions, and all the piebald brood issuing in desolating bastardy from such unnatural intermixture—the historic fiction, the political novel, the politico-historic-fiction, the historico-politico-fictive novel. Biographies of Nobody-cares-who, by Nobody-knows-whom. Imaginary conversations, fictitious debates, and memoirs founded only in the inventive faculties of the writers. Here is 'The life of Smith by Green,' 'Thomson's Biography of Styles,' and 'Recollections of Brown by Wiggins.' See, this is labelled 'Green upon Smith,' and the Editor gives unanswerable reasons why you should read it.

" 'Perhaps,' he says, 'reader, the works of Green may be unknown to you; you may never even have heard of Smith. But is it possible to adduce a stronger reason than that very fact affords why you should peruse these volumes in search of that information of which you are confessedly so ignorant.'

"Here we have 'The appropriation clause considered,' by Alderman Gibbs; 'Diffidence,' an essay, by Mr. Sheriff Moon; 'Every man his own trumpeter,' by Sir Peter Laurie; 'Statistics of the Russian Empire,' by M. P. Miles; 'an enquiry into the character and opinions of the one individual who voted for Mr. Alderman Moon;' 'The Municipal Institutions of London in 1846, or speculative enquiry whether the Aldermen of that city were allowed to vote for themselves in the election of Lord Mayor;' 'The life of Colonel Sibthorpe,' in ten volumes; 'The three repeals; Repeal of Catholic disabilities, Repeal of the Corn Law, and Repeal of the Union,' or, 'All the best speeches on both sides of the question, for young members,' by Sir Robert Peel, Baronet, 1860; 'On the strength of materials,' by Doctor Reid, comprising wood, iron, stone, caoutchouc, gutta-percha, and the patience of the House of Commons—on which he was led to try a long series of experiments, by accidentally witnessing the trials to which it was successfully subjected during the debates. Here is 'Every eye shall see him, or the visit of Prince Albert to Liverpool,' used in illustration of 'The second coming of Christ,' by the Reverend Hugh MacNeil, Canon of Chester; 'Hatchard and Sons,' 'The National Debt, how to wipe it out,' chiefly compiled from the early writings and speeches of Sir James Graham. Also (bound uniformly with 'Schlegel's History of Literature,' and 'D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature,') the 'History of Letters, their origin, development, and tendency, or whence they come, their contents, and destination,' by Sir James Graham. Here is 'No Surrender,' a letter addressed to the electors of Tamworth, bound up with 'The charter familiarly explained,' by Sir Robert Peel.

" 'Mediæval cookery,' or 'the art of roasting a goose alive,' together with 'The Economy of Retribution,' or, 'The whole art of satisfying one's vindictiveness,' by Benjamin D’Israeli; 'Loredano, the Venetian, or how to bottle up revenge and keep it close,' by Lord George Bentinck.

" 'Pastoral duties, or the price of a donkey ride,' by Lord Ripon.

" 'The Brahminical Dispensation,' by Lord Brougham; also 'the Jolly Huntsman,' 'a collection of sporting songs,' and 'some years later,' by Cardinal Brougham; 'The Lives of the Fathers' and 'Indulgences vindicated.'

"Here are two hundred volumes of Revelations. First, the Apocrypha, explained by Peter Borthwick, M.P. Next we have 'Revelations of Paris,' 'Revelations of London,' 'Revelations of Austria,' 'Revelations of the Turf,' by Lord George Bentinck, 'Revelations of Spain,' 'Revelations of the Eel-pie-house,' 'Back-stair revelations,' 'Revelations of St. Mary-le-bone,' 'Revelations of St. Pancras,' and 'Revelations of all the most public events which have occurred during the last half century.' Who would believe that a writer would be found after all these to style his book 'Revelations of Russia?' "

"Might I take the liberty to suggest," said Middleman Cautious, "that it is rather your compilation from these materials, than a catalogue or synopsis of your library, that I want."

"True, I was forgetful. I will at once communicate the result of my labours," replied Grubout Florid, who, referring to his notes, continued in a tone somewhat declamatory.

"After long research into the literature contemporaneous with, or authentically referring to, that period of British history in which Sir Robert Peel is said—through repeal of the corn laws—to have given a decisive impulse to that great principle of free-trade which eventually changed the political aspect of the world—after wading through its ocean-like immensity, and diving deep into its contradictory perplexities, I find that about the epoch referred to, the most prominent public characters were Daniel O'Connell, Morrison, the Hygeist, Sir Robert Peel, Abd-el-Kader, Professor Holloway, O'Brien Smith, Colonel Sibthorpe, and the Earl of Aldborough. At least during the period in question we find these names most frequently before the public, and we may hence deduce that, whatever their individual merits, they chiefly filled the thoughts of their contemporaries, and were invested in their eyes, with a degree of interest which we have now some difficulty in comprehending."

CHAPTER IV.

THE EARL OF ALDBOROUGH. COLONEL SIBTHORPE. O'CONNELL.

"On all these remarkable personages I have gathered and abstracted such particulars as my previous biographic studies and the immediate investigation of the subject could afford; but to give you some faint idea of the difficulties of such a task I will follow the example of the nobleman to whom I have alluded, widely famed in his day, and become proverbial in the next generation. It is worthy of remark that an individual reputation—thanks to the tendency of the human mind to allegorise—frequently survives all correct tradition of the acts or circumstances which have given it currency with posterity. Bacchus and Hercules no doubt were military or political chiefs of that stamp from which heroes have been framed in all ages; and their names have been handed down as gods indeed, but the one seated on a barrel as an incurable sot; the other, reeking from the Augean stables, as an indefatigable scavenger.

"Jason and the Argonauts—the intelligent and enterprising navigators of their day, who if they had lived in 1846 might have fitted out a vessel in search of guano—were represented by posterity as men who in their most successful attempt—the capture of the golden fleece—were merely wool gathering. In like manner I find the Earl of Aldborough proverbially and contradictorily cited during twenty years as the Job of the nineteenth century, and as at once the most consciously obliged and ungrateful of men.

"His history—as it may be gathered from the periodicals of the day, in which his name is as closely allied to that of Professor Holloway as the names of Castor and Pollux in the Greek mythology or the astronomic system—affords a colour to all these suppositions.

"This much afflicted nobleman—as perusal of the following document will demonstrate, might aptly have replaced the scriptural Job; and I have before me a tract, published in 1847, by a Canon of Chester, author of 'Every eye shall see him, or the Second Coming of Christ, illustrated by the visit of Prince Albert to Liverpool,' in which that reverend divine dwells upon the cure effected by Professor Holloway, and moots the question 'whether Providence in its inscrutable beneficence brought a Holloway into the world to soothe the afflictions of an Aldborough, or whether the Earl of Aldborough was saddled with these afflictions to illustrate the merits of a Holloway?'

"The document referred to is an extract from the corner of a county paper in the year 1860 headed—Popular Saws. 'It is common to hear,' says the country Editor, ' "If I had the patience of an Aldborough," "You are as thankless as any Aldborough," "I am as grateful as an Aldborough," &c.'

"The key to these popular expressions may be found in a communication made fifteen years ago to the press by the celebrated professor Holloway, and which runs as follows:—

" 'Extract of a letter from the Earl of Aldborough, dated Villa Messina, Leghorn, 21st of February, 1845.

" 'To Professor Holloway,

" 'Sir,

" 'Various circumstances prevented the possibility of my thanking you before this time for your politeness in sending me your pills as you did; I now take this opportunity of sending you an order for the amount, and at the same time to add that your pills have cured me of the complicated indisposition from which I was suffering, consisting of gout, ague, jaundice, tic douloureux, asthma, colic, debility, blotches on the skin, constipation, erysipelas, lumbago, scrofula, weakness, sore throat, headache, indigestion, dropsy, worms, tumours, liver complaint, and fits, which all the most eminent of the faculty at home and all over the Continent had not been able to effect; nay! not even the waters of Carlsbad and Marienbad. I wish to have another box, and a pot of ointment, in case my family should be afflicted with the little ailments from which your pills have relieved me,

" 'Your most obliged and obedient Servant
"(Signed) 'ALDBOROUGH.'

"It is obvious from the above admission that the Earl had the opportunity of exhibiting an unparalleled fortitude—it is equally clear that no man could ever be more obliged to another than he to the professor who cured him; and it is equally plain that he must have been the most ungrateful of men if he were not.

"Now on the one hand the payment for one box of pills, and the quid pro quo exacted in the shape of a fresh supply, appears but a niggardly reward; yet, on the other, this public acknowledgment of the benefit conferred will hardly warrant such a supposition, and the Earl may have simply refrained through delicacy from naming the fact, that he had in the effusion of his gratitude taken the coronet, (the peculiar head-gear of the British aristocracy half a century since) from his own head to place it on that of the professor—which indeed in the opinion of many would be the least he could have done."

"But what political connexion," asked Middleman Cautious, "had the Earl of Aldborough and Professor Holloway with Sir Robert Peel?"

"None, except that of sharing with him, the distinction of being great public characters in their day; and, as regards Professor Holloway, of being sanctioned by him, since we learn from the same authority that a government authentication was stamped on all the

Professor's medicines during the period in which Sir Robert presided over that government. Though however they were only public and not political characters I have cited them to illustrate the plausibility with which the most contradictory notions may be disseminated by contemporaries, and imbibed by posterity."

"I do not wish to interrupt you," said Middleman Cautious, "but suppose we confine our view exclusively to the political characters of the epoch."

"It was my intention," replied the historian. "First in my notes I have Colonel Sibthorpe. He was much celebrated both in that and in previous parliaments. The ten volumes of his life which I have before me are written with a modesty which would have been more becoming to that great man personally than to his biographer. They do not, though somewhat prolix, acquaint us with any of the chief facts of a life which doubtless was eventful, and it can only be gathered from them, that during a consistent parliamentary career he opposed every measure, good, bad or indifferent, until the last three sessions preceding his decease, in which he proposed successively—the re-imposition of Catholic disabilities—the restoration of the rotten boroughs—the re-establishment of slavery into the British Colonies—the re-introduction of the twelve-hundred-lash system in the army, and the abolition of free trade in corn. He failed in all these undertakings, though he had the benefit of all the light thrown at various times on his own view of all these questions by the great Sir Robert. Such successive disappointments probably were fatal to the gallant Colonel, whose decease was so sudden as to cause a Coroner's jury to be empanelled by a certain Wakely, which returned as its verdict,

'Died from too large a development of the cerebral organs, but whether from excess of the reflective or perceptive powers, there is no evidence to show.'

Beyond these particulars it is to be lamented that his biographer has left us but meagre and often negative materials. We are enabled to gather that he is reported to have been present, (or at least actually in London), at the period of the Coronation of Queen Victoria, but great doubts exist as to his having visited the fair held in Hyde Park on that occasion; and it is confidently asserted that he did not witness the roasting of the ox upon the Thames during the winter of 18———. It is further assured that he never employed Mr. Eisenberg to cut his corns, and that he had no share in the design of the fountains in Trafalgar Square, though this last assumption does not bear the same prima facie evidence of probability as the preceding. It must however be admitted that these facts, though full of interest for the archæologist, have little for a general public.

"The modern Biographer, seeking therefore to accord his task with the spirit of his era, is obliged to turn from the conjecture of unrecorded events to dwell upon the characteristics fortunately more distinct of so interesting an existence.

"Our hero appears to have united in his person—to the excellences of the soldier, poet and statesman—the pious zeal befitting a churchman, militant, and the graces of a leader of the fashion of his time.

"We always find him spoken of as the gallant Colonel, even in a senate in which the conqueror of Napoleon had once sat, and in which the victor of the Sikhs had still a seat. Though therefore no authentic account remains of the part he played at Waterloo, there can be little doubt that he (Colonel Sibthorpe) must eminently have distinguished himself there or elsewhere.

"In the midst of a fervid flow of eloquence when resisting the removal of Catholic disabilities at the time of the Emancipation Bill, he is recorded to have exclaimed enthusiastically—as may be seen by reference to the parliamentary reports of that time—

'Whilst I can handle stick or stone
I will defend the Church and throne."

"Now, besides proving him to be a poet, we may perhaps, be warranted in deducing from this distich, that his valour was of a primitive and Homeric kind, and it might not have been deemed ungracious in the crown or church to have rewarded his memory by a statue; whether in the court-yard of Windsor Castle, or opposite Lambeth Palace, representing their joint champion with a club in one hand, and a brick bat in the other.

"It is not meant to be contended that the lines above cited, attain poetic sublimity though breathing energetic resolution.

"But it must be remembered, that there are two kinds of poets, those who only move posterity, and others who make the very heartstrings of the living generation vibrate. Sibthorpe seemed to have been of these, and the extent to which he was appreciated by his countrymen, is obvious, from the fact, that he was returned member for Lincoln, in opposition to Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer, by the very parliament which repealed the Corn Laws.

"Of his character as a leader of fashion, we have some means of judging through the testimony furnished by Mr. Thomas Duncombe, Member for Finsbury, who was forced to admit—though a political opponent, and under circumstances of some provocation—that few of his constituents were such well-dressed men as Colonel Sibthorpe. We have hence, evidence that he was a well-dressed man, and learn from other quarters, that his appearance was remarkable. Now these characteristics would so well agree with those of D'Orsay—cited so often at that period, that we cannot but suspect these personages to have been identical.

"In fact, by the alteration of a few letters, Sibthorpe and D'Orsay are the same. Transpose the s of Sibthorpe beyond the seventh letter, strike out the ibt, change the h to a d, and alter the final p to an ay, and you will find that these names are literally the same.

"Sibthorpe was, therefore, D'Orsay, and D'Orsay Sibthorpe, the beau of his age—the witty, the elegant, the incomparable.

"Chateaubriand, or Walter Scott, or Victor Hugo, who imbue their descriptions so thoroughly with the spirit of the time, would have given, in a few lines, a masterly picture, no doubt, of this accomplished worthy, to the portraiture of whom my scanty materials only enable me to add his costume, which we know to have been irreproachable—his clothes by

Moses,* his linen got up by Mesdames Gilbert and Hitchcock, and his brows adorned by one of Professor Brown's patent ventilating, invisible toupées.

[*See advertisements in the London papers for 1846.

Mesdames Gilbert and Hitchcock, advertise for the washing of private families. Professor Brown offers invisible wigs for inspection of the public.

Moses of the Minories, from his palace of fashion, records the fact that he was visited by Ibraham Pacha.

It is somewhere related, that on a certain occasion, Ibrahim's father, Mehemet Ali, called the chief Rabbi of the Alexandrian Jews before him. He had beside him a copy of the Old Testament.

"That is a wonderful book," said the Pacha.

"A most holy book," said the Rabbi.

"Can you assure me that it is all true?" asked Mehemet, meditatively.

"Every syllable," replied the Rabbi, delighted at the impression he had made.

"Then it is a fact that the Jews were once in the land of Egypt?"

"Most true."

"And you are their direct descendants?"

"Undoubtedly."

"Then," continued the Pacha, "I find by this book, that before they took their departure, they borrowed of the Egyptians all the gold and silver plate and ornaments, but I cannot anywhere discover that they ever returned them. You will be so good as inform your co-religionaries, that I expect they will do so into my hands, or contribute an equivalent."

Tradition records, that Moses, of the Minories, avenged the acute rapacity of the Pacha towards his Jewish brethren, on the person of Ibrahim, his son-by equipping him as a gent.]

"I now come to O'Connell, the political leviathan of his day—alternately styled the Liberator, the Great King Dan, or the Big Beggarman, by his contemporaries.

"At all events, all seem agreed that there was nothing little about him—even his meanness.

"He is usually represented with a comically shaped tile upon his head—a sort of fanciful hat of Mercury without its wings—which it is supposed he started in opposition to Prince Albert. His figure is colossal and burly—he has a merry cock of the eye, and in his hand he holds a begging-box.

"There are, however, writers who have been unable exactly to discern anything more degrading in accepting the voluntary thousands of a people who believed it due, for service rendered, than in the salary of a minister or official, whom the contributing masses would often pay to get rid of; and some have even judged it quite as honourable as the provision made for princes, or the pensions of diplomatists who have been chiefly employed in allowing their cabinets to be outwitted. But it is impossible to speak of O'Connell without giving a few words to Ireland.

"During centuries that country had been fearfully misgoverned. Kings, favourites, puritans and parliaments, in turn, reduced oppression to a systematic art, on which they rung all imaginable changes, from open massacre, to Machiavelian cruelty.

"They were Englishmen, with all the energy and foresight distinguishing them in evil as in good; and which has given as great a pre-eminence to British pickpockets, burglars and buccaneers, in skill, hardihood and brutality as to British soldiers, sailors, statesmen, artisans and merchants in their vocations.

"There was therefore, probably, never in the history of the world, any oppression so varied in its forms, so consistent and so long enduring, as that, which during hundreds of years, the rulers of Great Britain inflicted on the population of Ireland. At least, if the social persecution of the Pariahs, by superior castes, exceeded that of the Irish people—the long oppression of the Jews in Europe was only second to it.

"When all these systems had been successively exhausted, the hardy Irish population had not been exterminated, like the early inhabitants of the West Indian Islands, and of the North American forests and prairies—but they were so reduced in numbers, and so far swamped by the oppressing race, that any alleviation of their misery through their own efforts, became hopeless.

"Towards the close of the eighteenth century, the dominant Anglo-Irish Protestant race, equalled the native Roman Catholics in numbers, and were possessed of wealth, arms, power, education and advantages, which nothing but an enormous numerical superiority on the part of the oppressed could have counter-balanced.

"Under these circumstances, the genius of Erin, with her harp under her arm, her long locks tied up with a green ribbon and a shamrock on her bosom, took her flight despairingly across the wide Atlantic.

"She dived downwards towards the earth,—not to catch, as they fell, the gems into which her bright tears hardened—but to pick up on the shores of the new world—the potatoe.

"Some say she had long since stolen it, together with a quid, from the pocket of Sir Walter Raleigh; and stored it up against a rainy day; but be this as it may, she made the esculent root the means of Ireland's regeneration.

" 'With the smile on her lips, and the tear in her eye,' she dropped it as the symbol of freedom on her Emerald shore, and from that unsightly bulb, there sprang stalk, leaf and flower, and finally—through the wonderful increase of population to which its cultivation led—aboriginal emancipation.

"Half a century afterwards, the native Catholics instead of constituting only half the population, outnumbered the Protestant colonists by more than six millions to less than two—and consequently, by this period, all the civil and political grievances of Ireland had been redressed, and there remained nothing but their deep traces to obliterate.

"The weeping spirit of Erin—for though then in comfortable circumstances she had grown watery-eyed through long habit—the weeping spirit of Erin then withdrew her gift.

"The potatoe had fulfilled its providential mission. By multiplying little Pats, it had brought John Bull to reason, and this feat once accomplished, she withdrew it lest her green island should have been devoured through preposterous increase, by its swarming children. The potatoe disappeared for ever from the Irish soil, to be subsequently reverenced by future generations, like the onion by the Egyptians—and to replace the old Shamrock as symbolical of Ireland.

"Should we therefore wonder that to the character and person of her most favoured son—the hero of that important epoch—she should have given a physical and historical resemblance to her favourite root?

"O'Connell, or the great King Dan, a mightier potentate than even King Hudson, and who did better service in his day, than any score of monarchs—Daniel O'Connell could not, as far as physiognomy went, have been so aptly likened, to anything created, as to the potatoe.

"His political history too, bore a striking analogy to the history of that esculent. He appeared upon the scene when the foot of the Saxon was really upon the necks of his countrymen. With the power and energy of a Titan—with a genius alike destructive and administrative—with an eloquence never equalled since the time of Peter the Hermit, (if we are to judge of eloquence by its result in persuading)—O'Connell battled successfully for Ireland's emancipation—and he is, undoubtedly, entitled to share with the potatoe the chief glory of being his country's Liberator, even if we accord some little part to the tardily awakened sense of justice in the British people.

"But when the potatoe had given Ireland numbers, and that numbers had given an importance to her wrongs which led to their redress; the pauper-breeding, famine-generating potatoe, instead of a blessing became a curse, which Providence happily banished.

"So, the Repeal threatened by O'Connell, as the alternative of refusal to redress the grievances of Erin, and his fierce denunciations of Saxon oppression—once so useful—became noxious to her interests when the Saxon foot was only, in his figures of speech, upon the neck of Ireland.

"Repeal in 1845-6 meant that Ireland, which remorselessly oppressed for ages, had never risen simultaneously against Great Britain, was to cut herself adrift at the very moment that the English people—having come to a sense of its past injustice—had righted all her wrongs, and for the first time felt inclined to efface, as speedily as possible, their deeply furrowed traces.

"O'Connell with his repeal, in fact, was like the old man in the fable, who set his idle sons to dig for an imaginary treasure, in the pursuit of which they secured real wealth by fitting the soil for agricultural purposes—but with this addition to the fable, that not daring to avow the suppositious nature of the treasure, he had been doomed to see these ardent explorers, in the prosecution of their researches, turn up again the crop-covered surface of the very fields they had fertilised in the course of previous investigation.

"The nation however was in this sense to blame, that instead of subscribing a given sum as a reward for his past exertions—as in the example of the tens of thousands collected by the league for Cobden it allowed him nothing but his salary or rent for present services.

"The shrewd British manufacturers paid for their work by the piece; the Irish people gave a time task.

" 'So much in a lump for redress of the Corn-law grievance, no cure no pay,' said the Manchester and Birmingham men.

" 'An annual salary as long as you choose to physic us,' said the Irish.

"After looming in the eyes of Europe as a political giant; after meriting the success which he commanded; and after having relinquished the fortune which his energy and talents must have secured, he found himself in this position, that unless willing to share the fate of a Belisarius, he was forced to derogate from his towering eminence, and from the Hero to become—the Humbug.

"The melancholy end of this once great man was occasioned, as it is well known, by the political plagiarism of the keen Sir Robert.

"When Sir Robert disarmed him of his repeal threat by passing repeal into a law, O'Connell's strength of mind abandoned him, and his last words were long remembered by the grateful country he had served so well and humbugged so gloriously.

" 'Pale! Pale!' said the dying patriot, reproachfully, 'you have been the death of me! you have taken the very bread out of my mouth, and out of the mouths of my childer.'

"So saying, he expired, leaving none to follow worthy of being afterwards embalmed in Ireland's memory like him, with its Ossianic heroes, its Fingals, and its Oscars, the extinct giants of its traditionary annals, as the antediluvian mastodon and mammoth of its zoologic history."

CHAPTER V.

HISTORY IN 1906.—SIR ROBERT PEEL.—CIVILISED STATES IN 1846.

"I now come to Sir Robert Peel," said Grubout Florid.

"Sir Robert Peel may be distinctly judged according to different standards.

"If we regard the importance of the part he played in his generation, he was a great and successful man. Peel, O'Connell, and Louis Philippe, were the three characters of their era, who, personally, most influenced the condition of the civilised world; as Napoleon, Pitt, and Wellington, had done in an age preceding them.

"If we are to judge him by the result of his actions on posterity, he is greater still, because, with his name is associated the recognition of the principle of Free Trade, a measure more important to the destiny of humanity, than either the gothic inroad of the crusades, or the French Revolution.

"Peel—like Pitt and O'Connell—looming dimly through the mist of history, will be remembered when Fox, Sheridan, Canning, and Lord Grey have been forgotten.

"But if measured by his individual merits, he falls far short of this standard, and seems only to have been the political Augustus of his epoch—the Octavius Cæsar, who wore, successfully, the mighty diadem which Julius died for having coveted—to whom his star decreed, that which had not been vouchsafed to Pompey's conqueror, and before whose fortune, the righteous cause of Brutus and Mark Anthony's fiery valor alike succumbed.

"Augustus Cæsar—hidden in his tent when Anthony vanquished Brutus—reigned peacefully over the vast realms which others had won; and transmitted to posterity a name more widely bruited, as the first and greatest of a long line of Roman Emperors.

"Sir Robert Peel strenuously opposed that Catholic Emancipation, which Pitt, in the midst of his tremendous struggle with England's mortal enemy, sighed to leave unachieved—which Canning looked to as the key-stone of his glory, and as the promised land, upon whose threshold he was doomed to die. Yet, where the far-sighted liberality of the one—the eloquence and generous enthusiasm of the other, had failed, it was given to Sir Robert—fresh from the ranks of toleration's enemies—to triumph!

"Sir Robert Peel, after opposing every liberal measure during a quarter of a century, passed every liberal measure but one, so that when he expired introducing his famous bill to make the Charter the law of England, this Augustan epitaph was inscribed upon his tomb by the Chartist-poet, Ernest Jones,

'Would, for the cause of progress, that he had never been born or never died!'

"Now, in which of these characters do you wish to set him forth, as the Octavius sick at Philippi, and profiting by the victory of another, or as the diademed Augustus, whose proverbial fortune, mankind had learned to bless in its beneficial results upon their destiny?"

"I want," replied Middleman Cautious, "to pick a hole in his coat. If he were good, great, and irreproachable, I would not disturb his memory just now."

"In that case, I will pass over the useful reforms he effected in the criminal and civil jurisprudence of his country, and in fact, wherever reform could be effected without sacrificing any interest or entailing any opposition, for he was never illiberal or arbitrary without a reason, and herein differed from some of his colleagues, and especially from a certain Sir James Graham.

"The earliest period to which my notes refer is about 1815. In or about this year, in the parliament then assembled, Sir Robert was instrumental in the imposition of those Corn Laws which he obtained so much power by supporting during thirty years, and so much credit for repealing. In the same House of Commons he declared with regard to the Catholic Claims—'That he saw no prospect of a final and satisfactory adjustment of them.'

"In 1817, he was elected Member for the University of Oxford as the recognised champion of the opponents of Emancipation.

"In 1821 we find him again the thrice elected member of the university, opposing Canning on Mr. Plunkett's motion in favour of that question.

"In 1822, on the occasion of Canning's motion to allow Roman Catholic Peers to sit in the House of Lords, we find him pointing out, with horror to the Commons, the consequences of this measure, which would inevitably be, he dared prognosticate, 'to give Roman Catholics a seat in that very House!!!'

"In 1825, we discover him active in support of the bill to dissolve the Roman Catholic Association.

"In 1827 he said 'That all the reason, which had been given for concession increased his dislike to it. He preferred a system of exclusion to any securities, and fairly confessed that he had a mistrust of Roman Catholics, and had a right to look to what the effect of their tenets had been in other countries. He believed that to admit Roman Catholics within the walls of Parliament would be dangerous to the constitution, and that its only effect in Ireland would be to increase discord and dissension.

"That at this time Sir Robert was considered as a rock and sheet anchor of immutability and consistency, may be gathered from this little parliamentary episode, which I have transcribed in my notes.

"Mr. Brougham (afterwards Lord Chancellor and eventually his Eminence Cardinal Brougham) was on the occasion in question very complimentary to Sir Robert at the expense of Canning.

" 'If,' said Mr. Brougham, according to the parliamentary reports, 'if the other ministers had taken example by the single-hearted, plain, manly, and upright conduct of the Right Honourable Secretary for the Home Department (Sir Robert Peel) who had always been on the same side of the question, never swerving from his opinion, but standing uniformly up and stating it—whose mouth, heart, and conduct had always been in unison upon the question; if such had been the conduct of all the friends of Emancipation he should not have found himself in a state almost bordering upon despair with regard to the Catholic Claims.' And then turning to Canning, he apostrophised him as one who, acting in contradiction to his avowed sentiments on this question—'had exhibited a specimen—a most incredible specimen—of the most monstrous truckling for the purpose of obtaining office, that the whole history of political tergiversation could furnish.'

"The sequel proved that there was more warmth and energy than foresight both in the praise and denunciation of Mr. Brougham, who, in lauding the immutable consistency of Sir Robert—in avowing his despair of Catholic Emancipation, and in holding up Canning as a shuffler on that point, fell into three errors as great as the circumstances would admit of.

"Canning did attempt to pass the Emancipation, and died in the attempt. Emancipation did pass, though Mr. Brougham despaired of it, and it was passed by Sir Robert, whom he had cited as a model of consistency for upholding it."

"Did Brougham laud his consistency afterwards?" asked Middleman Cautious.

"I cannot exactly call to mind," replied the historian, "but this I remember, that even at the close of Sir Robert's career he might conscientiously have done so. Every quality which can by any possibility be adjectively united to a thing or person is essentially comparative in its nature. A Brobdingnag dwarf would have been tall beside a Lilliputian giant, and vice versa, and Brougham, might, with perfect truth, have defined Sir Robert, if contrasted with himself, as a consistent politician, even when after having passed the three Repeals, he had become the champion of the Charter.

"On the occasion in question it is recorded, however, that Mr. Brougham's adversary gave him a not very indirect hint that his notions, or at least assertions, were inaccurate; for, according to the reports, Mr. Secretary Canning answered—'I rise to say that that is false!'

"When Canning at length determined to pass the measure, Sir Robert seceded from his Cabinet and gave up office, alleging 'that he could not hold it in connexion with an administration likely to forward the claims of the Catholics.' The efforts of this statesman to oppose his views are indeed said to have been fatal to Canning, and though Sir Robert endeavoured to expiate his conduct by voting three thousand pounds per annum to the son of Canning—who, like the great Pitt, died poor—and by passing the very measure which had broken his heart, retribution was in store for him.

"A connection of Canning treasured up this wrong. For nearly twenty years—in and out of the House—to Goodwood and the Derby—to the Spring and October Newmarket meetings, in the innermost recesses of his bosom did this sensitive nobleman carry it with him to overwhelm, at the opportune moment, the guilty baronet "who had hunted his noble relative to death."

"In 1829 Sir Robert Peel passed Catholic Emancipation. In 1830 the expulsion of the elder Bourbon branch took place from France and reform was ripening. On this bill, which the Whigs passed, I find these opinions delivered by the baronet, before and after the event:—

"This Bill (Reform) I shall oppose to the last, believing, as I do, that the people are grossly deluded as to the practical benefits which they have been taught to expect from it—that it is the first step not directly to revolution, but to a series of changes which will affect the property and alter the mixed constitution of the country—that it will be fatal to the authority of the House of Lords, and that it will force on a series of other concessions.'

"After the event he says to the electors of Tamworth:—

"I never will admit that I have been either before or after the Reform Bill the enemy of judicious reforms. I consider the Reform Bill as the great and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question which no friend to the peace and welfare of this country would attempt to disturb either by direct or insidious means.'

"On the Corn Law question in 1834 he says:—

" 'Free trade in corn would be a gross injustice to the owners and cultivators of the soil.'

"In 1841, he spoke again against the Corn Laws. I do not read to you even these little extracts just taken at hap-hazard, for I see you are growing impatient. I will hand you over my notes, and you can peruse them at your pleasure. Here is the speech by which he introduced the Corn Law Bill in 1846—here is the speech by which he resigned office when he had carried it, panegyrising Cobden,—here is the eloquent address to the Commons when advocating the repeal of the union in which he declares 'that he never was unconditionally hostile to that measure,' and here is the naïve exclamation of the terror-stricken O'Connell.

" 'Och, Jasus! he is coming Brougham over us: I defied him as an inimy, but he has sent me to the wall as a frind.'

" 'O'Connell,' says the historian, ‘having grown hoarse and old in clamouring for repeal, by the alarm and horror he exhibited on this occasion, recalled to every mind the old man of the fable—kneeling on his bunch of faggots and calling aloud for death—when death really stood before him.'

"Here is the last speech of Sir Robert Peel. He was four hours on his legs; you can read it at your leisure; but it closes thus. After expounding the five points of the charter, he makes a valedictory address to the House of Lords, reminding his auditors that he had foretold that the Reform Bill would be fatal to the authority of the Lords, and citing his letter to the electors of Tamworth, in which, he accepted the Reform Bill with all its consequences—consequences of which he had proved his knowledge; clear evidence that he never had been inimical to the opinions of the Charter.

"He winds up as follows, after repudiating the assertion of Lord George Bentinck, who reproached him with 'being like a rick burner who, having set fire to a stack, was preparing to run away by the light of it,' he proceeds.

" 'If circumstances render it incumbent on me now to retire from office, I surrender that power without complaint—without repining, and with a more lively sense of the support and confidence which I have received, than of the opposition I have met with.

" 'I shall surrender power, I fear severely censured by some who, from no interested motives, have adhered to superannuated institutions as important to the welfare and interests of the country. I shall leave behind me a name execrated by every impracticable, who from less honourable motives has adhered to superannuated institutions as important to the interests and welfare of the country. But, it may be, that I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of good will in those places which are the abode of men whose lot it is to labour, and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow—a name remembered with good-will when conscious that they have some share in self-government, and are freed from that humiliating insignificance once leavening their hearts with bitterness.

" 'In proposing this measure I have no wish to rob others of the credit due to them, and I must say with reference to gentlemen opposite, as I say with reference to ourselves, that we are neither entitled to the credit of it. There has been a combination of parties, and that combination, and the influence of government have led to this ultimate success, but the name which ought to be associated with the success of this measure is not the organ of the opposition, nor is it mine (cheers) the name which ought to be and will be associated with these measures is that of a man—I am happy to say that he is on his way from Norfolk Island now, and has by this time received the offer of a seat in the cabinet—a man, who acting, I believe, from pure and disinterested motives by untiring energy, by a daring appeal to physical force, by his long fortitude in adversity, and with an eloquence the more to be admired because it was unaffected and unadorned (cheers, particularly from the prosy members) impressed upon the country its necessity. The name which ought to be associated with this measure is that of Frost, the Chartist!' (loud and prolonged cheering.)

" 'At this part of his speech,' say the reports, 'the right honourable baronet became insensible, and was removed to his private residence.'

"Does this slight sketch, which you will observe affords several points of view, suffice for your purpose?"

"Amply," replied Middleman Cautious.

"Because if not here are notes, and extracts for reference—stock speeches altered to suit various occasions—graces of self-sacrifice—airs of political abdication, a fourth and fifth time repeated. Some eminently suggestive. Credit assumed for the moral courage exhibited in the acknowledgment of error. If you wish to place him in a favourable light, you may observe that besides passing all the great measures for a quarter of a century, that no statesman either before or after him ever had the opportunity of displaying so much of that kind of heroism."

"I don't," replied Middleman Cautious. "So comparing him to our own Sir Jasper, I shall moralise on the incredible fact that when a statesman had been, according to his own admission, utterly mistaken nine times out of nine, how the tenth any political party should ever have been found to place the remotest confidence in his opinions.

"And what were the opinions reciprocally entertained, at that time, by the Continent, of England, and by England of the Continent?" asked Middleman Cautious.

"On the Continent, all parties seemed to have agreed the English people as an aggregate of the most crafty, astute, designing, and foresighted and unscrupulous politicians who had ever existed.

"The English people, as a mass, till free trade broke through their indifference, knew little of the Continent and cared still less. Shall I read this brief sketch of the political condition of the chief civilised countries?"

"If it is very short," replied Middleman Cautious; "for I confess that I am like the British public in 1846."

"The East of Europe," continued Grubout Florid, "was an unredeemed despotism; Russia and Poland were the private property of a Tsar—Nicholas the unforgiving—who, delighting in the torture of political opponents, caused women to be flogged to death, and sent a quarter of a million of his subjects to Siberia, and who, possessing twenty one millions out of forty five millions of slaves as his private property, appears to have been a potentate much esteemed by many consistent characters in England, who, after hastening to bid him welcome, refused with horror to drink Brazilian sugar because the produce of slave labour, and recorded votes in Parliament accordingly. Three reasons qualified the unpopularity of Russia, which meant the Tsar in England: first, he was rich; secondly, he was powerful; and thirdly, there were not a few who in their hearts respected the state of things he represented, and expressed this sentiment, which they dared not openly avow, by sneering at the Poles, or slandering those who exposed the Russian despotism.

"The Poor Law Commissioners are said to have had his bust and a map of his empire hung up in their board-room at Somerset House, and, pending the Andover enquiry, are related often to have glanced at it with a sigh, ejaculating, "happy country!"

"The Austrian Empire—a mixture of races—was a concrete of divers limited franchises (which its government had been too cowardly to destroy) embedded in a homogenous mass of despotism. An imbecile Prince reigned over it, and it was governed by a sort of mayor of the palace—a Machiavelian old man who, with one foot in the grave, was planning incendiarism and murder.

"Austria was popular in England, because the chief notions connected with it were the magnificence, the picturesque costume, the lovely jewels, and the splendid plumes of its representative, always some Hungarian, whose family and wealth the government dreaded, and whom they lured by that dignity from all opposition and into the speedy dissipation of his fortune.

"Prussia was equally a despotism, but an enlightened despotism; that is to say, a thoroughly arbitrary government frightened into specious pretences by the vicinity of constitutional countries, and enlivening its subjects by occasional promises of a constitution which for many years had become a periodic joke.

"The Italian states were Austrian, or, until the accession of an independent Pope, in the condition of states tributary to Austria, which imposed on their rulers as the price of its protection the difficult task of governing them worse than its own.

"This was ingeniously achieved by rendering them almost as arbitrary and many degrees less orderly.

"All countries west of these, whether cisatlantic or transatlantic, were blessed with forms of government more or less free, only that they might be divided into two classes; the one consisting of states such as England, France, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, and the United States, with some notion of the rational enjoyment of the constitutions they possessed. The others, to wit, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and the South American Republicans, with about as much knowledge of such enjoyment as a South Sea Islander might display of the uses of the theodolite.

"John Bull only regarded these populations with qualified favour, after he had lent them some fifty millions sterling, which they had never refunded, and public opinion resolved itself into the following conclusions:—

" 'They are not fit for freedom; they don't know the use of freedom. It ought to be taken away from them,' said one party.

" 'They don't know how to use freedom,' said the other, 'agreed; but how will they ever learn, if you deprive them of it? You might as well take away my instrument to improve my playing on the fiddle.'

"These states fell into a chronic revolutionary state which baffled the interest of the most determined politicians; and at the period in question their chief uses appear to have been in the estimation of the press, to furnish three parts of a monthly column, which was kept standing in type with the account of a change of government.

"These revolutions occurred as regularly as spring tides—so regularly that their absence might have produced that sensation which their occurrence had ceased to occasion.

"In January there was a pronunciamento in Spain; in February, a revolution in Mexico; in March a change of government in Portugal; in April, May, June, political changes in the South American Republics; and in July and August, Spain and Portugal were ripe for fresh revolt.

"Lost, perplexed, and bewildered, the only thing John Bull at length insisted on was, that for the protection of British subjects and property, these states should not make revolutions out of their turn; but that Portugal should wait till Spain had done, and that Spain should not begin again till these movements had fairly gone the round.

"I now come to Sir James Graham, a statesman of an indisputably enquiring turn of mind. This biography is enveloped in much mystery for two reasons; the first is, that towards the middle and close of the nineteenth century his name became a sort of bye-word, bearing the same signification as Paul Pry, in the early part of it—an epithet, no doubt, derived from some public character of that period, who would have saved the historian much labour if he had earlier directed his attention to the accounts of an Alderman named Gibbs, whose secretive tendencies much occupied the public attention in his day. This confusion of the proper name of Sir James Graham with the epithet has been the source of much perplexity, still further increased by the fact that this name was eventually changed by the owner.

"The heathen deities had different attributes and symbols. Apollo, as the god of light, wisdom, poetry, and medicine—as the protector of mankind, and as the unrivalled archer—was sometimes represented with bow and shafts guiding the horses of the sun, handling his seven-stringed lyre, or grasping his victorious spear, or girt by snakes, and holding in his hand an image of the graces.

"So the memory of Sir James Graham has been transmitted to us, associated sometimes with recollections of a sponge and hammer, sometimes with the tube of a clay tobacco-pipe, which he holds in one hand, whilst he smiles complacently on a miniature group of the poor law commissioners, supported in the other, and secures under his elbow a small pamphlet upon corn and currency.

"The sponge alludes to a proposition much dwelt on by the personage in question, in the early part of his career, to wipe out the national debt in a very summary manner.

"The hammer is typical of the process supposed to have been resorted to by the worthy baronet, for the purpose of carrying on the post office espionage with (which his name appears to have been universally connected,)

because the impression of the seals of letters was taken by placing over them a smooth piece of lead, and indenting it with a smart blow of a hammer.

"The tube of the tobacco-pipe heated at one end, and blown through by the operator at the other, was the means employed to dissolve the seal after an impression of it had been taken, so that it might be re-sealed and forwarded to its owner, without exciting his suspicions.

"In the popular belief this inquisition constituted the chief occupation of Sir James Graham, the rest of his time having been occupied with schemes for reducing the famine-ration of the paupers, and increasing their personal discomfort.

"His pamphlet on corn and currency has not been transmitted to us, which is the less surprising, that he is said, when he changed sides, to have bought up every copy.

"We are assured (though it is still doubtful whether the fact can be taken in its literal sense) that part of this work—probably versified—was set by Balfe to music as an original composition, to the tune of

"Oh no we never mention it."

"It appears, however, to have been the accredited opinion of those better informed than the vulgar, that Sir James delighted in arbitrary forms and institutions.

"The whigs are supposed to have introduced the new poor-law for the purpose of retaining him in their ranks, and the conservatives frankly to have adopted it as the means of inducing him into apostacy and determined literary infanticide of the book in question. By such little indulgences he was retained faithful to his new colours.

"According to the popular tradition of those days a foreigner climbing up a lamp-post, opposite Whitehall, is said to have caught Sir

James with hammer and blow-pipe, busily employed in opening the letters addressed to the discoverer. It appears, however, indisputable, that such a charge was brought and proven against him by a certain Italian, named Mazzini, described by the friends of Sir James—for he had friends if only the poor-law Commissioners—as a turbulent and unruly character; but who appears, by the establishment of a gratuitous school, to have done more for the cause of humanity and instruction, even as an exile in a strange land, than many of the ministers thereof.

"This matter being brought before the House, elicited, to the general indignation, that this was a favourite pursuit of the Home Secretary, but one sanctioned by the example of his predecessors, and by some obsolete enactment, like those which inflict penalties on witchcraft. No one doubted that once brought to light, this odious relic of corrupt and arbitrary times would have been immediately abolished; but they were mistaken, it was retained with slight modification in compliment to Sir James Graham.

"Would for the sake of the national honour, that this contemptible inquisition into private correspondence—which a despotic government may palliate on the tyrant's plea—necessity; but for which, there is no excuse in a constitutional state, had been resorted to for the mere gratification of the ministers' prying propensities, but alas! the secrets thus surprised—the secrets of the weak—were gratuitously betrayed to the strong—and worse than this, there is much reason to believe that they proved indirectly fatal to some of the most choice and chivalrous spirits of a country, who could so ill-spare them in her profound abasement.

"Attilio and Emilio Bandiera sprung from an old patrician family of Venice, which in the days of her prosperity had furnished Doges to the ocean queen. Its two last scions were brought up in the naval service of the despotism to which Venice had been given over, when she had become an apanage of Austria—that is to say, of a weak-minded prince, whose time was spent in counting hoarded treasures, or in turning toys, and of an old man who governed in his name, a Machiavel in everything but genius.

"When an English expedition captured Acre, and stayed the progress of the victorious arms of Ibrahim, an Austrian fleet co-operated with the English.

"In this Austrian fleet, manned by Italians, the Bandieras held high rank, and won from their allies golden opinions, which were both privately and officially expressed.

"The two young men who had lived almost exclusively on shipboard, brooding over the ignominy of serving a government oppressive of their country and pernicious to humanity, could only derive confirmation in their opinions from intercourse with the mariners of the free people, with whom they had fought so gallantly side by side.

"They felt too, that they had to wipe from their escutcheon, the blot by which their father the Admiral Bandiera had stained it, by arresting, in 1831, in violation of the treaty of Ancona, the Italian patriots on their way to France.

"They were not men of desperate fortunes to whom adventure offered tempting prospects,—not youths whom enthusiastic reverie had betrayed into inconsiderate rashness, but distinguished members of an eminently practical profession, in which success had hitherto crowned their exertions, and on which a career full of promise was before them.

"They were not either of that sanguine temperament, which, blind to consequences, rushes to the strife for danger's sake—but mild, contemplative, affectionate men bound by the restraint of strong domestic ties.

"Attilio writes to Mazzini:

" 'I am rather feeble in body, ardent at heart, very often cold in appearance.'

"Emilio was distinguished by his piety.

"They both dearly loved their mother, and Attilio had a wife (who afterwards died of grief) and a child, to whom he was passionately attached. Yet, sacrificing all these considerations, they deliberately and without illusion, took arms against a sea of troubles; for illusion they had none; they knew that they must perish, but it was their belief—

'That Italy would live, when Italians should have learned to die.'

"Denounced to the Austrian government they escaped to Corfu. Alarmed at so important a defection, the Austrian government despatched their mother with offers of pardon and restoration to their rank and honours: but resisting the temptation of her entreaties and her tears, Attilio, who writes, that her reproaches struck like poniards into his bosom, replied,

" 'That no affection should detach him from the service he had embraced; and that the flag of a sovereign might be abandoned, but that of his country—never!'

"Here they were joined by another Italian naval officer from an Austrian ship, Domenico Moro, 'young, beautiful and brave;' who, true to his friendship and his country, joined them, saying,

" 'We have lived, loved, and suffered together—together let us die.'

"Panting for action, they watched eagerly the opportunity to draw the sword for Italy, whilst their friends sought to restrain their ardor, so that they might prove, some day, the triumphant champions of that cause, for which they had devoted themselves to martyrdom.

" 'Jealous of preserving, for better combined efforts, two such precious lives, we struggled desperately,' says Mazzini, 'against the fatality of the idea which dragged them on!'

"At length, the Italian governments, having received information from England of the dangerous attempt, combining, decoyed them into their territories by means of 'an agent provocateur' or spy, sent to tempt them by false accounts of discontent and insurrection amongst the Italian population.

"On the 11th of June, 1824, Attilio, preparing to set sail, wrote to Mazzini:

" 'Life has only been given to us to employ it usefully and nobly; and the cause for which we are about to combat and to die, is the purest and holiest that has ever warmed human breast.'

"They landed, they were betrayed and captured, and on the 25th of June Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, together with seven of their companions, were shot to death at Cosenza at five in the morning.

" 'Awakened the morning of the day from a tranquil sleep they dressed themselves with care,' says Mazzini, 'and even with a sort of elegance as if preparing for a religious solemnity. They said to the Catholic priest, 'we have sought to practise the law of the gospel, and to make it triumph at the price of our blood. We hope that our works will recommend us to God better than your words. Go and preach to our oppressed brethren.' Entreating the soldiers to spare the face made in God's image they shouted, 'Viva l'Italia!' and all was said.'

"Some months after a letter was received at Corfu.

" 'I bring it forward here,' says Mazzini, 'because it must suffice to prove what men accompanied the two brothers on their enterprise.'

" 'To Signor Tito Savelli, Exoria in Corfu.

" 'Dear Friend,

" 'I write to you for the last time, within twelve hours I shall be no more. My companions in misfortune are the two brothers Bandiera, Moro, Ricciotti, Venerucci, Rocca, Lupatelli, and Berti. Your brother-in-law is exempt from this fate, nor do I know to how many years he will be sentenced. Remember me to your family, and all friends as often as possible. If it be granted me I will, before ascending to the Eternal, revisit the Exoria. Kiss for me my Dante, (his godson,) and all your children. When you think proper you may make known this my fate at Modena and to my brother, receive the affectionate embraces of all my companions. I embrace you,

" 'And am yours,

" 'NARDI.'

" 'From the Condemned Cell at Cosenza, 24th Sept., 1844.'

" 'P.S.—I write with handcuffs, and therefore my writing will appear as if written with a trembling hand, but I am tranquil, because I die in my own country, and for a sacred cause. The friend who used to come on horseback was our ruin.

" 'Once more farewell.'

"Now, by whom was the intelligence transmitted to the Italian Government which induced it to entice these victims within its reach through the agency of the friend on horseback?

"Mazzini and the Italian refugees, who discovered that their own letters had been opened, have declared to the world that it was by the English Government.

"Though the enquiry which took place in the British Parliament elicited that—by an enactment of which the public were profoundly ignorant—Sir James Graham was entitled to pry into private correspondence, he was not able to deny that he had used this privilege to betray as well as to discover the secrets of the refugees.

"Nor could he even assert that, unwilling to allow the British post-office to be made the instrument of designs against a friendly government, these letters had been returned to those who sent them, or detained, or destroyed.

"No, insidiously re-sealed they were forwarded to their destination to tempt the writers into fresh confidences, which it is admitted were revealed to their deadly enemies, and thus instead of the passive course which lay safely open to him, he choose a part actively ignominious, even if it have not entailed upon his head the blood of men, for which none but a Sbirro in soul—not even a Sbirro by office—would gratuitously have made himself responsible.

"The Hampden and the Falkland of England's Civil Wars left not a name more fair or full of promise than the Bandiera's, and the fall of the Bandieras rests in the estimation of Europe, and of posterity on the heads of Ministers of the Crown of England. And who can wonder that it should, when these ministers were forced to admit that they had resorted to dishonourable (if legal) means to surprise the secret of the exiles—that they betrayed it to their persecutors—and when all they could allege in their defence was to deny that this insidious denunciation had directly led to the apprehension and death of these unfortunates?

"They had many times avowedly given information of the projects of the exiles. They did not do so in the last instance, because, ignorant of the intent of these unhappy men—a meritorious reason for forbearance—but on this fatal occasion the Bandieras and their companions fell into a snare laid for them through earlier denunciations.

"What wonder that some years afterwards the debates upon that enquiry were by a solemn enactment of the house expunged from Hansard, or that Sir James Graham, having retired from public life, (he was then amateur governor of the penal settlements,) should have petitioned Parliament to change a name which had grown historically offensive by connexion with that transaction?

"These," said Grubout Florid, setting aside with some diffidence a packet of notes, "were materials for the life of Abd-el-Kader, but it turns out to have been altogether a mistake."

"A mistake?" asked Middleman Cautious.

"An utter biographical misconception—or political mystification upon which I have wasted some pains and time, but which cost the French people far more, to say nothing of the vast expenditure of blood, argument, and treasure which, during sixteen years, it occasioned.

"I had, unluckily, collected these materials, when I lighted on a passage of history which put an end to all contradiction and uncertainty upon the subject. It refers to 1847 or 8, at which period Abd-el-Kader was put down. His name had grown year by year more widely bruited, and his fame had spread so far that he was appointed provisional director of several railway companies, and voted the freedom of the City of London in a gold box. Indeed several aldermen are supposed to have attempted to present him with it, actually crossing over the sea (during the railway panic) for that purpose, but it is not known whether or not the Sir Peter Laurie—whom Louis

Philippe caused to be stuffed, as a curiosity, at the Tuilleries—formed one of this migration.

"We read in the Chronicles of the Time that Sir Peter stuffed himself, but this of course is a figure of speech. And it is probable that Louis Philippe in selecting for preservation the skin of the city dignitary, recalled the assurance of the grave-digger in Hamlet, that even the body of a tanner would last nine years.

"Abd-el-Kader was not however killed or taken either by the Duke of Isly, or the other half-dozen peers of France, who earned their coronets in his pursuit.

"He was not put down either by Jussouf or Lamoriciere, by horse or foot, by the Zouaves or Spahis. A little old gentleman in a back attic, armed only with a Dictionary, suppressed him on the spot. By construing a single sentence, he not only put an end to so threatening an existence, but by the same action furnished to the world a complete insight into the actions, haunts, habits, and tactics of the redoubtable celebrity.

"In a word, he put an end to pursuits and razzias by the simple discovery that in the Arabic

"Abd | | Will
el | signified | o'-the
Kader, | | Wisp."

CHAPTER VI.

THE OUTCAST.

In the tumultuous city—palpitating always with the quick pulsation of commercial life, and now fevered by political excitement—there wandered one, an outcast and a stranger, companionless amidst its teeming life, and alike devoid of kith, kin, or friendship, with its bustling multitude, and of sympathy with the interests agitating it.

Tempest had been two days in the capital. Though disinherited of the chief secret of the great master of his art, he derived consolation from the thought, that he had rejected its possession clogged with the condition of devoting it to selfish or malignant purposes; and he felt elated both with consciousness of the powers he had mastered, and the prospect of antagonism with the errors and the evils of the world which lay before him.

Thousands of individuals have no doubt sank into oblivion, bearing with them the germ of mighty thoughts never developed into maturity or action, and tens of thousands more have fretted through existence in the deceptive belief of such an inspiration. This was not the case with Tempest. Gifted with great qualities and strange knowledge, he bore about him the peculiar stamp distinguishing those who are not only calculated to impress, but destined to influence their generation. Though deeply initiated into the mysteries of nature—though versed in the acquisitions of science and of art—though possessed of brilliant talents and capacious mind, and, though minutely acquainted with all that historic lore recorded of his kind, he was utterly ignorant of the present social condition of the world, and knew not either how to obtain a hearing from it, or even to meet the pressure of its imminent difficulties.

Let us imagine Copernicus, or Columbus, or Sir Isaac Newton, or Lavoisier, or Watts, carried over the space of a century or two and dropped suddenly on the crowded quay, or amidst the bustling mart of one of our great cities. Notwithstanding their mighty intellect these men, whose reputation has filled the world—weighed down, instead of supported, by conscious superiority—might have succumbed to hunger in the streets, or to slow starvation in the union before they had found means of snatching mere subsistence from the scrambling crowd. So it was with Tempest. He was cold, weary, and desolate at heart when darkness overtook him on the second day. He had met with nothing but flippancy and abruptness, and incredulity, and to overcome these obstacles, he found that there was nothing, in his acquirements, which he could turn to immediate account, unless such knowledge as might prove destructive in its tendency.

This was the alternative which, refused, had led to his disinheritance of the galvanist's secret.

He would not then accept malevolent power, and now, in his necessity, he would not disseminate aught pernicious to his kind for bread, so he wandered out of the crowd and sat down cold, hungry, and houseless. The peculiar solitude of loneliness amidst a multitude, or amongst the haunts of a concentrated population, has been so often observed as to have become the most common-place of truisms. Thousands of lights gleamed across the broad river, or sparkled in distant vista through the long alleys of the urban wood in which he had sought his second night's refuge.

Every light spoke of a home, however humble, and reminded him of the myriads sheltered from the pressure of want to vegetate through existence; whilst fate exposed to its inhospitable and, perhaps, fatal rigour one whose life was full of promise to others no less than to himself.

Nevertheless, he knew that this night would pass, like the last, to give place to another day, and that with the day would dawn fresh hope. He would have been glad to lie down at once, burying himself, according to his wont, in abstract contemplation or in conjecture of the future, till sleep descended on his eyelids; but there were still loungers about in the place of public resort which he had chosen as that night's abode, and he knew that he could not yet, without fear of being seized for vagrancy, prostrate himself at the foot of the old tree, whose roots had already been his pillow. He therefore lingered in the broad path, in the midst of the Champs Élysées, sometimes walking sharply to and fro to restore the circulation, at others reposing upon the benches so as to elude alternately the cold and weariness from which he suffered. Here and there these benches were tenanted. He sat down on one already occupied by a loquacious stranger, who speedily plunged into politics, though unlike the stray politicians picked up in public places, his conversation was rather of an enquiring than of a communicative turn.

When he asked Tempest what he thought of the sincerity of Sir Jasper, of the merits of the moderate leader, and of the measure of their respective liberality, of the last debates and of the threatened scarcity, Tempest answered him coldly, that he had no opinion on these subjects. When the stranger pressed him to say what notions he thought the public entertained respecting them, he replied, that he was ignorant of the popular opinion.

Hereupon his interlocutor drew his cloak closer around him and, wishing him good evening, walked away.

He had not been out of sight many minutes when Tempest descried a folded paper lying at the foot of the seat the stranger had quitted.

By the light of the next lamp he glanced at it, thinking thereby, perhaps, to discover the name or address of the owner.

Its contents, consisting of a long series of biographical and historical queries, noted and numbered, attracted his attention, and to while away an hour, he amused himself by appending brief answers in pencil to these questions, duly referring to page, volume, and edition of the manuscripts and works substantiating his remarks.

This done—in the belief that he might, probably, never meet the owner of the manuscript in question again—he was about to lay it down on the bench from which he had taken it, when he perceived the stranger hurriedly approaching him.

Tempest at once held up the paper.

"You have found it? How devilish lucky!" said the stranger, "to have lost that document just now would have been the most provoking thing imaginable. But how is this? Here is only one sheet—these are only my queries—where is the other?"

"This is the only one I discovered," replied Tempest.

"Are you sure?"

"Quite sure—you may have dropped it further on."

"No," said the stranger in a tone of profound vexation. "I came no further than this, and I have looked carefully down the path as I came along. The loss is irreparable to me. These are a mere set of questions. It is the invaluable answers to them I have lost."

"If that be all," replied Tempest with a smile, "you will find that, believing we should hardly meet again, I have ventured to append notes with my pencil. If not containing full answers to your questions, they minutely indicate where you can find them without much further trouble."

"You have?" said the stranger, with some curiosity, "let us see. Though," he added glancing at the manuscript, "it is the work of a day and night's reflection by a head grown grey in historical research, which I have dropped so carelessly."

But as he read through the annotations made by Tempest, profound attention and evident surprise succeeded to curiosity.

"This is strange," he exclaimed at length with marked respect. "I perceive that you are, at least, a distinguished Bibliophilist, if not a remarkable historian and biographer—remarkable, indeed, for one so young. You have noted some thirty books for reference, I see, and half a dozen of the works you quote were mentioned, as I distinctly remember, in the document I have lost. Young gentleman I congratulate you. You must be deeply read."

"I have busied myself much with books," replied Tempest, "I wish the study were more profitable."

"It should be so to so unusual a proficient." said the stranger, sitting down. "I am under a double obligation to you, and venture to found on this a claim to better acquaintance, which I have a suspicion might prove perhaps mutually advantageous."

Tempest, led on by the hints dropped by the stranger, confessed that he was in search of employment, and the stranger gathered from him both a suspicion of his destitution, and an exalted idea of his intellectual acquirements.

When they had conversed for nearly half an hour, his companion appeared on the point of making him some offer, but his preliminary questions having elicited that the youth was utterly unknown to any one in the great city he seemed to change his mind.

At length, after some reflection, informing Tempest that he was connected in a subordinate capacity with a political journal, he proposed that he should aid him in research and compilation.

Tempest closed with an offer which promised immediate bread and shelter.

The stranger, though he gave his name, appeared embarrassed when asked for his address, but so was Tempest, on whom the question was retorted, till after a moment's hesitation he resolutely replied, pointing to the root of an old chesnut tree—

"I slept there last."

"Well," said the stranger, shocked for a moment; but concealing this feeling, "I dare say you are not often to be found at home in such a lodging; what if we meet here at this hour to-morrow?" and Tempest having assented, he proceeded, whilst searching for his pocketbook, to observe—

"The labourer is worthy of his hire, and I am in your debt already—a debt I will at once discharge, though, as in our future transactions, less according to your merits or my inclination, than as my poverty permits, for we brothers of the goose-quill are all poor enough."

And so he seemed, for after a long search it was evident that he could not find cross or coin about him.

At this moment the clock of Notre Dame struck midnight, and before the sonorous response was over, which far over the city broke from innumerable steeples, the stranger with a mixture of shame, concern and regret, had taken Tempest by the hand—apologised, reiterated his appointment for the morrow, wished him good-night, and hurried off to obey a summons which appeared as full of import to him as to the King of Denmark's ghost.

CHAPTER VII.

A COMPANION IN MISFORTUNE.

Tempest consoled himself with the reflection that one more night of discomfort, and one more day of privation, would probably remove the pressure of want. But this night did not pass in solitude like the last. An hour had elapsed since midnight, and he had just laid down, when he was accosted by another stranger.

"We were neighbours last night. I thought it was you—I have been watching you this half hour. It is a cold night for the houseless, sir."

"Almost too cold to sleep," replied Tempest, who was struck with the intonation and manner of the man addressing him.

"Better even this cold air breathed freely than restraint with comfortable warmth.

Better to breathe the free air of the mountain
Than live in the walls of a palace shut up—
Better to drink the free wave of the fountain
Than wine in the thrall of its halls from the cup.

But I have half a cloak at your service."

"Are you too a stranger?" asked Tempest.

"No—I was born and bred within a gunshot of this place."

"And yet you are houseless?"

"Not exactly—for I dread being too securely housed."

"A fugitive?"

"A fugitive—not a criminal—escaping not from my enemies, but from my friends. We are the only two denizens of these gardens to-night."

"The only two out of the population of this city—a whole million!"

"A motive in itself," replied the stranger; "for sympathy and companionship. Last night we were four, and of the four one was a drunken man, the other a thief."

"How do you know?"

"Because one threw his arms round my neck, and called me his 'saucy Charlotte,' and because the other robbed me; I congratulate myself on having fallen into the company of a man of education and refinement."

"How can you know?" asked Tempest, "we have never, to my knowledge, met before."

"We have never exchanged a syllable; I do not know you, and yet I speak advisedly. The fact is, I cannot bear solitude. After my double repulse last night, I stole up to you and laid on the other side of this tree. You were sleeping, and your sleep was feverish and troubled, for you muttered audibly, your incoherent thoughts; but, incoherent as they were, arguing a cultivated mind. Whilst I was listening I fell asleep, and on waking found that you had taken your departure during my slumbers."

"I did not know that I was so much of a somnambulist," replied Tempest, "but why should you dread solitude, the nurse of study and the mother of thought."

"I was brought up, I have told you, in the heart of a crowded city."

"And have learned from habit, only to relish life in a crowd?"

"Oh no! but from long isolation amongst the multitude, I have come to dread solitude as the worst of evils; you do not know what it is to be perpetually alone—cut off from all companionship and sympathy with one's species!

If Zimmerman had led the life that I have led, he would have written the "Leper of Alost." I never till yesterday, came into contact with vulgar crime; but I would rather herd with bandits and assassins, than live in solitude. Man is made to congregate. Who is there living that does not want something from another? I am not without some such motive in accosting you."

"You could not worse have addressed yourself—I have nothing to give—not even advice, strange as I am both to this city and to the usages of social life."

"At least, you can give me your society this night, and I augur even from your voice, that you will not withhold your sympathy."

"You may command it for any affliction," replied Tempest, "and if the physical affliction of disease, I may, perhaps, soothe it more effectually."

"I am about to ask you to do me a service," said the stranger, "and though to speak candidly, I have no choice but to address myself to you, who are the only person in these gardens; and though I must have done so by the thief who robbed me yesterday, if he had been in your place, I cannot but believe that fortune has singularly favoured me in bringing me across your path."

"I never yet refused a service that lay in my power to any human being, provided it was not detrimental to another," replied Tempest.

"Well," observed the stranger, "so much the better, we can talk over it by-and-bye; but just turn to the other side of the tree out of the moonlight, lest the patrol should discover us."

And so saying, he moved, and spreading his cloak, invited his companion to lie down. As he divested himself of this garment, Tempest perceived that his dress rather bespoke affluence than denoted misery; and having obeyed the stranger's injunction, waited patiently for the explanation, which, after having proffered, he seemed timidly to defer. At least, he flew with extreme volubility from one subject to another, conversing upon all with ease, and vivacity, and exhibiting the information to be derived from much light reading, and an acquaintance, far more valuable to Tempest, with all the topics of the day. At length, he turned abruptly, and put to him several questions impossible to parry, respecting his own origin and history.

"Nothing can be more briefly told," replied Tempest, "my name and parentage are enveloped in obscurity; I have spent my life hitherto in study; I am now seeking to translate its thoughts into action; I am unknown in this city; almost unknown to any human being. Without a home to-day, but with better prospects for to-morrow."

"Without a name! without a parentage—without a lineage clogging all your steps—unknown, and without a world of spies to dodge and to denounce them—free as the winds of heaven; you are a happy man," exclaimed the stranger, with a sigh.

"And houseless as the winds of heaven," replied the youth, with a smile, "are you debarred such liberty?"

"My condition is a strange one," said his companion. "I perforce, in my solitude, have skimmed over the superficies of literature—you have both dived into its profundity, and revelled on its surface; you will, therefore, recall, if I remind you of it, some fragment of a memoir or a diary, or a tale, published some seventy years ago, and recording how the hero or heroine, travelling in Belgium or France, became captivated by the appearance and address of a youth, the chance companion of the road. His mind had been enlarged by education, his manners by travel. He united the urbanity of the finished gentleman, to the acquirements of the scholar, and the enthusiasm of a poetic temperament. He was the inheritor of vast wealth. He pointed out as they passed by the possessions of his father—possessions of which, the foundation had been laid three centuries before, and transmitted in uninterrupted line. He was not in debt—he was not in love—he was not sick, his conscience was at rest; and God forbid, he was not ambitious since he longed to change his lot with that of the roadside beggar—yet he was miserably unhappy. He complained that the hereditary brand of Cain was on his brow; 'he had spent some happy hours in the society of his present companions,' he said, 'and such sweet converse, was Elysium to him, but after he had quitted them, he should shun their path like the wolf, to avoid their loathing and their pity;' and thus, with tears in his eyes, he took his leave. From this conduct, the travelling party came to the conclusion that he was insane. They had almost forgotten the circumstance when traversing the same road one of them exclaimed,

" 'Look—that is the country seat of the father of that fine young man who is deranged.'

" 'That,' said an old man from the neighbourhood, ensconced in the corner of the coach, 'is the property of the hereditary executioner.'

"Highly paid, because—besides the endowment of perquisites, which had doubled and doubled again since their first institution—these officials received as much for an execution, as the most skilful surgeon for an operation, and without temptation to expenditure, because, cut off from all communication with society, these men accumulated wealth. They gave education to their children; but social prejudice sternly debarred them from any other career, however humble, than that followed by their fathers; and still more inexorably restricted them to matrimonial alliances with the families of their fellows in the trade of blood."

"I have read that such was the case with the headsmen formerly," replied Tempest, "but that office has fallen into desuetude with the abolition of the punishment of death."

"True," said the stranger, "but can you conceive anything more fearful than the cruel solitude to which society condemned these unfortunates?"

"There is no limit to the varieties of human misery," replied Tempest, "but I trust that such anomalies have ceased."

"What an illusion! Look down the avenues of the opposite gardens; whence are those lights glimmering? From the palace of the Tuilleries. Now tell me what is the condition of the royal puppets whom those walls imprison? In what, I pray you, as they sit without a shadow of their former power, amidst the wreck of their departed state—in what is their fate preferable to that of the executioner's family of old?"

"I know that royalty has fallen, but surely scarce so low as you contend?"

"Your young head is like that of some secluded grey beard, rich with the experience of the past, and ignorant of how far the world has progressed since he was young. Kings and their families were proudly isolated from their people by etiquette, and debarred from intermixture of their blood, with any but the blood of royalty when above their subjects; but this exclusiveism tells wofully against them now that they have fallen below them in condition. Now that they have sunk into a caste—the only European caste—a something between the Mikado of Japan, the grand Lama of Thibet, and the Hindostanee Pariah.

The people of the United Monarchies have accepted royalty indeed—they have preserved upon their thrones the dynasties occupying them, because they considered the forms of monarchy the most convenient.

"But the principle has been long since adopted in a Utilitarian age, of proportioning the salary of all office to its requirements, and the nation, reasoning that, after all, the steadiness and capacity of a good beadle would make (taking kings throughout history all in all) a tolerable King—have reduced the emoluments of Royalty pretty well to the level of the perquisites of beadledom."

"But even though it be an empty pageantry," said Tempest, "the halo of State assuredly encircles kingcraft, impotent though it be?"

"You shall judge," said the stranger, "imagine yourself the royal tenant of that palace, conscious that in your veins the blood of every illustrious line of European Princes flowed in commingling current—imagine your bosom swelling with the recollections of what your ancestors had been, and the knowledge of what you were—recollections forced on you every hour by each surrounding object. Every picture hanging on those walls, each faded rag of royalty adorning them, each statue in those gardens recalling the splendour or the power of your kingly predecessors. Imagine yourself not able to contemplate the shade of those horse-chesnut trees, or those formal alleys of trim limes, or that avenue lined with its centennial orange trees without remembering how these umbrageous walks had been trodden even in the last days of monarchy by princes whose mere word was law, or who even in its declining glory had a will more potent than the collective voices of whole assemblies in a nation's destiny, and whose hands could still dispense sufficient favour to secure the adulation of the crowd.

"Here Louis the Fourteenth, rendering monarchy odious, wandered with his mistresses and his confessor—here Louis the Fifteenth followed in his steps, making royalty contemptible.

Here the Sixteenth monarch of that name—the Charles the First of France, and of the House of Bourbon—paying the penalty of that odium and contempt, may have meditated on its growing dangers. These orange trees have given their blossoms to adorn the toilet of princesses of the House of Hapsburg. Here, bent upon conquest, Napoleon's booted heel has impatiently indented the broad path. On these balconies and terraces the selfish Louis Dix-huit, sunning himself, like a huge turtle, may have muttered complacently as he foresaw the approaching storm—the motto that epitomised his policy—

'Après moi la fin du monde.'

"Here the libertine king, become the bigot, thought of the morrow's battue, whilst France was convulsed beneath his footsteps as the earth heaving to the struggles of a buried Titan. To these halls, from which Charles the Tenth fled with unsheathed sword, Louis Philippe stole with umbrella under arm, having picked up the crown his predecessor had let drop. Here he reigned by his wisdom and his gold, and hence he burrowed like the fox, making the Tuilleries a castle of Udolpho, and honeycombing all its environs, so that when surprised by a coup de main, the conspirators found nothing but his coat, hat, and garters, the majesty of France having dived into the earth to pop out again in safety many miles away. Across the road—close to the pedestal of the bronze lion, the subterranean passage still, to this day, exists, running through the terrace opposite the Seine, and threading the place du Carousel, and the soil beneath our feet, to communicate with excavations which lead as far as Neuilly. Here his royal son-in-law, Hudson, the railway king, to whom—a widowed pair—he gave his widowed daughter, may, like an old spider, have meditated which portion of the globe he should next overspread with his lines, and have calculated how dear, how slow, and how insecure he might venture upon making them.

"In fact, finding around you everywhere the reminiscence or the trace of majesty allied to omnipotence or power, or, at least, to colossal wealth, and then reflecting that it had devolved on you shorn of every attribute, but its restraint and onerous ceremonial. Imagine your palace converted into public offices—your Majesty habitually banished to the apartments of a third floor—the halls of state, except on public occasions, 'en papillotes,' the pictures covered up, the frames in gauze, the carpets druggeted, the tassels in bags, the hangings rolled away, and an inexorable major domo watching the preservation of the nation's furniture. Imagine the kingly office limited in the means of its support by economy so strict as barely to suffice to the occasional pageantry rigorously exacted, and kings and their families made to understand that the people supported them—like a beadle or coachmen in their state liveries—chiefly to do it credit on great occasions, but that at all other times they must lay these trappings up in lavender and keep out of sight, not to offend the ostentatious pride of their employers by exhibiting the sordidness of their every day attire."

"But, at least," suggested Tempest, "royalty has gained in this respect, that it forcibly lays aside the panoply of majesty in ordinary life?"

"Not so;" replied his companion, "there is a conventional dignity, part and parcel of the office which must be rigorously sustained. The beadle or parish clerk, even when off duty, dare not jump over a post, or play at leap-frog. A sovereign and his family must not appear in public without due honours. A royal prince must not move abroad without salvos of artillery; but as honours are costly, and gunpowder expensive, the monarch and his children are shut up in the former seclusion of a sultan's harem."

"And is such really the condition of present royalty?" asked the youth.

"Such is the condition of French royalty," replied the stranger, "not the worst off in Europe either, let me tell you, thanks to a lingering leaven of the national vanity and love of splendor. Though it be true that in France the royal race is parsimoniously isolated from society in forced retirement, and, though all its younger branches, forbidden to derogate by any mis-alliance, are doomed to celibacy as well as solitude, they still enjoy the affluence of the middle classes; but there are other of the Federative Monarchies in which the reigning families are even worse cared for. There is the kingdom of Bavaria, in which the sole support of the crown is derived from the gratuities paid by strangers who visit the Valhalla; and there are the Netherlands, whose sovereign is found in nothing but coals, candles, houseroom, a suit of clothes at Christmas, and thirty shillings a week; for which,—besides making an opening and closing speech to the States-general—he is bound to brush, as well as wear, the royal robes, and furbish up the crown jewels.

"Why even at the last period preceding the decline of royalty, princes—now treated with such indifference and neglect—were at least thought worth encouraging or reviling.

"I find by reference to the Times of 1846, that three years previously a transaction took place between the East Berkshire Agricultural Association and Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria the First of England, in which a two pounds testimonial is mentioned thus:—"His Royal Highness Prince Albert for (as?) a labourer for having brought up a large family without seeking parish relief, £2."

Now this passage, though obscure, will only admit of four interpretations. Either that two pounds were paid by the Prince to reward the industrious exertion of a life, and in that case, perhaps, out of the sums his Highness had received as prizes for fat cattle; or else that they were awarded to a peasant, who in the employ of Prince Albert, had contrived to avoid the Union. Or to Prince Albert himself for having enabled one of his labourers to rear his children without the aid of parish bread; or last, fourthly and most plausibly, the two pounds were awarded to that illustrious personage himself, for having brought up a large family without seeking parish relief—a feat which history records him to have accomplished.

"Now whether as a gift from him, or to him, forty shillings was a small testimonial certainly, considering that he had thirty thousand per annum, but it was at least sufficient to prove that the public of that day was disposed to make the most of any little merits he might possess. Princes were then maligned or praised, and even in the last hours of royal popularity we may gather on the authority of a Spanish paper, that the sons of Louis Philippe were received by the waving of two pocket handkerchiefs, and threatened by a regicide on the same day, 'more than one handkerchief,' says the Heraldo, 'was waved in the air, more than one smile worthy of envy responded to so much grace allied to so much dignity.'

"This contrast, however—hard though it may be—is not the hardest part of the case. It may be well for those who choose to accept the phantom royalty of our time to submit to its conditions—but is it not a glaring injustice that these should unavoidably descend like their fathers' sins upon their children?

"Yet so it is with the reigning family of these realms. An old man, the shadow of impotent sovereignty, wears the crown. His next of kin is a nephew with too much sense of his manlike dignity voluntarily to accept so insignificant a part. He only wishes to step down from the foolish and inconvenient eminence, on which the accident of birth has raised him, into the ranks of the people, yet even this privilege is denied him.

" 'Stay, my friend,' say the millionaries, 'one moment, if you please; we do not live in an age when princes were allowed to abdicate rights present or prospective—but just as we did not then allow the private soldier to resign his musket, so now we keep our princes in the ranks, and dutifully coerce them to play their part in that state to which it has pleased Providence to call them.

" 'We cannot afford to risk any slur being thrown on that royalty, our property, by the derogation of unworthy members—we cannot brook to see its regular succession interrupted. You must therefore remain a prince, you must not associate—you must not intermarry out of your caste.'

"The Hereditary Prince—determined to vindicate the rights to which he thought every man inalienably born prepared hereupon—petitioned the Federal Parliament to be allowed to descend, or rather to ascend into private life; but this step proved his ruin. The ministers and magnates declared that he was insane.

"With all the mock formula of respectful loyalty they resorted to confinement, and even to the straitjacket, the lancet, and the blister, when their victim grew outrageous. Yet even two years of such enthralment did not subdue his spirit. He watched his opportunity—he took wing—he breathed the free air of heaven—he communed with his kind—but alas! cut off from all intercourse with them for so long, there were none to sympathise with him—and he was without friend, or well-wisher in the great city. He could find no refuge—he felt that he was tracked—that far and wide they were searching for him; but two nights he had baffled them because he came—like a hunted hare returning to its form—where they least suspected, within sight of the very walls from which he had fled, and laid down at the foot of this old tree, for it is he who craves a favour of you now."

"What," said Tempest, "you are—"

"I am the unfortunate Count of Paris, heir to this largest of the Federal kingdoms."

"Indeed," said the youth, looking at him with some interest, and then recollecting that his companion had just avowed his escape from a place of confinement for mental alienation, he made no comment lest he should irritate his malady.

"Well," said the stranger, "I can hear by the tone of your voice that, like all the world, your interest in me has vanished now you know me to be a royal prince. If I had confided to you that I was a pirate or a Thug, or even a fugitive from the galleys, you might have listened to me with horror but with interest. I suppose that now your indifference will refuse me even the service I was about to ask you?"

"You are in error," replied Tempest. "I should be glad to do anything in my power which might be useful to you."

"Then listen," said his companion. "I have been three days at large, but to remain so, much longer, is impossible. In a day—in an hour I may be hurried back to my confinement. There is one whom I have vainly sought to see—one whose sympathy solaced the early solitude to which I have been doomed—need I say it was a woman. I have not been able even to communicate with her. Could I trust to you to see that this letter reaches her; will you promise me by your honour, by your soul; by all that you hold most dear, that it shall, or must the descendant of St. Louis implore in vain?"

"Give it me," said Tempest, endeavouring to soothe the agitation of the stranger, who having entrusted to him his missive with many exhortations, retired to rest.

The two sleepers were at length awakened not by the dawn of morning, but by a police agent supported by several gate-keepers ranged at a respectful distance, and ready to advance at his beck.

"Quite right!" exclaimed the official. "It is he."

And then doffing his cocked hat, he addressed Tempest's companion in a whisper deferentially impertinent.

"Your Royal Highness has given us much trouble, I have followers at hand to assist your Royal Highness home. Your Royal Highness must be pleased to lead the way to that vehicle."

"Ha!" said the personage addressed, looking round him to ascertain that escape was impossible. "A curse on your officious persecution."

"You too," said the official to Tempest, "must follow me—we will endeavour to ascertain what connivance you have had in seducing the heir apparent from his friends."

"None," replied Tempest, "my present companion accosted me as I lay here last night."

"Then you were confessedly vagabondising," observed the official. "As you have not the appearance of a beggar, you must be a criminal, let me look to my notes. Ah! I have it—two birds with one stone. Height five feet ten, brow high, expression sinister, speech fluent and pedantic. Do you call yourself Tempest, young man?"

"I am called Tempest."

"You are my prisoner then."

"On what charge?"

"I cannot say, not on any that I know of, excepting want of wit. Here it is in black and white—a monomaniac escaped from his friends—gentle and plausible, but very dangerous—to be immediately secured."

And Tempest finding expostulation futile, and separated from his companion, was being led away, when the party was accosted by his last night's friend, who muffled up in a cloak appeared in search of him.

"Good God, not a criminal?"

"No," replied the official, "only an insane patient."

On receiving which assurance the new comer hastily exchanged a few words with Tempest, and after expressing his belief that he was the victim either of mistake or persecution, assured him both of his ability and determination to see to effect his speedy liberation.

CHAPTER VIII.

ANTICIPATIONS OF VICTORY.

Antipathetic sympathy—more powerful than any predilection in common—together with the impending crisis, had brought the Ladies Sabina and Floranthe together.

"It was high time," said the former "to rally round Sir Jasper. The pressure from without, occasioned by the scarcity, shows clearly that we could not have held out, and all prolongation of the struggle now serves only to give political ascendancy to an element socially extraneous and repulsive. I had hoped that the Cashes, with their wealth and influence, would have been absorbed into our ranks by intermixture with a patrician family."

"So I had flattered myself, but oil and water will sooner mingle than they assimilate with us. It is impossible to endure their assumption, and the ridicule of their vulgarity."

"No one can feel it more keenly than the bride's father."

"Except the husband of the bride; but the Lady Calliroë has not fulfilled the mission which her station imposed upon her, and makes common cause with them against us, abetting the old man in his arrogance and ambition."

"Yes, it is time, as I was saying," observed the Lady Sabina, "that this contest—this revolution should be ended. It is our bounden duty to strain every nerve to support Sir Jasper in the demolition of the doomed edifice, that he may then speedily reconstruct another more suitable to the exigences of the time, more durable and more secure."

"But in this work our joint efforts are nothing to the co-operation of old Cash," said the Lady Floranthe bitterly.

"So long as the battle is undecided. But there is one advantage in the demolition of the former state of things, that we shall reconstruct on a new basis. Our order has succumbed through an elemental weakness, because it admitted too hastily within its pale mere vulgar wealth in all its plebeian grossness—unrefined and unannealed."

"And, because our reverend Seignors, too, jealously excluded us from their councils. But what says Sir Jasper? Did you press him in our joint names—did you extract anything from him but a shrug—a nod—a hint blandly uncompromising?"

"Yes," said the Lady Sabina, "Sir Jasper has unbosomed himself at last; and has spoken unreservedly and satisfactorily. He perceives distinctly that the new power by whose aid alone he can disentangle order from inevitable chaos, may become dangerous to him as well as offensive to ourselves, and he therefore implores us to wait only till his object is secured—and then his views will be our own."

"So he has vaguely hinted, but without doing anything to curb that power."

" 'Why seek to curb that which one means to break:' such were his words to me. Besides, he argues thus: 'the more promptly and effectually the present measure is carried, the greater will be his popularity; and the power derived from that popularity he will use at once to scatter the party of the new Crœsus, and to clip for ever, the wings by which he thinks to soar."

"Chance what may, that is a satisfaction," said the Lady Floranthe, "at least, materialism will not triumph where intelligence ought to reign. This man is unendurable in himself; but something tells me that the dominion of that haughty and unnatural child his daughter-in-law, the Lady Calliroë—would be still more difficult to brook."

"More odious because an apostate in her premature ambition—but set your mind at rest. Till the final success of Sir Jasper, it is expedient to humour and caress John Cash—but that triumph will be secured to-night, and then, in the zenith of his popularity, the minister will cast aside the instrument he was forced to cherish, and to-morrow the parvenu will be nothing but a worn out and abandoned tool."

"Why did he not satisfy us of this before?"

"He dared not, till the decisive day was come, give a dangerous assurance which might have reached the ears of his ally."

"Men never trust us till it is too late," replied the Lady Floranthe, "but we too shall have a part to play, we must act promptly and decisively in putting these people in their place."

At this moment a knock was audible, and the Lady Sabina, who was apparently expecting Eustatius Cash, desired that he might be refused admittance.

"I have this day already ordered my door to be denied him," said the Lady Floranthe. "Eustatius, though I sincerely pity him—forgets that he has no longer, a hand to dispose of, which could once proffer all the wealth of his sire."

"Besides," said the Lady Sabina, slightly colouring, "the time is come to assert our own dignity by drawing a line which, I trust, will prove indelible."

"The time is come for excluding all the Cashes," said the Lady Sabina.

It was not Eustatius Cash, but the family doctor, the oracle of all the small talk of the higher classes, part of whose duties it was to appear on certain occasions in certain houses in the character of an ambulatory chronicle. His presence was welcome at this moment; he was admitted; and, though his grey eye twinkled significantly on seeing two powers long rivals so confidentially united, on a hint to that effect, he disburthened himself of his budget.

"All mouths," he informed them, "were filled with expectation of the great event; and nothing could exceed the popularity of Sir Jasper. With the people, because supposed to be hostile to the millionaries, and with the millionaries, because they were confident, that he had only saved them from an untimely end to restore, by some political hocus pocus, their power in another form. From Sir Jasper, by a natural transition, the Doctor passed to Old Cash and his family; and here, growing sad and confidential, he imparted to them a melancholy secret. He had just left the Lady Calliroë, and—he deeply lamented to state that young, high-born, and beautiful as she was—he feared that these gifts would prove more transitory than is even commonly the case with frail humanity. In fact, in that fair frame, he did not hesitate to say, that—without some providential interposition beyond the reach of art—the ineradicable germ of dissolution was already manifest."

"Impossible!" said the Lady Floranthe.

"Too possible," replied the Doctor; "for, alas! I may say so here, always in the most solemn confidence, that unhappy lady is the unconscious victim of an insidious malady which does not admit of cure."

A feeling of pity, and almost of remorse, moistened the glance which the Lady Sabina cast towards her fair visitress as she thought of her own daughter, whose cheek was often so pale; but this association gave rise to another and a very different sentiment; for she had once speculated on securing for that daughter the colossal wealth which the demise of the Lady Calliroë would leave again disposable. So, after a common-place expression of sympathy, she observed:—"That would be a great political fact."

The Lady Floranthe nodded acquiescence; but, wrapped in her own thoughts, answered nothing. For her the words of the doctor were full of import, because only that morning, by a singular coincidence, an eminent physician had encouraged her ailing (and, as she believed, hypochondriacal husband) with the assurance that he only suffered from the same symptom as one of the reigning beauties of the hour, the young Lady Calliroë Cash.

When the Doctor had taken his leave and the Lady Floranthe had departed, the Lady Sabina countermanded the order she had given, and desired that Eustatius should be admitted.

CHAPTER IX.

A SCENE IN THE SENATE.

It was at the close of the debate upon a question fraught with change to the very constitution of the United Monarchies, that Middleman Cautious sat down after an able speech, in which he successfully appealed to the fears and prejudices of the ultra Oligarchs—the class towards which his hostility had been so long unceasing.

After a bitter personal attack upon Sir Jasper, in which he contrasted the expression of that minister's former opinions with those avowed at present by him; he had drawn an alarming picture of the various concessions into which, one by one, Sir Jasper would unavoidably be drawn; concessions which would become inevitable when the initiative in a measure of reform was assumed by a statesman who had for so many years made inviolable immutability the rock upon which he had based his government.

Change, indeed, beneficial in itself, (he contended,)

if carried, though by politicians of pretentions more elastic, would become fearfully perilous if due to the sudden relaxation of a political inflexibility which had never known exception; for in the eyes of all men, one might be only the bending of the sapling or the bough, which would quickly spring back with unimpaired vigour into its first position, the other, the breaking asunder of the beam, which argued the eventual prostration of the whole edifice it supported.

"To prove that his predictions of the future were warranted by the experience of the past, he drew from the stores of history numerous examples; but in particular, one he cited" which,—from its peculiar aptitude to present circumstances—appeared in its pages like a providential beacon, to warn the present generation of its danger. It was that of Sir Robert Peel, whilome prime minister of Great Britain; and indeed, of Great Britain and Ireland, before he repealed the act of union with the latter country.

"They would find that the first part of that statesman's career, was precisely identical with that of Sir Jasper up to the present period—of the future conduct of Sir Jasper—of the steps into which a like necessity would hurry him—and of their final effect on the community, how could he furnish them with a better means of judging, than by briefly epitomising the subsequent period of Sir Robert Peel's career—the past of that notorious minister's history which it depended upon the members of that House, by the votes they would record upon the question before them, to prevent from becoming the future of his prototype, Sir Jasper."

Here the Moderate leader, primed as he was, by the historian, went lucidly, graphically, and profoundly, into the public life of Sir Robert Peel. He gave his auditory the most salient and contradictory points—the brightest white and the darkest black—from his speeches on both sides of every great question of the day—and after proving the remarkable, and almost ludicrous coincidence betwixt the early stage of his tergiversation with that which Sir Jasper was now exhibiting, he pointed out its consequences on the British Empire, step by step, until the very day on which Sir Robert had expired, introducing his last bill—the charter—repudiated by Feargus O'Connor, for his excessive Radicalism, in a letter published in the Northern Star of that eventful morning.

As far as any speech could produce a sensation, the discourse of Middleman Cautious, was prodigiously effective. The enthusiasm which the sudden conversion of Sir Jasper had excited, was beginning to cool down; and it was now perceived, that in his anxiety to outbid the Moderate leader, he had progressed beyond that boundary, whose limits it was equally disagreeable for Rationalists and Moderates to see overstepped.

The great and the minor capitalists had, in fact, quarrelled for supremacy amongst themselves; but their interest, as possessors of property, were identically opposed to the masses who had none; and whom, in the heat of the contest, Sir Jasper had called into the struggle, and was about to invest with power.

It was, in fact, nothing but the adhesion of old Cash, his powerful party, and more powerful example, which had, hitherto, saved Sir Jasper from a dangerous reaction.

Under these circumstances the arguments of his adversary told with marvellous effect; but what a pity that his plan of action had been revealed to the Lady Floranthe! It is true, that this was done with his full concurrence and consent—because, anxious to popularise his notion on the analogy between Sir Robert and Sir Jasper.

But as the same tide cannot serve two ways, Sir Jasper had, in this manner, become acquainted, as the reader has seen, with the nature of the attack meditated on him by his opponent—and forewarned he was forearmed.

It is true, that Middleman Cautious could not conceive any defence which would be very effective against such an attack—but he was deceived.

Sir Jasper rose amidst a universal titter, and observed—"That in reply to the censure which the organ of the Opposition had been pleased to heap upon him, he could only ask that House, what could be more puerile than to argue a question so momentous and practical as the one before them, upon the grounds of a mere fanciful historic analogy? He would tell honourable members. There was one thing which might add to the ridicule of such a proceeding, and that was an utter misconception of the historic facts obtruded upon so grave and practical an assembly,—the imposition not of bootless pedantry only, but of pedantic ignorance. Yet this misconception he would show to have been imbibed—this imposition to have been attempted, by the honourable member who had just sat down.

"Every one in that house knew that all political history, beyond the personal recollection of the present generation, became more obscure and clouded in proportion as it approached our own times, on account of the deluge of contradictory writings in which the truth, in the estimation of the vulgar, was hopelessly engulfed, and from which the persevering and the learned found it so difficult to extract it. They knew that the visitation of Providence which twice during the last half century had proved so fatal to all but the young, had even prevented the memory of the present generation from extending as far back as, in the natural course of things, it would have done; so that the political condition, sixty years back, of the countries constituting the United Monarchies was now popularly more obscure than that of Europe five centuries ago; and on this obscurity the leader of the opposition had relied to fill the ears of that august assembly with absurd historic fictions.

"The honourable member who had just sat down had likened him to Sir Robert Peel, the premier of Great Britain, when Great Britain was an independent state. Now to which of the two Sir Roberts did he liken him? For—he spoke advisedly, on the authority of the first historian of the age, with whom he had casually discussed this question—there were two Sir Roberts Peel who lived and flourished together, and ruled alternately the realms of England, reigned over by the house of Guelph. They differed indeed widely as the antipodes in their policy, but both were equally consistent and remarkable in their career. When he cited Niebuhr St. Thomas as that authority, he would not be charged with pinning his faith to the opinions of one credulously erudite in these matters. A namesake—at least partially a namesake—of this great historian had proved, three quarters of a century back, that the best part of the early history of Rome was fabulous, and had scattered into thin air its long accredited traditions; but it had been reserved for the authority he had cited to go further, for he had proved that Rome had never been founded at all. Niebuhr St. Thomas had been led utterly to doubt of the existence of a Sir Robert Peel, by the preposterous contradictions of conduct and of opinion to be met with in his fragmentary biography. He (Sir Jasper) could not help saying, that for any one to record these alleged inconsistencies without coming to the same conclusion as Niebuhr St. Thomas, argued a credulous simplicity which might readily have accepted the legends of the Roman wolf and of the nymph of Numa—unless, indeed, they had fallen upon the true solution due to the perseverance and ingenuity of his learned friend.

"In fact, it was obvious that Sir Robert Peel must have been a personage entirely figurative, as some have even thought the two feminine politicians of that day—the Mrs. Harris and the Mrs. Gamp—to have been; it was obvious that there could never have been any, or that there must have been two Sir Roberts; and this inference, which common sense dictated, was triumphantly borne out by documents which the unremitting zeal of the historian in question had brought to light. He had discovered a pamphlet entitled "The National Debt productive of National Prosperity," published in 1780, by one Robert Peel.

"In 1778, the birth of that Sir Robert Peel who passed the abolition of the corn laws is recorded. Now he (Sir Jasper) submitted to the members of that House, whether the statesman alluded to could have written a pamphlet on the national debt, or on any other subject eight years before he was born?

"It may be said, that Robert Peel, or, Mr. Robert Peel, might easily be a distinct character from Sir Robert Peel; but he could prove that both these personages were called indifferently Mr. Robert or Sir Robert.

"From 1802 to 1820, we have positive proof that the author of the pamphlet sat in the British Parliament on many occasions as Sir Robert Peel; we know it was he, because he makes allusion to that work as his own. Now, in 1809, we find the other Peel called in parliament Mr. Peel, and on other occasions Sir Robert. Both had pursued a consistent and honourable career.

"Now, if the organ of the opposition compared him to the Sir Robert No. 1—the upright and able advocate of conservative institutions, he could but assure that House that he (Sir Jasper) took no umbrage at the comparison. If, on the other hand, he was likened to the Sir Robert No. 2—the ardent and consistent promoter, through a long life, of every liberal measure, and above all, the author of that great principle of free trade from which the United Monarchies had sprung—then he confessed that he felt flattered by the distinction.

"The fact was that Providence, to further its inscrutable designs, had raised up, at that critical period, two men eminently fitted to meet the wants of their century—the one to give that impulse in the career of progress and civilisation which had led to the fraternisation of so many races—the other, by incessant opposition, to act as a sort of drag on the impetuosity of the first, steadying thereby the progress of the nation and averting the danger of its headlong rapidity.

"It so happened that they rejoiced in the same name. Now they might compare him to either of these remarkable characters; he might be likened either to that Peel, the indefatigable conservative champion, from whose name he (Sir Jasper) was informed. that the vulgar expression of "peeling," or taking off the coat to fight was derived, or from the great reformer Peel, whose patronymic had equally enriched our language, to Peel having become synonymous with to redress an abuse, whence—as philologists would readily understand—re-peel or re-peal its further redress or abolition. He might even be compared to both these distinguished politicians collectively, because he dared flatter himself that Providence had intrusted to him a mission comprising that of both of them; but to lump these individuals together, and compound an imaginary inconsistency for the purpose of saddling it on a political adversary, exhibited either an assurance more unblushing, or an ignorance more profound than he would have dared to charge on any political opponent.

"He had but one word more to say—if there had been any point in the allusion which he had just dissected—what could there possibly be in common between a period comparatively barbarous and our own—a period in which every reform threatened the fundamental laws of society, and perilled the sacred rights of property, and our civilised era in which even the greatest changes—rendered necessary by the spirit of the time—tended only to their confirmation; for he took this opportunity of reminding honourable gentlemen that the solemn recognition of the inviolability of these rights would accompany the measure submitted to their notice."

This announcement of Sir Jasper was received with loud cheers by every one but Invective Rabid, and his partisans, for though having abandoned Middleman Cautious to side with the now more liberal minister, he felt galled at the implied assurance that the interests of the monied classes would still be in principle alone considered.

Besides this, since Lord Lofty had broken the ice for him, the democratic leader habitually indulged in extemporaneous rejoinder and reply.

"Invective Rabid had no intention," he said "of disputing the view taken of Sir Robert Peel's character by the ministerial leader; but whilst on the one hand it appeared to him that the individual who had been one or many times wrong, and who had one or many times acknowledged it, was undeniably preferable to the man who had never come to a sense of his error—on the other he must join issue with Sir Jasper, both as to his etymology and his facts. He was credibly informed—and he, too, had spoken from authority—an authority which he had consulted, he believed, in the same manner as the two learned speakers—for the occasion—that the true derivation of the word repeal was wholly different from that attributed to it by Niebuhr St. Thomas, who, if he only outlived Sir Jasper, would some day bamboozle the world into the belief that that minister himself had been a fictitious character.

"Re-peel, or re-peal, as his informant proved, was actually derived from the proper name of

Peel, as borne by that political celebrity, Sir Robert.

" 'To peel' in the first instance meant to change opinions from black to white, or in vulgar phraseology to 'turn one's coat,' and in thus far the honourable member who had just sat down was, no doubt, correct in supposing the slang term which describes the preparation for a pugilistic encounter, 'to peel, or take off the coat,' to have had the same derivation, since it is quite clear that every man must take off his coat before he can turn it.

"Now to re-peel or re obviously meant to repeat such change just as we say to re-heat or to re-call. Thus probably Sir Robert was popularly said to have peeled the Catholic disabilities, that is to say to have abolished them through the intermedium of a monstrous dereliction of his personal opinions.

"When about, by a like process, to abolish the restrictions upon corn, and to rescind the Union of Ireland with Great Britain, it was natural to apply to this act the epithet of re-pealing or peeling again. And this conjecture is triumphantly confirmed by the fact that the chief liberal measure passed by his opponents, in 1832, the abolition of abuses in the representation is never designated a repeal but mentioned as a reform.

"He (Invective Rabid) had dwelt on the derivation of this word because it appeared to him to furnish proof of the unity of the individual to whom Sir Jasper had been compared, and whose example, if that unity were established, would, he trusted, encourage him in a career which might prove conducive to the liberties and well-being of those masses, whose interests he seemed ashamed of having forwarded by the present measure—and whose condition, he (Invective Rabid) contended to be in the midst of the boasted progress of our civilisation worse a thousand fold than at the period to which the honourable gentleman had alluded so contemptuously.

"Sir Jasper replied, 'That the subject of the present debate proved that he was not indifferent to the well-being of the masses, but that whilst not only in word but deed, making manifest his wish to serve the interests of those to whom the possession of property has been denied, and whose lot it was to labour, he owed to the community at large, he owed to those who had entrusted him with their confidence, and above all he owed to the labouring classes themselves the declaration that he did not intend now to advocate, or at any subsequent period to support any measure ostensibly devised for their welfare at the expense of the security of property, its just privileges and paramount influence, because convinced that such a step would prove in the end alike hurtful to those possessing wealth, and to those without it, and though he had denounced as idle the attempt to argue a present and practical question through reference to a remote and uncertain past, yet as the honourable gentlemen opposite had chosen to take up that ground, and as a casual but public spirited supporter had chosen to argue on it, to that past he (Sir Jasper) would refer, to show—whatever might be thought of the present condition of the masses—how much more grievous was their particular state, how insecure the liberties of the whole community in those vaunted times of fitful popular concession.

"He would draw, always from irrefragable documents, a brief picture of the state of the British Empire from 1840 up to the famous Repeal of the Corn Law.

"From this evidence he was prepared to show that about the period in question, the lower orders in England were driven to eat the rotten marrow of bones destined to manure the broad lands of the rich. That mothers poisoned their own children to secure the burial fees.

"That in Ireland the peasantry by tens of thousands, impelled by famine, rushed upon the bullet and the bayonet in search of bread.

"That gentry and even royalty spent its substance in pampering fat pigs instead of fattening lean paupers.

"That the Parliament of Great Britain was so capriciously despotic, that when it met its fate at the hands of Doctor Reid it perished unpitied by the world at large, to say nothing of the premier's sentiments, who would have been in the minority on the morrow. That the Parliament of that period, or the ministers which it upheld, condemned the three popular patriots of Ireland, England, and America, to death, imprisonment, or exile.

"That Ireland's young hero and martyr, O'Brien Smith, was kept savagely confined in the cellars of the edifice in which the House was sitting, and at the risk of rousing in a body the eight hundred thousand

Smiths then (according to McCulloch) inhabiting Great Britain, and who, some years after, espousing the quarrel of the fair Penelope their namesake overran and settled the kingdom of the two Sicilies.

"That Frost, the chartist, was kept in penal slavery for the same offence as it forgave in the death-doomed Papineau, whether to reward him for having escaped beyond the reach of law and parliament, or because of the moral distinction which locality makes in treason, he, Sir Jasper, could no where discover in the records to which he was referring."

CHAPTER X.

A POLITICAL EVENT.

It was known that notwithstanding all opposition, the bill brought in by Sir Jasper would pass by an immense majority, and the chief partisans of old Cash ranged on the Ministerial benches, had already expressed opinions in favour of that measure.

Nothing was now required to render formal the triumph of Sir Jasper, but that the votes of the federative assembly should be finally recorded.

In anticipation of this event rejoicings on an extensive scale had been prepared, and to celebrate it the Lady of the Premier had that evening invited his chief supporters.

As these were yet in the house, the room was filled, with few exceptions, by their wives and daughters, amongst whom the Ladies Sabina, Floranthe, and Calliroë occupied a prominent position.

Each moved the centre of a circle, entirely eclipsing the Lady of the Minister, who, but for her station as his wife, would have passed in unobtrusive insignificance through life in the same manner that, without the profusion of her diamonds, she might have remained unnoticed amongst the brilliant guests she was entertaining.

The lady of Sir Jasper, though perfectly high bred and dignified, shrank in the indolence of her nature from the duties imposed upon her by her husband's guests. She was so apathetic in disposition—so deficient in mind, and so diffident of her own intellect, that she habitually deferred to the Minister, and would have made, what he esteemed an admirable wife, if she had not been tormented into doubt of the salvation of herself and Lord by an elder sister—a lady whose ill health (she was dying five-and-twenty years ago) and vast fortune had not a little influenced the choice made by the Premier of her unportioned sister.

This elder sister, who had been a quarter of a century expiring, without having yet accomplished that feat, imagined herself, as some one has defined it, "pious when she was only bilious." The wealth at her disposal gave her a very painful control over the domestic comfort of Sir Jasper through the agency of his wife's peace of mind, which she disturbed with persevering industry.

She had insisted on bringing up the adoptive niece of Sir Jasper, and this young lady, after several years' residence with her elder aunt, had been returned on the hands of the Minister's lady, with the strictest injunctions that she should carefully be made "to walk in the way of the Lord."

In the exultation of her heart, when removed from the restraint imposed upon her by the ascetic glances of her late monitress, the first request made by this damsel of Sir Jasper's lady was—

"Dear aunt, do send to the library for an improper book."

Such a charge had not a little contributed to harass the hostess, and her attention was so thoroughly absorbed in efforts to bridle this young lady's exuberant flow of spirits, that even upon that evening, dedicated to her husband's triumph, she scarcely played more than a secondary part in her own drawing-room.

On this occasion the two arbitresses of fashion had already, in a marked manner, withdrawn their countenance from the Lady Calliroë.

The Lady Sabina was reserved, the Lady Floranthe slightly satirical in her reception of Lord Lofty's daughter.

The Lady Calliroë had, from the first, proudly rejected all affectation of sympathy for the sacrifice she had made; she had identified herself with her new family, and instead of shrinking from the ridicule of their absurdity, had boldly faced it with an ostentation of their power; but keenly sensitive to any slight, she had haughtily resented these first signs of hostility.

Her self-possession was not even shaken, as the Lady Floranthe had calculated it would be, when her cousin Julian—the governor-general of Japan—made his appearance, though it was the first time they had met since her marriage.

It was not without some embarrassment that Julian accosted her; but though conscious that, to secure his present brilliant position, he had too abruptly yielded up her hand, his vanity had suffered at the sacrifice she had made, and was still further piqued to find her now apparently so tranquil.

The Lady Calliroë remained too apparently unmoved, even though an undefinable sensation of pain shot through her heart when the young governor-general joined the Lady Floranthe's circle, and became pointedly demonstrative in his admiration of her.

On the whole, however, a tone of anxious expectation, like that which may be noticed in a breathless audience when the curtain is about to rise for the last act of a deeply interesting drama, pervaded the whole assembly. If it was disturbed by the union of two former rivals—by the obvious schism now dividing them from the new aspirant whom they had so lately been caressing, or by the flirtation between Julian and the Lady Floranthe, this was only the bye play of the boxes which gradually ceased as the denouement of the piece drew near. The general interest grew gradually more absorbing as the hour approached, which it had been judged would be decisive; and the first member who abandoned his post to bring intelligence of the progress of the debate, appeared welcome as the dove to the inmates of the ark.

The Lady Floranthe could not, for one moment, monopolise him, and though he had come in her honour, the guests of the premier's lady would not wait to have the intelligence he brought interpreted even through her lips.

Though all were convinced beforehand of the result of their enquiries—though the solution of the political problem that evening was certain; and though the manner of its solution was past doubt—still the parliamentary truant was overwhelmed with questions spoken almost in a breath.

It was true, that even though virtually decided, there was still an imposing solemnity about the act which was to overturn the long ascendancy of the wealthy oligarchy, scattering the elements from which each party hoped to construct a political edifice suited to its views.

In reply to these questions, the member made answer,

"That in consequence of unavoidable delay, the votes of the House had not yet been taken, but that when he left, John Cash, whose speech it was understood would wind up the debate, was on his legs—that he had commenced his speech by avowing himself (as every one expected) in favour of the proposed measure. From these data they might judge how long it would be before the great bill which would immortalise Sir Jasper, would become the law of the United Monarchies; and, in fact, this event would be instantaneously announced to them by the roar of cannon, for on all the surrounding heights—on the Montmartre and the Montrouge, the gunners were waiting now with lighted match."

Then followed congratulations to the premier's lady, conjecture as to the amount of the majority, and then another lengthened interval of silent suspense. The guests began to range themselves to receive the triumphant minister, but still the cannon was silent.

At length, the outer door opened—no announcement was made, but a step too hurried and heavy to be that of the well—trained attendants, traversed the ante-room, and Sir Jasper himself burst in amongst them.

He was deadly pale; his eyes were haggard—his knees bent under him, and he directed his steps hither and thither, like one confused and giddy, amongst the astonished crowd whom he pushed aside with his arm.

At length, he flung himself upon an ottoman, and compressing his brow with his palms as if to contain the distending brain—uttered incoherent sounds, and groaned aloud—a pitiable spectacle.

Was the minister seized with sudden illness? had the mind given way, and was he stricken by a terrible aberration of intellect in the very hour of triumph? All was confusion in a moment—some ran to summon the family physician—some deluged him with refreshing perfumes, whilst fair hands supported him and felt his pulse enquiringly, and chafed his throbbing temples.

His terrified wife exclaiming "that he was a sinful creature, that we were sinful creatures all," fell down upon her knees and prayed aloud.

Sir Jasper still only muttered unintelligible sounds, and glared vacantly around him.

This scene had not occupied three minutes when Eustatius Cash and Lord Lofty made their appearance quite as unceremoniously. Both were deeply agitated—both were pale—and the lip of the senator quivered so as to impede his utterance.

"We have no hand, no participation in this," he exclaimed at length, appealing, as it were, from the insensible minister to his lady still upon her knees, and then in bewilderment to the astounding group surrounding them.

"Our faith—our inviolable faith is plighted to our leader."

"Against all—and every one," said Eustatius, seizing his wife's hand, "come, Calliroë, let us exonerate ourselves, and declare our fidelity to Sir Jasper."

"No," said the Lady Calliroë, coldly, "why should I use deceit?"

"Good God!" exclaimed the husband, "do you know what has taken place?"

"I can surmise, I was forewarned" said the Lady Calliroë, "and I know that it is unmeet that we should trespass farther on the hospitality of Sir Jasper's lady."

"Stay," whispered the husband, "you will ruin our position if we do not disconnect ourselves from this rashness."

"Will you call my carriage?" replied the wife aloud, composedly to a by-stander.

"My child," whispered Lord Lofty, eagerly, "I implore you, do not retire."

"It would not be decent for me to remain."

"Not with your father?"

"You have given me another family."

"But your husband commands."

"I obey his injunction who commands my husband."

"What has happened," asked the Lady Floranthe, for the third time, of one of the partisans of Sir Jasper, who were now crowding in.

"An event—the most strange—the most unaccountable—a treachery the most perfidious—the bill is lost by a large majority. John Cash has opposed it."

"Impossible!" said the first member who was introduced to the attention of the reader. "I saw him on his legs, and I heard him express his full concurrence in the expediency and justice of its principle."

"He did," replied the last speaker, "with his quaint, plain, vulgar, hard-spoken rhetoric, he gave us fresh and indisputable reasons why it should be passed; he brought forth startling facts respecting the progress of the scarcity and showed the necessity of disposing of the agitation occasioned by the question before the house, to be enabled to meet and provide for that emergency. There was no doubt he said that the present law must be repealed—it would be repealed before another week went over their heads, as sure as God made little apples. He was pledged together with those who reposed confidence in him to aid in its abolition, but he thought that they would agree with him that it was fraught with danger if introduced under the auspices of one who having once turned coat and broken faith with his order could not be trusted by men of capital. He would not confide in him for one. He was pledged, and so were those with him to support the bill, but not to do so that night, and he should vote against it, now and at all times when introduced by Sir Jasper, towards whom he entertained the most friendly personal feeling, but whom, politically speaking, he would not trust the length of his foot. As for the bill, he had as large a stake as any body in the state, he should be glad himself to introduce it, but that night he opposed it, with this reservation that he at the same time begged the House to understand his objection to be directed not against the measure but against the man. Nothing could exceed the uproar occasioned by this announcement, but startled as they were, the followers of Cash voted with him to a man, the party of Middleman Cautious made common cause with him, and worst and most fatal, a large number of the magnates seem disposed to take part against Sir Jasper, and to see in old Cash the true Conservative."

"How has my lord voted?" asked the Lady Sabina, inwardly prepared to blame him either way.

"He did not vote at all," replied the member, "but you see that it is thus war to the knife. Sir Jasper—poor Sir Jasper—must rally to-morrow, or old Cash must become—it may sound strange—but by Heavens! he must become himself the Premier of the United Monarchies."

"Old Cash, the rag and bottle-merchant, Premier!" said the Lady Floranthe with a laugh began in natural mirth, and concluding in a forced termination.

At this moment the Lady Calliroë made a dignified courtesy to the wife of the minister, who now having risen, though still bewildered, replied,

"We are all miserable sinners, but indeed I have slipped tracts into all his papers and dispatches."

The daughter-in-law of the millionary then, leaving her father and her husband in attendance on Sir Jasper, made her way through the company to the door, bowing haughtily to the Ladies Sabina and Floranthe, the latter of whom said ironically,

"Dear Lady Calliroë, the daughter of the

Minister that is to be will not refuse us her protection!"

"You at all times command me as you may would a daughter," and with this reply so cutting to the juvenile pretensions of the Lady Floranthe, she moved onwards.

Seeing her alone her cousin Julian flew to offer her his hand according to the respectful ceremonial of that day.

"No," said the Lady Calliroë, "to the rejection of my hand, you owe your present office, do not now peril your governor-generalship by proffering me yours, for Sir Jasper is still Minister to-night, and he may yet be so the whole day to-morrow."

CHAPTER XI.

BENEVOLENCE.

It was night-fall when a man, wrapped in a cloak, rung at one of the bells of a private building, whose light and unprisonlike architecture contrasted strangely with its heavily barred windows.

Over the porch of this edifice, on a small marble slab, its destination was recorded in unostentatious characters.

"hospital for the reception of insane patients. founded a. d. 1880, by voluntary and anonymous contributions."

This individual was of middle age and powerful stature. His head was large, his features prominent, and, at first glance, seemingly weather-beaten, but, on close inspection, rather scarred and swollen by the habitual distortion of intemperance and passion. Their expression bespoke a boastful hardihood and recklessness mixed up with a certain amount of vindictiveness and cunning, relieved by an occasional dash of frankness and good-nature. To the eye of the physiognomist they might have seemed to denote a nature, whose gross sensuality was incessantly struggling with its intellectual tendencies, and a mere creature of impulse probably for good or evil exactly what circumstance had made him.

He was about to pass by the attendant who admitted him as one accustomed to the ways of the place, when he stumbled on the principal of the establishment, whose reception of him was at once cordial and respectful.

"What, come as usual to see my patient?"

"I would not willingly miss seeing him for a day. His case deeply interests me; do you still think it to be a bad one?"

"Incurable," replied the principal with a grave shake of the head, "but he is more tractable I am told since you have kindly taken him in hand."

"I am not quite disinterested," said the stranger. "He is an admirable numismatist. I amuse my leisure by collecting coins, and the employment which diverts the thoughts of the poor youth from his mania, is of the greatest utility to me in my pursuit."

"Ah!" said the principal, an easy good-humored man. "I have been a collector too, sir, in my time—a conchologist—but one day I was introduced to a brother-collector, who invited me to visit his 'cabinet.' It was a very extensive one, fitted with thirteen hundred little mahogany drawers, each labelled with forty Greek names, and divided into as many compartments. They were filled with horse-chesnuts picked up during half a century by the old gentleman in the gardens of the Tuilleries, and classified according to their peculiar grain into fifty-two thousand distinct varieties. I went home in profound disgust and threw my shells out of window, vowing never in future to collect anything but wines—will you be tempted now, sir, to try with how much judgment?"

"Not to-night, my worthy friend, time presses, I must not disappoint my protégé; will you be good enough to order that I have at all times access to him."

"Undoubtedly," replied the principal, "I am proud to make the exception in your favour. Though it is against general orders—I am sure that your benevolent hobby could give nothing but satisfaction to the chief—or really for ought I know, the sole contributor to this institution."

"Nevertheless you will singularly oblige me by not acquainting him with the matter; I have reasons for it."

"You shall be obeyed. I understand you sir—political differences—unwillingness to interfere with the secret charities of an opponent. Why sir, people say we live in an age of iron; but there is more benevolence in the world than it gives itself credit for. How beautiful is the unassuming charity which anonymously supports this establishment—how easily and comfortably its whole machinery works in the absence of prying contributors, who on the strength of a trumpery subscription meddle inquisitively with everything—and how very touching it is to know that under the rose, two men opposed to each other in those politics which are supposed to absorb all their attention, devote their substance or their time to further the laudable objects of this institution."

"And how fortunate that they should have so discreet and valuable a coadjutor as yourself. But I must go to my Numismatist. Good night, Doctor."

The stranger, no other than the politician of the Champs Élysées was ushered into an apartment in which a youth was seated writing. That youth was Tempest, who rose to give him welcome.

"I am almost prepared for you."

"Already!" said the stranger, glancing with surprise at the papers handed to him.

"I have worked without intermission since yesterday," replied Tempest, "when my attendant was satisfied that I had retired to rest, I rose again to my task."

Without a word the stranger sat down and carefully ran through the documents. Here and there his eye brightened, and sometimes an expression of assent or admiration seemed to burst involuntarily from him; when he had concluded he said—

"You have nobly redeemed your pledge. This is truly a wonderful production, as powerful as marvellously rapid. At least," he continued, modifying the first enthusiasm of his praise, "these notes contain thoughts and passages which, judiciously selected and adapted, ought be turned to great account. Unhappily I come to announce to you a startling fact, which reduces all this to inutility. Sir Jasper has succumbed, and John Cash is this day Premier of the United Monarchies."

"Indeed," said Tempest calmly. "I am not surprised. Did not I tell you that he might possibly become the master of the world? Did not I tell you that the interests of humanity were identified with mine against him?" And then taking the papers he tore into shreds, the fruits of his labours, observing quietly—

"But in that case these have been lost time; we must begin again."

CHAPTER XII.

A FRIEND IN NEED.

Tempest after being rather identified than examined, had been removed to a lunatic asylum.

He had been asked, for form sake, by a grave doctor, a few questions, to which, mad or sane it would have been difficult for him to have given satisfactory answers, seeing that they related to the topography of Paris, with which he had never been acquainted.

In all the vigour of youth, and in all the consciousness of mental superiority, he had been unable to devise any means even to disprove the intellectual deficiency attributed to him. The account he had given of himself and of the malicious motive which had led to his incarceration, had only served to confirm the impression of his mania; and this impression was further strengthened by the peculiar wildness of glance and fervency of speech derived from the solitary life he had led and the exhausting practice of mesmeric abstraction.

Conceiving that he was the victim of the same persecution which had broken the spirit of his master and preceptor, he judged that the measures of Old Cash had been too skilfully taken to contend with.

He resigned himself therefore, apparently, to his fate; deeply dejected indeed at the nature of this first obstacle to his career, and at the delay it must involve, but resolved to overcome and confident of triumphing over it. He did not underrate, because he knew from the experience of his departed friend the baneful influence of coercion, solitude, and the contagion of insanity, but to battle with it he felt within himself a persevering energy which time could not subdue, and which danger and difficulty could but augment.

He soon gathered that the establishment in which he was confined had been chiefly supported by the munificent charity of Old Cash, "whose unostentatious benevolence," he was informed, "had led him, many years before, privately to contribute to its first institution and subsequent prosperity."

He also elicited that he had been introduced there by this personage, as patron of the asylum, with a certification by the highest medical authority of the incurable nature of his malady, and the accompanying remark, that the mental alienation from which he suffered was hereditary in its nature, and, in this respect, dangerous and worthy of the solicitude of the authorities, that the hallucination of the youth threatened the existence of the founder of that establishment.

Hence, though no unnecessary restraint was employed, the utmost vigilance was exercised as regarded the custody of his person; and Tempest saw no immediate prospect of escape from these walls, in which he doubted not that, under a pretext equally insidious, the spirit of the old man whose disciple he was, had been effectually broken. And, in fact, escape from that building, difficult as it was, would only have been one step towards freedom—when the facilities at the disposal of his persecutor—the hue and cry, the electric telegraph, and the police—were taken into consideration.

He was kept usually in solitude; but books and even scientific apparatus were allowed him, and exercise, under the eye of a guardian, in a garden so carefully enclosed that any attempt to approach its walls, could immediately be detected by the vibration of unseen wires sounding a tocsin in the centre of the building.

Chance had, however raised up a friend to the forlorn.

The stranger, who had witnessed the apprehension of Tempest, determined not to lose sight of him, without learning something further about his case, which he readily devised the means of doing, when acquainted with the place of seclusion to which he had been conveyed.

It so happened that the superintendent of the establishment in question had formerly been under deep obligations to him, and hence, being wholly ignorant of any political motive for the detention of his patient, saw no reason to refuse his visitor access to him.

A brief conversation sufficed to persuade the stranger of the Champs Élysées that—according to his first suspicion—the mind of Tempest had no taint of that insanity which those who deal professionally with it are so apt to imagine where it does not exist, in the same manner as men whose avocation leads them into conversation with guilt, are prone to see a criminal in every man whose innocence is not presumptive, from his known antecedents. Shrewd, bold, plain spoken, and avowedly delighting in the detection of a grievance, it would have been difficult to have chosen a more eager advocate than the stranger; and persuaded that Tempest was the victim of some machination, which he might fling with startling effect in the teeth of those in the high places of the State, he took leave of the captive, with the assurance that, corrupt as society had become, he would find means to see justice done him.

The morrow passed, and he did not come according to promise, but on the third day had again made his appearance.

On this occasion, though equally confident, because the tribune and the press were indirectly open to him, he dwelt on the necessity of energy and prudence, and proposed that Tempest should set forth his own case.

After an interview of several hours' duration, he took his leave, sincerely bent on the exposure of this act of oppression; but as he came to reflect on the singular ability of his client, the thought suggested itself, that—fashioned by the tact of his own experienced hand—the versatile talent and rare knowledge of the imprisoned youth might be applied to purposes more general, and at any rate more interesting—than the vindication of an individual wrong by Tempest's liberation—to him who had undertaken to effect it.

There was, however, some truth in his allegation when next they met, that circumstances had taken place which had singularly changed the position of old Cash, and rendered more difficult the enlargement of his victim; but the plan which he proposed, of gradually assailing the Colossus preparatory to calling him to account for this act of oppression, originated in the wish to further his personal and party views, through the instrumentality of Tempest's genius.

It may be readily understood how eagerly Tempest undertook to devote the hours of his solitude to an occupation which, whilst conducive to his liberation, involved hostility to the great rival with whom he believed it was his destiny to struggle on the behalf of humanity and human progress.

It was equally true that when in the direction indicated to him the prisoner tried his powers, his efforts were not available without modification and adaptation. Junius resuscitated from that terra incognita in which his ashes moulder, to take a part in the politics of a succeeding century, would not have been more liable to sin against its conventionalities of sentiment as well as form; but the insight which Tempest rapidly acquired into the present, soon placed him in this respect on a level with his contemporaries, whilst at the same time the freshness of his style called attention to the boldness of his views and the depth and originality of his thought.

CHAPTER XIII.

MYRRAH.

It is an hour past midnight, and Myrrah thrones in the midst of her adorers.

Still in the zenith of her beauty and celebrity there lives no woman of whom fame has spoken so much, so variedly, and yet so truly. Truly, because her conduct has been a tissue of contradictions. There are but three points—her charms, her talents, and her levity—on which report is agreed, and of these without dissent, she is considered far and wide the living impersonation.

Her figure is tall and ample enough to give her aspect dignity, without detracting from its grace or lightness. She has a bosom fair, full, and marble-like, as that on which the Cleopatra of sculptors and of painters feeds the asp, a waist unclassically small, which the hands might span, and alternately—according as she chooses to be playful or majestic—the port of an Empress, or the step of an aerial nymph.

Her profile, like her name, is Greek, but relieved by her Circassian eye-brows and long lashes from that heaviness which, notwithstanding all their purity, so often stamps the lineaments of antique beauty.

The long, soft tresses of her raven locks, bound by a wreath of golden ivy, descend in almost fabulous profusion upon her beautifully rounded shoulders. Her lip seems to breathe perfume. Her dark eye, in its ever-changing expression, sparkles with merriment, or lightens with irony. Now, it subdues its fire into a glance of exquisitely languid softness, and now it wakens to a flash of passion or of anger ideally intense. Her voice is more flexibly expressive than her features.

There is no sound which its modulation cannot compass, and no sensation to be conveyed by sound which it cannot impart.

She is arrayed in a robe of deep garnet-coloured velvet, girt at the waist by a mosaic zone of precious stones, ingeniously wrought into the semblance of a serpent, whilst her wrists are encircled by bracelets which correspond in all but their predominant tint. She is surrounded, too, by the most dazzling colours, the most gorgeous stuffs, and by a profusion of gilding, light, and brilliancy, such as even the wife of the millionary can hardly match, but then her unerring taste has taken pride in blending into harmony, hues which no other could venture to combine, even as the sun-rays and the cloud mingle their glaring yellow, bright scarlet, and deep purple into splendour, without gaudiness.

In a word, though both her person and everything around her is voluptuous and warm, there is nothing meretricious in either, and even as with a bold glance and glowing cheek, she reclines at the head of her board, pledging her guests from the sparkling goblet she recalls rather the Divinity than the Courtesan.

These guests, few in number and select in choice, are all present, or former admirers, for Myrrah is a privileged person in whom everything is forgiven, and whose notice is esteemed as a signal honour, even by those who affect to apologise for resorting to her entertainments.

None but personages eminently distinguished by their rank, fame, or talents, are admitted to convivial intercourse with the sorceress who has at one time or other disturbed the heads of one-half of the public of the United Monarchies, and employed the tongues of the remainder.

Amongst the company that night assembled, consisting of about twenty individuals of the male sex, may be distinguished her former favourite, the young governor-general of Japan, who has come to gamble away his twelve months' salary by anticipation. Next to him is a very grave professor, chairman of the committee for enquiring into the corn-murrain, and who cuts as great a figure in the scientific as Julian in the fashionable world. On the left hand of Myrrah, sits the ubiquitous Lord Besom, a good deal dejected, because, after having so long plumed himself on being in advance of his century, he begins to suspect himself to be, after all, behind the spirit of his time. Bilious by temperament, and contradictious by nature—it is has been his pride to enlist under one political banner, and vote, argue and associate with the followers of another, but now he can no longer keep pace with the recent changes of party, which provokingly render him in spite of himself, consistent.

Beside Lord Besom, sits the husband of the Lady Floranthe, a middle aged personage, pale, sickly, youthful-looking, for his years, and upon whose inane features, the traces of long and exhausting dissipation are apparent.

Like two other of Myrrah's guests, his claim to the distinction of a seat at that table is not personal.

The spouse of the stately Lady Sabina, plebeian in aspect, dwarfish as a Spanish grandee, and yet of a stature more exalted than his intellect, is of that company, together with Eustatius Cash—who now, having quarrelled with his father, has nothing to recommend him.

Indeed, the actress has spared no pains to attract this trio to those renowned entertainments to which all the world are struggling for admission, where the versatile genius of this extraordinary woman joyously and spontaneously developed, constitutes both the attraction of grave and gay, and their apology—where men of the most contradictory prospects and views, whose avocations and opinions, forbid elsewhere all social converse, may meet and mingle, and where, by tacit consent, all that passes—unless the names of the favoured few—remains as inviolably secret, as the mysterious transactions of a masonic lodge.

Myrrah, in fact, considers the presence of these men at her banquets, as necessary to her triumph as the Roman conquerors, the display of vanquished kings and captive queens to the eyes of the Roman people, because she loves to feast her vanity upon the homage of these husbands whose neglected wives rule by their rank, wit, or beauty in a sphere from which she is excluded.

There is one more personage with whom the reader is acquainted—not least, though last, because, at this moment, known to occupy the chief place in the good graces of the hostess. It is Invective Rabid, whose overbearing manner, rude and impetuous speech, and repulsively coarse physiognomy, have once been both a motive of exclusion and the object of her remark and satire.

But Invective Rabid, both by the decline of the importance of his rivals, and by the sudden development of unsuspected powers, has recently risen from the position of a noisy demagogue, to that of a powerful political leader in the public estimation; and—at least, in that of the capricious Myrrah,—has almost, at a step, progressed from the contemptuous indifference, which he formerly inspired to the enthusiastic admiration which she now professes for him.

"I have now," said Myrrah, "a question to ask you all; but more particularly of you, my lord Besom, who are always on the right side, or, at least, on the winning side in politics; and of you, my friend, Eustatius, who are always on the wrong."

"I upon the winning side!" exclaimed the ex-chancellor.

"I know you pique yourself upon the contrary. We all disclaim our weaknesses," continued Myrrah, "but when so distinguished a Moderate transfers his intimacy first to Sir Jasper, and then to John Cash, this transition of the affections does look like an instinctive predilection for the uppermost. As for Eustatius, he has shown much commendable acquiescence with the neutral policy of his respected sire, when he might have made his own terms, by pronouncing for Sir Jasper, and he has quarrelled with the venerated author of his existence at the very moment that the old gentleman has become premier."

"But what change is this?" asked Lord Besom; "how comes it, Myrrah, that you occupy yourself with politics?"

"Not I, but politics have altered," replied Myrrah; "prosaic as they were, I abhorred them; but now filled with eventful change, unexpected situations, and dramatic incident, they afford attractions greater than the stage can offer."

"Do you think the conduct of political men more wise, more dignified, or more consistent than it used to be?" asked the professor.

"No; but more amusing," answered Myrrah. "I would rather see a vaudeville or a ballet, or sing in a new opera, than listen to the stream of sapience which flows from your learned lips, when you lecture on the corn murrain. I prefer, without hesitation, the diverting simulation to the prosy reality: but reverse the case; stand forward to the world as a dancer on the tight-rope—and I fly from the dull delusion to the entertaining truth."

A general laugh followed this conceit, which conjured up the irresistibly ludicrous image of the grave professor in flesh coloured tights following the avocation of the tumbler.

"But your question, beautiful Myrrah."

"I was about to ask," said Myrrah, "whether any one could tell me in whose hand the helm of state would be this day month."

"Why?" said the ex-chancellor. "Do you mean to turn courtier as well as politician?"

"No," replied Myrrah, raising her goblet, "I addressed myself to you and to Eustatius as to the two opposite points of a weathercock, one of which shows whence the wind does, the other whence it does not blow. I wish the name of the future premier, to pour this libation in his honour."

"Who shall dare venture to say—who will answer for a month?" said Julian, "there have been three favourites in one week, and I would take long odds upon the field against any candidate you could name for the portfolio."

"Well," said Myrrah, "nameless then I pledge him. If truth, talent, and consistency are to triumph—and I have faith in their ascendancy—I believe that these elements will rise uppermost amidst the disorganisation to which political corruption has led—then I know who must shortly hold the reins of government, and to this individual I drink—and call on all my guest to drink—success."

"A strange pledge, most imperious, Myrrah," said the Lady Floranthe's husband, "since you inevitably propose to some of us to toast an adversary."

"I cry you mercy!" said Myrrah, "I had forgotten your consistency, or do I not read in all your looks the modest consciousness that the description I have made can have no personal application."

"And what," said Julian, "if your nameless candidate should not become minister? For though it is hard to determine as things go who will not, it must be equally difficult by the same rule to say who will."

"I provide against such a contingency—not by that mental reservation, through which certain of my friends qualify their protestations of political fidelity—but by the accompanying stipulation that if any less deserving than he whom I have in view should fill the post in question, I drink not success but confusion to him, and so long as he will not make way for better men, hereby invoke upon him every evil that can befall the statesman. May he have Julian to take charge of his finances who has gambled away his year's salary, and who would stake his new government if it were portable."

"Amen," said Julian.

"May he have Lord Besom for a partisan, whom every one dreads more as a friend than as an enemy."

"May he fall under the ban of Myrrah's tongue," interrupted the ex-chancellor.

"Worse than that," continued Myrrah, "may he wither in the shade of her indifference.

May he have Eustatius Cash for a son, who never did a public spirited thing except to spite his own father."

"You are too severe, Myrrah," said the professor.

"May he have a murrain in his brain, and the doctor to preside a committee on it—may he have the husbands of the Ladies Sabina and Floranthe for partisans, and may he have for adversary, one whose patriotism has never wavered, where all around were changing, whose courage has never failed where all have been false-hearted—whose dormant powers have been roused by the greatness of the occasion, who has gathered new faculties from his country's peril—as a mother finds strength in the danger of her child—and who has brought forth in its defence, the unsuspected pathos of the poet, the skill of the logician, the knowledge of the man of science, the learning of the sage—the deep insight of genius into men and things, and the language with which heaven has gifted it to innoculate the minds of millions with its thoughts. In a word, may he have Invective Rabid for an enemy. Such is the toast I drink. The next time I propose one perhaps you will follow suit my lords and gentlemen, without calling on me for an explanation."

"Most perspicuous Myrrah," said Invective Rabid, rising, "your praise would call a blush into my cheeks, if Burgundy had not permanently as well as prematurely coloured them."

"In truth," said Myrrah, "I owed you a reparation, for a former ill-advised judgment on you."

"That reparation would have been more flattering still," said Invective Rabid, good-humouredly; "if unaccompanied by censure on my fellow guests, who though political foes are united with me at this board in good companionship."

"Why should I not speak what I think of them as well as to them, if they thwart me," said Myrrah. "It was before them, that not long since I called you a brawling demagogue—coarse in manner, mind, and speech—with the gait of a butcher, the voice of an ox, and the head of a boar. There was no one to gainsay me then, you would have thought that the reputation of an unprotected woman, was being torn, or that a weight calumny was being added to the load she justly had to bear already."

"And now?"

"Now, I trace the lion's traits in your features—his roar in your voice—his heart in your bosom."

"Well, you have modified your opinion, they have entertained the same and modified it too."

"I will never incur Myrrah's wrath again," said Lord Besom.

"I never refused to drink anything to any man or woman living," observed Julian.

"Myrrah," said Eustatius, "in your present vein, you seem to think us all unworthy of your society."

"No, on the contrary," said Myrrah, "I think the association most natural between a woman without private character, and men without public morals."

"You are too severe, Myrrah," said Lord Besom, "but as submissive lieges we bow to the chastisement without a murmur. As for Invective Rabid, for whom your fair hands have twined a wreath so enviable, I think there can be no one here—whether political, friend, or opponent—whether having entertained an exalted or contemptible notion of such talents as he formerly deigned to exhibit—who has not been astounded at the new character in which he has burst forth upon the world. None who can deny the extent and variety of the powers he has so long and unaccountably suffered to lie dormant—and none

I trust who will not as heartily add their tribute as I do mine to this ovation.

"I propose," said Julian "as an amendment to Myrrah's toast—anathematised be he, who bars the place of Myrrah's candidate, and may that nameless favourite be—whomsoever each of us inwardly thinks fittest for the office."

"That is to say himself. Yourself, for instance, Julian?" said Eustatius.

"Why not?" said Julian, "no man can tell in these strange times what qualifications he may or may not possess. The example of Invective Rabid realises the suspicion of the Hibernian who thought it possible that he might play the fiddle because he had never tried. Like Invective I may find myself out to be a poet, a philosopher, a statesman, and a man of learning. I believe we are—or ought to be—political opponents, but I beg leave to assure him that except in as far as my quarter's salary requires, I do not entertain any feeling—I will not say of enmity towards him, for I have none towards any living being—but other than extreme good-will. The man breathes not whose rising fame I would hail more cordially than that of Invective Rabid. He has never for years done aught but drain the bowl, rattle the dice, or roar out an extemporaneous diatribe, yet he comes out when least expected as a most proper man, puzzling the pedant and the statesman, and routing the man of science and the financier."

"And then," said Lord Besom, "of all the strange qualities he has brought to light, the least suspected was his modesty. Who would ever have expected modesty from Invective Rabid?"

"His life was an exemplification of its practice," said Myrrah. "He concealed his powers as the unvaunting soldier keeps his brand in the scabbard, till the hour of battle."

"In truth," said Invective Rabid, who, notwithstanding the brazen effrontery of his habitual manner, received these compliments almost with diffidence. "I am afraid I can plead nothing but culpable idleness. A sort of humble Brutus in my way if I have been induced to disguise the acquirements of early life and of my occasional leisure in a boisterous frankness—as the Roman did his patriotism in the garb of folly—it is because I feared as much to task my mind and memory, or to bore my neighbours, as he had learned to dread the Tarquin's anger. The occasion makes the man. His country's danger thawed the fears of Brutus. The people's peril has dissipated my repugnance to exert in its service the slender faculties I possess."

"All modesty is humbug," said Lord Besom "but those faculties are not so, and I do homage to their vast though tardy promise."

"If the matter were not personal," said the professor, "without any wish to detract from the merits of Invective Rabid I should beg leave to protest against the ingenious sophistries of his attack upon the theory of the corn-murrain."

"And I should beg leave to observe," said Myrrah, "that every one of his anticipations have been realised in diametric opposition to the opinion published by the committee."

"An accidental coincidence," said the Doctor, "on such the success of empiricism has in all times been founded."

"That is to say," replied Myrrah, "that after six months' labour—after examining sixty thousand witnesses, and after printing one hundred and thirty thousand folio pages of reports—your committee came to the stupendous conclusion, 'that wheat and rye did appear to be affected by a disease.' "

"And I am prepared to substantiate the affirmation now," said the professor stoutly.

"Good Lord!" said Myrrah, "why every man, woman, and child in the United Monarchies was aware of that before the committee commenced its labours. We did not want sixty thousand witnesses to tell us that."

"One cannot have too much evidence to authenticate a fact of so great magnitude," replied the professor.

"Then," continued Myrrah, "your committee sat for six months longer."

"To enquire into the pathology of the disease."

"Which had altered in every feature by the time you published it."

"And to specify remedies?"

"Yes, such as the following," said Myrrah—

"Remedy the first, when the symptoms appear in the rising crop, root it out.

"Remedy the second, when it appears in the garnered harvest, to stop the disease, thrash the corn and eat it.

Remedy the third, where this is impracticable or inconvenient, steep the grain in a mixture consisting of seventy-five parts saccharine extract of sound old wheat, fifteen antimony, and ten sulphur. Every sixty-four ounces of this composition will render sixteen of any kind of grain impervious to the contagion, or in other words, for every three pounds of good grain you expend, you may save one pound of tainted corn from further decomposition."

"Well," said the professor, "if not unexceptionable, these remedies are, at least, all efficient."

"And lastly," proceeded Myrrah, "the body of wiseacres presided over by your sapience, set forth a hundred and forty reasons why the contagion could never spread to any other sorts of grain, and why it was impossible that it could ever attack the farinaceous roots. Invective Rabid condemned these propositions collectively and individually, and the result of the last three weeks has shown him to have been in every instance right."

"To keep up the prestige of my modesty," said Invective Rabid. "I must confess the simple process by which I arrived at that result. I gathered all the opinions of the commission, and—considering that it had invariably been wrong—by taking their converse secured the strongest presumption that I should be right."

"This is making a buffoonery of science," said the irate professor.

"The commission has done that already," answered Myrrah.

"And yet," observed Invective, with earnestness, when the laugh at the professor had subsided, "Though you who sit at the loaded board may find matter for merriment in this corn-murrain, believe me it is rapidly becoming a subject terrifically tragic."

"At least," said the husband of the Lady Sabina, with a sigh; "we know to our cost, that loss is more likely to accrue than gain from a rise in the price of the poor man's bread."

"Loss is sure to arise to the rich man," replied Invective Rabid, "from all increase in the cost of the provisions of the poor, because he must, eventually, pay that augmentation. This—until reaching to a certain pitch and whilst the multitude were only hungering—might be an inconvenience only, but past that point—when hunger, grown starvation, impels the ravening masses—then—the inconvenience shifts into an appalling peril; and this peril, gentlemen, is now treading fast upon our heels. Want threatens to become utter destitution. The prospect is before us of a time when the famishing millions converted into starving wolves, will be driven by nature's irresistible law to break into your hoarded store and devour yourselves like shipwrecked sailors on a raft, who feeding on each other, no doubt select the fattest."

Here the glance of Invective Rabid fell on the professor, who pale and obese, became a shade whiter as he shrunk into himself like a huge maggot, contracting its length into width.

"Strange accounts have been received to-day," said the Lady Sabina's husband, with a corroborative shake of the head.

"Accounts have been received to-day," continued Invective Rabid, "suggestive of the wildest terrors. Your John Cashes and your Sir Jaspers, seek to make a mystery of these things—I don't. Truth is our first duty to the people; and you gentlemen, though you no doubt disclaim the soft impeachment, are a portion of the people: as such, it is no less due to you. We all know how formerly it was supposed that the universal failure of any crop was as rare in nature as a universal flood; yet such a phenomenon we have witnessed since, and now it would appear that we are menaced, not only with the universal prevalence of disease in one article of food, but with its extension to every organic substance. These accounts unhappily realise my theory, and prove that the contagion, threatening alike the seed, the root, and the kine, hangs like a dark cloud over the future of all humanity."

"Portentous signs are indeed in its horizon," said the Lady Sabina's husband, drowning the reflection in a copious draught.

"And before these signs," observed Myrrah, "Sir Jasper and Middleman Cautious have sunk into insignificance, and your fidelity and friendship have evaporated into air."

"What would you have us do?" said the last speaker. "I still hold by Sir Jasper; but the influence of John Cash rises and floats on the surface of each ascending wave."

"This day," said the Lady Floranthe's husband, "a deputation has waited on him from the Bank of Manchester."

"This day the city of Lyons has returned his unpopular candidate at the eleventh hour, and implores his financial aid," said Julian.

"By this night's paper," said Lord Besom, "the capitalists and cultivators of fourteen counties and departments publicly entreat his benevolent co-operation, to avert famine and ruin from their embarrassed population."

"For all that," said Eustatius, "Sir Jasper will get the better of him."

"Impossible!" said Invective Rabid.

"Or, at any rate, Middleman Cautious."

"Preposterous!"

"John Cash is the man of the age," said the Lady Sabina's husband.

"John Cash," replied Invective Rabid, "will overcome Middleman Cautious as easily as he will triumph over Sir Jasper. A true type of the force of circumstances; he may break through the factitious interests of castes and classes, but he must himself succumb before the majesty of the people and their imperishable rights—whose principle, if there be no other, I shall uncompromisingly uphold."

A month before this vaunting speech of Invective

Rabid would have provoked the contempt or satire of his listeners. Now it was received in silence almost deferential.

The fact is that a suspicion prevailed in every mind of the possible truth of his affirmation.

During the last few weeks they had witnessed every position giving way before the fortunes of old Cash, except that of Invective Rabid and the paper edited by him—one of the four great papers of the United Monarchies—had within that time so singularly increased in merit, popularity, and importance, that it seemed not wholly improbable that these two men might be arrayed against each other as the representatives of the two parties which would have swamped all others.

"At all events," said the Doctor, after a long pause, "admitting the extent of the calamity—and I admit nothing, till the committee over which I have the honour of presiding has reported on it—it is a satisfaction that it must affect every one in equal ratio."

"Yes," said Lord Besom, "in thus much, that it touches my neighbour's grain and beeves, and your professional credit."

"I hope," said the little man, spitefully, "that it will at least include the palm tree, the coffee shrub, and the date, in its ravages."

"I trust not," replied the ex-chancellor, "though I have no immediate interest in those articles of produce."

"I thought you had estates on the borders of the Sahara."

"So I have; but I have given up the cultivation of anything on them but food for my negro tenantry. "

"From an ill-judged philanthropy?"

"No; on economical grounds. My negroes multiply—my estates have never paid as well. I trust to their spontaneous produce; and I send out whites to gather it."

"Spontaneous produce, and send out whites to gather it! why what is the use of your black tenantry then?" asked the Doctor.

"My negro tenantry is everything," replied Lord Besom, "considering that the spontaneous produce I allude to is negro wool—a valuable and beautiful article, indelible in colour. My negroes prepare their rice, bask in the sun, chew the betel nut, or dance to the tom-tom. Once a week they submit their heads to the shears, and that is all that I require of them."

"And their hair grows in a week?"

"Not naturally, but by the aid of cultivation and the hot sun of the tropics. Every ship that sails to bring home a cargo of the wool takes out a shipment of macassar oil, wherewith to manure their heads and ensure the next week's harvest."

"Well," said the professor, drawing a long breath. "The opinion is shared by several members of the committee, that if ever the murrain should be transferred to animal life, that it would become a ringworm."

"Come," said Myrrah, "enough of politics and of the murrain."

"You are right, beautiful Myrrah," said the professor, "let us change the subject to more domestic themes."

"Domestic themes! I thank you for the hint," said Myrrah. "Doctor, how is your lady wife?"

"What is the professor married?" asked several of the guests.

"You shall hear," laughed Myrrah.

"This is too bad," said the disconcerted Doctor. "I will never confide anything to you again."

"A politic premium on discretion! Know then, gentlemen, that the professor is married. His case is a singular one; he has been married seven years, and he is yet waiting the advent of his honeymoon. Shall I give you the history of his courtship?"

"Do, do," said several voices; whereupon the professor resigned himself to his fate, attempting to assume a serio-comic gravity, which soon degenerated into an expression ludicrously foolish.

"It is seven years ago since I became acquainted with the professor. Declaring that there was no other woman like me; he offered to place me amongst the stars, by naming after me the new planet he had discovered, providing I would let him press my fair hand to his lips. You seem, indeed, convinced that I am unlike all other women, I replied; for I do not believe there is any other living who could ever be induced to grant you the favour you ask of me. It was in this desperate vein of gallantry—ready to have disgraced all the constellations if he had been allowed to christen them—and stung by this rejection that the professor was called to Ireland.

"At a Christmas party he was induced, notwithstanding the gravity of his character, to lead out to the dance a very beautiful young lady. He was preparing to apostrophise her eyes when she squeezed his hand. Some personal allusion was made to agreeable partners; he added an airy common-place, about happiness and such a partner for life, on which, hint to his surprise, the young lady simpered, and then implored him 'not to mention it to her mamma.'

"It had reached the professor's ears that the beauty was an heiress, and his heart (for he says he has one) leaped immediately at this discovery of the sudden impression he had made. He drew from her the confession that her mother and brother would never give their consent to her marriage, because enjoying her income so long as she remained single; but at the same time her consent to privately to become his wife, on the express condition that the circumstance should be concealed from her family for some weeks, until she became of age.

"After he had made due enquiries into her fortune the lovers met, and were clandestinely united.

"They parted at the church-door with the understanding that he was to call that day as if nothing had happened, and he employed the intermediate time in penning me a triumphant bulletin of his success. This done and expedited—with a bland smile and an assured step, he walked to his bride's door and knocked. He was received, however, by the mother and brother with a volley of abuse, in which, to his utter confusion, the bride joined heartily, vowing that he had trepanned her into the marriage...that he was fat, vulgar, odious,...that she abhorred him, and...I believe he confided to me at the time...adding the epithet of muffin-faced.

"The poor professor was too glad to abandon his new wife, her fortune, and her family, and to resort from the exploration of the female heart, whose affections he had not the art of fixing, to the exploration of the firmament, whose unknown stars he could reduce to fixity at pleasure, and so from an unpleasantly warm admirer, he became, as you perceive, a most amusing friend."

"And has he never since seen his lady?" said Julian.

"Listen," answered Myrrah, "after three years of separation, the bereaved received an epistle from his wife, in which she expressed all due contrition for her former conduct towards her beloved husband, and begged to be restored (she was an Irish lady) to those dear arms into which she had never yet been admitted. Touched by this appeal, he resolved to forget and forgive, and repaired again to the green island, where a meeting was arranged at the house of a relative. His wife, who was an equestrian, was to ride over from Dublin, and James, the one eyed groom, had been dispatched with horses for her.

"The husband was looking forward with natural agitation, and the whole of the party with natural interest, to the meeting, when the lady dashed at a furious gallop into the yard.

"Before they could get down stairs to give her welcome... before the husband could help her to dismount, she had beckoned James to assist her, and there and then as she alighted on the ground, in full view of the whole assembled household, she turned from her astonished spouse and flung her arms passionately round the groom's neck, exclaiming,

" 'James! dear James! how I could love you, why did not I marry you instead of that odious creature?'

"Since then only three communications have passed between them. She wrote a second time to express her contrition, and her wish to join him: and perhaps you will tell me which was the most insane, the professor or his lady, when I inform you that he was unwise enough to refuse acceding to this request?"

"Unwise?" said Eustatius.

"Unwise, because on that refusal followed communication the third consisting in a living pledge of her affection with which she has recently presented him without his being able to deduce therefrom any pretext for finally getting rid of her since by rejection of her previous offer, he had forfeited all legal right to take cognisance of her subsequent misconduct."

"This story of the professor," said Julian, "reminds me of an episode of my very juvenile days, when reputation was first imposed upon me, which I have since discontinued endeavouring to discredit."

"Let us hear it," said Myrrah.

"You must know then," said Julian, "that I had the misfortune to spend two years of my youth with an aunt, and godmother, a lady possessed of godliness which has prompted her to attempt the redemption of many young souls from perdition, and of wealth so great as to have induced many parents to confide to her their offspring in the hope of securing for them her inheritance. You have all heard of her, I dare say, as the sister of Sir Jasper's wife. There was another lad with me undergoing the same course of spiritual regeneration, dull, cowardly, and sheepish, but in the estimation of my godmother a far more promising subject. I was not very tractable, and three fourths of the mischief done might fairly have been laid at my door, but he slyly contrived to saddle me with the remainder. He was therefore regarded as the Simon Pure and I as the embryo reprobate always condemned without a hearing. One day my aunt looked unusually austere, she lectured me during the whole dinner on the wickedness of my conduct, and the precocity of my vices, and at length informed me that a female with a child had been enquiring for Master Julian, whom she declared to be its father. I denied the allegation with all the indignation of injured innocence, but was silenced by an imperious wave of the hand, and the intimation that I should be forthwith confronted with the woman who was below.

"The good lady rose at once to overwhelm me with what she was pleased to term the proofs of my profligacy. Her favourite Elijah delighted at the prospect of seeing me in trouble sneaked down before us, and I stoutly followed. No sooner did the mother of the child set eyes upon him than mistaking him for your humble servant, she ran up and embraced him, saying, 'Oh! Master Julian, how could you be so cruel as to abandon me and this sweet baby?' "

"The effect of such a scene is more easily imagined than described," said Myrrah, "because the narration of any ridiculous surprise always falls short of the reality, there is a story I could tell with considerable point of some individual present in retaliation of a personal slight," and here Myrrah's eyes wandered over her guests.

"Whose guilty conscience smites him of you all, for of that one I am about to make an example?"

The guests with one accord disclaimed the imputation.

"Understand me," continued Myrrah, "I know well who and what I am, and so does all the world. Now I will not permit those who with this knowledge solicit admittance to my intimacy, and eagerly throng my table on nights like this to insult me in the open day. There is no one so great and grave in the United Monarchy who need fear to exchange with me that passing courtesy which Socrates might have vouchsafed Aspasia. There is no one excepting always a bishop or a husband in the presence of his wife whom I will exempt from such a duty. Eustatius Cash, do you remember being in the next box to mine with the Lady Floranthe, and turning your glass at her desire full upon my face as she dared you to it without deigning me a sign of recognition?"

"Myrrah!" said Eustatius, "I thought you had forgiven and forgotten that."

"No," replied Myrrah, "neither in favour of the gems with which you tried to obliterate, nor of the excuse with which you sought to palliate the injury, because you refused the reparation I proposed."

"That reparation was impossible to a man of honour. I am sure you would not wish it mentioned."

"You are mistaken," answered Myrrah, "I only asked that you should come into my box and stare as vacantly into the face of the Lady Floranthe."

"And who would dare listen to such a proposition?" asked the Lady Floranthe's husband fiercely curling his fair moustache.

"Any one," replied Myrrah, "you would dare do so by the Lady Floranthe."

"Believe me, I would not leave such an indignity unpunished."

"No doubt," replied Myrrah, "you would avenge it by behaving the next night in a similar manner, to the wife of Eustatius, if she were not under the especial protection of her father-in-law. But if I have forgiven the provocation I have not pardoned the excuse by which Eustatius sought to palliate the insult. He said to my face, that it was the result of a moment's pique at my capricious preference of a new friend to my old, and behind my back, echo has repeated to me that he avowed the same sentiment but with this modification. That Myrrah must rapidly decline—since she had transferred her preference from the patrician many, to the plebeian one, and since the nature of the courtesan had broken out in her choice of the vulgar Demagogue, Invective Rabid."

"I am ready to avow that, or anything you choose to affix upon me in the face of Invective Rabid," said Eustatius fairly at bay.

"Invective Rabid has left all retribution in this matter, to me," replied Myrrah, needlessly appealing by a deprecatory glance to the Democratic leader, whose equanimity was only ruffled by a contemptuous smile; "and what if I were to retort upon this dainty youth—the parvenu patrician—the baseness of his own origin and connexions?"

"Listen, Myrrah, your tongue is privileged, you cannot provoke my anger. My father's origin I admit to be, if not as you term it, base, perhaps obscure, but we live in an age in which birth has long ceased to be valued, and in which all real aristocracy is based on wealth and power, and on the refinement of education and association. Like all those here assembled, excepting one, my hands have never been black and humid from pressing the greasy palms of the unwashed; the position I occupy has never depended on the foul breath of a fickle multitude.

This is the distinction which separates me, not politically alone, but socially, from the champion of the vulgar."

"You talk of association," answered Myrrah, "do you forget the itinerant vendor, who fainted on my steps as you were handing me into my carriage. Who recognised the old play-fellow and cousin, with whom he used to make mud pies in the gutter of the lane you both inhabited, and whom he touchingly reminded of your childish games of fives, played for halfpennyworths of hardbake, with knucklebones of mutton purloined from your mother's store?"

"I remember it well," said Eustatius, irritated but not disconcerted. "You sent him to me, but I think the last anecdote related by Julian, may show how far assurance sometimes leads impostors in their attempts at extortion. The instance you are alluding to, would have led to the condign punishment of your protégé, had he not voluntarily taken service in the Japanese mine corps, where I regret to say, that his death debars me from obtaining the personal avowal of his falsehood, to set off against this ridiculous allegation."

"Bring in my spaniel, and let us have more wine," said Myrrah, touching a tiny bell, which summoned her attendants; "and we will drink oblivion to the past. If it be as you say, Eustatius, it was too bad of your pretended cousin—for he was a most ill-favoured plebeian-looking dog even when improved by the accessories of a peach-coloured and silver livery, hair powder, and paste buckles."

And as Myrrah spoke, she looked full in the face of an approaching lacquey, who, on this signal, let fall the spaniel he was bearing on a velvet cushion, and throwing his arms round the neck of the haughty millionary, addressed him as his cousin Tat, and began to sob aloud.

CHAPTER XIV.

MRS. CASH.

"So you are really little Jemmy, my sister Susan's brat?" said the mother of Eustatius, to a well-dressed but mean-looking personage introduced to the reader in the last chapter in a peach-coloured and silver livery.

"Why, bless your kidneys, so you are! There is the very mark upon your cheek where you cut yourself with the broken bottle. Bless the boy, where has he been all these years? Jemmy! Jemmy! Jemmy! my own sister's child—though you did run off with the change of that shilling along with the trampers, your aunt Bess would have been glad to see you back long ago—she don't forget that she nursed you through the measles, that she attended to your christening and vaccination, and all your other religious duties—she don't. Who would have thought of your turning up after so long. Well, it is in the nick of time, and I am right glad to see you, Jemmy—for as sure as I hope to be a blessed angel, I never thought to set eyes on you more."

"My dear, good aunt," said Jemmy, "or rather, I should say, your ladyship."

"Never mind that, Jemmy, all the world have their ups and downs; and it's a fact, that we have gone up prodigiously—but though we look down upon half the great folks in the land, flesh and blood, is flesh and blood.

How is it you did not show forth before? Did you never hear of us, for your uncle has feathered his nest along ago?"

"Oh yes! these last several years, I have heard of John Cash here, and John Cash there. People used to jeer me on my name, and ask if I was related to the rich John Cash. How could I ever dream that it was my uncle?"

"Ah!" said the millionary's wife, complacently. "He knows what's o'clock.—He knows the time of day—he knows which side his bread's buttered, I promise you. Why, how glad Tat will be to see you—he used to be so fond of you—and yet," she added, hesitating, "he is so odd, that there is no telling."

"I have seen Eustatius," replied Jemmy, across whose gipsy-like countenance there passed a malignant expression; "and he won't believe I am your sister's child—in fact, he sent me far over the sea, and may get me sent again, if you won't help me."

Here the nephew related to the aunt, his meeting with Eustatius on the steps of Myrrah's dwelling, how the truth had suddenly flashed upon him, the incredulity and persecution he had met with at the hands of his cousin—his escape from the colonies—his application to Myrrah, and the last vain appeal made, at her suggestion, to the good feeling of Eustatius.

"Aye," said the poor mother, with a tear in her eye. "Tat has been brought up quite a gentleman, and he has grown up ashamed of all of us. He cares no more for me, than the ducklings, when they ran into the pond away from the old hen. I suppose it's right it should be so—though, foolish boy, the gentlefolks, among whom he has been bred, can never love him half as well as the mother who fed him with her milk—who dandled him upon her knee—whose heart warms when she hears his footsteps, and who feels, when he only speaks kindly to her—which is not often—as one does on a cold winter's day, when the sun shines out. The fact is, Jemmy, that we have not been brought up as he has been, so that perhaps, he thought you vulgar, ignorant and ridiculous, as he used to do me—and that may have angered him—for I do not think his heart is bad. You must do as I have been doing this long time past, acquire requirement, as he calls it, and in time, we shall all set horses well enough together, I daresay. I have learned a great deal, but I have still much to learn for his sake—and if it was not for his sake, you don't think I would have foreigners, and companions, and gimcracks round me, or bother my old brain with a strange tongue, at my time of life, or worry myself with this smart toggery—though this cap is so tasty, and though this brocaded satin—which stands alone was made on purpose for me. No, no, Jemmy, you will still find me your homely aunt, who will do what she can, and who can do a good deal—or at least, my good man can, and he knows what sort of a life I'd lead him, if I was to ask him and he didn't."

"If you do not think that my uncle Cash will behave like my cousin, Eustatius," said Jemmy, dubiously; "I would make bold to entreat your interest with him."

"Never fear," replied the Aunt, "though he is master of the mill, I am the missus; so let's hear what we can do for you?"

"I would make bold to entreat you to persuade him to give his own nephew—your sister's child—a lift in life—a sum of money to set him up in business."

"To be sure he shall," replied the millionary's wife, rising. "I will speak to him this very day."

"But, dear aunt," replied the nephew, "how can I insure getting safe to my uncle? What if they clap me on shipboard when I quit your presence, as they did before when I tried to make way into it?"

"Dear me," said the aunt, "they would not dare do so; but stay—if you are afraid to go, it is twelve o'clock now, and my good man will be here before one; you shall stay till he comes. You need not move away from my apron string; but I am busy, I can't talk any more to you now, Jemmy. I have my toilet to arrange for a grand jollification at two, in which I play first fiddle. But you needn't mind that with an old woman like me—I shall go no further than this room or the next; and I shall take no more notice of you so long than if you were a dog or a cat. Now then, Smithers—now then, Madmoisellee Fillysee!"

Mademoiselle Felicie and Smithers obeyed this summons.

"Now," said Mrs. Cash, in a jargon which she imagined to be French, in answer to the pure English of Mademoiselle Felicie, "what of my coiffure?" and she then proceeded to rate her roundly for the failure of the last attempt of this kind. "It was all your—what do you call taste in French, Smithers?—stop;

I will look in my dictionary—g, o, u, t, gout—I thought it was. It was all your gout, Miss Fillysee. Pray, Jemmy, if ever you learn French, remember that if you say a man or woman has got the gout it means that they have taste. In fact to speak French correctly you have only to miscall things, and ask for one when you mean another,—if you wish 'em to understand a horse, say a shovel; call a game a jew, an oak a chain, a hat a chopper, a cabbage a shoe. It was your own choice Miss Fillysee."

"Madam," said Mademoiselle Felicie, whose respectful subserviency gave way before the imputation of such a monstrosity. "You took the feathers from one toque, and the flowers from one cap and the lace from another."

"To be sure; and a pretty thing it was even then. Why, Smithers, my son Tat has not forgiven me for it yet. He says it haunted him. That it gave him the night-mare. What do you call night-mare in French, Smithers? No—I will look into my dictionary—don't tell me. Oh! coachmare. It gave him the coachmare, Miss Fillysee, your last toque did. He said I might as well have had a chest of drawers upon my head. What do you call a chest of drawers? No—I will find it out myself. He said I might as well have a poitrine de caleçons upon my head."

"A Commode, Madam," said Smithers.

"No, Smithers," answered Mrs. Cash, "I have it from the book; and though there may be two ways of saying the same thing, I don't see why you should prevent one's making the most of what one knows."

The attire of Mrs. Cash had been not only determined upon, but donned when John Cash made his appearance.

"Well, Bess," said the millionary, "I see you are all in your best, you have not forgotten that the opening of your pet hospital takes place at two o'clock? I hope you have borne in mind the terms on which I am now with Sir Jasper?"

"Of course I have. Don't I think of everything. I should like to know what you would do without me, Mr. Cash?"

"Get another wife, my dear," replied John Cash placidly.

"I do believe you would, if I was to die before you," said Mrs. Cash; "but so sure as you did, I'd pray to my Maker to be raised up from the dead like Lazarus, if only to persecute you both for bigotry!"

"Well, you are not dead yet, my dear. But I suppose you have consulted Calliroë—is she satisfied with everything?"

"I don't know how she should be otherwise; it has all been done at her suggestion. The sister of Sir Jasper's Lady, after witnessing in my company that frightful railway crash, and discovering that there was no room in the hospitals, proposed the endowment of another by subscription. She hawked it about from post to pillar; she whined, cried, and grew abusive over it, she did everything but subscribe to it, as Tat says. At last she put down the name of Mrs. Cash, with a nothing opposite to it in pencil, and then, by Calliroë's advice I scratched down 'Elizabeth Cash, the ground, building, and endowment of the hospital.' "

"I know it," said John Cash, "and I have paid willingly for its erection. Its opening will tell well to-day, though they do say, my dear, that the least the wife of the proprietor of so many lines could do was to found an hospital for railway accidents. But who is this man?"

"This," said Mrs. Cash, who had called the attention of her spouse to the presence of her nephew, by making very intelligible signs to the latter to step forward, "this, John, is your own nephew, my own sister's child, little Jemmy, who ran off with the trampers from Marrow-bone lane."

"My dear uncle," said Jemmy, falling at his uncle's feet, as from the gallery he had often seen sons and nephews do in melodramas. "I am, indeed the little Jemmy that used to be."

John Cash said nothing; he only knit his bushy brows, and listened in silence to the explanations afforded by his wife and nephew. His thoughts oscillated between taking this scion of the house of Cash, by the hand, and shutting him up in the same asylum with Tempest. He would have been glad to humiliate Eustatius, but he dreaded to annoy his daughter-in-law and favourite.

In this incertitude he put a few straightforward questions to his nephew. He found that he had travelled much, that he had notions of business, intuitive or acquired, that he was of a speculative turn of mind, and that his present ambition was limited to the acquisition of wealth. These interrogatories being therefore solved in a satisfactory manner, he honoured his relative with a formal recognition.

"And now," said Mrs. Cash, "that you see he is our own flesh and blood, you must do something for him."

"What do you want me to do for you, young man?"

"Ask him for a good round sum," said the aunt, nudging her nephew.

"Since you are so rich," said Jemmy, "if you could let me have a small capital to set me up in business, I should be everlastingly grateful to you, dear uncle."

"Don't dear uncle me; I am not your dear uncle, though you may be a dear nephew if I were to comply with your request," replied John Cash facetiously.

"You know," continued the nephew "I might return it all to you in time with a thousand thanks."

"No," said the uncle, "I had rather have compound interest."

"I was going to offer it," replied the nephew.

"Well now, Jemmy, tell me, you want a sum of money, say ten thousand pounds, to speculate and make more of?—to make it ten times ten if you can?"

"If I can, certainly," said Jemmy.

"And when you have got it, are you a lad to take care of it?"

Jemmy nodded acquiescence, and grinned knowingly in reply.

"Then, when you get it," said the uncle, "take my advice and never lend it to a speculative nephew, because he might lose it all and never pay you back again."

"Well I never!" ejaculated Mrs. Cash. "Won't you lend it him—won't you lend him ten thousand pounds?"

"No, my dear."

"What an old screw; do you mean to bate him down?"

"No; he would be less like to pay me back a lesser sum."

"And you mean to leave your flesh and blood in misery."

"No, Betsy; not that either," replied John. "Come along Jemmy. Catch hold of my arm; your name is Cash; you shall walk with me through the Stock Exchange; that will be worth more to you by a long chalk, than ten thousand pounds, even if you had your peach-coloured livery on, and I shall keep my money in my pocket."

At this moment the Lady Straightlace, the sister of Sir Jasper's wife, was announced, and the nephew was led out, his arm trembling with emotion in the arm of his eccentric uncle.

"Well, my worthy friend," said the Lady Straightlace, when the first salutations had passed between them, "what has the Lord done for you since we met last?"

"Nothing particular," replied Mrs. Cash a little puzzled.

Here the Lady Straightlace groaned audibly.

"I have been favoured, as I humbly hope, with an inspiration of grace—a farther suggestion respecting what might be done for the conversion of our heathen brethren; it is contained in a letter of sixteen pages from the correspondent of the S. M. M. S."

Here her Ladyship read through this lengthy document, which consisted chiefly in censure on the European authorities and colonists, and in unceasing panegyrics on the native virtues of the heathens, whose conversion the South Ministering Missionary Society was struggling to effect.

"Now what do you say to that, my worthy Mrs. Cash? What do you say to these interesting savages?"

"Only," replied Mrs. Cash, "that if they are so very good and so much better than our people, what a pity it must be to meddle with them."

"Ah! but you forget they are cannibals," observed Lady Straightlace. "What does your good husband say? I am counting on his subscription to the S. M. M. S."

"It's no use," said Mrs. Cash, "he calls it the society for making mischief amongst Savages."

"Your husband is a profane jester, Mrs. Cash. Did you tell him that their mission was to preach brotherly love to Cannibals?"

"I did," said Mrs. Cash, "he bade me tell you that if Cannibals they must be fond of their fellow creatures without further teaching."

"This is awful," said Lady Straightlace, but judging from the imperturbable countenance of the millionary's wife that she was innocent of her husband's meaning, she continued, "Never mind. If Eve led Adam into sin it has since become the mission of wives to efface by their good works the impiety of husbands. We must associate together, Mrs. Cash, in some great work of regeneration to which we may consider the inauguration we are met to celebrate this day as a preliminary step. There is no reason, Mrs. Cash, why your wealth and the pious energy with which I humbly trust I am endowed should not suffice to forward one of those great movements which electrify humanity. Such movements have been got up by, pious zeal in past ages as many of my brethren inform me. There was even the great Temperance movement in which tens of millions pledged themselves to abstain from liquor at the suggestion of the famous what's his name, beginning with an M."

"What was his name Smithers?" said Mrs. Cash.

"Whose name, Madam?"

"The man we are talking about who made the people what-you-may-call-it?"

"Who made them take the Temperance pledge," replied Smithers. "It was first Mahomet and afterwards Father Matthew, but both supposed to be the same personage by Niebuhr St. Thomas, in the same manner as the Scriptural Japhet and mythological Jupiter are undoubtedly identical."

"Well, this noble association in works of piety and charity we seal to-day by the opening of our hospital for the relief and care of compound fractures and internal contusions—contingencies unhappily much multiplied of late and requiring in their attendance peculiar patience, care, and skill. I came to consult you as to the inscription to record its destination. Suppose it were something simple and to this effect:—Planned, built, and endowed 1907, by Mrs. Elizabeth Cash and the Lady Bountiful Straightlace—or by the Lady

Bountiful Straightlace and Mrs. Elizabeth Cash."

"No," said Mrs. Cash, "Betsy Cash paid for it, and Betsy Cash will have the credit of it, the inscription is cut and carved already. Hospital for the treatment of compound fractions and internal confusions, and my name and the date in small letters under it."

The Lady Straightlace bit her lip, though without the slightest inclination to laugh.

"Compound fractures and internal contusions," suggested Smithers, words which Mrs. Cash was repeating when the Lady Calliroë was introduced. Half an hour after the whole party, invited to witness the opening of the charity, were assembled.

Mrs. Cash was in high good humour, her disposition was charitable—she read the approval of her fastidious daughter-in-law, and of her still more fastidious son, in their looks, for both felt how much this noble use of their mother's wealth must tend to cover her many ridicules.

"Let me see," said the worthy matron, "let me be quite sure of those long words, ah! I do now remember them, the hospital for the treatment of———"

"Compound fractures."

"Compound fractures, and—stop a minute—eternal conclusions."

"Internal contusions."

"Internal contusions, ah! now I have it," said Mrs. Cash, quite glibly. "Hospital for the treatment of confounded fractures and infernal contusions."

The attention of Eustatius was at this moment diverted by the hilarity apparent on the faces of the crowd returning from inspection of the inscription, surmounting the portals of the edifice.

"You are sure it is quite simple?" he asked with some misgiving.

"Quite simple," said his mother, "nothing but my name, Elizabeth Cash, wife of John Cash, and the date."

As the carriage drove up, they found that Mrs. Cash had spoken truth, and yet in that short sentence she had contrived to introduce a mistake so ludicrous as to provoke the general laughter of the crowd.

The building was magnificent, and ample, the space before it crowded with carriages, banners waved over it, and sacred music was heard within. On its broad façade was inscribed in gigantic letters, the purpose of its foundation, and under it in characters deeply graven in the stone, though only legible within a certain distance.

erected and endowed
by
ELIZABETH CASH,
relict of
JOHN CASH,
1907.

As Eustatius turned aside in profound disgust, his eye, sensitively acute, caught sight of his father descending the steps of the opposite Bourse arm-in-arm with the hero of the peach-coloured livery.

CHAPTER XV.

RENUNCIATION.

"Well sir," said John Cash to his son, "what have you to say to me?"

"Shall I retire?" said the Lady Calliroë.

"No, stay;" said the old man; and his son reiterated this permission, which his wife had not asked of him.

"I have this to say," replied Eustatius, who was much excited, but whose resolution seemed to fail him before the cool, scrutinizing glance of his father, "I have this to say, sir, that though you have never honoured me by reposing in me any confidence, reserving that for one whose virtues as a wife appear to be absorbed in her duties as a daughter, that a crisis is at hand which imposes on me the necessity of speaking, and impels me, sir, to obtrude my unsolicited advice."

"Go on," said the father.

"I thank you for that permission. Emboldened by it, I proceed, though I should have ventured to assume as a right that privilege, as your son and heir—and as the only scion of our house—"

"That is to say, excepting Jemmy!"

A darker shade passed across the usually impassive features of Eustatius at this unfortunate allusion; but he continued:

"As such I can have no interest but the prosperity of that house; and, next to yourself, have the most immediate interest in that prosperity. Hitherto, I will not deny that, it has been both rapidly progressive and creditable to your foresight and prudence."

"You are very good," said John Cash drily.

"Sir," replied Eustatius, on whose eloquence this observation acted as a damper, changing his tone from pompous exposition to entreaty, "do not let us bandy sarcasm, I implore of you, at such a moment!"

"What moment?" asked old Cash, provokingly.

"A moment," said his son, "in which the fortunes and the greatness of our house is menaced—a moment which threatens to level in the dust the patient labours of so many years—a moment in which the enmity of all the world has combined against us, and in which that moral blindness has possessed you, with which the gods are said to afflict those whom they have predoomed to ruin. Listen to me, sir: you have risen to eminence and authority; you have taken your place amongst the great and powerful, but you are not of them. My education, my associations, and my pursuits have blent me in more intimate connection with those with whom it is impossible that you should ever cordially comingle, and it may be that I have awakened sympathies which have induced; for my sake, a forbearance such as may still be our salvation. You have a party, sir, I know, you have sycophants and followers numerous enough to have enabled you to turn the balance in the late political crisis. Middleman Cautious was almost minister one day, Sir Jasper our friend and patron was in the ascendancy the next, and in this uncertain contest of jarring elements, whilst each was baffled by the other a casual and temporary preponderance has permitted you to step into the place which they were struggling for. Middleman Cautious had no majority. Joined with him you had a majority against Sir Jasper and on the strength of that fictitious majority you are, according to our constitutional customs, Premier for the time being.

It is an imposing but untenable position. Those whose place you have usurped, whose confidence and esteem you have forfeited, and whose bitter enmity you have incurred, are uniting to expel you from it; but you may still make terms before it is too late. Our ridicules have rendered us already the theme of the United Monarchies in the midst of your successes—judge what a laughing stock we shall become when bowed beneath the indignity of inevitable failure and disgrace. There is still time, Sir, to reconcile these menacing animosities, and to secure a pardon and a position more unequivocal if less brilliant—I come charged to negotiate it with you from those who within one hour may be your friends and colleagues, or fraternising in irreconcileable enmity against you."

"Is that all?" said John Cash.

Eustatius was silent with vexation.

"Then go back to those who have taught you to fetch and carry; go back to those who are making a cat's paw of you, and tell them that John Cash answers to their proposition—nothing."

"Listen then," replied Eustatius, "I have fulfilled to the last, the duties of a son."

"Banding with your father's enemies and snubbing your own mother."

"No sir," said Eustatius, "repudiating his absurdity, and endeavouring to repress her ridicules, which he has so unfeelingly and indecently dragged into light. I have my birth for which to thank you, sir, and I might have been indebted to you for my education, if its nature had not been such as to render me acutely sensible to the contumely which your caprice has lately drawn upon me, but you will be pleased to remark that the position to which that education has raised me, has its exigences which I cannot, and will not neglect—and you will, therefore, understand how it becomes me, to separate my political identity from yours, if your obduracy remains immoveable."

"Pray make your election," said John Cash.

"I have no choice," replied Eustatius. "If you are blind to your interests, I must look to mine." And then addressing Calliroë, "but you, madam, have a choice to make—you, who do not vouchsafe one effort to avert disgrace and ruin from him, whom, for purposes best known to yourself, you flatter by such abject deference. You, madam, will have to choose between your husband and his father."

Neither the Lady Calliroë nor old Cash made answer, and Eustatius continued,

"At this moment—whilst I am speaking to you, the mene mene thekel of our fortunes—ours unless my forethought separates mine from yours—is being written on the wall.

"I have fulfilled my duty as a son. I shall waste no more futile efforts to persuade. I now denounce, and may that denunciation yet prove salutary!

"At this moment, sir, know then, that the sworn foes of a quarter of a century are united, the prejudice of castes and classes are levelled in hostility to your ascendancy. I come from a conclave in which Middleman Cautious and Sir Jasper sit side by side—where patrician and plebeian, where churchman and layman, where moderate and rationalist, are united in a common enmity, and gathered for a common purpose—your expulsion from the post you occupy.

"In that assemblage, Sir, the chief of your former supporters may be found; in that assemblage, madam, your father has a seat; to that assemblage I, your husband, now return, if not as a mediator between its anger and my father's rashness, to disclaim all sympathy with, or participation in his stolid ambition. You, madam, must, therefore, too, make your election; you must remain with him or follow me."

"Eustatius," said old Cash more earnestly than he had yet spoken, "beware; do not expose your folly to those who will kiss my feet to-night."

"Chimeras!" replied Eustatius, "what do you say, madam, are you prepared to brave repudiation by me—disgrace and ridicule and ruin, by adhering to a sinking vessel?"

"I have faith in your father," answered Calliroë, "faith enough to walk without sinking, on the surface of the waters. I would stand by him if I knew he was about to fall, and I am sure that he will triumph; you have my answer."

"And if I command, will you forget your duty as a wife?"

"To the husband who forgets his duty as a son."

"Enough; remember, sir, that you renounce a son—you, madam, a husband, by that resolution!" said Eustatius striding to the door, through which he vanished, as old Cash replied—

"No, sir; it is you renounce a father and a wife; but go on, sir, renouncing till you renounce your folly!"

When Eustatius had departed, the millionary turned to his daughter-in-law, and said gravely—

"I thank you, Calliroë. But do you know that he speaks truth? At this moment it looks like all the world against old Cash. Why should you stand by him?"

"Because I believe in you, not in the world; because I know that your success is the result of a mighty system, and that you are not the creature, but the creator of your fortunes."

"You have read aright," replied old Cash, taking her hand. "You are a bold and noble girl, and if the world be round, as they say it is, I will put it, some day, under that tiny foot of yours in pastime."

CHAPTER XVI.

A DILEMMA.

Sir Jasper and Middleman Cautious, burying the rivalry of years, had really met in confidential concert.

That night John Cash was to bring in the bill which he had invidiously thrown out when chaperoned by Sir Jasper, and both Sir Jasper and his former opponent had made unheard of efforts to crush him by their united influence.

The appeal made by each to his former partisans had exceeded the most sanguine anticipations which the previous conduct of their followers could reasonably justify. The chief political notabilities—the patricians entitled to most weight, and the moderates most influential, had for some time hesitated to compromise themselves in any movement hostile to old Cash—yielding only to the solicitations of their former leaders after witnessing the list of adherents to the proposed combination. In fact the financial shocks which were disordering the internal framework of society in that commercial and monetary age, had brought every capitalist into straits which left his fortune at the mercy of another, who, in turn, depended on the precarious forbearance of a third.

The thread of all these influences was really centered in the hands of John Cash, by a transmission so complicate as to be entirely occult. It thus happened that each of those regarded by another, as the arbiter of his fate—was only a puppet quailing before some unconscious agent, himself circumscribed by a like chain of imperious liabilities to a cycle, traced by the millionary's master hand.

It was thus that John Cash had so readily secured his majority, whilst the numerous and avowedly hostile gathering collected at the summons of Middleman Cautious and Sir Jasper, was a result of the consummate skill with which he concealed his own action on the toils he had spread so cunningly.

But this gathering proved, as he foresaw, barren and deceptive in proportion to its promise. Each individual forming part of this assemblage was attracted by the attendance of some other by whose will the independence of his own action was really fettered, and who himself was no free agent.

Though therefore an encouraging array of partisans gladdened the sight of the two leaders, the explanation which ensued soon discovered the fallacy of the impression under which they had assembled, and Middleman Cautious and Sir Jasper, when their followers had compared notes, each retired to confer together, filled with disappointment which they sought mutually to conceal.

Both had been rendered so acutely perspicuous by their individual failure as readily to suspect the deception they were seeking to practise on each other, and after some ingenious and protracted efforts to sustain these hollow pretensions, both simultaneously acknowledged the futility of the endeavour.

"After all," said Sir Jasper, "if we consider the low figure to which such of our partisans as will give us their unqualified support are reduced, perhaps we must admit that our united force falls very far short of that upon which we separately counted."

"We must admit," replied Middleman Cautious, "that our best chance lies in the moral influence of our combination on John Cash."

"Or in other words," rejoined Sir Jasper, "candidly avow that our most reasonable hopes centre in the mission of Eustatius."

"It is useless," added Middleman Cautious, "to disguise the fact that—whether separately or united—we can make no good and efficient fight. Our parties are like houses built up of cards, each supported by, and depending on, the other. They are good only for a show. I was deceived by it myself. I was never more deceived in my whole political career, and to this appearance we must trust."

"He will not dare to brave it," observed Sir Jasper, with an assumption of confidence which his voice denied, and at this moment Eustatius was announced.

His countenance betrayed some anxiety and alarm, blent with that expression of self-gratulation, which the inmates of a burning house exhibit, when they pause to contemplate their present safety, and the danger they have escaped.

"Gentlemen," said Eustatius, with respectful solemnity, "my father's ruin must be on his own head."

"Does he refuse all compromise?" asked Sir Jasper.

"All compromise?" echoed Middleman Cautious.

"I lament to say," replied Eustatius, "that he is rashly obdurate."

"Will he listen to no terms?"

"No gentlemen, he is mad enough to set us all at defiance."

There did not follow, as Eustatius expected, any haughty rejoinder, or any fiat of political outlawry against his misguided sire. On the contrary, to his unspeakable surprise, the two statesmen looked at each other in utter consternation.

At length Middleman Cautious ejaculated,

"Then the game is up!"

"The game is up," echoed Sir Jasper, "a malediction on him!"

"After all, he is lord of the ascendant," said Middleman Cautious. "So here ends our alliance, Sir Jasper, for I shall make my submission."

"Stay," said Sir Jasper, whose pride, whose former station, and whose personal hostility forbade all compromise of which he now began to envy his colleague the facility. "Stay; all is not hopeless yet. The banks, the public companies, the universities, the academy, the church, and the great bulk of the patricians are still irreconcileably hostile to him."

"What matter?" replied Middleman Cautious, "every man who has a vote is in his leading strings. We have found it out to our cost, to-day, and it is too late to make a revolution now."

"Well said," Sir Jasper, "I at least, will die in my harness."

"And I beneath your banner," said Eustatius.

"I thank you," answered the ex-minister,

"let us now proceed to see who will stand by us when Middleman Cautious separates his interests from mine."

Not until that trial, did Sir Jasper find how pale his star had waned. In vain he turned from one hesitating partisan to another—in vain, he recalled former favours and suggested tempting hopes. He could obtain no unconditional adherence. Even the Lady Sabina's husband, who had been delegated in most active, hostility to John Cash, took upon himself to waver, and Lord Lofty, his last hope, turned very ghastly, and muttering with white lips, something about family ties and force of circumstances, braved all the reproaches of his former idol.

But the fertility of Sir Jasper's genius, and the elasticity of his spirit, did not abandon him in this emergency. Though all compromise was impossible and though his position was at present irrecoverable the thought flashed, across him, of a means by which he might retrieve it through the future. He foresaw as distinctly as Middleman Cautious, that it was hopeless to attempt to triumph over John Cash. He foresaw that the United Monarchies would, from an Oligarchy, become a virtual kingdom, but forgetful of his own age, he reflected that John Cash was old, and he knew that his son—the inheritor of his wealth and influence, in whom, the hopes of discontent and disappointment would centre—was a fool.

On these convictions, Sir Jasper based his plans. He dreamed an opposition to the millionary, of which, Eustatius should be the instrument and base, and he the head and hand, and a few words sufficed to convince him that he would find in the son of John Cash a willing tool.

Neither when that assembly broke up, did Sir Jasper and Eustatius seem isolated, for though most of those who had any direct political voice, had seceded from the ex-minister's interest, the remainder—whom old Cash had not taken means to influence—were unanimous in their animosity to him; and far more vehement in expressing their feeling than the seceders; who, though now without hesitation, did not feel that they cut a very creditable figure in the course they were pursuing.

CHAPTER XVII.

JOHN CASH.

"No, I have no confident in the world, but you, Calliroë," said old Cash. "I once scouted the idea of having any; and though I have found such designs as I am harbouring oppressive to a lone breast, stout though it be, I should not have disburthened its secrets even to you, had it not been that you have understood and divined—untaught and uninformed as the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, who know the approaching storm and coming frost—things which disturb and baffle even my strong brain.

"I feel the want of some one, too, who can have no interest but my own, to whom I can unfold my plans—some one who can assure that my great combinations—sown like the seed and ripened into the tree—are indeed the fruit of my own forethought and daring patience—some one who can say to me, John Cash you have not dreamed that you devised all this, for I heard you say it would be so and so.

"I feel the want of one to whom I can reveal the strange agency which chance threw into my way, and who can judge how nobly I have played out those cards put into my hands by fortune, which might have led another——I know not whither."

"To the madhouse cell, or the pauper-pallet," murmured Calliroë, with a shudder.

"What," said old Cash, with a start, looking a little wildly at her, "what puts these things into your thoughts?—and yet why not? Why should not those who wasted such golden opportunities, expiate that neglect there or elsewhere?"

"It is true," said Calliroë, "that the world is full of misery and meanness; it is true, that you are progressing towards the mastery of the world, and that you can readily reform it when you have mastered it."

"We will master it at any rate," replied the millionary.

"But why not now?" asked Calliroë, "you have long been Lord of its bread. I know that all vast conquests entail great sacrifices—that tens of thousands perish in war—that millions have been transferred to bondage to square a treaty or secure a recognition—but why needlessly coerce? why needlessly make them suffer whether for one's own greatness or their eventual welfare."

"I am, I have been for years, master of the world's bread," replied old Cash; "but without craft and patience that power would have proved only fatal. It was John Cash against the world; and the world, which will be one day at his feet, would long ago have crushed John Cash, if he had braved it in the face of day. It must be bound with bonds that it cannot see—it must be subdued and held by patient policy; and he who subdues must not stand forth in its sight as its master, or he will share the fate of vulgar tyrants—the world will prove too many for him—mark that!

"They have built up a state of things," continued the old man, "in which money rules the masses. I have long had the means of mastering every man's wealth; but if I had deprived the staunch supporters of property of that property, whose rights they uphold so manfully, these makers of the law would, by some enactment, have undone me. It was therefore necessary to make money a means of mastering the law, and the law a means of mastering money. A fool, like Eustatius, or a craven, like your father, would have been crushed already by the weight of those treasures whose dominion intelligence can make absolute."

"Undoubtedly," replied Calliroë, "equal daring and prudence have been necessary. I like that word absolute—I hope it will be absolute. We have no business with power, if we mean to misuse it, and used well it cannot be too efficient. You bring in your great Bill to-night?"

"I pass the great Bill to-night."

"But how reduce to submission the elements of this oligarchy—which after all is a democracy of the few—without some eventful revolution?"

"Easily," replied John Cash. "I have a means infallible—gold, gold, gold—let me only make it safe, and the world is my own. It needs no other revolution."

"I can understand the potency of gold," replied

Calliroë; "but it has ruled before, and found limits to its power."

"Aye," said the old man, "but you forget that wealth has never been set off before like mine by the world's poverty. Now mark me. Without meddling with our constitutional laws—without overturning one corporate or popular privilege—by the sole agency of gold—I will sway a power before which that of all preceding despotisms shall fade into insignificance; for my wealth will be acting on a world which I have beggared."

"But," argued Calliroë, "if the age is covetous, and its oligarchy individually money-loving, it is not quite corruptible, and the surface of society is studded over with impregnable points of honour. The church, the bench, the army and the bar may not be tempted, and the venality of legislators has its limits, if only in their pride."

"Wait," replied John Cash, "till you see the prelate and the soldier and the judge—now sternly proof against the influence of gold—pinched by that total absence of its support which we call poverty—wait till you see the tempted man turn indignantly from the golden lure held out, only to rest his eyes on the necessity and misery of those dear to him, and then tell me what gold cannot do?"

"And is there none?" asked Calliroë—"none who can dispel this magnificent conception, making it like the vision of a dream?"

"There was one," replied John Cash setting his teeth together and breathing hard "but he is no more."

"And is there no other?"

"There is one other—your instinct prompts you truly—only one—who might cross my path—our path, Calliroë, but he is so far safe—at least do you not think he is secure?" And here the superstition of the strong-minded man spoke out.

"Who and what is he?" asked Calliroë.

"Nay, I can explain no further now," replied the millionary. "He may be a mere bugbear—I believe he is—but this I feel that unless he thwart me, the future is all my own."

CHAPTER XVIII.

TEMPEST.

It was midnight, and Tempest paced up and down his cell. A terrible conviction had forced itself upon him. The attendant who had come to see him safe for the night, had casually dropped a daily paper, an article which had hitherto been strictly withheld from him. It referred precisely to the day on which Invective Rabid had assured him that a public effort had been made on his behalf.

Of this he found no traces; but on the contrary discovered his labours appropriated almost without change by the daring plagiarist.

It was obvious, not only that he was betrayed—not only that he was without the friend he counted on, but that another bold, crafty and unscrupulous man, had acquired the deepest interest in the continuance of his incarceration.

What hope was there for him in the world? What conceivable avenue of escape?

He was still pacing up and down his cell when the booming of cannon disturbed his melancholy reverie. The cell door opened. His keeper or attendant stood before him. He had returned for the paper he had missed.

"I must make haste," said the menial, "to light the lamps—we illuminate to-night—did you hear the cannon just now? John Cash, the patron of this establishment, has passed the great bill which will make every poor man rich and every blackguard a gentleman."

At this grotesque announcement of the triumph of his persecutor, Tempest sat down and leaned his face in his hands with a feeling akin to despair; but after a few moments, his bold spirit, which had reeled before these prostrating blows, recovered something of its elasticity.

"At least," he reflected, "in the discovery of this treachery, I am one step further advanced than I was this morning."

But turn over his position as he would, he could find no other source of consolation. Such was the condition of the man whose image at that very hour, flashed across and troubled the thoughts of John Cash in the midst of the success which the thunder of a hundred cannon and the roar of a hundred thousand voices were proclaiming.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE INSECT.

When the wind sweeps over the blue seas—when it ruffles the smooth surface of the lake, or rushes with the gush of the quick river, wafting the humid exhalations of the waters far over the fair shore, it scatters no longer fertility and promise.

The boor in the rich grass of his fading pastures; the Teuton in his parched fields; the Iberian in his arid plains, and the Sclavonian in his thirsting steppes, watches in vain the clouds, which, sailing from the west, dissolve in genial rain. Better for him to welcome the locust or the blight; for the murrain is in that rain. It is sucked into the soil with each descending shower; it lurks in every drop of dew, and infiltrates through every artery and vein, invisibly small, of the stem, leaf, or flower of root and grain. The insect of the galvanist is in the third stage of transition. In every transition it becomes more minute and subtle. A single drop of water has been computed to contain a thousand million animalcules, discernible by the microscope, crowding and jostling each other—a larger number than the whole human population of the earth.

Let the reader now imagine an atomic being bearing the same proportion of magnitude to these infinitesimal denizens of a drop of water, as they to the human species, or as that watery globule to the terrestrial orb. Let this insect be conceived gradually insinuating itself into the most exiguous vessels and fibres, whose net-work transmits vitality to the extremities of the organic system, and let it there be imagined writhing and revelling like the monsters reflected by the hydro-oxygen microscope—curving its snake-like form into a bow, and then, through the projectile power thus acquired, shooting forth perpendicularly its hideous body, and discharging at the end of each propulsive movement its myriad larvæ, like a rocket bursting into stars. Let this progeny, matured and fitted to reproduce in less than the space of one human pulsation, be conceived to multiply till its multitude bursts the very tube in which it has been generated, and some idea may be formed of the progress of the murrain and of its destructive effects upon organic life.

In each stage of transition the insect undergoes a change of form and properties, like that which has been experienced by many species transmitted to our old world through a chain of extinct varieties, whose remains still teem amongst its early wreck; and only through these gradations to be recognised as connected with its primæval type.

But this change, in which days occupy the space of ages, is infinitely greater and more rapid, and in each transition, the insect grows more subtle, minute, and mischievous, because adapted to prey on more perfect bodies, or to impregnate more completely those with which it was already fitted to assimilate.

At each stage the murrain becomes more difficult to baffle by the antidote. It has spread from the grain to the root, from the root to the grass, from the grass to the cattle, extending thus its ravages from vegetable to animal life.

No corresponding benefits—as with the evils nature generates—compensate the destruction it occasions, but unseen by human eye, it works its loathsome way, a curse to all mankind, but one, who sees a blessing in this scourge of all humanity. Whilst John Cash in the applauding senate turns pale as the image of Tempest flashes across his thoughts, the man who in his cell can still strike terror into the breast of his all-powerful master, trembles in his turn—not before the fortunes of his triumphant persecutor, but in the contemplation—to which the profound discouragement if that hour gives rise—of the growth and progress of the Insect.

END OF VOL II.

VOLUME III.

SIXTY YEARS HENCE.

CHAPTER I.

RESULT OF SIX MONTHS INTERVAL.

Six months have passed away, the great bulk of the people, who have never enjoyed more than a bare sufficiency of food and raiment, suffer little by the scarcity; but those who live by the labour of others, whether great capitalists or petty farmers or traders, have one by one seen the accumulated fruits of labour, called capital, pass from their hands. A heavy but inevitable tax weighs upon the first necessaries of life, because the antidote to the murrain is quite indispensable to all primary articles of produce, as the guano had become, fifty years ago, to certain lands barren without this fertilising principle.

But the millions affected by this ruinous state of things are kept quiescent by the facilities afforded them by all the national and local banking establishments. As they have wisely not been driven to despair, and as the credit to be obtained depends upon the general tranquillity, they are on the contrary the most zealous supporters of public order.

As each man now depends on his credit he carefully conceals his circumstances from his neighbours, and all living on the indulgent forbearance of their unseen creditor, continue ignorant of the general bankruptcy and dependence.

If we now turn to that portion of society constituting the political world, we shall find that it has learned—after the rapid succession of events which half a year ago disturbed its long apathy—to view without surprise the great but gradual change which has taken place during that period.

Having witnessed, within the space of a few weeks, the alternate ascendancy of various political sects and leaders, the wreck and dissolution of time-honoured parties, and the appearance of new and preponderating characters in the political arena—men begin to regard the possession of power as legitimatised by half a year's uninterrupted enjoyment, and the respectability of an opposition as established by six months of consistency and continuance.

Nothing is changed in the external forms of the United Monarchies.

Their dynasties immured in grand, Loma-like seclusion still figure in public pageants. The federal assembly still meets and deliberates; John Cash is still premier and is still opposed, as all previous ministers have been, by a party in the senate.

But for those who look beneath the unruffled surface of things the whole constitution of the state is changed. John Cash, the nominal premier, is its acknowledged sovereign, and a sovereign about as absolute in 1907 as Louis Phillippe the first, of happy memory, would have made himself in 1846 if all his deputies had been sufficiently moderate in their price and equally venal and timid. Middleman Cautious is the real minister and devoted servant of this potentate, and though the opposition is not like that traditionally attributed to College Green, "All one way," the most chimerical of its partisans does not dream of any proximate majority.

This opposition, combining two distinct shades of opinion, embraces two distinct sections, the one presided over by Invective Rabid, and the other by Sir Jasper—in the name of Eustatius Cash.

It is now universally suspected that there are few individuals whose fortune is not at the mercy of John Cash, but even the most abjectly submissive of his followers do not forget that a day of illness may transfer the power thence derived into the hands of the sullen and vindictive Eustatius, and hence the weight of his position, though in open hostility to his father, serves quite as much to keep his party together, as the talent of Sir Jasper, or the fame and daring of Invective Rabid.

It will thus be perceived that Sir Jasper and Middleman Cautious have sunk into second rate importance, and that John Cash, Eustatius, and Invective Rabid stand prominent in the political drama.

John Cash is regarded by the whole people as a despot whose unspeakable yoke is hopelessly imposed upon it during his lifetime. Eustatius is approved by the democrats for his liberal demonstrations, by the oligarchs for the hope which his weakness inspires of some day seducing from his hands the power they dare not attempt to snatch from the grasp of his astute and energetic father.

Both oligarchs and democrats applaud and extol Invective Rabid as the meet adversary, and uncompromising antagonist of their common enemy. For as a common enemy both the popular and aristocratic parties now regard him, though both in their successive necessities had invoked the intervention of absolute authority in preference to compromise with each other, herein obeying the instinct which, perhaps to preserve religious and political creeds from fusion, renders them less inimical to adverse extremes, than to those shades of opinion which trench more closely on their own.

Statues of bronze are raised to John Cash on palaces, marts, exchanges, railway-termini, and in the halls of public companies; but the figure of Invective Rabid hangs in rude woodcuts on the poor man's whitewashed walls, or gesticulates in plaster of Paris, or in terracotta on the image vendor's board.

John Cash, in the popular estimation, now epitomises in his person the wealth and government of the United Monarchies, and Invective Rabid is looked upon as the patriot "sans peur et sans reproche," whose chivalrous advocacy of the right of the many against the power of the one, alone curbs in some measure its encroachment.

In truth, however, the millionary could undoubtedly both overbear all resistance and reduce his adversary to silence, only that his unerring sagacity teaches him, that a certain licence of speech and of discussion operates as a safety valve to the ebullition of feeling inevitable in a state of society still mindful of its former comparative independence, and he judges his virtual absolutism none the less secure because he allows those whom he governs to pull upon the rein by which he can at will restrain them.

Like many sovereigns who have preceded him—and on the principle of the Scotch Laird who had a son in each camp—John Cash, too, has seen the advantage of having his immediate successor in the opposition, if opposition there must needs be.

He had therefore done nothing originally to discourage this tendency, little suspecting the acrimonious feeling into which it would unnaturally ripen in one whose eventual interests were identical with his own. But six months have both developed and accustomed the world to the hostility of the father and son; and six months have served to habituate it to the final separation of Eustatius and the Lady Calliroë, who more than ever enjoys the confidence and favour of old Cash.

Mrs. Cash is still magnificently absurd, and has always the control of her husband's purse-strings, a privilege to which she owes the brief visits of her son, whose necessities she supplies with the profusion of a mother, accounting as she best can for the enormous increase of her expenditure, a pious fraud to which John Cash shuts his eyes.

CHAPTER II.

THE LADY FLORANTHE.

It is a cloudless morning and the sun beams so brightly through the hangings, that its light might have been deemed not sufficiently subdued for charms less susceptible of its searching scrutiny, than the beauty of the Lady Floranthe. She is besides prepared to face the full radiance of day, because attired in her walking costume for the purpose of profiting by its matinal freshness. But though unusually early, even for her to be seen in those apartments, she is startled to find her husband already on foot and sleeping in a chair.

The fact is, that not long returned home he has fallen in that position, overpowered by weakness and fatigue. His wasted form, his pale, attenuated features and their haggard expression, speak of the last night's orgie, and of a long previous course of dissipation; and yet, the poor wretch dreams that he has still the strength which he abused, and has fallen asleep in the intent of seeking the refreshment of a change of raiment and the bath before proceeding to a scene of fresh debauchery.

Mutual indifference, and indeed disgust, have long characterised the intercourse of this wife and husband.

By tacit agreement, and even by specific consent, both parties follow the bent of their own inclinations without interference, comment, or recrimination. There is but one point of confidential and almost friendly contact between them—that of their pecuniary and political interests. This is neutral ground, on which they meet with the cordiality of business partners useful to each other—the partnership of this couple being only in the weight and influence of the name they jointly bear, and in the fortune they divide with scrupulous exactness, and spend with perfect independence of each other.

Formerly the advantages of this association were nearly balanced. The wife was possessed of capacities which her sex prevented her from directly utilitising, the husband occupied a position which he had no gifts to enable him to turn to account, without her guidance. But time and circumstances had destroyed this equilibrium. With the subversion of the former authority of the magnates, the husband is rapidly sinking into a nonentity, whilst the ambitious wife, whose merits are rather personal than adventitious, is rising into notoriety and importance. Just too as he has ceased contributing to the common stock, and just as pecuniary embarrassments are gathering round them, his expenditure is become ruinously lavish, and his conduct so openly scandalous as to be humiliating even to the indifference of his wife.

It was with the increased aversion to which these considerations had given rise, that the Lady Floranthe was about to turn away, as we do from an object both loathsome in itself and from its obtrusion, from an owl or a bat in the broad day, or from a lizard on our drawing room carpet; when her attention was rivetted by the change which had come over his wan features.

A dark shade encircled the sunken orbits of his eyes, the hectic flush subsided, his lips were of an ashy whiteness, and his whole aspect, but for the troubled sleep and the throbbing of the deep blue veins, seen prominently through the transparent pallor of his temples, would have been that of death—death rendered more ghastly by the bright, warm, mid-day sun, which streamed over the distorted countenance and disordered attire of this victim of the night, its disease and its intemperance.

The Lady Floranthe has been long cognizant and indifferent to the fact that her husband is dying by inches, because every step he makes towards the grave has been a personal insult to herself, and an advance towards her deliverance; but still the truth placed before her in all the relief which this hideous contrast offers, has thawed for a moment the frozen fount of affectionate pity.

After contemplating for a few minutes, in painful silence, the ravages of a few weeks—for it was weeks since they had even met—she placed her fair hand lightly on his forehead, but even the motion disturbed his unsound slumber, for he started, uttering, mechanically the last words of the licentious, (or as the French have it débraillé,) toast he had been drinking. Then starting and looking haggardly round him he called for more wine, addressing his wife—whom he did not yet recognise—by the name of a celebrated dancer, as graceful in her steps, as graceless in her morals.

Even his first return to consciousness was not shown by perception of the Lady Floranthe's presence, so little did she occupy his wandering thoughts, but they were first recalled by the vivid glare of day and by the sound of an opposite pendulum which struck twelve.

"Mid-day, already! why did you let me sleep? I don't want sleep, sleep does not refresh me. I ought to have been dressed and away. Give me some water—are my horses ready? I have a wager coming off at twelve o'clock."

The wife placed her hand upon his, and called him softly by his name. The husband now first perceiving whom he was addressing, replied,

"You, madam! I crave your pardon for being here and in this guise. I know not how it has happened; I retire," and he rose with a courtly salutation, walked a few paces with a staggering gait, and then sat down again a little giddied.

"You are not well," said the Lady Floranthe, almost tenderly, "you are suffering—you must retire to rest."

"Madam," replied the husband, "since when do we interfere with each others' actions?"

"Good heavens!" replied the Lady Floranthe, "do not misunderstand me, I would only advise."

"Believe me, that my intrusion here cannot be more distasteful to you than your advice to me."

"Hear me," said the Lady Floranthe, earnestly. "I speak only from interest in you, and—" she checked herself as she was about to add "compassion," "I should neglect my duty, I will not say as a wife, but as a friend by remaining silent. You must take care of yourself—you are ill—you are very ill, Hugh."

"Hugh," repeated the husband, ironically, "why not dear Hugh, madam? It is late in the day for us to play the 'Darby and Joan.' I wish you good morning. I have an appointment, I am late, and I must call first at my jeweller's."

"Common humanity and pity impel me then to lay bare to you the truth, and command this interference. The wild career of dissipation you are pursuing is rapidly hurrying to an untimely close, a life which care and abstinence might still prolong. The name we have jointly borne so long, our residence beneath one roof, the interests we have shared, justify this solicitude, which believe me is sincere, and of which the expression is urgent, not untimely even, though irksome to you."

"Why allude to our union, Madam? We have neither of us forgotten the circumstances under which it was contracted. It is not good breeding to remind our friends of their infirmities, or their misfortunes. You should have compassion on the state of my health; though, thank heaven! it is not what you imagine. Though I have been a little feeble lately, I have an iron constitution. When I overstrain it, it gives way, and then rights itself."

"Not without abstinence and repose."

"My remedy is homœopathic; excitement only, cures what excitement has caused; but it must be of a more amusing kind than this discussion. I have not slept excepting a few minutes here, since the night before last, and I am better to-day than I was yesterday, even though it thwart your theories and your wishes—I am progressing."

"Alas!" said the Lady Floranthe, "to your own destruction."

"Even if it were so—and it is not, for I am getting stout and strong—do you think I would not sooner that my last moments were soothed by sweet smiles, or by melodious sounds, or in the pleasurable delirium of excitement, rather than rendered irksome by these tardy lamentations?"

With these words he had gained the door.

"Indeed you are not fit to go out. Hear me one moment!" said the wife.

"No," replied the husband in a galliardly, boastful tone which contrasted strangely with his weakness, as to sustain his emaciated frame he leaned against the door. "No, upon my honour, I should keep a lady waiting,—and then," he added, as if a sudden thought had struck him, "but since we have met, madam, I remember that yesterday my steward denied me the sum I asked until these liabilities are staved off; and I want gold to-morrow—I want gold to-day—in fact I want gold at all hours and times just now."

"We must share ruin as we have shared prosperity," replied the Lady Floranthe, "Our property is mortgaged as far as it will go; and we depend on the indulgence of companies in which the influence of John Cash is paramount."

"Ah, I would have veered round to John Cash long ago."

"Securing so perpetual dependence on him. No, I shall manage this matter as I have done before, by means of Eustatius through his mother."

"Ah, Eustatius!" replied the husband sarcastically, looking through the window, "he is at your gate. I wish you a good day. If report speak truth, you will not press me to stay now."

"Eustatius is the keystone of our party."

"Eustatius, and the convenient chances of a disease, and an inheritance, and a marriage are the keystones of whole castles in the air. But if the disease neglects its deadly work, or the hero of the romance proves fickle, or unwilling, what then?"

The Lady Floranthe grew pale, and the blood suffused her face and neck. In her inmost heart the thought had arisen, repulsed with horror at first, but gaining strength as it recurred—that all the power of John Cash—Eustatius must inherit; that Eustatius, easy to guide, was not difficult to captivate; that her husband's and the Lady Calliroë's health promised inevitably to leave Eustatius and herself at liberty, but that when his hand was free it might be lost in the general competition for such a prize."

But her husband relieved her embarrassment by adding, "And the daughter destined for him in your impenetrable intent, must grow up equally dutiful and pleasing. Think what may not have chanced, for even that first wrinkle of her mother's will have multiplied and deepened before then." and with this offensive sarcasm he withdrew.

The Lady Floranthe's pity had vanished. She glanced in a mirror, and the fear this false alarm had excited, vanished also just as Eustatius was announced.

Eustatius, after professing at several periods a fitful admiration of the Lady Floranthe, had of late been suggestively assiduous in his attentions towards her.

He was one of those persons who, though not in any other sense imaginative, derive all their affections from the imagination. Abstracting the intrinsic merits of all things, he prized them only in proportion to their rarity, or valued them according to the estimation in which others held them.

The fame and fashionable celebrity of the Lady Floranthe had therefore proved irresistible attractions to him; and the unscrupulous beauty had lured him on, as a bird or butterfly seduces a child into a pursuit offering difficulty enough to impart a zest to the chase though holding out too much promise to discourage. The admiration of Eustatius had thus been ripened into a passion, if not of the heart of the head, and a passion in which envy had as large a share as vanity.

In fact all the pique of unsuccessful rivalry rankled in the bosom of Eustatius, and of this rivalry Julian was the object. It had so happened that he had always crossed the path and deeply mortified the pride of the millionary's son in all his schemes of love or gallantry. The reader may recall how Julian had triumphantly carried off Myrrah, and Eustatius knew, with how much truth he boasted, that the Lady Calliroë's hand had only been relinquished by him in consideration of the governor-generalship which had purchased his abandonment of a claim more potent—though founded only in her affections—than all the seductions, position and wealth could render that, urged by his rival.

In his aspirations to the favour of the Lady Floranthe he had again found a competitor and according to report a not unsuccessful competitor in Julian, who, on his last return from his government, had assiduously cultivated her good graces.

In truth she had made this flirtation, began in a spirit of irrepressible coquetry, a means of exciting the jealousy and increasing the ardor of Eustatius and she had succeeded so far beyond her wishes that the first few words exchanged between them, showed that he was inconveniently under the influence of that passion.

"I am too early?" said Eustatius endeavouring to disguise, in a tone of forced urbanity, the sullen ill-humor which his countenance betrayed.

"Do you find it too early?" asked the Lady Floranthe, answering his query by this conciliatory question.

"If before I am welcome," replied Eustatius ungraciously.

"Those whose society gives us pleasure are welcome at all hours of which the occupations do not preclude reception. I thought I named two o'clock. It is a miracle that I am down; a chance that you found me before my morning's walk."

"Scarcely a chance; I knew that I should find you, or at least that you were matinal to-day."

"By inspiration?"

"No, by inference."

"I do not understand you; what do you mean, Eustatius?"

"Only," replied Eustatius, "that Julian is arrived."

"Julian!"

"You are pleased to be discreet."

"Is Julian indeed returned?"

"I met him half an hour ago, he told me he had an appointment at twelve o'clock, and therefore I spurred on to beg that you will excuse me at two."

"Why, therefore?"

"I thought it would be a pity to interrupt a tête-à-tête so soon."

"I do not know what you mean," replied the Lady Floranthe, more in sorrow than in anger, "I have no appointment with Julian, I am not expecting Julian."

"Then behold! he comes unlooked for," and Eustatius pointed through the window at the young governor-general advancing at the canter of his Arab, "and so not to be obstinate as well as inopportune, I retire."

"Eustatius," said the Lady Floranthe after a pause, "really you do me injustice; I knew nothing—nothing of this visit. I will deny myself."

"It is too late. I hear the clank of his spurs upon the staircase. Your people are not accustomed to deny him."

"Is it too late?" said the lady imploringly. "If so, Eustatius, I beg of you, retire into this room, or let me go forth into the next to meet him."

"Why?" asked Eustatius, "he may hold official rank above me, but I think the world does not give him any other precedence."

"Hear me! I would not have you meet for worlds. He is the vainest man in the United Monarchies, and when his vanity is hurt his tongue does not hesitate to tear a female reputation into tatters."

"It is awkward," answered Eustatius "when two assignations become confounded."

"Oh! Eustatius," said the Lady Floranthe, "you do me injustice. This is unkind. I declare, by all that is solemn, that I knew not of Julian's coming. No, you shall not go, I will dismiss him. You shall hear." And with these words the Lady Floranthe, without waiting his reply, advanced into the adjacent apartment, quitting Eustatius on its threshold and disappearing through the curtain which masked the open door.

Eustatius was thus left an almost authorised listener, or at least in a situation which licenced him to overhear what was about to pass, without manifesting an indelicacy too derogatory.

Julian, just recalled by the premier from the luxuriant idleness of his harem to suffer the infliction of a reprimand, had yet lost nothing of the graces which made him the hero of so much feminine reverie and remark; though on the verge of the critical period which witnesses the sudden decline of that stamp of male beauty, of which the characteristics are not strictly masculine. The waist had not yet began to enlarge, the waving locks to thin, nor the blush of the peach upon his cheek to merge into the ruddiness of the apple.

As Julian advanced, the Lady Floranthe put her finger to her lips and cast a glance behind her, but it so happened that at this moment—having turned back his head to assure himself that they were alone—the sign had escaped his notice.

"Queen of my thoughts! Bright ladye of my love and idol of my dreams!" said Julian, tossing back his dark curls. "Half the circumference of the earth divided us when you vouchsafed a wish that I was by your side. The salt spray of the Persian gulf still tingles on my cheek—the burning dust of Palestine is still in my locks—and lo! I am at your feet."

The Lady Floranthe saw it was too late now to deceive Eustatius by repetition of her warning to Julian, so changing her tactics she replied, as she withdrew the hand he attempted to press to his lips.

"Welcome! but I am almost alarmed to find, that redolent of eastern hyperbole you construe seriously the idle words of a daughter of the West!"

"I have brought back from the East," answered Julian, "nothing but its burning passion; nothing but the mad idolatry into which it has matured the love born in my bosom in the West; the love of which you are the object."

"Hush! hush! hush!" said the Lady Floranthe, "you must not talk to me of love, at least in the second person."

"An unfortunate prohibition," answered

Julian, "for on my soul I can speak to you of nothing else but love. Remember how time flies, dearest Floranthe—time spent with you—and cease this coquetry."

"My moments too are limited," replied the lady, "for I did not expect this pleasure."

"Oh!" said Julian, "do not repress the tumultuous joy that has made my heart leap with emotion, by such cold looks, and by such chilling words. You know, beloved Floranthe, that my adoration is not the growth of one capricious hour. You know that you were relentless and unkind till fate became cruel: and you cannot have forgotten the entrancing avowal of that moonlight hour——"

"Never mind moonlight hours," interrupted the Lady Floranthe hurriedly, "let us talk reasonably Julian."

"You have not forgotten the sweet admission contained in those dear lines—still warm with my fervent kisses—still reposing next my heart—which have brought me to your feet to-day."

"Julian," said the Lady Floranthe, "we are all in some measure creatures of impulse; our feelings change sometimes from hour to hour we know not why; and for good or evil I obey their dictates. Now tell me, if really I were willing to indulge in a dream of love?"

"A dream?" replied Julian, "why call that a dream which is unalterable as the most stern reality? A dream! though you are right, for me the passion you may deign to share conjures up a vision such as only delights our slumbers, when prismatic tints and diaphanous forms flit in the bright delirium of the night, conveying to our senses a foretaste of heaven!"

"And if," said the Lady Floranthe, "wearied with the adulation of the multitude—if abdicating the mission in which I once had faith—the assertion of my sex's dignity—if I were to believe in the homage of one heart—yours, for instance, Julian?"

"Oh!" interrupted Julian, "if the most unchanging constancy—if the most passionate adoration—if the most delirious worship..."

But the Lady Floranthe continued silencing even the fervor of this interruption.

"If it were so; if I were to risk the wreck of all my hopes, no ordinary affection would requite my own; I should be inexorably exacting; and he in whom all the feelings of my soul would centre must meet my unmeasured love by a passion as intense, and prove it by every imaginable sacrifice."

"Speak, beloved Floranthe!" said Julian, "in the wide range of human possibilities there is nothing can appal...there is nothing could deter, from such an offering...on such an altar!"

"This is agreeable," thought the mortified Eustatius, his lip white and his hand trembling with agitation on the curtain which he had seized to tear aside, an act from which he still restrained himself as the lady continued.

"What offering is there but a heart that can requite the sacrifice of a heart? But I should exact that, in one devoted to me, no other image, thought, or passion should obtrude. I should require the utter abnegation of every interest and affection, the abandonment of the habits of a life, the abdication of its projects and ambition."

"All these would be but feathers in the balance," said Julian. "What is there that you could ask and I deny?"

"Oh!" replied the Lady Floranthe, "I should impose no ordinary trials. What if I were to bid you choose between me and your honour?"

"Can you doubt?" said Julian. "What if I were to demand that you should throw up your present office?"

"This is unpleasantly straightforward," thought Julian, "but perhaps they are going to take the governor-generalship from me," and falling at her feet he answered aloud,

"I would say, Idol of my soul command and I obey!"

"Oh, but stay," replied the Lady Floranthe. "It is notorious that you have said all this to every woman you have ever met; how shall I now dare believe that you speak truth?"

"Trust to the inspirations of your nature and interrogate the instincts of your woman's heart; they will teach you to discern the real from the false—they will enable you to distinguish the depth and plenitude of my unalterable passion."

At this moment the curtain was moved with so much violence that Julian could not have failed to perceive it, if the Lady Floranthe had not astounded him by bursting into a loud laugh, none the less musical and silvery because prolonged and hearty.

"Admirable! admirable! You must forgive me, Julian, but I really believe you thought I was in earnest."

Julian looked aghast.

"I have carried my point; I have heard you make a declaration; but since you have acted this scene so often—since you have deceived so many—it was only fair that one of my sex should act and deceive you in her turn."

"Oh!" said Julian, "why torture me by such a jest."

"A jest indeed!" and the Lady Floranthe laughed again, "an admirable mystification. Rise, my Don Juan of the rueful countenance, rise, and tell me, did you really believe that I was serious?"

"Did you think me so?" asked Julian starting to his feet with a laugh as natural and full of merriment as her own. "We are two master spirits. I congratulate you; we could both take the stage by storm. Your part was admirably played—more admirably perhaps than safely."

"I was not aware of the remotest danger," replied the Lady Floranthe, "I never risked my heart."

"Perhaps that would have been better than to peril your reputation. Let us just glance at our amorous correspondence: there is your answer to my last pathetic epistle, perhaps I should call it my circular, for I sent six by the same courier. I told you that I bore that answer next my heart, but I had left it in my dressing case; it might give point to this very diverting story."

"You have no letter of mine signed even by an initial."

"You forget the hand-writing, that peculiar, clear, and delicate hand-writing."

The Lady Floranthe laughed again.

"You are quite in error—all my notes and letters are copied by a companion, who writes, but who cannot read."

Julian bit his lip with vexation.

"And now," said the Lady Floranthe "I lament that my minutes are numbered, and I can only express my hope that whilst the histrionic art has gained such an accession I shall never lose a friend."

"Farewell then," said Julian nothing disconcerted, "since you dismiss me so cruelly from your presence. But to return the compliment I shall declare to the wide world, that as the Lady Floranthe exceeds every woman in it, but one, in wit, eloquence, and beauty, so she is only inferior to that one as an actress."

"Whom do you mean?"

"An actress by profession,—her name is Myrrah—your husband can describe her if you wish it," and with these words, Julian, having succeeded in ruffling the serenity of the Lady Floranthe, made his exit.

The brow of Eustatius was radiant with delight—one thing only was wanting to complete his triumph and Julian's mortification, that was, that the governor-general should perceive the cause of his discomfiture, and for this purpose he rushed to the window. Unluckily Julian would not look up—at length he reined up his arab. Was it to cast back a lingering glance at the casement of the fair traitress? No, it was only to pass his fingers through his long curls and remedy their disarray, after which he spurred forward and was lost to sight, and at that moment the Lady Floranthe lay her hand upon the shoulder of Eustatius.

Eustatius, his grey eyes beaming with enthusiastic admiration, now turned towards the woman who having administered that delicious draught to his vanity and invidious feeling, had become almost a divinity in his estimation; but the Lady Floranthe saw and pursued her advantage, and coquettishly dismissed him till the morrow, waiving the appointed interview to punish him for having doubted.

CHAPTER III.

TEMPEST.

Invective Rabid, according to his wont, stole in so silently that he did not disturb Tempest's reverie—half slumber and half meditation, in which sleep and thought contended to be, perhaps, afterwards mingled into dreams. He paused for a moment in contemplation of his victim, struck by the change in the youth's aspect which those months of confinement, of which he was the accomplice, had made.

If there had been less at stake for Invective

Rabid, he would not have yielded to the temptation—if there had existed any means, consistent with his own safety, of compensating the prisoner for his captivity, he would not have neglected them, but the lure had been too great, and the peril of discovery and shame was too imminent, and he therefore drowned the cries of his own conscience by such sophistries as the following:

"After all it was John Cash imprisoned, and I am not bound to liberate him. He would be no further advanced if he had never met me.

"His talents are at least directed against his persecutor. We are bound to devote our faculties to the public cause, which his misguided efforts might otherwise have injured; and, after all, if I profit by his exertions and his genius, what then? Does not man take the milk of the cow and the honey of the bee? Does he not appropriate the fleece of the sheep, and the scent of the hound, and the fleetness of the steed, and legitimately too, so that they be devoted to a good purpose."

With these soothing reflections Invective Rabid advanced towards Tempest, who raised his head and turned upon him one of his habitually, penetrating looks, which troubled—and irritated because they troubled—the popular leader, who piqued himself on an assurance which nothing could abash, but hiding his discomfiture in a burst of boisterous cordiality, he pressed the wan hand of Tempest in his gigantic palm, exclaiming:

"Come! come! cheer up. You must not despond, we shall baffle the old man yet."

"I have never doubted it," replied Tempest, "I do not despond. If I am dejected it is in the contemplation of the selfishness and treachery of those whom the world holds in fair esteem."

"It is a sad theme," said Invective, "and we can but hope in the compensating virtues of those who are beneath its ban; but you must not lose courage—you must not slacken in your zeal—we are both in captive thrall to-day, but we shall burst amongst them like a thunderbolt before long, only we must not be idle," and as he spoke he glanced at the deal table, usually piled with books and papers, and now bare, for though six months had elapsed since Tempest had become cognisant of his treachery, for reasons best known to himself, he had continued, without comment, to devote his labours, as before, to the service of his false friend.

"I have not been idle," answered Tempest, "I completed my half year's task three days ago when last you visited me."

"What task have you completed?"

"That of unmasking an impostor and a traitor!" said Tempest, calmly, but looking so steadfastly at Invective Rabid that he could not mistake his meaning.

"Now hear me, Invective Rabid."

"Invective Rabid!" echoed the Demagogue, his features growing almost purple.

"Why do you call me Invective Rabid? Some of these madmen—some of the mad attendants have imposed upon you. I am a persecuted captive like yourself."

"No," continued Tempest, "you are Invective Rabid, the popular leader; you have never been a captive here, you have never deceived me, at least during the last six months of a plagiarism, not only base but heartless, because exercised at the expense of my freedom, and of the popular liberties for your own personal aggrandisement."

At every word, Invective bounded as a caged lion seared by a hot iron. The veins upon his forehead swelled into the prominence of whipcord, his teeth might have been heard grinding together, and he dug his nails into the palms of his clenched hands, so intense was the shame of this proud man, who had never quailed before human being. But this expression of humiliation was too intense to last, or to merge into contrition, and it changed to hatred and defiance and a boastful villainy, which, perhaps, could hardly have sustained itself beyond that moment of unnatural excitement.

This change came over his features before he could find words and—

"Presumptuous pedant! Learn to distinguish between that talent which is the instrument, and the genius which directs it...the genius to whose guidance fortune has committed subordinate abilities, as the tool by which to influence the destiny of states! Learn all the difference between the sheep which gives its fleece, or the steer which yields its strength, and man—man who comes naked into the world—man who grows up the weakest of all animals, but whose master mind appropriates and utilises all these gifts. Moreover know, that in pursuance of his mission nature has endowed creation's lord with a relentless heart, which neither the plaint of the shorn lamb, nor the affrighted bellow of the ox, which travail-worn he destines to the shambles, can touch or turn from his unchanging purpose. Know that the fate of those predestined to mark in their generation, become the oracle of millions yet unborn—the Cromwells and Mahomets of the world—rolls like the pitiless car of the Hindoo god, crushing without remorse beneath its wheels countless individualities! And lastly, know that the existence of innumerable Tempests must be consumed to mould the fortunes of one Invective Rabid! Bow therefore, poor victim of an inevitable doom! before that superiority which you blaspheme. We meet no more; for you the world's stage is irrevocably closed, and I can leave you only this consolation, that you have played the not ignoble part, of contributing to Invective Rabid's greatness!"

With these words he moved towards the door, still writhing beneath the scorn of Tempest's withering glance.

"Stay!" said the youth at length. "Insensate mime! travestying presumption in the garb of prophecy, and aping inspiration! Have you indeed been so misguided as to believe that effrontery and cunning could prevail against intellect—and the gifts of mind unsullied in their development by impurity of purpose?"

"You will have time," replied Invective "to solve that question when the door closes upon your living grave."

"Stay yet," said Tempest, "why do you think that cognizant of your treachery six months ago, I should have continued to further all your views?"

"Heaven knows," replied Invective, "your men of talent, gifted with one faculty at the expense of others, are always in some things fools! why does the bee, robbed of its honey, fill the hive again? You acted, no doubt, in obedience to an instinct implanted in your mind that my destiny might be fulfilled."

"No, miserable man," replied Tempest. "It was the stratagem of the despoiled marking his coin for the detection of the villain who had robbed him. Now listen to the scheme that I devised, and learn, to your confusion, how, shut off from all communion with any but the spoiler, I have made him the instrument of his own denunciation to the world. There is not a thought stolen from my brain, there is not a passage in which it is conveyed, on which I have not stamped the theft. For six months the labours of my days and nights, which you thought to apply to your selfish purposes, were framed to contain the history of my persecution and of your treachery.

"Refer to your leaders, your essays, and your speeches, and you will find that each is an acrostic. The capital letters commencing every sentence constitute a connected narrative, which in all the detail of names, dates and locality publishes to the world my story.

Six months ago you had grown too idle even to re-arrange or alter one sentence of the materials furnished you; but to render your exposure certain, the narration of my wrongs is set forth in a hundred documents which you have pompously published to the world. One hint to the public, like the spark in a mine, blasts your reputation irrecoverably, and dooms you to an infamy more wide and lasting than the fame you have usurped!"

A hoarse cry, more like the scream of an affrighted bird than to a human articulation, burst from Invective Rabid's throat. I have heard such from the osprey and the eagle when surprised behind a jutting rock they rise within a few feet of the fatal gun. His first impulse—thus foiled, lost and degraded—was to dash out his brains against the walls of his victim's cell, and then a hope shot across his brain, and his brow darkened with a homicidal thought, as he bounded upon Tempest with the ferocity of a tiger.

"But these words you have not spoken?"

"No!" said Tempest, "I have not spoken them yet. I will be merciful; there is no human heart, however black with guilt, in which the germ of human feeling does not slumber. Open my prison doors and I will bury your treachery in oblivion."

"Never!" replied Invective gloomily.

"Hear me," continued Tempest. "If in six months of captivity I have curbed my spirit, panting for activity, to patience, I should scarcely with injurious precipitance have warned you now of the disclosures I could make. I should have watched my opportunity, days and weeks and months to send forth safely to the world the key to your infamy—but, in truth, events are progressing which renders my liberty invaluable, the time lost here irretrievable. By restoring me to freedom you will render me such a service, you will confer upon humanity so great a boon that I will forget your guilt and baseness in my gratitude."

"No," said Invective Rabid, hoarsely, "it would be madness not to crush you—you or I must die," and with swelling veins and eyes, across whose starting orbs there shot a bloody film, he sprang upon the youth and seized his throat in his gigantic hands.

Tempest, enfeebled by long privation and captivity, had only time to utter one single cry and might have yielded up the ghost, almost without a struggle, in the iron grasp of his ferocious assailant, if at that moment Tempest's keeper had not entered, and rushed not to secure the aggressor, but the victim.

"Ah, sir! he has flown upon you at last. It is lucky you were such a lusty gentleman. These mad people are never safe, especially these very quiet ones; I trust, sir, it will be a lesson to you."

"Undoubtedly," replied Invective Rabid, who rapidly perceiving the advantages of his position, left the keeper securing Tempest in a straitjacket, and proceeded to receive the congratulations of the principal at his fortunate escape from the sudden and murderous assault of the maniac.

CHAPTER IV.

THE SICK-BED.

One day, in the plenitude of his uninterrupted prosperity, it was whispered that John Cash had fallen ill. No one knew whether it was apoplexy, or paralysis, or fever of the brain; no one knew how or when he had been attacked—no one connected with the millionary even dared acknowledge his indisposition, and yet the impression was universally prevalent that he had been stricken by some dangerous and sudden malady.

The anxious countenances of Middleman Cautious and of Lord Lofty, and the seclusion of the Lady Calliroë, who living beneath her father-in-law's roof, and had not for three days appeared in public, confirmed these rumours, which speedily brought Sir Jasper and Eustatius to the spot.

All access to the presumed patient was, however, sternly denied the son, and the usual means of communication were precluded by the absence of Mrs. Cash, who having been persuaded that he was consumptive, was rusticating on a milk diet in a valley of the Jura.

The intense and universal interest excited by the ailments of an old man whom no one loved, was neither unmixed nor unprecedented. Sixty years before when men divined the imminent dissolution of Austria's decrepit despotism; one night passed in the sleeplessness of disease by the Machiavelian minister, whose arts still kept together its mouldering framework, could often disturb, with the excitement of hope, the slumbers of suffering millions.

Sixty years before, tens of thousands would have heard, with profound anxiety, of the indisposition of the French king, when the union of France and England and the consequent interests of civilisation were still supposed to hinge upon his individual life.

The illness of old Cash occasioned a sensation far more widely spread, and compounded of the hopes which inspired the few, and of the apprehensions which alarmed the many, not that his friends were numerous—he had none—he did not want any—he only sought for partisans—but even those who were not so, trembled at the prospect of his decease, because partially acquainted with the Leviathan capitalist's connexion with the local banks and companies upon whose credit their own was utterly dependent.

Everything, therefore—the eagerness of the expectants who flocked around him, the forebodings of the multitude, and the promptings of Sir Jasper—combined to arouse the vigilance of Eustatius, who, though repulsed from his father's door, still remained, by the advice of his political mentor, watching the progress of events from hour to hour.

There existed an undoubted probability that old Cash might disinherit his son, it was almost certain that if he made any provision it would be clogged with onerous conditions, but Sir Jasper also suggested that it was possible that he had not yet made any will, a supposition which the anxious looks of Lord Lofty seemed to confirm. Now, in either event, it was urgent for the son to reach the death-bed of his father, whether to prevent the use of any tardy influence, if he had made no will or if he had to step boldly into his father's place.

Though Eustatius had been discouraged by the peremptory denial he had met with, Sir Jasper persisted in considering as feasible both admission to his father and appropriation of his otherwise testated property.

"But," argued Eustatius, "they look upon me as the prodigal son. I am refused his door."

"Never mind, bide your time," replied Sir Jasper, "when the danger becomes imminent their firmness will soften into pliancy."

And so it proved. On the third day decisive tidings reached the ex-minister, upon which he urged Eustatius to act without delay.

He had, in fact, received intelligence from Julia de Fougeres, who like the sea-bird seen before a storm, only made her appearance before each political crisis, ever mixed in the tortuous intrigues preceding it.

She had gathered in the vicinity of the sick-bed, that on the day in question no improvement had taken place in the state of old Cash, whose head was wandering; that Middleman Cautious, wearied with the consecutive exertions of eight and forty hours had retired overpowered by sleep, and that the Lady Calliroë after incessant vigils had quitted the presence of the patient.

This was the moment chosen by Sir Jasper to urge Eustatius to a determined effort. A few threats and promises adroitly made had paved the way. "I am assured," said the millionary's son, "that my father lies insensible. Under these circumstances I am his representative. I shall reward your faithful adherence to his wishes, however unnatural, so long as he had power to utter them, but beware! I shall visit with severity all opposition you prolong beyond."

With these words, overcoming the faint resistance offered to him, Eustatius forced his way through the irresolute guardians of his father's privacy, now become doubtful whether they were not thwarting their real master by impeding him. From apartment to apartment he thus reached the room in which his father lay, and to which, yesterday, access might have been deemed impossible.

His entrance was still strictly forbidden by the physicians of his father's household, themselves refraining from intrusion into the chamber of their patient, whose malady was only irritated by the presence of any but those he chose to call for, and on whom, for two excellent reasons, they were equally chary of imposing their remedies. The first because old Cash would not have taken them: the second, because being remunerated by munificent pensions, which ceased with their patron's life, that life was inestimably precious to them.

Now it had long since been observed that your great doctors, who, in ordinary circumstances, are great experimentalists, usually leave everything to nature in cases personally affecting themselves.

It is as rare for those professing the hygienic art to take the medicines they scatter so profusely in their practice, or to give them to their families, as for a pastrycook to gorge himself with his own comfits. The utmost your acute practitioner will do is to palm them off on a mother-in-law or a step-child, or a scolding wife, though doctors' wives have a preservative horror of their husbands' ware—but if he falls ill himself he gathers round him his medical friends, speculatively collects their opinions on his case, and then—lets nature take its course.

So the physicians of the millionary treated him, mulcted as they were for every day of illness, fined for every drop of medicine they administered to him, and threatened with the loss of their tempting pensions if he died.

Eustatius, however, set their remonstrances at naught, and passed authoritatively into his father's chamber, closing the door after him.

John Cash was alone. The Lady Calliroë, supposed by the household to be by his side, had left him, as Sir Jasper had been informed, and Eustatius sat down in the chair she had quitted.

The old man having over-excited himself in a long conversation with his daughter-in-law, had lapsed into partial unconsciousness and incoherence, not such as to render his ideas wandering or disconnected, but sufficiently to prevent him from distinguishing between the thoughts he would otherwise have spoken or concealed, or the persons to whom he would have chosen to address them.

It was soon evident that he mistook the husband for the wife, that he had not yet made any testamentary disposition of his enormous wealth, and that his mind was sadly harassed at the thought either of making or neglecting to make any.

If he died without a will Eustatius would inherit and dissipate his substance; if the guidance of his fortunes was confided to the Lady Calliroë, whose clear head and bold heart were equal to the burthen of this greatness, the transfer of his inheritance must be made by a formal document, and that document once signed gave her the greatest conceivable interest in his death.

"Imagine," meditated the sick man, "how horrible to know that from that hour the young, ambitious heart of the only being who tends and watches me, will be assailed by the unceasing reflection, that nothing but the breath of life in my old body keeps her from the possession of the world; who every time her glance rests on me will revel in the thought of all that must be hers—if I died then—who will grow to wonder when I shall die and to wish that I were dead. Ah! when I was young my brain I know would not have stood it—I hate anything that gives our memory unrest—but I should have succumbed to the temptation. Oh! no; such thoughts will turn the milk in a woman's breast to poison—better to let a she-wolf tend my pillow; no, I will send for my own wife. I will have Betsy by me, but then Betsy will bring in Eustatius to my bed—Eustatius urged by his ravenous parasites and expectants, all hungering for my death; Eustatius, whose unskilful hand will bend the bow till it snaps asunder, whose feeble head will never keep my possessions six months together.

"No, no, I cannot see scattered to the winds that which I have collected with so much pain. What a strange thing is death, that it casts its untoward shadow darkening such a destiny as mine, and threatening me whilst yet sparing a wretched existence, whose protraction is so disquieting to my own. A blight menacing the maturity of the fruit on the wide-spreading tree, and yet unscathing to the sapling's growth, which sickens in its shade and threatens to canker its majestic roots. Why does it not strike him instead of hovering over me?"

Such were the notions which recurred, in different shapes, again and again, to the old man's troubled brain, though only expressed by disjointed sentences, from which Eustatius could gather nothing but that his father's will was not yet made, and that when it was it would be to his detriment.

After a brief pause, the chain of thought into which John Cash had fallen brought him back again to that point of his last conversation with the Lady Calliroë in which his overstrained intellect had given way; and, gradually recovering its coherence, he continued where he had left off, stretching out his arm and grasping in his horny palm the hand of Eustatius, whom—in the darkened room, or through the mist which the efforts of his vigorous mind were only just dispelling—he obviously mistook for the Lady Calliroë.

"Yes! Middleman Cautious knows the working machinery of my system—but not all—the caitiff! I have never trusted him too far. You, though you are but a woman, are mistress of its hidden springs and secret principles. All were together contained in this old head—in safety too—though they have worn it out; but then it might die with me, and I find, as I have grown old, that we cannot bear that what the mind has produced should perish with the body.

"I believe it now—that no man capable of creating aught that would live after him ever could bear that thought. We live again in the offspring of our brain. The author in his works—the statesman in the power he leaves even to political rivals—the miser in the hoarded gold he bequeaths to thankless heirs so that they do not dissipate it.

"You will not let this be done. It was necessary to trust some one. I am trusting you. You have a clear head and an iron will—and an ambitious heart; and you shall be the old man's inheritress, but you must be quite pitiless now I have told you all. Whilst he lives we are never safe. I have broken through envy, prejudice and pride—I have trampled on combinations—I have scattered parties, I have triumphed over the whole world's opposition, I have raised an edifice of solid beams and plated iron and brass, but that man is like a cankering worm who maybe in the night is eating into the heart of the strong oak, and mouldering it unseen into powder. The other was but a poor fool, and yet whilst he breathed I felt that every hour he might turn the wheel round, and send me back into the dust from whence I started. I kept him safe for twenty years; he was broken in mind by long confinement, and yet he escaped from me even then—always remember that. He flitted from me to leave behind his dangerous spawn; the youth has stepped into the place of the old man, and I must quench the young man's vigour, as I quelled the poison of the old. You know that age has not made me credulous, that sickness does not make me wander, when I tell you that there are powers in nature which the commonplace world recks not of—and that these men are conversant with its horrible secrets.

"I have heard, when I was one of the people, that the body sympathetically feels the outrage done to an amputated limb, and so have I always felt by those men. Strange warnings ever disturb me when they are working evil. I cannot rest—I cannot cure—I cannot live—I cannot die without hearing of him—without knowing whether the foreboding which agitates me now is a vision of the disordered phantasy—a sick man's dream—or a reality, and there is no one whom I dare to send but you Calliroë! You must see with your own eyes that he is secure—you must watch how confinement has affected him; you must mark its ravages, whether on his cheek or in his eye; whether it be the body or the mind which has suffered, because on his condition I must base my plans.

"Will you do all this, Calliroë? Will you go at once—will you peer into his face and glance into his soul, will you tell me how he fares—that youth who gives so much care to my grey hairs, and whose image darkens the visions of your future and my own? Go, Calliroë, you know the hospital for insane patients which I founded so many years ago, and have supported since—that hospital was my state prison before you were born; in that bastille he died; no, what am I saying? he did not die but, fretting his energies away, spent half a life there. No, what did I say? not he, it was the other, he is my captive and you will find him there. Ask for the principal, and in John Cash's name, bid him admit you to his patient, number twenty, letter T—that patient is the disturber of our dreams. Do you understand me? will you go Calliroë? will you remember number twenty, letter T?" and after a pause which Eustatius dared not break, he added, gasping for breath, and disengaging his hand from that of his son, "but, dear me, what am I doing? I have told you all this before, but you will not forget number twenty, letter T?"

With these words he turned upon his pillow, and Eustatius, who found that the old man still retained an alarming degree of consciousness and who felt that he had surprised a secret, stole to the door and made his exit.

CHAPTER V.

TEMPEST AND CALLIROË.

Tempest had fallen asleep. His sleep was of that feverish and unrefreshing kind, to which nature's weakness yields, after the vigils of a weary night, but in which it neither finds oblivion nor repose.

He had been awakened from this slumber to find his now uninterrupted solitude broken in upon by a human visitant. A fair form rose before his eyes; the musical accents of a soft voice stole soothingly upon his ear, and just as the world and all pertaining to it was darkening into a hideous nightmare on his soul, one of its most delicate creations, dispelling the gloom of that contracted cell, appeared before that lonely captive, whose complete and susceptible organisation was so eager in its appreciation of the beautiful in whatever shape, recognizing that mysterious identity in its physical and moral forms which makes the heart respond to both, grieving to find their attributes disunited, as if both recalled some dimly remembered phase of earlier being, or were instinctive of some time to come in which they had been or were to be inseparably united.

The Lady Calliroë's loveliness—light, rainbow-like and ethereal enough to have characterised the Alpine witch in Manfred, seen through the mist of the torrent, or the moonlit shade of Francesca appearing to the renegade on the battlements of Corinth—was deeply impressed upon the memory of Tempest in connexion with gentle associations. He remembered her beside the dying galvanist; he remembered her when she sought to warm her perished favourite on her bosom, and he recalled her the sacrifice to a haughty man's ambition. It was the Lady Calliroë, whose apparition, breaking the monotony of his solitude, had disturbed his fitful slumbers now.

Their converse had been long and animated and Tempest's faith at its close was shaken in himself. Her words were full of mournful gravity, her tones filled with a mixed respect and pity. If she had doubted, if she had ignored the superiority he felt within him, if she had imperiously attempted to bear him down, his resolution would have remained unchanged—but, on the contrary, she had divined the truth, she had acknowledged his powers, and yet she came to persuade him that he was persisting in an unequal contest in which he must perish or submit.

"Your animosity against John Cash is idle. I came from him, not to take advantage of your obscurity, not to disavow your importance in his eyes, but to point out to you that there must be a vanquished, and a vanquisher in every struggle; that there are struggles in which the utter submission of the vanquished alone can justify the forbearance of the victor; to remind you that it is a part as noble to succumb to an inevitable fate with dignity, as to resist whilst resistance was yet possible.

"The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Life has innumerable missions; it is not those who have stolen the largest share of the Promethean fire to whom the guidance of their fellow men is assigned, on the contrary, almost ever—chained to their narrow rock—it has been their doom to pass away, with nothing but the consciousness of the appropriated flame they have imparted to their race. It is one bent of genius makes another, which applies the acquisitions in which mankind glories. These may not mix their attributions. We doubt not yours; we do not call in question the powers you have inherited or mastered; we do not deny the benevolence of your intent; but it is enough that these run counter to a system in whose mighty vortex all interests, great or small, must be absorbed. There are ten thousand in the world who can criticise, or who could destroy, for one who could remodel or who can construct—there have been ten thousand schemers who have dreamed, for one who could achieve. You have but dreamed, and John Cash has achieved—almost unlimited dominion. He cannot yield to you, he cannot share it with you, and he dares not despise you. Therefore you must perish. Fortune, if it be only fortune, has given you bound into his hand; self-preservation prompts him to destroy; and now, if like the conqueror whose upraised sword spares when its stroke might smite, he is merciful, has he not a right to ask that the life he spares should never be turned against him?"

"That," replied Tempest, "was the law of old which made the bondsman. The victor said, will you purchase life with servitude? the vanquished accepted, lived, and was a slave; but the imposition of that condition, and the compliance with it—whence slavery sprung—were alike derogatory to manhood, and accursed."

"When slavery was the price of life; but assuredly he to whom life, or even liberty, is given may accept it on the condition of refrainance from that which he could never have done if deprived of either. The desire is implanted in your heart of opposing him; the conviction that it is a duty is rooted in your mind, but fate renders this impossible. You could but die, or linger in captivity, or madden here, suffering an unknown martyrdom, and that is sad to think upon for one so young, so gifted, and so pure of purpose—why not therefore renounce that which has become an idle aspiration. It is not for your sake only that I plead for you with yourself, but for my own. I repudiate all suicidal weakness—the waves must overwhelm the pebble, the unit cannot be allowed to stay the mass—but I should grieve—I should remember with remorse and pain the extinction of so noble an existence. If you had even the shadow of a chance, you might be firm, but you have none, and can be only wilful—for you have none. Do you think that you have one—one single chance?"

Tempest bowed his head in desponding acquiescence.

"Then why not abjure this barren hostility, even if you will not be one of us; even if too proud to carry out your views in subordination to an irresistibly preponderating system?"

"Because," replied Tempest, "that system is his work, and because he is the incarnation to humanity of all its evils."

"Listen," said Calliroë. "What the purest means could never have effected, the rudest instrumentality accomplishes. The barbaric impulses of superstition, vanity, the lust of blood and gold have, perhaps, occasioned throughout history the movements most beneficial to mankind. The inordinate thirst for power which knows no sating, but leads to its unscrupulous appropriation at every cost, at every sacrifice, is an ingredient indispensable in the nature of all fated to remodel or reform on a gigantic scale; it is part and parcel of that instinct which, in its partial development, in every age, when failing to inspire midway, has made the tyrant. By its fruit not by its root we must judge the tree. The most Godlike attribute of man is power, through ages sparingly vouchsafed. The will, however pure, is barren without it; and yet power, the author of this system has achieved to an extent that the world never saw before. Whatever be its origin it is there a stupendous fact—it will outlive him—it will pass to other hands—a mighty instrument of good, incompatible in its existence with your hostility, and hence inexorably destructive of your being, if, without a hope, you will oppose instead of yielding to its supremacy."

"What," said Tempest, "can it be that one so wise and gentle, whose looks, no less than words speak her nobility of soul, pleads for ill-gotten power against powerless purity of purpose? Can it be that she holds it in higher estimation?"

"Upon my soul I do!" replied Calliroë, boldly, "unbounded power, even misapplied, is nearer to sublimity than good intentions never to be fulfilled: a flash of thought, the conviction of an hour may make one fructify, whilst the will without the means must remain perpetually barren."

"Well!" said Tempest, "it may be as you say; my existence may be a mere worthless unit destined to obscure extinction. It may be that the germ of those great thoughts which stir within me—the antagonistic impulse I obey—may perish like a seed that rots away, but I feel that it is in me, ready to expand if ever it should see the light, and I will not sacrifice its vitality."

"But if it be impossible that it can ever see the light?"

"There are no impossibilities," replied Tempest, "for those whose faith is firm. Even if there be no fate, the wheel of fortune must still contain some possible though widely improbable prize; some chance, however remote, if not one in a million—still a chance—must yet be mine. Of this chance no power could deprive me, even if the knife were descending on my neck, and whilst this chance is mine I will never abdicate my mission."

"Noble, but misguided nature!" said Calliroë, with emotion. "A dark, an irreconcilable fatality impels us. Oh! do not obstinately perish, listen to my prayer, oh! let these tears, not such as woman weeps, persuade. There are possibilities so remote that all but the insane consider their converse certainties, and the certainty for you is to wear out your existence in these walls."

At this moment two shadows intervened betwixt them and the light, the door had turned upon its noiseless hinges; two figures had glided in, and another darkened the threshold. Sir Jasper and Eustatius stood before them.

"This is a strange meeting," said Eustatius. "I beg you all to note well the hour and circumstance. You might well renounce a husband, madam, and fly the gaieties of the great world when you found compensation here."

"I must implore you to observe," said Sir Jasper, "that I am an unwilling witness to this discovery; I came only to see the calumny made manifest which your presence here unhappily has not disproved."

"As for your patient, Doctor Boniface," said Eustatius, addressing the principal, who was very pale, and who had just heard that John Cash was dead, "he follows me: I can have no personal pique against the man who enables me to rid myself of an unworthy wife—but I must look to his freedom and his safety. I must prove that he is not insane, and you may count upon my countenance and protection."

CHAPTER VI.

JOHN CASH.

The night had passed. It began to be reported that John Cash was worse, and some even hazarded a whisper that he was no more. The funds did not fall because the millionary was the only extensive fund-holder, but far and wide all public business was tacitly suspended. Groups gathered to converse on the momentous topic, in streets and squares. Who was his successor? Some bold spirits asserted that be he whom he might they would not submit to the same dictation from a young man that they had endured, out of respect for the deceased's grey hairs. Others now discovered that they had always thought Eustatius a most promising and public spirited youth, and that he had been much ill-used by his father. The print-sellers sold off every copy of his engraved portrait in two hours, and pleasing anecdotes of his private life appeared in paragraphs of the morning papers. The credit of Middleman Cautious went down rapidly, and it began to be pretty generally observed, that after all Sir Jasper was the only living statesman.

By every train important arrivals took place from every part of the United Monarchies, and the capital would have been crowded with political notabilities if velocity in railway travelling had not been limited to the express that carried government messengers and dispatches. Whilst these trains came with the rapidity of lightning, all others had been curtailed to the most remunerative rates of speed, which long experience had discovered to be the slowest conceivable, short of standing still. Four miles and a half an hour had therefore been suggested by John Cash, who was chief proprietor of all the lines, as the most profitable rate of travelling, and it was pitched upon as being on an average of a mile an hour beyond the performance of pedestrians.

It is true, it was foreseen that this state of things would resuscitate stage coaches, but many parts of the old highways were in a high state of cultivation, growing strips of wheat, or planted with mangel wurzel, the horses had to be bred, the coaches to be built, the capital to be got together, and when all this was done it was proposed by the companies to run fifteen miles an hour, at low fares, for six months, and so to crush all opposition.

One great advantage of this mode of travelling was that carriages never ran off the rails, that the engineers slept comfortably, and that when the engine separated from the body of the train, the passengers jumped out of the carriages and pushed them till they overtook and anchored them to the truant locomotive. Accidents, in fact, were almost unknown, except when the government expresses came smashing over them, which was pretty much every time they were expedited, but that was not often, because John Cash kept a sharp eye to the financial working of the concern.

"He did not," he said, "dispatch diplomatists as they had formerly been employed to go from one court to another to ask what o'clock it was, and his chief faith lay in the electric telegraph."

It was, therefore, only those who had local interest with the ruling powers, who had been enabled to avail themselves of this rapid mode of conveyance. Nevertheless even these were considerable in number, and it may therefore be readily imagined when the health of John

Cash was sufficiently interesting to make it the theme of general conversation, and to draw so many persons to the capital, what crowds beset his dwelling. All enquiries as to the progress of his malady were, however, baffled, meeting only with the reply, "That he was as well as could be expected," an answer peculiarly unmeaning at his door, because one he had always caused to be given when in perfect health. They were forced, therefore, to watch without for such signs as sooner or later always evidence what is passing within a tenement in which death is busy. Some of them had been there from early dawn, but hitherto without perceiving anything to guide their conjectures, excepting that all was so studiously regular in its external aspect, as to be suspicious.

The hour arrived on which change opened, but the chief characters, who figured in that arena, instead of resorting thither now only remarked, that "through that side door poor Cash had been wont to issue as regularly as the stroke of ten." And as they spoke the door did open and John Cash, his umbrella under arm, his step perhaps a little slower, and his skin barely one tint more sallow, walked out without noticing the astonished crowd, and crossed the square, as usual, to the opposite Exchange.

This was the manner in which the old man, that morning recovered, blighted the combinations of his enemies, silenced their machinations, and restored the wavering loyalty of the multitude.

CHAPTER VII.

SIR JASPER AND EUSTATIUS.

"Your father is a strange man; who would have thought that he would have rallied?" asked Sir Jasper.

"Who indeed," replied Eustatius, gloomily.

"We shall all suffer for this premature attempt to assert your just claims to your own."

"I knew he was better when I was again refused admission to him. You have seen him?"

"I have just seen him. There is a sinister expression about his eye which bodes mischief to us all."

"Perhaps," said Eustatius, "it would be wisest for me to join my mother."

"She will be here to-night. You must be of better cheer. If we have shown the old man our cards, we have derived some advantages from this untoward circumstance, not least of which, perhaps is, that it will force us into open collision. If on the one hand he is on his guard against us, on the other our position is strengthened by the prevalent impression that he is breaking up, and so I believe he is, if, as you assure me, his shrewd and matter of fact brain is turning superstitious."

"There is no doubt of it," said Eustatius "he babbles of mysterious agencies and strange powers, from which his prosperity has been derived, and which he now imagines to threaten it, when we all know that he owes what he is to the discovery of a specific for the murrain, discovered as a quack stumbles on a vermifuge powder."

"No, it was no ordinary capacity, no chance discovery which founded such a power, even though he be less well fitted than the son he persecutes, to extend and adorn the fortunes he has upreared," replied Sir Jasper. "But he too has his weakness, has he?" and on this reflection he began to muse, for the first light of a novel and daring thought, which he did not confide to Eustatius, was dawning in his mind. At length he added. "But we must act decisively, we can only threaten him through the Lady Calliroë; and we must make him purchase your forbearance by his own."

"What of that Tempest?" asked Eustatius, "is he safe? that was a great move of mine."

"He is safe—in the consciousness that his security depends on our protection; there is no fear that he will venture beyond the shadow of our wing."

"Let us only take care that he be not tampered with," replied Eustatius, "what have you made out of him? I have a notion that he will prove a trump card in our hands."

"On what do you found his importance?"

"On the importance my father attaches to his safe custody."

"There may be something in that," replied Sir Jasper, "even if he only serve to prove an hallucination. Hitherto I have not made anything out of him; I have found him mysterious and impracticable to a degree suggestive that there was really nothing in him. I shall try again, for it seems undoubted that some strange connexion, which we must solve, unites him to your wife's family. It is well to bear in mind that this youth I surprised in the park of Upland Castle with the Lady Calliroë on your marriage eve, that this youth has been confined as a lunatic by your father, and that we both surprised your wife a visitant of his cell."

"I never knew of that rendezvous before our union," replied Eustatius, whose vanity was profoundly hurt by the allusion. "But even if that unnatural woman were not her husband's worst enemy and rival—and even if she were guiltless, I have been outraged. Her affections have been tampered with."

"Doubly outraged," added Sir Jasper, "because she has besides allowed Cæsar's wife to be suspected."

"And therefore I will threaten, suspend the blow, or mercilessly strike her as the occasion may require. As for that wretched youth, her victim or accomplice, or perhaps both, I commit him into your hands to make such uses of as you may devise, or, as he may lend to, but, that done, you must remember, that the instrument—however humble—of my dishonour—even of such dishonour as a calumnious imputation—must not be allowed to go unscathed. Do you understand that, Sir Jasper?"

Sir Jasper, with a few words of careless acquiescence, quitted Eustatius to seek the presence of Tempest, in pursuance of the thought which has arisen in his mind, and which his fears no less than his ambition fostered.

"Was it probable," he thought, "that John Cash would forgive him? was it probable that with all the appliances of his power his subtle patience would not eventually prevail? Did not the safety of Sir Jasper lie in hardihood? Would it be quite impossible to prove old Cash himself insane? to make a bold snatch at the reins of power—gathered into a knot in the centralised despotism he had established—and by a sudden and daring stroke to shut him up in his own name, and set his son up in his place?"

But when the ex-minister reached the retreat he had provided for his protégé, he found to his consternation that the youth had absconded, though made aware that his description as an escaped maniac was that morning being published under the very windows of his place of refuge.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE ALTERNATIVE.

Tempest had deliberately quitted the asylum offered him. The dress in which he had been habited at the suggestion of Sir Jasper was little calculated to attract attention, differing so widely from that published in the description of his person, as to divert all notice from it. When after his long confinement he moved abroad in the free air of heaven, amidst the life and bustle of the great city, its animated crowd no longer, as before, impressed him with a sense of loneliness and solitude.

His lungs seemed to inhale, like a delicious draught, the breeze which fanned his cheek, and his eyes to repose with delight on the sunlit scene, bright with the vivifying rays which warmed the genial atmosphere.

It was one of those days which make the spirits buoyant; and his mood was full of that irrepressible hope which, quelling reason's sombre suggestions, makes the surrounding world a land of promise.

He felt that he was no longer a stranger in that crowded city. Those passers by whose smiles alone he noted, though ignorant of his person and identity, were familiar with his thoughts. They had devoured with avidity his glowing pages, they had gloried in the depth of his intellect, extolled the universality of his knowledge, and responded by enthusiastic applause to the bursts of his passionate eloquence, even though delivered through the lips of another, revering thus in him, by proxy, the champion of their rights—the prophet of their destinies.

His own ingenuity and foresight had prepared the indisputable proof of who and what he was. He had but to enter the first place of public entertainment, and point out the singular revelation contained in all the works and speeches of the popular hero, if the capital letters heading every sentence were construed into words. His listeners would disbelieve, but undoubtedly at the same time seek to disprove his words, and, struck by an apparent coincidence, trace the formation of syllables and sentences into a connected narrative, prolonged, repeated and detailed till bearing the irresistible impress of design and truth.

This truth and this identity established, the allegation of insanity would be untenable against him, and he would start into a notoriety the more widely bruited, that his rise would be into the place usurped by the popular champion, whilst at the same time a flagrant accusation of the great enemy of the people's rights.

The ardent desire for action so long repressed in barren inactivity; the oppression he had endured, and the treachery he had met with, had so far nursed the contentious instinct natural to Tempest, that he would have rushed with ferocious eagerness into such a strife fearless of the result.

Such last night had been his impulse, and therefore he had answered with indifference the offers of the astute Sir Jasper, and parried his insidious questions with disdain.

But with the night came this reflection—Tempest in his cell had been induced to appeal to the fears of Invective Rabid, because to him the progress of the insect, whose development he had witnessed for so many years, was always discernible as an open book. He watched it in his bread, he watched it in the water given to slake his thirst, and he knew, that the fourth and most dangerous stage of its transition was approaching. In the first part of that stage he judged that it was still possible for one man with the appliances at his command, to destroy its growth for ever, as so many things venomous and dangerous may be destroyed in the torpid state which precedes renewal of poison, form or vigour; but that brief stage once passed, its destructiveness might multiply beyond all control even of him whose fortunes had been founded on its ravages.

John Cash, whether gorged with spoil, or touched with pity, or inspired with fear, might still, if Tempest ventured into his presence, be persuaded to forego his terrible prerogative. But there was no time to lose. The youth perceived, with horror, that another day might occasion an irremediable transition in the departed galvanist's creation. If therefore, exposing his own wrongs to the world he fought successfully through the long battle of its disbelief—if he succeeded in impressing it with true notions of the incredible responsibility which John Cash had abused—if even able, as with a trumpet's voice, to rouse and array humanity against him, it would be too late. He (Tempest) personally might step into gigantic pre-eminence, but in what would he then, founding his fortunes on the public woe, be better than the selfish millionary?

At all risks Tempest, hazarding his immediate safety, determined to seek out old Cash. In pursuance of this resolution he had eluded the protection sought to be imposed upon him by Sir Jasper, though without illusion as to the dangers of such a course, and though rendered, by the temptations of the smiling world around him, keenly sensitive to the value of the freedom he was perilling.

In repairing to the millionary's dwelling, urged by a sense of duty, the elation into which his soul seemed ready to expand, was repressed by the foreboding that he might be again cut off from enjoyments of which he felt so much reluctance now to forfeit the fruition.

Never had that scene, from which he was hazarding perhaps eternal separation, seemed so alluring to him; but nevertheless—without slackening his step—without casting back even one lingering look—he went his way till he stood at his persecutor's door.

Access to John Cash, though in ordinary circumstances less difficult than to most great men, was not easy on the first day of his convalescence, but Tempest was provided with a means sure to attract the old man's attention, if not to obtain admission to his presence. Having delivered a letter, he patiently walked up and down upon the footway.

Many minutes had not elapsed before several attendants rushed out in all the hurry of pursuit, and on learning that he was the person who had left a missive for the minister, led him into the mansion, simply acquainting him that he had been sent for by Lord Lofty.

At this name a dark reminiscence crossed the brain of Tempest. Filled with the conscious dignity of his mission, an expression of pride, and almost of scorn, stole across his countenance, as he prepared to encounter the haughty magnate, whose former reception he had not forgotten, and with whose political tergiversation he had been made acquainted.

But a glance sufficed to show how much the senator was changed. His brow was no longer erect, his look no longer coldly arrogant, but typical of the dejection of his class. No longer the member of a powerful oligarchy, he had sank into a courtier of the fortunes of another, on whose forbearance he depended, and on whose pleasure he throve.

Lord Lofty did not recognise Tempest. Though his demeanor was still characterised by a modified kind of hauteur—that of the dependent anxious to assert his position rather than of the proudly, self-complacent master—he received the youth with respectful courtesy, occasioned by the eagerness with which John Cash had ordered that he should be overtaken and ushered into his presence.

John Cash had returned from the politic exhibition of his person in public. He had been transacting business with Middleman Cautious, the Lady Calliroë was by his side, and he was just receiving an impromptu deputation, sent to convey to him the congratulations of the Senate and Exchange, on his sudden restoration to health. By his side were two parcels of letters into which he piled those handed to him, sorting some for immediate perusal, for though it was said that he could not read, it was certain that he could acutely distinguish the handwriting of many of his correspondents. But the thoughts of the old man were far away from all these matters to which he was attending. He could neither calm his uneasiness nor conceal his vexation. The escape of Tempest caused him a profound anxiety, which all the measures taken for his capture could not re-assure, and his sharp glance wandered eagerly towards the door in the hope that each intrusion would convey some tidings of the fugitive.

And indeed, at that hour, so general was the search for Tempest, that it would have been difficult for him to have escaped detection any where but in the unsuspected vicinity of old Cash's dwelling.

The deputation had concluded its time-serving address, to which John Cash made not one of his habitually brief replies but—contrary to his wont—a most ungracious answer.

"Senators, gentlemen and capitalists," replied the millionary, "receive my acknowledgments for your good wishes, but in future, before you waste my time and your own in such congratulations, be good enough to ascertain that there is occasion for them, and wait till you hear from me, that I really have been ill," as John Cash spoke he made a prince-like bow of dismissal, and at that moment a letter was put into his hand, for he would literally see every letter addressed to him. He was about to consign it to the pile of unknown epistles, when a hieroglyphic on its corner caught his eye.

At this sight a singular change came over the usually unchangeable features of the millionary, on which even the traces of a dangerous attack had scarce sufficed to make any visible alteration; with an imperious gesture he impatiently dismissed his company, and then—even before he could utter the necessary enquiries respecting the bearer of that epistle, or issue fitting instructions for his detention—his eyes became rivetted with an expression of fear and wonder on the sign which had attracted attention. Nothing could be apparently more simple. It was only about three parts of a ring drawn with a pen upon the superscription of the letter, but yet, for John Cash, so full of strange and terrible import that his lips quivered with agitation, as he glared rather than looked into this unfinished circle, devouring its proportions with his eyes, as if for him it was the stamp of an irrevocable doom.

And in truth to John Cash this mark was preternaturally portentous, for to his superstition the completion of that ring was significant of the close of life or fortune. Twenty years ago the old galvanist in his dungeon had marked down the small segment of a circle, bidding him beware of the meeting of its points in that mysterious figure without beginning or end, which images eternity and infinitude, and whose encompassed space all human knowledge has hither to failed to measure.*

[*Note.—The posthumous papers, by which it appeared that Colonel Sibthorpe had squared the circle, were still undiscovered at that period (1907).]

John Cash, the unbelieving and strong-minded man, might have laughed such a conceit to scorn, had it not been that every communication made by his victim, of which time had stamped the mysterious accuracy, was marked by this fatal segment, which grew and grew for years—till at last John Cash would note how far the curve had progressed with as intense solicitude as if watching the development of a serpent fated to devour him, and until he started in his dreams affrighted by the vision of that appalling circle.

Need it be said that it was Tempest's missive whose envelope the millionary scanned with such frightful eagerness.

A few, hasty orders given, when recovered from his first surprise, brought Tempest, into his presence. The old man, whose spirits rose. with the reflection that the youth, at least was in his power again, signed Lord Lofty to retire, but beckoned the Lady Calliroë to remain.

With a firm but measured step, with the mien grave and severe, of one who, impressed with the peril he is braving, and yet with all the enthusiastic elation, conscious advocacy of mankind's interests could impart—Tempest advanced up to the millionary.

The old man's glance had become again cold, impassible and cruel. There was some thing of the complacent, self-gratulation in his look, with which the keeper of a menagerie surveys some untameable and dangerous animal restored to the safe durance of its prison bars.

The ordinary salutations of courtesy would have been a mockery between these men, but there passed a glance of recognition betwixt Tempest and the Lady Calliroë, who could not help regarding the apparition of the fugitive with a strange interest, not unmixed with fear. She remembered his irreconcilable enmity to her house, and though less alarmed at his enlargement than John Cash, the boldness of the liberated captive in thus bearding his persecutor in his den, augured the consciousness of impunity or power which must be an inevitable peril to their interests.

She did not share in the security which old Cash felt when he found his victim once more in the toils which had so long and safely circumscribed the animosity both of Tempest and of him from whom his knowledge had been derived.

"John Cash," said Tempest, fixing his dark eye upon the millionary, "we know each other. Your human hounds are tracking me; no ordinary impulse leads me into your presence."

"You are welcome," replied John Cash, significantly, "we know each other. What brings you here?"

"I come," said Tempest, "with a solemn warning."

"Speak," answered the millionary, "but since we know each other, do not waste words as he did."

"I come not," said Tempest, "appealing to your compassion, such words would fall like rain upon the rock. The fount of all pity is frozen in your soul. Even charity itself could but gleam over its ice, like a moonbeam, bright and cold, illumining its depth and not dissolving it. But there, as in every human breast, its liquid springs still flow beneath the surface—hopelessly congealed at least to all impulses of benevolence—but if doubt or terror break through the frozen crust—the genial ray may reach and quicken that frigid current in your soul. I come to plead for the interests of humanity against my own and through your own—"

"Speak on," replied John Cash, "as you say the rock is more impressionable than I am. On that immutable firmness I have reared my fortunes. But deaf to sentiment and feeling, I am quite accessible through fact and reason. What have you to tell me?"

"This," answered Tempest, "that the curse, on which you have founded your prosperity, threatens to destroy it. As the insect to which he gave birth, and endowed with his own envenomed spirit grew to be his chastisement so it may become yours. I told you once that we should meet again, you confidently answered me never, and then, if I doubted whether we should meet, I believed that it would never be except in fatal conflict. yet I am here to avert the doom, so justly merited so darkly overhanging you."

"Our enmity was your own choice," replied old Cash, in nowise shaken, "I would have served you."

"You would have made me the subaltern accomplice of your usurpation, rewarding my compliance with the merited treachery by which his was paid."

"Well, that is past. We know each other," replied old Cash. "Why have you sought me? Say on, remembering that threats unproved fall idly on my ear."

"Not mine, when I speak solemnly upon that theme," said Tempest. "And you may judge whether I am earnest, if you reflect that I was free, and by returning here come like the bird into the fowler's net, like the lamb into the tiger's den—without one struggle for deliverance—the defenceless to the unpitying."

"If it be to menace evil that you come, there is none that you can do me in your cell that you could not at large."

"I come to avert evil."

"Why from me?"

"Because it can only reach you through the calamities of that human family whose sufferings have been your steps to power."

"The gain of one is another's loss," observed John Cash. "What then?"

"His illegitimate gain!" answered Tempest. "And in these no impostor, conqueror or false priest has ever more largely traded. None ever yet deserved a more tremendous doom. I lived in the hope that it would have overtaken you—I suffered in the belief that I should be its instrument; but it seems otherwise ordained. The most cruel tyrants have been reserved to heal the wounds they had made—to pacify the nations they had affrighted; and so into your hands, John Cash, and not into mine, fortune has placed the remedy. Hear me! That terrible creation, over whose ravages you only have hitherto, of any human being, held control, sleeps now in its harmless chrysalis. In that stage it may still be destroyed, like the torpid snake, or the ova of the locust crushed by a peasant's spade, or vivified to desolate provinces—but that stage past, its next transition may be into a form baffling all remedy, and calculated to progress with time to an intensity of destructiveness which I am gifted to foresee but not to measure.

"There is a sign, before which I know of old that your lip quivered—the closing circle! That circle marks the progress of the insect—"

"Oh!" said John Cash who had listened with the most eager attention, as if inexpressibly relieved—"that is the meaning of the ring! All hail then to the progress of the insect! The silk-worm has furnished kings their robes, the shell-fish, it is said, has raised up shores for monarchs to rule over, but what are they to the insect of the murrain? It has given me more of the world than perhaps the world imagines. Let it weave on its spell, let it complete its circle it can but give me all."

"And what will that avail you with the earth become a scene of ruin—when disease and dissolution have made a desert of its surface, and when—amidst this reck of its organic life—you or your inheritor lie down to die alone."

"Oh!" said the Lady Calliroë, "I would not inherit such a world."

"Labour is wealth. The earth untenanted would be valueless," mused old Cash, "but how prove to me that I should not lose by annihilation of the insect?"

"Is it not evident," said Tempest, "that you could gain nothing by its progress, if unable to stay its destructive development?"

"Well, let it be proven," replied the millionary,

"that John Cash gains nothing and loses anything by the murrain, and if it may be it shall be removed."

"Great benefits are not conferred, atonements are not made without some sacrifice," answered Tempest. "You must lavish your influence, you must expend your wealth, you must give the world your secret."

"What!" said John Cash, "and find the world, in its anger and dismay, turn round and strip off all my plumes like the jackdaw's borrowed feathers?"

"You must hazard this," replied Tempest "but you have no choice, the future bars you your way unless you expiate the past."

The old man mused for a few seconds, and then said,

"But when will the growth of the insect become fatal? and how, prove to me, that it will?"

"Thus;" answered Tempest, "I will open to you the sources of my own knowledge. I am not here to waste words, I know whom I address—one who will not give up the substance for the shadow, and so let us argue as if facts were proven, holding the proof as indispensable. Now hear me! I have staked my destiny upon this interview, I must persuade or perish, and therefore I will solve a doubt which cruelly disquiets you. He to whose manes be peace! did not bequeath to me his secrets."

"None of his secrets?" said the millionary, with mingled eagerness and incredulity.

"I am possessed," continued Tempest, "of fragmentary portions of his knowledge, some self-acquired, some imparted by him, but all incomplete, all wanting in some link, like the works of an intricate machine in which some piece is wanting.

"If one had been vouchsafed to me in its completion I should not be here as a suppliant now, but gifted with the power of averting that which I can but foresee, and sitting in judgment on past guilt instead of denouncing future evil!

"Yet even my foresight, accurately vague, is limited though unerring. The history of the insect has been bared to me like a volume, which I have spelled through page by page, even as the geologists discerned—recorded in the earth's great book—in its leaves of rock, and in its strata chapters—the progress and decay of animated life through ages unsuspected. From these past phases of the insect's being I gather those to come, even as you foresee the fall of autumn leaves, the bursting of the buds in spring, and even as those who read in the earth's surface can judge unerringly in what serial order they should range—according to the completeness of its organs—a newly exhumed species, since every transition of organic life has been an undeviating step in the ascending scale of its perfection, from that stage in which vegetable first passed into animal organisation, when the star-fish started into life, with plant-like root adhering to the rock, down to the creation of man, who thinks, transmits accumulating thought, and aspires to encompass with his mind the mysteries of the universe surrounding him.

"Yet geologic art assigns the place, but cannot fix the time within a score of ages.—So with my judgment of the insect. I know that its next transition is imminent—I know that with transition it will pass beyond control, progressing to unlimited destructiveness; but when and how rapidly is but a vague conjecture."

"You talked of my successor dying amongst the wreck which it had made." said old Cash, eagerly.

"I cannot fix the time; it may be a year, it may be half a century—I can but prophecy the fact, I can but show you in its present form the germ of organs, present, though undeveloped like the limbs of the serpent tribes, like the ostrich's wings, but hereafter destined to bud into efficiency unboundedly destructive."

"Stay," said Calliroë, "all you say may be true, but you forget that according to its theory the propagation of animal and insect life must long since have devastated, and rendered barren, earth and sea. The eagles must have destroyed all fowl, the sharks all fish, the locusts all vegetation. Yet it is not so."

"True," replied Tempest, "but the same wise law which called them into existence to keep down redundant life, preserving a due equilibrium in its creations, limits, by countless accidents the multiplication of these species. It is not so with the insect. A malevolent thought presided at its birth, a misanthropic spirit gave it being. No countervailing cause has been provided to stay its ravages, save such as may proceed from its creator man."

"Then the fact is," said old Cash knitting his bushy brows according to his wont when he jumped to a shrewd conclusion, "that the murrain will desolate the world—that it is sure to desolate the world, but that we know not when. Therefore it is like Death. Now all men know that they must die and come to tenant a few feet of sod, yet who in that thought gives up one ill-gotten acre? It comes to this; that the murrain may at some time remote ruin the world when I am its possessor, or to the immediate certainty that I may stay the murrain and be trampled upon by the world I am trampling.

"There is no choice in such a matter. You say, young man, that man has a mission, and you speak truly, that mission's law—the first law of creation—written in unmistakable characters in every impulse of all animated being dictates that according to our abilities and capacities we should—" and here John Cash either dreading to become rhetorical or slipping from his stilts, added "that law dictates that we should take care of number one. Let the world do so, and John Cash will, I promise you!—What have you to say further?"

"A few words more," said Tempest, "and if these fail I bow resigned to my despair. Why appeal to a mere animal instinct—that selfish instinct self-preservative, foreshadowed in the protective thorns of insensate vegetation, and which distinguishing animated life first started into being when the crinoid detached its stem from the bottom of the sea, and from a plant became a star-fish?

"That instinct was a step in creation's progress, even as the first vegetable organisation was an advance beyond the combinations of inorganic matter. But the principle of life was not the principle of thought or soul any more than light is heat.

"Life—with its selfish instincts—teemed in the early world when the shell-fish and the corals made islands in its seas. It lingered in the forms that writhed in its reeking slime—it still animates the reptiles of the tropics, with a tenacity and plentitude unknown to the earth's more perfect organisms.

"Some of the most degraded of these were old when the human race began; the toad has existed ages in the rock, the severed worm, the divided polypus live on, whilst life lasts but a few brief years in man, extinguished by a blow or dissipated by a thought!

"In man the principle of life is blent with that of soul and secondary to it.

"In him, contend the instincts of inferior states, with aspirations linking him to the future, to constitute his part in that stupendous drama, which—eternally progressing—has passed into its third act.

"The law of its first phase was gravitation. The second life and its development. Soul, thought, and unbounded progress mark the third, whose ministry is mankind's especial mission.

"An impulse, irresistible, rolls onwards, mind and matter. All records of all things chronicle their perfectibility. The burning nebulæ of chaotic stars condense into suns and planets before our eyes throughout the firmament. The lava and the mist cool into earth and sea. The sea and earth give birth to life, changing incessantly to forms more perfect till, man adorns the scene. Man's history is a like career of progress—a like advancing tide whose partial waves recede, whose mass of waters moves on steadily.

"He roamed the savage, or he toiled the slave. He reared the conqueror's Babylonian walls, the Egyptian Despot's Pyramid. Science, art and freedom—freedom unshared beyond the favoured race—dawned for exclusive Greece and selfish Rome. The doctrines of christianity were spread declaring all men free and equal. Slavery became serf-dom. Ages of serf-dom passed and slavery and serf-dom vanished.

"Science resumed its reign. Civilisation,—partially checked, perpetually advancing—again rolled onward the accumulating mass of thought and knowledge,—never diminished, indefinitely expanding in obedience to that eternal law, which rules the universe—eternal law which rules the universe—the law of illimitable progress.

"Gravitation and heat were the early agents of the change which that progression involves, organic life the next—strata of shells, the fossil wreck of forests, next changed the earth's surface—and the last was thought, to man confided, and woe to him if he ignore his mission! woe to him if—neglecting the spiritual aspirations which disquiet or impel individual man and his collective race—he look back to the mere animal instincts of his being, as you, John Cash, are looking backwards! Remember, and remembering beware, how nature punishes all transgression of her order with a severity and promptitude proportioned to the offence. Judge then what terrible chastisement may visit so great a violation as you contemplate of its first, sublimest law! and pause ere you decide, for that violation will be irrevocable."

"Enough," replied John Cash, whom these words troubled, but whom they did not move.

"Oh! hear him," said the Lady Calliroë; "something warns me that there is a fatal wisdom in his words."

"No," said the millionary, "he can but disturb, he never could persuade me. If it be as he says—if to each there be assigned his mission, each can but obey the impulses which guide him in it. Mine are to doubt the most plausible uncertainties, to grasp at tangible realities, to acquire—to retain—and nothing farther."

"Then," said Tempest with the proud look of the militant Archangel, "whatever be my doom I devote you to your fate. Henceforward be your life a crime—your name and memory a malediction!!"

* * * * * * *

One hour afterwards Tempest was again the occupant of the asylum from which Eustatius had released him. The principal was changed. The door of a subterranean cell, more dark and more secure than that which he had so long tenanted, closed on him, with its iron grating, of which John Cash took the key, observing to the jailor in his captive's hearing:

"Remember, you are the trustee of this poor maniac, and if I die before him you will apply the interest of those funds to your own uses until he should become sane or pass into another's care."

"He never will," replied the jailor, who had served in the police of the Bokharian despot. "And if he dies, I am to understand you—?"

"That then the capital of those funds becomes the perquisite of him under whose charge the patient may have died. You see all is provided."

"It had need be," said the principal, "for if, sickly as he is, he lives six months here, I will forfeit the reward of all my care."

The outer door closed. Tempest was left alone in darkness—with despair.

CHAPTER IX.

MRS. CASH.

If we lead the reader back one half hour, just as Tempest was entering the dwelling of the millionary, Eustatius might have been seen arm in arm with Invective Rabid on the opposite side of the square. Both found their account in the occasional parade of an intimacy beneficial to the credit of Eustatius for liberality, and to that of the Democratic leader for respectability in the estimation of the monied interests.

"After all we live in a free country, or we do not," said Eustatius. "I have casually discovered a glaring case of oppression, on the part of that arbitrary old man, my father. I can prove it, I am determined to expose it."

"Indeed," replied Invective, "then honour to you my young Brutus! the case is reversed; but what matter? the name fits, and Brutus Cash will mark as the third Brutus. But what is the story? What says Sir Jasper to it? Is it a fine, sound, tangible case of intolerable oppression?"

"You shall judge," replied Eustatius, "for you shall hear; but I must first be assured of your co-operation. The matter must be pushed home to him at once and fearlessly. Any timidity——

"Timidity!" echoed Invective with an expression vauntingly ironical. "Do you speak of timidity to me whom all seek to restrain to prudence, to me who never bowed to man, or fortune, who have not only defied your father's power, but faced the tedium of his speeches—to me who would assail the arch fiend without blenching?"

At this moment a vision passed before the eyes of the democratic leader, and a sound rang in the ears of the millionary's son which prostrated all the confidence of the one, and gave wings to the feet of the other.

Invective Rabid remained, with tottering knees and blanching cheek, speechless and motionless, until his arm, upraised in seriocomic adjuration, fell powerless by his side. Eustatius, quitting him without comment darted hastily away and disappeared down a cross street. Invective Rabid had recognised Tempest, entering the dwelling of old Cash, and at the same instant there had been drawn up suddenly in the square a state carriage, from which burst—through the lungs of Mrs. Cash, prominently discernible in it—a cry of maternal solicitude, morally touching perhaps, but so loud and inappropriate as to be irresistibly ludicrous. Mrs. Cash, just arriving from the railway station, had caught sight of her son, whose attention she first sought to attract by waving her handkerchief, and then by calling out, regardless of the laughter of the bystanders, his abbreviated name, in a stentorian voice.

"He is gone!" said Mrs. Cash at length with a sigh, "the footmen will never overtake him. Drat them! If Tat has cotton in his ears, they must have lead in their heels—and to think that I have hired them for their calves too! They could not run slower if they were spindle shaped."

"He could not hear you madam!" said Smithers.

"I wish I could say as much," said the Lady Bountiful Straightlace, the third occupant of the vehicle, still pressing her ears with her open hands, as people do in a vicinity deafeningly sonorous, "At any rate if he could he would not."

Mrs. Cash sighed again at this remark which confirmed her own suspicions? and then a consolatory thought suggested itself. "After all," said the old lady, "he may not have heard me, for though I did try to sing out, we should not forget that I have weak lungs now."

"Weak lungs!" echoed the Lady Straightlace.

"To be sure; isn't that my disorder, and haven't they been tried by the telescope," replied Mrs. Cash angrily, for she would sooner have endured a doubt of her virtue than of her ailments.

Here the wife of the millionary turned wrathfully upon Smithers, who, putting her hand to her forehead, was making telegraphic signs, which the vexed spirit of her mistress obviously misunderstood.

"If some people," said Mrs. Cash, "affect to be as tender as young rabbits about the ears, it is no reason why you should impertinently pretend that your head aches as well as their ears. You should not forget that I pay you, that you are my menial, as Tat says, and that I don't pay them, though they do travel at my expense, and though I do pay for their charities."

"Dear Mrs. Cash, calm your irritability," said the Lady Bountiful Straightlace, "it is unchristianlike, unbecoming, sinful, and it gives wrinkles. That young person is under an impression which, had it not been for your positive assertion to the contrary, I should have shared, though God knows I am not prone to suspect the artifices of the toilet, since humbly content with the gifts of my creator, I never wore the hair or teeth of another."

This assurance on the part of the Lady Straightlace was needless because her mouth resembled that of a shark given to the use of the quid, and because her hair was of that hue with which neither wig makers nor time ever appear to meddle, and which is therefore never either false or changing, perhaps because it could but benefit by any change.

"What do you mean?" said Mrs. Cash; "do you think I ever wore any but my own hair or teeth?"

"He! he!" simpered the Lady Straightlace maliciously, "I cannot so far forget myself as to doubt the declaration of a lady; but if it were not for that fact, I should say that the front of your head-dress is displaced, showing a white stubble underneath it."

"Dear me," said Mrs. Cash, "my wig is awry, why couldn't you call things by their names, and tell me so?"

"What after I had heard you protest that you never wore any but your own locks?"

"And are they not my own, haven't I paid for them. Do you think I would have hair or teeth on credit, or borrow them?" asked Mrs. Cash, triumphantly, "not that I am unmindful of what is due to the graces of my gender."

"Your sex, madam," suggested Smithers.

"You corrected me when I said sex this morning," replied Mrs. Cash, tartly.

"That was because you applied it to a word."

"I'll tell you what," said Mrs. Cash. "What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I have a notion that there is finding fault for finding fault sake."

This discussion was terminated by the return of one of the footmen, who having overtaken Eustatius, was desired to acquaint his mistress that her son would be with her in an hour, and that John Cash was so far recovered that he had that morning been upon change.

"Well! he has been coming the old soldier over me," exclaimed Mrs. Cash. "I never knew him do such a thing before since I put my neck into one halter and offered up my hand, and heart upon another!"

"Did we not tell you that all would be well," ventured Smithers, who saw the face of her patroness brightening. "Have we not been prophets?"

"Profits!" said Mrs. Cash, "very small profits, if any, seeing that my lady there has snored, and that you have contradicted me the whole way, and that I have paid the piper. No, I cannot say that you have been profits at all. I never object to profits, however small, in fact small profits and quick returns was once my maxim. But, as you say, Smithers, we must not forget that we belong to the bow-sex—at least I suppose we do, though bows are out of fashion—and that therefore we should make ourselves at all times as pleasant as we can. I have an hour to spare, we have come a long way together, so your ladyship must take a snack with me. Smithers will step on before and see that it is snugly and speedily prepared."

"Where will you please to take your repast?" said Smithers.

"Suppose we say that room newly fitted with the tapestry, in which what's-his-name addresses his army."

"In which Napoleon points to the Pyramids and says to his host. 'From the summits of those pyramids forty centuries look down upon you.' "

"Aye, I remember;" continued Mrs. Cash "from the summit of those Pyramids forty sentries look down upon you! but it is like that painting in which Diogenes is represented in his tub, with the lid shut down upon him, for if the sentries are there they are on the other side of the Pyramid."

"Might I venture to suggest that the tapestried gallery is not the best fitted."

"Pooh!" said Mrs. Cash. "I am determined to convert one of them into a dining room; every one says that they are peculiarly well suited for it. They have been nicknamed so—"

"I never!"—said Smithers.

"Oh! you never—" continued Mrs. Cash "You never heard them called the gobbling rooms, did you?"

"Yes," answered Smithers—a part of whose sad penance it was to maintain imperturbable gravity—mildly, and as if venturing on a bold and questionable hypothesis, "but that might also be from 'Gobelines,' the place where the tapestry was manufactured."

CHAPTER X.

THE VICTIM.

The dreariest hour in the captive's solitude,—when the mouse leaps out of his bitter loaf, when the tadpole and the leech from his dungeon moat defile the water he raises to his fevered lips—when, motionless with sickness, he dreads the tooth and feels the cold feet of the carnivorous rat patter over his forehead—when the rude hand of the jailor has crushed the beetle or the spider grown tame from long companionship, or rooted out the lonely plant whose growth he had learned lovingly to watch—is nothing to that of his first restoration to the cell from which he has been suffered to emerge, after long confinement, to breathe the pure air of heaven, and dream that he was free.

Hope—where the future is hopeful,—withers in the most sanguine breast. What, therefore, must have been the desolating thoughts of Tempest pent in that living sepulchre without a chance of egress, and without one prospective ray to illumine the despair of that dank dark dungeon's night?

There was nothing to relieve but everything to sharpen his anguish. The very thought that his sufferings were unmerited added to their poignancy. He was not even in the situation of those who though still clinging to existence, with the tenacious instinct of the love of life, have yet been in some measure sated with its experiences. Tempest—without the consciousness of having lived—without the memories and regrets which satisfy the soul they sadden—was arrested on the threshold of the world that wooed him, withheld from the fruition of untried delights which disappointment had not leavened, and consigned to the oblivion of the grave—an artificial grave, without the repose, and divested of the hopes, of that in which outworn humanity finds refuge.

The night and day were one in his gloomy prison; but though he made no effort to mark the time—for what was time to him?—it became evident that a night or day at least had elapsed without the appearance of the jailor to bring him food or drink.

Then his growing thirst began painfully to mark the hours, and the horrible suspicion flashed across his mind, that he was devoted by his present guardian to a death of famine.

After long repeated and exhausted cries he relapsed into silence. The last chance vanished that, accidentally forgotten, his voice might still have been heard. If murder were designed who would heed the shout of the supposed maniac? why therefore longer rouse the echoes of those unpitying walls?

He sat down; a cold shudder crept over him. The sensations he experienced were those of one buried in a trance when awakening in the coffin. The very air seemed close and suffocating. He gasped for breath. All the distinctive horrors of death by starvation, he had ever heard or read of, came crowding on his harrowed memory. The gnawing pang,—the acute despair—the wolfish howl, the longings of the cannibal—were vividly present in his thoughts. Imagination conjured up the draught of blood from the sufferer's own veins—the long delirium, the wasted frame, the afterwards discovered skeleton whose fingers gnawed and horrible contortion argue the unspeakable agonies of vitality thus departing.

The maddening contemplation of such a death was almost enough to urge the victim of it to dash out his brains against the walls. Yet this was the death to which his connexion with the galvanist had led—from which the galvanist might have saved—him. The death reserved not for him alone, but perhaps for all mankind.

At this thought a curse inexpressibly bitter gathered in his heart. He began to doubt the justice of that Supreme Power whose abstinence from all exceptional control over terrestrial weal or woe, beyond that proceeding from his primordial laws, he had once recognised as distinctive of eternal wisdom.

There came a change but no relief in these weird imaginings. The vivid promptings of despair gave way to the dull monotony of desolation and then succeeded to it.

At length, rather a mechanical instinct than a hope, urged the captive to try the walls and fastenings of his cell.

Both seemed to mock his efforts. The wall was solid stone, the door did not even respond by a faint vibration to the most desperate concentration of his strength.

But yet, so utter was the darkness, that he had been obliged to explore, by the touch, the sides and flooring of his cell, and as his finger travelled over them he lighted on certain inequalities, which he discerned to be characters rudely graven on its surface. Was he awake and sane, or was it the delusion of delirium? those characters formed the name of his departed master.

This then was the dungeon in which the deceased galvanist had been for so many years immured? Even here then there was hope so long as there was life; but how long would there still be life for Tempest?

Beside this name there was the date, beside the date were other characters—innumerable characters—the smoothness of the wall was roughened by their multitude, the work of the captive's dreary leisure. Deprived of writing implements, he had made a note book of the stone and scratched upon the wall whole passages of his mind's history, in hieroglyphics unintelligible to all but their inventor except to Tempest, his initiated disciple.

Nothing but that insatiable thirst for knowledge which had marked his early life, could for a moment have diverted his thoughts from the burning thirst, then throbbing in his veins and husky in his throat. Once or twice he essayed to read and then—with breathless interest—he read on unmindful of his pain, forgetful of his misery.

Hours passed and Tempest thought no more of his thirst or of his despair.

His mind, if not his eyes, devoured this unexpected record. That which he had longed so ardently to know was here made manifest. He followed step by step the process of his predecessor's thoughts. One by one he discovered and connected the missing links of his own imperfect knowledge, till, by degrees, the secrets of the galvanist were revealed.

Tempest had thus appropriated all the galvanist had withheld. He had possessed himself of more than his predecessor's power: because gifted with the intellect to compass, and with the energy to master weapons which the old man had never dared to wield. The youth was now, as he had so long dreamed, lord of the grey-beard's spell! From the exultation of absorbing thought he was at last recalled to a sense of the stern reality.

If it were terrible to die before, Tempest felt that to perish then would be to die a thousand deaths—he was resolved to live. He willed it with that energy of volition which overcomes impossibilities. He tried the powers he had mastered as a new fledged bird which essays its wings, or as the blind restored will sometimes open their eyes and glance at the offended sun with rash impatience. Too reckless, and unpractised, at every effort, he risked annihilation from the fluids, which flashed and roared like the summoned spirits, which howled round the necromancer in old tales to tear him into atoms at the first error in his incantation.

His cell—filled with a fitful brightness, whose intensity increased or waned—was light as day. His glance could pierce not alone the night of his dark cell, but even the masonry of its vaulted arch, with more clearness than a sun-ray struggles through the mist. The figures dim, the muffled sounds, the thoughts confused of men—from whom walls of stone divided him—dawned to his eyes and ears and apprehension, and then, again one fault—in the manipulation, his untutored hand practised too daringly—left him a wholesome warning of the destruction he had narrowly escaped, as he lay stunned and prostrate in the darkness.

But Tempest was desperate if not utterly fearless. He could but perish; starvation and oblivion were within—the world and its renown beyond—those walls.

With the convulsive energy which his overwrought nerves permitted, he once more gathered the subtle fluids round him. Like a child disporting with the lightnings of the thundering Jupiter, he made them flash and play around his frail frame, which one error in their management would have reduced to ashes. Until at length—taking leave of life, like one who tempts a desperate hazard, and recommending his soul to God—he concentered all his power, and made a final effort.

A shock was felt—an explosion heard—the walls were shaken—the building rocked—the lead poured in a cascade from the roof, the molten iron of bolts and gates and bars ran in a glowing stream—but Tempest was unharmed. His prison doors were no longer. He walked out. The millionth part of a hair's breadth had made the difference for him between annihilation and freedom!

* * * * * * *

Half an hour before the principal had been summoned to receive the bearer of an order of admission from John Cash. His obsequious obedience was increased on recognizing the Lady Calliroë, who armed with unlimited authority desired that Tempest should be brought before her. There was however a trepidation in her manner which roused the suspicions of the principal. He recalled how the credulity of his predecessor had cost him his office, and he had a vague idea that the very detection of his capture was connected with some love passage betwixt him and the Lady Calliroë.

Under these circumstances, to detect whether her authorisation was authentic, he boldly denied all knowledge of the youth. The Lady Calliroë peremptorily commanded him to usher her into the cell in which she had last seen Tempest.

This cell was vacant. The principal, who was now convinced, led her through the other apartments, omitting all mention of the subterranean dungeons: until finding the search fruitless, the Lady Calliroë retired, conscious of having deceived old Cash, and compromised herself in vain. She had hardly quitted, when the chief of the establishment determined to convey information to his patron of what had happened. He was in the act of departing when Tempest drew down the electric fluids on the building, and as the captive passed outwards through the last smoking corridor he trod over a charred and shapeless mass, which in its utter disfigurement it was difficult to recognise even as a relic of humanity, much less as the scorched, blackened, and blasted body of the principal!

"Why!" said Tempest, "is the exercise of power inseparable from violence—my first step towards freedom homicidal?"

CHAPTER XI.

MYRRAH.

"Myrrah," said Invective Rabid. "You are changed—you are becoming interrogative and serious. You have grown almost dull. It is not thus that you were wont to delight the world. It is not thus that you made me an object of its envy."

"I am changed," said Myrrah. "Once I only prized the affections and the gifts of men their fame or talents, as fit—when offered up on folly's altar—to grace a woman's triumph. But then I only dreamed a transitory passion—a fleeting predilection, whose ephemeral nature I knew, as surely as we know that the sunshine, in whose rays we bask, will soon decline.

"But you, Invective Rabid, have opened a new and unknown chapter in my heart. You have taught me the worship of a hero, not for my sake but for his own. You have inspired me with that ennobling affection which refines, and elevates, and purifies, and fills the soul! My thoughts, once only of myself, are now all of you; my life is in your glory, my pride in your success—my hope all in your future. That is why I am changed. That is why Myrrah is no longer Myrrah, and yet all this you doubt—all this you disbelieve from Myrrah's lips!"

"What matter whether I believe, so that I love?" replied Invective.

Myrrah continued with a deep sigh.

"You doubt! but time will prove my truth. I thought myself more—others, perhaps, thought me less—than woman; yet I was neither more nor less than woman, endowed with the warm capacity to love, and liable to the longing to love something with all enduring and absorbing passion! This faculty, too tardily awakened, has been roused, I know, when the worshipper has become unworthy of the adoration. From the vain idol men despised and bowed to, I have grown to be the idolatress. But my idolatry is an abstraction. It is not of Invective Rabid but of the millions' champion, of the name become a hope and blessing—of the daring assailing him to whom the world succumbs—and of the mighty mind to which he quails—the mind, which in the elasticity of its unbounded powers, stretches to compass all it wills. You know that I have surrendered all the vanities of a life, the freedom cherished through it, the heart of my proud bosom, to your fame. Flung recklessly beneath the wheels of your triumphal car, what matter if they pass over? what matter if they crush it? what matter even if my worship remain for ever unrequited? It will not the less endure. Disbelief cannot chill—neglect cannot alienate it."

"Come! come!" replied Invective, impatiently. "Though you are the first actress in the world, I feel that those lips, those eyes and that swelling bosom are made to tremble, sparkle and heave with unfeigned passion. I do not doubt your love more than I doubt anything, more than I believe or doubt my own existence, which after all may be a dream. I have told you that I love you, but I loved you better as you were than as you are. Better as the frivolous and joyous, than as the pensive Myrrah. I was more proud of you thus, I could unbend and revel in your reckless merriment, your questions and solicitude only sadden me.'

"Well," said Myrrah, with a pang, "I will be then as I was before. As I have often done, you insist that your captive shall figure with all her insignia in the pageant of your triumph. It shall be as you wish. I will throw open my halls, they shall stream again with light and gold, they shall resound with mirth and wit and melody, and since you disdain the silent adoration of your votary I will be the priestess of a dazzling temple, of which you shall be the god. But first you must answer me one question—one—and I will importune no longer."

Invective Rabid gave a nod of impatient acquiescence.

"You have an enemy—a dangerous enemy—one who threatens your existence, or you, the undaunted and the fate-defying, would not have been shaken as you were yesterday."

"Myrrah!" replied Invective, "this is a phantom of your brain."

"No," said Myrrah, "a reality oppressing it. You cannot deceive me. I can read your looks—and then in your troubled sleep you spoke. It is not John Cash, your great opponent—it is another, what other? how does he threaten you? who is he who has set the seal of anxiety upon that brow so prompt to confront peril with defiance?"

"Listen," replied Invective, "I have deceived you, and you are self-deceived. I have nothing now to dread from the untoward event which yesterday disturbed me. The danger happily past is painful to recall."

"But something preys on your mind now."

"Not that by which yesterday it was shaken; but you shall hear, Myrrah. This is an eventful crisis. Old Cash is growing too strong for us all. My fame, you will say, rises with his power; but that fame is only the vain breath of the people. If he were to strain his authority against me they would clamour; but I know them well, who would assist me to resist? I shall soon live only by his sufferance, like all who make common cause with me against him. They are convinced of this; they have concerted to assail him openly; yet they are wavering now, the pitiful knaves, and if they ail it will fare ill with us all. I am forced to depend on others, not on myself; that is the source of my anxieties."

"They are not unworthy of your undaunted spirit," answered Myrrah, "but who hangs back?"

"Every one," replied Invective. "They are letting slip opportunities which never may recur. The report of the old despot's death made many prematurely compromise themselves. The rumour prevalent of his failing health still cramps his power. Oxford has rejected his candidate, and passed a vote of censure on him. The ecclesiastical courts set his intimidation at defiance. Eustatius knows himself disinherited. Sir Jasper knows that he is lost, and yet they talk instead of acting."

"And how did they propose to act?"

"Overtly," replied Invective, "by attacking the Lady Calliroë, whom he has declared his heir, and whose guilt if proven will debar her, by the laws of the United Monarchies, from the power of inheritance, as well as from all civil right. You will not be sorry for that."

"Nor pleased," said Myrrah. "If she seduced Julian from me, I have paid her back in kind. I bear her no ill will. Once indeed I might have laughed to see these prudish dames unmasked—now I have other cares. But in what will this result? If she be disinherited he will find no lack of heirs from my former footman upwards."

"It will result," replied Invective, "in our ruin, unless our part is acted resolutely and well. I can say no more to-day—you shall know all to-morrow. To-night, Myrrah, perhaps you may be able effectually to further our views. If so will you assist us? Will you assist me?"

"What is there you should ask and not command of my devotion?" said Myrrah.

"This, if it be possible," said Invective.

"Entice Middleman Cautious to your house, and detain him there for two hours from ten till midnight."

"What!" said Myrrah. "Middleman Cautious! Is he not my irreconcilable foe? Impossible! You would not ask me that, Invective?"

"I know," answered the Demagogue, "that you extorted from the weakness of that austere personage a declaration which hangs framed and glazed in the gallery of your amorous correspondence—but nevertheless, I believe that you could tempt him. He has no grave occupations at that hour."

"Invective!" said Myrrah, "That gallery was the courtesan's. I was the first courtesan in the world. I am now the mistress—the unwedded wife—but the last, for she must be the last to whom such a proposition is made."

"Myrrah, my brave and beautiful! you misunderstand me. Have I erred in judging you gifted with man's unscrupulous mind and daring, arrayed in more than woman's beauty, allied to more than woman's faith? Have I erred in judging you a fit confidant of the deeds of men? The truth is that my fame, my honour, and my safety hang by what I ask you. Answer me therefore this one question as you love me; could you seduce him here if the salvation of your soul depended on it?"

"To save my soul I would not—but I could—I will to save your honour, to shield your person!"

"If so," said Invective, "and I have unlimited faith in your powers of seduction and fascination—if you can keep him here till midnight—or till I send you in my ring—that may occur which will give me to-morrow the place I only seem to hold to-day. If you can do that, Myrrah, a great danger will have been averted, and our ambition will have taken a mighty stride."

"Your ambition—to which I the courtesan am devoted." said Myrrah mournfully. "It shall be done."

CHAPTER XII.

THE PREMONITION.

John Cash, even without doubting, would not have been the man to trouble himself about Tempest's prophecy. He believed its fulfilment, at any rate, remote. With regard to its eventual effect upon humanity he felt very little more scruple than speculators usually do, about the sufferings of those whose losses constitute their gains. His mind, though comprehensive, was limited in its foresight. The idiosyncracy of his acquisitiveness was of that kind which has led to the invention of leasehold property, and ninety nine years leases, and which, valuing possession beyond mere life tenure, is careless of its transmission further than a generation or two. He would as soon have thought of troubling himself about the exhaustion of the coal beds two thousand years hence, as about the ravages of the insect half a century afterwards. Nevertheless, though this did not contribute to disturb him, though the man whom he had so much cause to dread was, as he believed, removed from all possible antagonism for ever, and though his absolute dominion was now firmly established and widely spread, yet John Cash was perplexed in spirit and ill at ease.

He had lived and laboured in the belief that he should find peace when he had virtually established that despotic authority, which he thought to consolidate, by concealing it with the tact, and administering it with the moderation in which all preceding rulers had been wanting.

He had perfected an occult but effective mechanism, whose harmonious complication of parts combined irresistible power with noiseless facility of direction. The restlessness of acquisition was over, the dread of opposition had ceased, and yet he was further than ever from the repose he coveted.

John Cash had attained that fatal experience which succeeding to the anxieties of the struggle for absolute and irresponsible power disturbs the enjoyment of it.

The sword of Damocles hung suspended over him. The thought that maddened Nero into frenzy; the thought that darkened on the soul of Cromwell when in the sullen gloom of his old age he learned to regret the hazards of the strife—that thought—the retributive law which brands and punishes as blasphemy against mankind free agency, the assumption of unlimited authority—avenged humanity upon the selfish millionary.

John Cash had acquired the terrible conviction that since centering all power and property in his person he had rendered his very existence invidious to a hungering crowd, and made his life and liberty the sole obstacles of multitudinous ambitions. He felt as that animal, which bears about it the perfume which the hunter covets, is said to feel—conscious that it exposed him to unceasing danger, though nowise disposed to act like the hunted beast, which traditionally casts away the cause of its persecution to avert pursuit.

Though still collected in demeanor his glance was sombre, his eyes bloodshot, and his teeth occasionally clenched with an expression of ferocious resolution once foreign to him. If formerly unscrupulous he had not been cruel; but his mood was changed.

The incessant suspicion that others were hungering for his life, or seeking to compass its extinction, gave birth to a vindictive feeling in his bosom once coldly impassible to revengeful impulses.

There is no animosity so fierce as that inspired by the instinct of self-preservation. Hence not unfrequently we find the coward, or the man who has never harboured thought of violence against another, roused when he has thrust back from his throat the baffled knife to a ferocity unknown to more daring or less pacific natures.

This perhaps is the secret history of half the monstrosities of the most cruel tyrants. Nero, and Ivan the Terrible, and Robespierre lived or died cravens. The fears and the anxieties of John Cash must account for the morbid jealousy which now obscured his judgment, and for the incipient desire to make an example of his foes, which sometimes rose like a bloody film before his eyes.

He had come to the resolution that there was no one living or dead whom he could trust; no one to whom he could confide the inheritance he should leave; no one to whom he could commit the care of his own life.

His son was not alone unworthy of being his inheritor, but John Cash was upon the trace of a foul conspiracy concerted by his own child against his person.

The Lady Calliroë, in whom his confidence and his affection had once centered, when estranged from their more legitimate object, was now under the ban of his suspicion.

As he paced up and down the room in which she was sitting, with that restless step that indicates disease of mind, his glance fell upon her with a keen and malevolent expression.

The Lady Calliroë herself had lost the haughty fire that kindled in her dark blue eyes, the colour that flushed in her proud cheek,—she was pale and pensive now.

Old Cash found her as changed as those rude men converted by the Galilean fishermen from pride and violence to the law of peace. The energy of her ambition which he once viewed with alternate jealousy and complacence, had given place to an avowed conviction of the illegitimacy of his power and wealth. Persuasive importunity had succeeded to her once spirited adherence, and when her efforts and her arguments had failed to move the old man's grim resolution she had sank into desponding silence.

The millionary thus found the rock upon which he had built his hopes melt away like an iceberg in the sun. "Her sympathies had been estranged, her heart was confessedly against him," thought John Cash, "why not her hand?"

The first step of the old man, after the experience of his last illness, had been in self defence, to spread the report that his will was made in the favour of his daughter-in-law. This will was really made but not signed.

Eustatius had retaliated by threatening a recriminatory suit against his wife. If the Lady Calliroë had still been, as before, a true confidant and fearless partisan, John Cash would have laughed that threat to scorn, but now—even whilst he had caught a glimpse of a darker premeditation, foreshadowed by this attempt—and even whilst he was bent on crushing the evil in the bud, by striking a decisive blow against his son and those who prompted him—yet this accusation suggested strange suspicions in his mind, to which an event, with which he had just been made acquainted gave significance.

The fact of the Lady Calliroë being surprised in the cell of Tempest, the groundwork of the threatened charge against her, John Cash knew how to estimate at its proper value, since he had dispatched her thither. The allegation of a prior acquaintance and intimacy was more mysterious; when he coupled with her avowed conversion to Tempest's views, and with her knowledge of the mortal hatred between them, the attempt she had made to penetrate to him, which had just come to his knowledge. John Cash began to see in her one leagued by some unaccountable sympathy with his deadly enemy in a common cause against him, in himself an intended victim, beset by unnatural foes, conspiring against his liberty and life in violation of the ties of nature and of gratitude.

He was determined he would quell them all, through whatever means he quenched their opposition. As he paced to and fro his glance fell with increasing irritation on his daughter. He could no longer reach her through the menace of alienating from her his promised fortune, since she had confessed, not hastily but placidly, her intent, if left to her, of scattering it to the winds. Yet he was resolved that she too should suffer, that she should bow like the bruised reed that quivers in the storm and moans in the blast it bends to. His suspicions grew with reflection, his cruelty and hatred strengthened with his fears, until at length the thought suggested itself, of giving up the Lady Calliroë to the persecution of her husband, who would not fail to cover her with infamy. At all events—whether or not—he afterwards interposed to shield her, and why should he? he was determined to see whether this prospect would not shake her resolution, and he was about to acquaint her with his intention, abruptly and brutally, as one who fears that his will may still misgive him, when a visitor was announced.

It was long past ten o'clock, and no ordinary circumstance would have induced those of his household whom it concerned to disturb his privacy at that unseasonable time. The apparition of Invective Rabid in the house of John Cash, and at that hour, was a fact too remarkable not to be communicated to the millionary, or to be neglected by him.

He gave orders that Invective should be admitted.

John Cash had never met the Democratic leader except in the senate. He was used to be the object of his denunciatory volubility; he was accustomed to the irrepressible exultation of his scorn and sarcasm, and was therefore proportionably struck with the anxiety which Invective's countenance betrayed. There was no trace of the boastful arrogance common to its expression; he looked like a man come on a hasty errand of life and death, and to whom life or death were not indifferent. The Lady Calliroë had retired; the millionary beckoned his visitor to be seated. Invective Rabid spoke briefly, earnestly, and to the point. The tale which he unfolded confirmed the anticipations to which his demeanor had given rise, as to the serious purport of his visit.

"John Cash was aware," he said, "that though a strenuous political opponent, and though banded against him with other sections of the opposition, that with many of these he had no sympathies of opinion, and that his hostility to him had always been overt and candid. He now lamented to have found that those with whom he was leagued, in temporary companionship, were resorting to tortuous intrigues and meditating sinister projects at which his loyalty so far revolted, that his conscience would not permit him to have even a political adversary unwarned."

John Cash, who listened with eager interest, begged him to proceed. Invective hesitated.

"Perhaps," said the old man, "you think the information you can give worthy of some reward, if so, speak candidly; though all the world knows that I am liberal in recompensing those who serve me."

"I am not to be bought and sold," replied Invective, with offended pride.

"Then why do you come to bring me the secrets of your party?" asked old Cash, so keenly and suspiciously that it was evident that he had no belief in the spontaneous candour of his visitor. Invective was embarrassed for a moment and then he answered:

"These secrets I have discovered; they were not confided to me."

"Ah!" exclaimed John Cash, who saw in this rather a motive than an exculpation—"go on."

"But," continued Invective, "if I am in honour free to communicate these secrets, and impelled by the loyalty of my disposition to do so, I still think that I have a right to some guarantee that I shall not thereby suffer. You have not met me in a spirit of equable confidence and frankness, and you will therefore pardon me if I require some pledge both of my own security and of your gratitude.

"The design against your person which I propose to unfold to you, amounts to conspiracy in the eye of the law; with such a pretext, in your position, you have the power to strain the law to any conceivable point, and I might find myself constructively mixed up in the very plot I had unmasked. This is an eventuality which I do not suspect that you would bring about, but against which I have a right to provide. In the nefarious combination I allude to, most of the personages of note in the United Monarchies are concerned. Its object is to declare you insane, and to shut you up in a lunatic asylum. We all know how easily that may be done. How the exhortations of a sane man once beneath bolts and bars will be disregarded, how—after one individual has rotted in a maniac's dungeon with his obnoxious secrets—he to whom chance has divulged it may in a like manner be secured."

John Cash at these significant words turned a penetrating glance upon the speaker, but Invective Rabid continued.

"Now all I ask, before proceeding with my tale, is a written acknowledgment that I have forewarned you of this conspiracy. It will be at once my security against being implicated in it, and a formal title to your gratitude."

The millionary turned the matter over in his mind. A suspicion of some other motive flashed across it but he could discover none. Invective was obstinate and so he consented, simply adding,

"But I never write."

"No matter," replied Invective, "I will write, you can append your name and seal," and further observing "that this document would be in itself a revelation," he read as he proceeded to indite the document in question.

"I, John Cash, First lord of the Treasury and President of the Council of the United Monarchies, hereby acknowledge that Invective Rabid, member of the united parliament, has this day, between the hours of ten and eleven p.m., made a solemn declaration to me, that certain personages were treasonably and feloniously conspiring against the authority, constitutionally committed to my care, and to deprive me of my personal liberty, my individual rights and private property. I furthermore acknowledge that I have been chiefly indebted to the information with which he has furnished me, for the means of frustrating the designs of the persons undermentioned and of bringing them to condign punishment."

Here followed the names of the conspirators. Invective, looking keenly at John Cash, hesitated before he read aloud the first upon the list.

"Speak out," said the old man, "the first bears my own name."

"The first is Eustatius Cash," replied Invective.

Then he proceeded to name Sir Jasper and every personage of note in the opposition. As each was mentioned the old man made a slight inclination of the head as if to mark his attention, and there rose to his lips a grim and unnatural smile, so diabolically malicious that even Invective shuddered. When this list of proscription was done—for such the denunciation of these names made it—John Cash said quietly,

"Give me that document; but first, if you have made one error, of the ninth part of a syllable, in it, I will not sign it, you had therefore better re-copy it at once."

"It is literally correct," replied Invective.

The old man peered alternately into the face of Invective, and into the document before him, with so much acuteness that though he could not read one line of it, he could not have been deceived, and then, having scratched his name and appended his well known seal, he sat down to listen attentively to the details of the plot. Invective minutely narrated the formation, progress and intentions of the league against him; and old Cash, satisfied himself of the demagogue's veracity and frankness, by testing it through questions on points of which secret intelligence had already been conveyed to him—Invective further informed him that, on the following night, the conspirators were to come to a final resolution, with which he promised to keep the minister duly acquainted, meanwhile deprecating any rash steps, which might arouse suspicion, and demanding the means of private access to John Cash at all hours of the night and day, which was accorded.

When Invective took his departure he shook hands cordially with the minister; and as he grasped in his own his horny palm their eyes met with a strange expression, which instinctively conveyed to each the conviction, that at some stage of the matter the other meant to deceive him.

"Never mind," said the millionary, as he watched his visitor retiring. "I am forewarned and if you deceive John Cash you have only one left to deal with.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE CONFEDERATES.

It was past eleven on a dark autumnal night. The rain beat without, there was apparent festivity within. But the light that streamed through the windows of the mansion of Eustatius did not shine on a mirthful banquet. A few of the members of the opposition had been that evening collected at the suggestion of Sir Jasper, but it was evident that something had damped the spirits of the party.

They had been ostensibly gathered together to consider the best means of vindicating their host's honour, by proceeding against his guilty wife, in whose favour old Cash was said to have disinherited his son. Sir Jasper had, however, a few hours before, intimated privately to each that a more momentous project would be discussed.

These personages who had expected to derive confidence from the countenance of each other, now they were united, served only to depress each other, because there is a point at which apprehension, like hope, becomes contagious.

To this conclave the Lady Floranthe, though in the early days of her widowhood, had been convened, and the Lady Sabina, her rival in former pre-eminence and in present projects, though her co-adjutress in those of Sir Jasper, was also of the party.

Eustatius still flitted between the one and the daughter of the other, and to these dames the ex-minister had entrusted the care of inspiring his political pupil with resolution to repudiate his wife, till having compromised them by that step he had proven the danger of pausing there.

This was the text which Sir Jasper chose, to exhort the company to decisive action, an attempt in which he was frustrated through the influence produced upon his hearers by the irresolution of Eustatius, who when persuaded of the peril of standing still, dumb—foundered the ex-minister by threatening to escape at once from the United Monarchies.

At length another of the initiated was admitted. It was the Lady Sabina's husband, fresh from the senate.

"What news?" said Sir Jasper. "Has Middleman Cautious left the House?"

"Middleman Cautious quitted his place some half hour ago," replied the senator. "The debate was dull, the subject unimportant, the leaders of the opposition absent."

At this reply Sir Jasper seemed to breathe more freely, though there succeeded on his features, an evident expression of intensely anxious expectation, which recalled the agitation felt when the explosion of the mine is imminent, and which succeeds the satisfaction elicited by the announcement of the lighting of the train.

At this moment a vehicle dashed up furiously to the door. The plot thickened; no doubt it was Invective Rabid.

"You advocate procrastination; you propose delay," said the ex-minister addressing all there assembled, "but did it never happen to you, when shivering on the water's brink you were pushed in by some friendly hand, to thank the violence to which you owed the involuntary plunge when afterwards disporting in the stream?"

As he spoke Invective Rabid entered. There was nothing remarkable in his appearance at a political reunion of that nature, though it might have excited some comment, if its object had been purely social.

But when disregarding the courtesies of polite life he pushed breathless past Eustatius up to Sir Jasper, every one felt that there was some strange augury in his presence.

They were not deceived. After conferring for a few minutes in an earnest under tone with Sir Jasper, the ex-minister requested the company to draw their seats into a circle, and spoke as follows:

"My friends. If there be one thing more immediately concerning us than any other, and in which an identity of interests should more closely unite us, it should be the care of our common safety. I have explained to you individually, I have endeavoured to prove to you collectively, that we have advanced so far in the career of hostility towards the minister that we have hopelessly incurred his enmity. He or we must fall! Retreat is ruin—you would have retreated, and for that vacillation we have provided by placing retreat beyond your power. You will at once agree with me that we have no alternative but to act promptly, when our colleague here has disclosed to you what he has done and heard."

"Fellow citizens! or, I should say, gentlemen, and indeed ladies," exclaimed Invective Rabid glancing round him as he made a strong effort to recover his composure. "Sir Jasper says truly! By G—— we must sink or swim!" here apologising for the expletive into which he had betrayed himself, he continued. "We have done for you what Warwick the king-tamer did for his army when he slew his steed; what Cortes did for his followers when he fired his fleet. We have made retrogression impossible. We were all convinced before, that unless we soon shut up John Cash he would put us all under lock and key—well—I have placed you this night between the necessity of securing his person within two hours, and the certainty of being victimised by him to-morrow. Do not be startled, I come now from denouncing to him the intention we have entertained in common, of depriving him, as a madman, of his liberty and of his power."

At this announcement a cry of indignation and surprise burst simultaneously from every lip.

"You have not denounced me?" said Eustatius, whose face was of an ashy whiteness.

"Your name is first upon the list. That's all; you see that I don't deceive you;" replied Invective, handing round, for the inspection of the company, John Cash's formal recognition of the denunciation he had made to him.

"Good God!" ejaculated Eustatius, "we are betrayed indeed! I must fly at once."

"Whither?" said Sir Jasper, "be calm. Flight is impossible. You would be overtaken. In two hours the telegraph will be at work."

"Listen," said Invective. "Do you see these initials appended to each name, these are the memoranda I have noted down of the punishment to each apportioned by him. It may suffice to point out that the most lenient is a strict fulfilment of the lex talionis—perpetual deprivation of that liberty, which we meditated taking from him. You ladies are not exempt from this prospective retribution."

"How should we be?" said the Lady Floranthe, bitterly, "with his daughter-in-law at his elbow."

"And what of me?" asked Eustatius faintly.

"Nothing positive," replied Invective, "but we know that in his present mood reflection does not mitigate his resolution. He dwells on the story of the Russian Tsar Peter and of the unworthy son he put to death."

"To death!" murmured Eustatius.

"The suggestion of that heartless woman," said the Lady Sabina.

"Of the Lady Calliroë, no doubt," observed Sir Jasper. "She is an ambitious Sataness, but if our courage fail us now we shall all be at her mercy to-morrow."

"Nothing can be more true," added Invective Rabid. "You see in Sir Jasper, the surgeon who has probed the wound, in myself the friendly instrument. You will be duly grateful to us, in good time, no doubt, but meanwhile we have brought you into a strait in which you must conquer or succumb, in which you must triumph with us this night or perish with us to-morrow."

"There is in fact not one moment to be lost, we must proceed to secure his person," said Sir Jasper.

"What now? From hence?" asked Eustatius.

"Without preparation!" said the Lady Sabina's husband.

"Due preparation has been made," replied Sir Jasper. "Middleman Cautious, the true minister of this ministerial despot, has been enticed away from the senate. John

Cash will not find him for two hours; he can take no measures till then. Invective has led him to believe the danger less pressing. Our partisans, in and out of the house, are at hand and ready. We must proceed from this direct to the bed-side of John Cash, attack his person and carry on the government in his son's name. Possessed of the ministerial seal, the finances, the telegraph, and all the paraphernalia of authority, in half an hour we can obtain the sanction of the senate. You will be saved—the inheritance of Eustatius will be rescued. But one hour hence it will be too late. What do you say?"

"What a fearful emergency!" exclaimed Eustatius.

"How force our way into his presence without impediment and detection?" said the Lady Sabina's husband.

"For that we have provided," replied Sir Jasper.

"I have secured the means of direct access to his chamber," added Invective Rabid. "Come!"

"It is a desperate venture," observed Eustatius, still hesitating.

"It is a terrible alternative," added the Lady Sabina.

"What is your filial heart compunctious?" said Invective, tauntingly.

"Towards the father," hissed Sir Jasper in his ear, "who is sitting now in judgment on his own son."

"No," replied Eustatius. "But if we fail?"

"If we fail in this attempt," said Invective, "we shall be in the same condition as if we neglect to make it—there is no denying that."

"Come," said Sir Jasper, glancing at his watch, "time flies—"

"I am but a woman," said the Lady Floranthe, "but I will be one of you."

"I would be one of you," added the Lady Sabina, resolutely, and appealing to her husband,

"if I were not a woman, a mother and a wife."

"I am ready," said the husband, "and—I and I," added others of the party, "so that Eustatius joins us."

"Come," whispered the Lady Floranthe to Eustatius, "one bold stroke for universal dominion."

"Well," said Eustatius, "let us go."

"At once," said Invective, "where are our hats and cloaks? Each minute lost after this may be a link added to our chains."

"Stay," said Sir Jasper, "I have some orders to give—and I am with you."

"Meanwhile I shall call for wine. The night is cold, my throat is fevered," said Eustatius, unconscious of the implied contradiction. Accordingly whilst Sir Jasper gave his final instructions, wine was handed round, the attendants retired, and Eustatius having filled and rapidly drained his goblet, once, twice, and thrice, offered the filled vessel in his agitation to the Lady Floranthe.

She, accepting, raised it to her mouth and touched the beverage with her lips. "I have already drank success to your enterprise—this is success to you."

But as she returned the goblet to the giver it fell from his trembling hand, and the crystal was sonorously scattered into a thousand fragments, on the mosaic hearthstone.

A dead silence followed this ominous mishap. It was first interrupted by the Lady Floranthe who said with feigned assurance:

"Nothing can be more propitious, the glass was full—a noble libation on your own hearth to your success."

At this moment Sir Jasper stood up in his cloak and hat.

"Come! speed is success."

"Who doubts of success against the tyrant for the people?" said Invective Rabid, whose pugnacious spirit was roused by proximity of the strife, of which the distant dangers had appalled him. Without further hesitation the conspirators rose; there was a convulsive pressing of hands, a few interjectional remarks, and then these men issued through the armoury and down a private staircase out into the dark night, on their momentous errand.

The Lady Floranthe and the Lady Sabina were left alone in that lighted hall. The rivals sat down opposite to each other, watching, in breathless suspense and with intense agitation the motion of the hands upon the dial, and every faint sound audible from without, as they waited the development of an event which must unite them in misfortune, or strengthen their rivalry, by magnifying its object.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE IDES OF MARCH.

John Cash sat brooding over the communication made to him by Invective Rabid. The more he reflected over it the more suspicious he became of the intentions of his informant. That very night he determined to surround the parties implicated with an invisible network, causing their every movement to be watched and notified to him by his secret agents. For this purpose he summoned Middleman Cautious, to whom, by means of a private telegraph, he could communicate his orders at all hours. The answer immediately returned was that Middleman Cautious had left his place, but as John Cash knew that he must come back to it, he took no further precautionary step, but awaited his return. Minute passed after minute, an hour had elapsed. The old man had retired to bed, but to watch and not to sleep. Indeed he rarely slept now. At length, growing impatient and uneasy at the protracted absence of his agent, he was about to transmit the order that he should be sent for, whithersoever he had gone. But at this moment the stroke of a small bell announced to him that some one was approaching his chamber by the private entrance.

He had no doubt that this was Middleman Cautious. He touched a spring; the bar of steel, that secured the door, sprung back, and Invective Rabid entered.

"What you returned?" said the old man.

"In fulfilment of my promise," said Invective, "to warn you at any hour of the night or day; I come to acquaint you that the conspirators have stolen a march upon us."

John Cash started up from his pillow.

"Stay," said Invective. "Don't be alarmed, the peril is not so imminent, they meet to-morrow at mid-day."

"No!" said the millionary, "they shall never meet; but go on, what has happened?"

"Of that," replied Invective, "I cannot accurately inform you, but I have one with me—a woman—who can tell you all, but she insists on personally stipulating her reward. Shall I bring her in; she waits below."

"It is Julia de Fougeres," said the Millionary, who felt his guess a conviction, "fetch her to me."

Invective Rabid nodded affirmatively, and then having cast a furtive glance around him, retired.

John Cash had fallen into the snare and his betrayer hastened to admit the confederates.

These—the initiated—were only nine in number, though further assistance was within calling.

The conspirators, muffled in their cloaks, were drawn up beneath the shadow of the wall upon the pavement, waiting in breathless suspense for the return of Invective Rabid.

"What if he should not come back?" whispered Eustatius, when the iron plated door having closed upon the burly figure of the democratic leader, the echo of his footsteps died away in the silence of the night.

This remark expressing a simultaneous fear in the breasts of those to whom it was addressed, heightened their misgivings. The smallest incident, a gust of wind, or the creaking of a shutter might have changed this foreboding to a panic.

"It is strange!" said Eustatius, after a few minutes had elapsed, in a tone expressive of profound alarm.

"Hush!" said Sir Jasper, grasping his arm as in an iron vice, and as he spoke the door opened and Invective appeared upon its threshold.

The "all is right" which burst from his lips, though appalling from its unnatural tone, was a relief, if not re-assuring his auditors.

"The coast is clear. One solitary porter dozes in his box; no other help is at hand. The old man is alone—I have access to him. Come, now or never!"

Sir Jasper stepped out into the lamp-light, so that its glare should fall full upon him, and waved his handkerchief aloft. At this signal the tramp of men emerging from a street on the other side of the square was audible, and then turning to his companions, he proceeded hastily to concert their plan of action.

"One of us," said Sir Jasper, "must guard the door, the other keep the porter in check by holding some weapon to his breast."

"I will stand at the door," said Eustatius, unsheathing a dagger, for the confederates, like true conspirators, were all armed to the teeth.

"No!" said Invective Rabid, with a tremendous oath, "you shall not shirk the danger. You are our trump card, you must be ready to our hand."

"Impossible, we cannot leave you behind," added Sir Jasper, "You must be upon the spot, we must act by your orders under this roof, become yours by the aberration of your relative."

"Well then," said Eustatius, sullenly, "so be it."

"I will go first," said Invective. "It is possible that the porter may not perceive, and if perceiving may not take umbrage at the extent of my retinue. If so you had better all follow me. Remember, gentlemen, that the slightest hesitation will be our destruction, that we shall retrace our steps through this corridor as captives."—

"As captives or as captors," added Sir Jasper. "We are convinced of that—now onwards, and God speed us."

Invective led the way. Sir Jasper lingered to bring up the rear, and the whole party moved stealthily along the narrow passage.

The drowsy porter drew the wire that announced in his master's chamber that some one was approaching, but he made no comment on the accompaniment of Invective. Knowing him to have the pass and the double signal, he was quite without suspicion, to say nothing of his disbelief in the possibility of such audacity. It was therefore only to testify his own vigilance that he had drawn his bell a second time, and this sign was responded to by a sharp click, which Invective knew to be the withdrawal of his door bolt by John Cash, who this time did not wait for the preconcerted knock, which was the sesame of admission.

On its very threshold Eustatius paused.

"Courage!" said Invective, turning round.

"I will not go in," whispered Eustatius, doggedly, "not till he is secured."

"Craven!" said Invective, drawing his pistol.

"Stay, in God's name! What are you doing? let us secure him!" said Sir Jasper, throwing the door wide open as he spoke.

It was time. Alarmed by the sound of voices outside. John Cash had jumped out of bed. At this sight, Invective, divining his intent, sprang forward, and at one bound placed himself between the old man and the alarum, of which in his previous survey of the room he had noticed the position.

Thus intercepted John Cash made for the door, but here two or three glittering daggers, together with the figures of Sir Jasper and of his followers in the background, arrested his progress, and he retreated. A toilet table was drawn across the only other door of his apartment. The window looked down into the square from an elevation of eighty feet, and it could not readily be opened.

Under these circumstances—much to the unjustifiable surprise of the confederates—since there was nothing he could have done which offered more plausible chances of escape—the old man jumped nimbly into bed with so much apparent sense of the impropriety of his costume, as would have done credit to Susannah surprised by the elders.

"What, what?" he asked, testily, as he covered himself up with the bed clothes, "is the cause of this unseasonable intrusion?"

Was it possible that John Cash could seriously mistake the designs of his visitants?

At any rate the hostile nature of their intentions was soon made manifest to him. Without an answer, and in grim silence, seven of the conspirators took up their position in his chamber, and then Sir Jasper addressed him.

"A painful duty brings us to your bed-side, sir—a duty we owe to our country and ourselves."

"To come to the point," said Invective. "Your race is run—your time is come old man. You are our prisoner."

"Traitors and knaves," said John Cash, "by what authority?"

"In the name of the people! and by the right of the strongest—of which we happen to be possessed just now," replied Invective Rabid.

"On the authority of the senate and people in consequence of your unhealthy state of mind, and in virtue of the order of your next of kin," said Sir Jasper.

"Ah! of the worthy child I have begotten! Do you know, gentlemen, the penalty you incur by stealing upon me so in the dead of night like thieves? Do you know that I can hang you all?" said John Cash, who, wishing to gain time, would not appear to yield too readily.

"I have no doubt you had that power an hour ago," replied Invective, "we are here to deprive you of it."

"He speaks truly," said Sir Jasper. "All parties in the state have combined to wrest from you the authority you have abused. Resistance is idle—you must resign yourself."

"What do you want of me after all?" said the old man, half covering his face with the bed clothes, like the ostrich which buries its head in the sand.

"To speak plainly," said Invective, "we are come to seize your person. We are here, men of different opinions, banded in a desperate enterprise. You may judge whether our measures have been well concerted, whether anything will shake our purpose."

"You must rise and follow us," said the Lady Sabina's husband.

"Dead or alive," added Invective, "you must come with us."

"This is harsh treatment, gentlemen—I have served some of you I think. What would you with me?"

"Convey you to a place of safety. Whether above or below ground depends on your own prudence," said Invective, "come, rise!"

"Stay," said Sir Jasper, "we would wish to execute mercifully and courteously, what we have irrevocably devised. It lies in your own power to soften the rigor of unavoidable captivity and in some measure to mould your future fate."

"We are wasting time," said one of the conspirators, who had prepared a gag, manacles and cords.

Sir Jasper waved his hand impatiently, and continued.

"Your characteristic sense will, I doubt not, bow to a necessity, painful I allow, but unavoidable."

"What is your pleasure?" asked the old man.

"This," answered Sir Jasper, "you must transfer, by will, your worldly substance to your son Eustatius."

"I will bequeath my curse to him!"

"Beware," said Sir Jasper, menacingly, "and remember that we can act without that document. Do you refuse?"

"I would not have treated you so, gentlemen."

"Come, we are no children," said Invective, "refuse or consent. Say yes or no."

"Stay," answered John Cash, in a tone which might have been ironical or timorous, "if my case is hopeless—anything to propitiate your favour—anything to secure your merciful forbearance, and to win for an old man some little indulgence in the perpetual durance to which you destine him—"

"Only consider yourself politically dead," replied Sir Jasper, "and as I have said before, to some extent you may weave out your own future."

"If so," said old Cash, "do you see that red portfolio—open it, you will find some papers in it ready for my signature and sealed already with my seal. They concern my son—read them, but let it be aloud."

Sir Jasper read. Was the old man demented? Some of these documents were warrants, on which the ink was scarce yet dry, for the apprehension of all present that very night. Others were orders for their condign punishment at sunrise!

"So," said Sir Jasper, "this is a billet to my address."

"You were to die," said John Cash, "I admit it, but you will see that I had secured you a public trial."

"Afterwards!" replied Sir Jasper, sarcastically. "I thank you."

"And I," said Invective. "I was to have been made safe without a trial, I thank you for that unobtrusive favour."

"And I carried off to the mines to-morrow, my property confiscated," said the Lady Sabina's husband, "I thank you too."

"And I—and—I" added others of the confederates, as they read the warrants which Sir Jasper handed to them.

"But what is this," said the ex-minister, "the order for a state funeral—the churches to be hung with black for forty days of mourning, the vault to be prepared—the coffin plate got ready, with this inscription, 'Eustatius Cash, born December the first 1870, died October the ninth, 1907,' we are to-day the eighth of October, gentlemen! This is horrible indeed, this cold-blooded dooming of the son to death by his own father."

At this moment a pistol shot thundered through the corridor.

"Help at last," said John Cash, "you asked me to sign something, gentlemen, hand me those warrants," and as he spoke he sat up in his bed, and flung from him the handle of a signal rope, which he had been working assiduously under the bed clothes, whilst conversing with the confederates.

CHAPTER XV.

Three quarters of an hour have elapsed counted minute by minute, and second by second by the slow ticking of the clock. Suspense is become intolerable. The Lady Sabina, and her companion and rival, start up with simultaneous accord and hasten to the windows. But these do not command the entrance to the mansion, and there is no trace of any movement in the solitary street they overlook. They dare not even summon the domestics to make enquiry, lest the circumstance of their being left thus alone should arouse suspicion. Minutes thus spent are days; hours, years; a day, an age. A night of such anxieties does the work of half a century, changing the human hair to silver.

"Hush! is it a gust of wind or a mere imagining? no they are voices in the distance—they draw nearer, many clamouring voices—they are beneath the window."

"Listen! what do they say? He is dead!"

"Merciful providence!" said the Lady Floranthe, throwing up the sash, "who is dead?" and then they first distinguish a voice singing—

"Old Care is dead,
We have drowned him in wine
And with him thought and sorrow
We have drowned him in bottles nine."

And then the chorus chiming in—

"But if he should rise from where he lies
We will drown him again to-morrow."

They are only revellers! They pass bye. The sounds die away in the distance as they came and all is silence.

A few more minutes pass.

"I cannot bear this," says the Lady Floranthe.

"It is indeed terrible, to think that one's own children's future is at stake," observes the Lady Sabina. "If it were not for one's children I could not pass an hour so for an empire."

"Something must be decided by this time——?"

"That clock has stopped."

"Hark! there are approaching footsteps—through the armoury."

The door opens—it is the Lady Sabina's husband. His face is pale, his clothes are torn and gory, and the blood drops from his hand; he tears past his wife and rushes to a seat.

"Where! how! is he secured—speak! tell us the worst at once?"

"All is over!" replies the husband, but he can utter no more: he has fainted.

"Good God, he bleeds!"

"We are lost! he is come back alone and dying!" exclaims the Lady Floranthe clasping her hands together, "all is over indeed."

CHAPTER XVI.

Let us now return to the chamber of John Cash where we left the confederates panic stricken at the report of a pistol in the corridor. Invective Rabid was the first to fly to the door of the ante-room, but in his terror Eustatius had closed it.

A loud knocking was heard.

"You are my prisoners, wretched men," said John Cash—"there is the guard."

"Who is there?" asked several of the party in a breath.

"It is I," said the voice of the ninth conspirator. "I have shot the Cerberus. He was escaping."

"The game is still our own if we are speedy," said Invective. "Unhappy man, you have sealed your doom."

"He must die," said Sir Jasper, now in a state of febrile agitation.

"He or we," said Invective.

"Stay," said John Cash, "lay not hands upon me or I will have you torn limb from limb—the guard is there. I was summoning Middleman Cautious whilst you spoke—he has answered me."

"You lean on a broken reed," said Invective, "Middleman Cautious is absent; he who answered you is bought over."

"You lie!" exclaimed John Cash fiercely, "as you lied to me to-night," but his fears said otherwise, for he sprung suddenly from his bed and towards the door.

Two pair of arms seized hold of him and barred his passage, but his night garments gave way, and leaving the fragments in their grasp he retreated, and seizing up a chair, made for the other door of his sleeping chamber, of which he shook the panels, shrieking murder in stentorian tones.

Female voices responded to this appeal, confounding the conspirators and inspiring John Cash with a momentary hope; but in an instant he remembered that the Lady Calliroë and her women, whom his cries had roused, had that night been securely locked in their apartments, so that they might hold no communication without, till he knew who was for, and who against him.

Finding this, the old man turned to parley with his assassins.

"What do you want? say what will satisfy you—what would you have me do?"

"Die!" hoarsely replied Invective. "All compromise is incompatible with our own safety."

"He must die! he must die!" said the confederates with one accord.

The lights were suddenly extinguished, and the gleam from the windows of an adjacent wing now made a partial twilight in the darkness. Again he roared out lustily murder, and attempted to throw open the window.

"He must die!" repeated the conspirators, and some one—it was impossible in the confusion to say whom—added:

"But no steel, no fire-arms, no blood," and at the same instant, a heavy blow on the forehead with a boot-jack brought the old man to the ground. They kneeled upon his prostrate body, and in an instant the cord, which had been prepared to bind him with, was tightened round his neck. The old man struggled with an energy more consonant with the vigour of his character than with his years.

"Assassins! I will not sign—you shall never have my gold. Stay! mercy on an old man!—not my throat—a little air—you would not strangle me? I am weak and aged. Oh! murder, murder! gold for one breath of air! Oh! millions—untold wealth, to save me—not to let me die!"

"Stay!" said Invective Rabid, "this sickens me. I had as lief perish myself. Shall I let him go?"

"It is too late," said Sir Jasper, "we must all die if he lives."

"Then," said Invective, "every man shall pull at the rope, no one shall ever throw it in the teeth of another or I will loosen him."

"Where is Eustatius?" asked some one.

"Where is Eustatius, the craven?" said Invective.

"Where is he?" said Sir Jasper, dragging him into the room, "he must participate in this."

"Oh! let me go!" exclaimed the terrified son of the millionary.

"Now by the God that made us," said Invective, "you shall join in this work or I give it over. If any one consents to trust him I will. I am ready to loosen him now. Shall I let him loose, Eustatius?"

"At the expense of your life and fortune and of our common safety," said some tempter.

"No, no! no, it would be suicide—to-morrow the ninth—my coffin-plate inscribed!" replied Eustatius—who had heard every word from without—in a paroxysm of terror.

"Hark!" said Sir Jasper; "voices in the corridor! we shall have no choice soon; we must sell our lives dearly, or he must die."

These words determined the conspirators. A scene of hideous confusion ensued in that dim twilight. There was a scuffle—the sound of blows with a blunt instrument,—oaths, shrieks of murder and imprecations. There were appeals to mercy not only from the struggling victim, but in the tones of a seraphic voice from without, which interceding for him arrested for a moment but could not deter the murderers.

There followed a fresh struggle, a piercing cry—more blows, and then a solemn silence succeeded to the death rattle.

John Cash was dead.

Not all the incalculable sums he had hoarded—not all the wealth wrung from mankind's necessity, not all the gold ever dug out of the Mine could now for one brief second restore to the departed soul the senseless clay.

But even then—when all was hushed but the low breathing of the confederates, who, afraid of their own voices, dared not ask whether he had ceased to breathe—there still rang vividly in the ears of the participators in that foul deed—the dying man's malediction on his son—the only distinctly remembered incident of that appalling episode, become thenceforward a perpetual night-mare of the memory.

John Cash had ceased to live, but he had died hard. When light flashed over that ghastly scene, part of his skull appeared to have been beaten in, his glaring eyeballs were starting from their sockets, his features were blackening. Blood too was streaming over his face and had clotted his grey hairs, but it was not his own. In his agony he had bitten the hand of one of his assailants to the bone.

Invective Rabid who had seized in his gigantic palm the hand of Eustatius, still closed on the extremity of rope coiled round the dead man's neck, held it up that it might testify to all present the share of the son in the violence done to the father.

From the mangled remnant of humanity before them, the assassins of the old man turned to weaken their remorse by contemplation of the parricide, beside whose crime their own transgression was venial.

Of all who had shared in that dark deed, not one had crossed the dead man's threshold meditating murder—of all its perpetrators not one had left that chamber without remorse and horror, yet—conscience stricken as they were—there was not one, who if the past could have been revoked would have hesitated to enact again the part he had played in that sad drama. A little reflection will in fact demonstrate that the dictates of self preservation forbade all other course—that a fatal necessity impelled them. To slay or to be slain was the horrible alternative, which if the features of the case could have been recalled must have urged them to renew again their repented violence.

And yet, was that murder sinless? Did those remains unfold no tale? did that disfigured corpse give no dumb evidence of guilt? And if so, upon whom shall it be charged? on those who in obedience to a universal instinct destroyed that they might not perish, or rather upon him who—knowing that in all ages with all men like circumstances have produced a like result—forced upon those who slew him this necessity? Reason gives the same answer in the case of John Cash as in that of all others who having attained irresponsible power drive the victims of their homicidal suspicion to forestall it by some act of despair. That guilt—the guilt of his own blood must be upon his head—as their blood upon their own.

It was thus that John Cash passed from the world. It was thus that the world he had almost spanned passed from John Cash unto his next of kin.

* * * * * * *

"Let us step into the shade," said Eustatius, "I dread the glare of the lights—I dread to meet any one. I shall never face the Senate—I shall never hold up my head again."

"The Senate know nothing of it," replied Sir Jasper. "Your father has died of apoplexy, the porter has shot himself through grief and despair at his master's death—a touching instance of fidelity. The world knows nothing beyond."

"But it will," said Eustatius, "murder will out. I tell you I shall never hold up my head again!"

"Child's talk?" replied Sir Jasper, "you forget that you are possessed of his inheritance. All men will soon have forgotten the lamentable event to which you allude. It is not without precedent. You have the death of the Emperor Paul which almost incident for incident resembles it. You have the example of his sons Alexander and Nicholas. Did not they prosper? were not they joyfully received by a free people in its most canting age? I tell you never fear. If your interests oblige you to fulfill a thousand sterner duties, you will never want for praise and flattery—you will never want for a Phillips, who if he cannot say that you are a good son, or show that you are a merciful Prince, will find out that you are an excellent father."

CHAPTER XVII.

THE SNARE.

"Listen!" said Myrrah clapping her hands triumphantly. "It is midnight!" And at this moment a maiden, fair as the morning, brought her in, on a jewelled salver, a ring which she placed upon her finger.

"Midnight. Enchantress! you annihilate time!" exclaimed Middleman Cautious. "I can stay no longer; I must begone; and yet you have not revealed to me the promised secret."

"Was it only that promise drew you hither?"

"I will not dissimulate," replied Middleman gallantly. "It was rather the pretext than the cause of my visit. There was a vision of bright eyes more attractive than state secrets, but nevertheless—"

"Has the hope of seeing it fulfilled detained you here?"

"I must confess again," said Middleman, "that I would rather have spent two such hours at the price of forfeiting the most important secret than two hours away from you to secure it. But yet if you know aught concerning the welfare of the state, as you have assured me that you do—let me hear it now; and believe me you will find a not thankless confident."

"Midnight!" replied Myrrah looking at the clock.

"You promised me that I should know it before midnight. If there was nothing in that promise,—if it was a mere stratagem—a most needless stratagem—to attract me here, say so, most beauteous Myrrah. But if that confidence has been reposed in you by others into which I feel that you could tempt me, so easily, speak, for I must now tear myself away."

Middleman Cautious, in yielding to the request for an immediate interview with Myrrah, had been influenced by a double motive. He felt that the ridicule with which she had covered him by her publication of the amorous declaration into which he had been formerly inveigled, would be, in some measure, cancelled by her actual reception of him, especially at a moment when the unprecedented constancy of the actress to the Democratic leader was the theme of every tongue. There was some piquancy, too, in this triumph over a troublesome opponent, beneath whose rancorous sarcasm he had writhed so often, and he did not doubt that this consideration had influenced Myrrah. He was not vain enough to believe that any feeling personal to himself had induced her to proffer him this interview, and his sagacity could not conjecture any more plausible motive for it than the wish to mortify Invective Rabid. At the same time Middleman Cautious—vaguely acquainted with the secret machinations of the coalition against his chief—thought it equally probable that Myrrah, through her known connection with Invective Rabid, should have possessed herself of some of the secrets of the opposition, and that the same impulse which prompted her to appoint this rendezvous might induce her to betray them.

These political considerations, added to the fact of the unimportant nature of the debate and the absence of the great guns of the opposition, had in some measure determined him to obey Myrrah's summons, though perhaps there was more truth than he suspected in his avowal to her that her promised communication had been as much the pretext for, as the motive of his visit.

He came to lay at her feet the most flattering tribute he could pay to her. He, Middleman Cautious, who had piqued himself through a long parliamentary career on the punctuality of his attendance to all his public duties, "came at her command," as he said, "neglecting the business of the nation to devote an hour to her."

But it was but a single hour, and that would only have made half-past eleven o'clock! Myrrah, therefore, while promising to make, playfully deferred her promised revelations. All her notorious powers of fascination—her most irresistible blandishments, were summoned to her aid to disguise the flight of time; and time, charmed by these enchantments, had flitted by with noiseless wing.

The reader has seen that it was midnight.

"Now that I have no wish to detain you, you shall know all. But there are things that one dare not speak—that one cannot convey through words—would you understand an allegory a tableau vivant. Look into yon glass. Lay your head upon my lap, and now, as I dissever one of these scanty locks, what does that picture recall?" asked Myrrah, leaning over him with her golden scissors in one hand, and a mesh of his iron-grey hair between her fingers.

"I am dull," replied Middleman Cautious. "I cannot understand—I do not take you."

"Stay, we will change the scene," said Myrrah; "for, on my honour, I wish pantomimically to convey to you an important truth," and rapidly adjusting her dress, she drew out from its gorgeous sheathe the sword once presented to a great captain by a liberated city. "Now lay down upon this ottoman and look, with eyes nearly closed in mimicry of sleep, at me, as having risen from your side, I direct the murderous scimitar against your neck. Of what historic incident does that remind you?"

"The expression is artistic; the pose beyond all praise; but still I do not take you."

"You are dull indeed! But perhaps," said Myrrah, starting up, "you have never seen the originals. Follow me." And leading her guest into an adjacent chamber, she drew the curtains of two pictures, in each of which a female figure represented to the life the form, features, and expression of Myrrah in the attitudes in which she had just thrown herself.

But in these works of art the prodigious power of the Hebrew Hercules whose head was on her lap, and the grim visage of the warrior upon whose neck the fatal scimitar was descending, even without explanatory accessories, told at once the story of Samson betrayed, and of the death of Holophernes.

"A foolish artist," said Myrrah, "the weakness of whose heart or head could not resist an experimental simile, once sought to avenge his disappointment by painting me as the Delilah and Judith. I, retaliating by contemptuous indifference, bought the pictures. I allowed them to be exhibited and had them placed here. Do you understand my allegory now?"

"Not unless it be that you have lulled Invective Rabid into security, and mean to betray his unconstitutional secrets," replied Middleman Cautious.

"So the Hebrew champion and the Assyrian leader thought, and so they perished!" answered Myrrah. "Believing too readily in woman's treachery towards her own, they succumbed the victims of a woman's stratagem. And you, Middleman Cautious, have fallen so into my toils. The hour of amorous dalliance spent with me was the last of your crumbling government. At this moment it has ceased to exist. Your chief and leader is a captive. His power has passed to other hands, and you, his Achates are not free to go beyond the precincts of this dwelling."

"The woman raves!" ejaculated Middleman.

But Myrrah, as she spoke, threw open a door beyond, in which a banquet glittered in a flood of light, not the subdued light whose voluptuous tint rather suffused than lighted the apartment they had quitted. "These," continued Myrrah, "are the personages whom this turn in the lottery of fortune, which sends you downwards, has placed uppermost." But the guests, if bidden guests they were, pressed hurriedly through the hall, some only pausing to snatch a hasty draught. Breathless and discomposed, they were seeking Middleman Cautious, on catching sight of whom, they rushed to secure him, without noticing Myrrah's presence, uttering a simultaneous exclamation like that which bursts from a pack of hounds when they light on the lost scent.

Then too she first perceived with pain that Invective was not with them.

"Middleman Cautious!" said Sir Jasper, "it is our painful duty to attach your person."

"In whose name?"

"In mine," replied Eustatius.

"John Cash is the Prime Minister of these realms," replied Middleman calmly, "show me his signature."

"John Cash has passed to another and, let us hope, less turbulent world."

"What dead!" exclaimed his stricken servitor.

"He is no more," said Sir Jasper, "he died in his son's arms."

"An apoplectic stroke," faltered Eustatius.

"Ha!" said Middleman, turning a searching glance upon the millionary's son, "an apoplectic stroke, and you bled him, I suppose. There is the print of bloody fingers on your shirt."

Eustatius, who felt dizzy, faint, and sick, closed his coat hurriedly, to hide these traces which the conspirators thought they had obliterated.

"Eustatius," said Sir Jasper, "from this I must to the senate. Compose yourself. In half an hour I will present you to the senators, as your father's heir. I go to secure your appointment to his office, and I leave Middleman Cautious in your safe custody meanwhile."

"There is little need," said Middleman when Sir Jasper was gone. "If your lamented sire be dead indeed, in whatever manner he may have died, I must regard his death—the dissolution of his government—as a fact accomplished. He has left a will but it is not signed. You are his inheritor, as such command my services. Your inheritance is so complicated and so vast that you will require them even to discover its extent."

Meanwhile where was Invective Rabid, for whom Myrrah inquired in vain? Invective Rabid had hastened to the senate, and thence had just reached Myrrah's door. In the excitement of precautionary measures to be taken—in the flush of rapid action, and in the comforting reflection that his great rival was no more, he had begun to recover from the horror with which the deed he had abetted had inspired him. He had almost succeeded in persuading himself that his part in that dark transaction had been one of mere justifiable hostility and defensive violence. His solicitude was now to discover the person of Tempest, of which he was determined without loss of time to secure the custody. He was then seeking Middleman Cautious to endeavour to extract from him if possible the place of the youth's confinement, when a hand was placed detentively upon his arm. He turned, and Tempest stood beside him.

At this apparition a superstitious fear overcame Invective, and for a moment he was obliged to support himself against the wall.

"It is time we met," said Tempest. "I have been watching since sunset to waylay you."

"Who, in the name of H——, has loosed you on me?"

"No one," replied Tempest. "I have delivered myself."

"What!" said Invective apostrophising the deceased, "the old dotard! were there no bolts, no bars strong enough—was there no dungeon so secure—no mine so deep—no grave so silent, as would have made you safe?"

"Bolts and bars cannot imprison—the grave cannot extinguish—thought; death only gives it immortality," replied Tempest.

Invective Rabid, after the first surprise which had shaken his disordered nerves was over, began to reflect that this unaccountable meeting had taken place opportunely, since just as he was invested with a share of temporary power; but then the thought struck him that take whatever precaution he would, yet Tempest might speak, and even though treated as a madman, yet the unlucky application of one sentence he might utter would lead to the detection of Invective's plagiarism.

Invective Rabid was still armed. If once rid of Tempest his anxieties would be ended—fate seemed to have thrown his two deadliest enemies successively into his power. One had ceased to exist, why not the other? Blood had been shed already, why not more?

But Tempest saw the motion of his arm, divined, and changed his purpose.

"My death would be your ruin, my detention your disgrace. Sad experience has taught me with whom I deal; and therefore I have provided that whenever I am missing for four-and-twenty hours your shame will be published to the world. This understood between us, I have come to make you the guardian of my life and liberty."

Invective Rabid thus baffled and confounded, felt his brain—overwrought with this rapid succession of events—grow dizzy, and dropped the weapon he was holding, on the pavement, from his unnerved grasp.

"Pick up your arms and follow me!" said Tempest with the accent of a master to a slave, and with a rapid stride he led Invective, who mechanically followed, into the centre of the square.

"Now listen!" said Tempest. "Henceforward you must do my bidding. The guilt and baseness of mankind first entailed on man obedience to his fellow man. Your own now retributively binds you to obey me. I could smite; but I will spare. The fame you have usurped is a pillar of strength in the people's cause—that cause I will not weaken by exposing you. Only mark me! henceforward I shall appropriate your acquisitions, I shall exact your unwearying exertions. You are become my servitor as surely as I am the people's servant, and if you swerve one hair's breadth in your fidelity to either—beware! I will inexorably defame your reputation, blast your power, and fling your name a prey to the world's scorn and execration! Think over this. I leave you! We shall meet sooner and more often than you may wish for." With these words Tempest moved away and was lost to sight, whilst Invective still remained rooted to the spot.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE SPOIL.

John Cash had left no will. Eustatius was his sole inheritor, and the Senate when assured of this fact, recognised—by the nomination of Eustatius to the post his father had occupied—the hereditary character with which the late minister had invested his once ephemeral office.

It had in truth long been obvious that according to the present constitution of the United Monarchies, the immense patronage and influence attached to the unprecedented possessions accumulated by John Cash must give their owner that parliamentary preponderance which entitles to the guidance of the State. Under these circumstances in which the hereditary premiership had become a transmissible sovereignty, and the adviser of the premier a real minister, the confidence of Eustatius in Sir Jasper was hailed as of happy omen, and though all felt that the monarchy which John Cash had founded was perpetuated, yet it was augured that its growing absolution would not be continued.

The chief difficulty of the confederates, after the death of John Cash, was to make the public believe in it. The world had grown to regard him as too tough a customer for even the grim king of terrors to meddle with. After its experience of his former resuscitation from his rumoured grave, it looked confidently forward to seeing him turn up again. The belief was so prevalent that he would still be seen, when least expected, emerging with umbrella under arm from the private entrance through which the conspirators had found admission to his chamber, that nothing less than the exposition of his body in state would have secured the popular conviction of his decease. This step the marks of violence upon the corpse forbade. They had no Sir James Wylie to plaster up its hideous indentations and to paint over the disfigured and blackened countenance, as he did by the remains of the murdered Paul.

In this dilemma even Sir Jasper advised acceptance of the proffered services of Middleman Cautious, whose submission to the new order of things was calculated to bear with it immediate weight.

It will thus be understood how, shortly after the old man's death, his chief servant should have been amicably transacting business with the son he had been employed to thwart so often. He was delivering to Eustatius a general statement of the extent and nature of his inheritance. Sir Jasper and Eustatius had been persuaded that John Cash had been possessed of enormous wealth; but all their anticipations were at fault.

Not even the wildest speculations, built up on the most exaggerated rumour, had even faintly foreshadowed the truth.

But for the sober seriousness and financial knowledge of Middleman, both would have leaped to the conclusion that he was indulging in an improbable romance of figures.

Eustatius, bewildered with the recapitulation of millions and of the inexhaustible variety of their investment, had ceased from following the expositor to pause and wonder, and Sir Jasper listened with unspeakable astonishment chequered with occasional incredulity which Middleman promptly dispelled by the practical precision of his replies.

"No wonder!" exclaimed Sir Jasper at length, "that nothing could resist the influence of the old man. You develop an astounding system—association within association—wheel within wheel—in which the public private fortune is entangled, and John Cash for ever discovered as the primary and moving cause in every combination! I congratulate you, Eustatius! You have little left to desire."

"And little to require," added Middleman Cautious, "you will perceive that the wealth of which you have become possessed has been disposed of according to a system which must eventually absorb all other property whatever, by the unerring principles which regulate financial matters with as much certainty as fluids obey the law of hydrostatics. It needs in fact now only be left to its undisturbed operation to achieve what little is left to do in the shape of acquisition."

"Eustatius!" said Sir Jasper, "in quest of a treasure we have found an inexhaustible mine. The fabled wealth of Eastern hyperbole fades into insignificance before it. Why, if I read aright, Great Britain alone is indirectly mortgaged for one thousand five hundred millions!"

"That is to say," added Middleman Cautious, "for nearly double the amount of the national debt which Sir Robert Peel repudiated half a century ago, when he turned Chartist. A sum which in bullion, to put it picturesquely, would considerably exceed a thousand cubic yards of gold, or a solid mass thirty feet broad, wide, and high, of the precious metal!"

"There is only one thing inexplicable to me," said Sir Jasper, "and that is how, with such irresistible means of influence in so many unsuspected quarters, its late possessor should have tolerated the opposition he did; we can only attribute it to the unhappy alienation which threatened us with a danger, of which we can only now perceive the true extent, that it is fortunately averted."

"There is one thing more. I should be neglecting my duty as a depository of the confidence of my late lamented chief," said Middleman Cautious, "if I failed to impress upon you the great maxims which he would have bequeathed with his fortune if—"

"Spare us allusions to a family misfortune," said Eustatius gloomily.

"They are ill-timed, indelicate, unnecessary," added Sir Jasper with contracted brows.

"I had no intention," replied Middleman Cautious, "further than the business in hand rendered imperative, of referring to the past. I have accepted it as a fact accomplished and irretrievable. I was about to remark that the late John Cash has inserted in his will the solemn admonition to his inheritor. Not to strain the bow as far as it would bend. To enjoy prosperity with lenity and moderation, disguising, not parading it, and never to forget that the power he had bequeathed was founded on respect for the rights of property; which respect would cease whenever the world should be made to feel or allowed to know that all property was monopolised by one individual. And yet, gentlemen, the painful event which has this day brought us together, proves that John Cash was a man who underrated, instead of exaggerating, the difficulties and perils of his position."

"Undoubtedly," replied Sir Jasper, "the greatest tact, industry, and prudence are indispensable in guiding such overwhelming fortunes, not alone profitably, but even in common safety."

"Gentlemen," replied Eustatius in a tone which aroused the suspicion of both his auditors that they would find him far more difficult to lead than they had reckoned on, "permit me to observe, that there is one very plain maxim by which I propose to regulate my conduct; it is simply that every man has a right to do what he likes with his own."

CHAPTER XIX.

A PARTY LEADER.

The Confederates having effected the purpose they had leagued together to accomplish, dissolved their ill-assorted union, relapsing into former hostility. They had in point of fact never ceased to be rivals whose enmity had only been suspended, not absorbed in their combination against a mutually dangerous opponent.

It was the prevalent impression that with the life of the late minister his despotism had ceased. The public was as yet unaware that he had never brought forward one tithe of the means of coercion he possessed, and it was ignorant both of the fact that they had passed into the hands of his son, and of that son's designs and character.

Having removed in concert the great obstacle to their respective ambitions, these were allowed to follow their natural bent without restriction.

Eustatius—supposed to represent opinions conservative or stationary, but whose real tendency was retrogressive—carried on the government with the support of Sir Jasper and of Middleman Cautious.

Invective Rabid again in opposition stood forth as the champion of ideas fortuitously progressive, though the fruit of mere subversive inspirations.

Both parties had reasons for burying in oblivion an event in which they were equally implicated, and by which both had profited.

Eustatius and Sir Jasper had passed from opposition to office—from factious notoriety to the possession of authority prospectively unlimited by the removal of old Cash from the scene; and this incident which renewed the hopes of the oligarchists, served at the same time to raise the importance of Invective Rabid's position. He was no longer the mere chief of a clamorous but powerless party, deriving its sole weight from the vague prospect of being able to outlive the gradual repression of a ruler to whose encroachments, whilst he lived, no one dreamed that effective resistance could be offered.

That contingency was realised. He was now the recognised leader of a formidable opposition which might reasonably expect to secure majorities, and was considered capable of eventually establishing its preponderance in the state. Men of weight, character, and proverbial prudence, who had formerly kept aloof now heartily joined his party. Substantial influence strengthened his former popularity.

From the desultory partisan he had become at one step the chief of an embattled host.

It was midday. He was in the midst of those occupations which obtrude on the most indolent of party leaders. A few of his most valuable adherents, and confidential friends were around him. He was receiving their congratulations, and busied in discussing an approaching election.

So great a change had taken place in public affairs that the interference of his party was now sufficient to secure the return of a popular candidate for any representation which fell vacant, and that his personal recommendation served to determine without appeal the individual to be supported by that party.

Nomination to the seat in question was therefore as much at his discretion as a rotten borough had been formerly at the disposal of its patron, or a subordinate place in the gift of a minister. He had been accordingly beset by solicitations and applicants.

To escape their importunities he had made an early selection, and was referring to that fact in answer to the earnest intercession of one of his most influential followers in favour of another candidate.

"It is unfortunate," said Invective. "I am free to confess that, under the circumstances, I might have been induced to give my interest to D——, but it is too late. My word is passed. I have made a promise. There is nothing to be done." A conclusion in which his petitioner could but concur.

It was however remarked that the temper of the Democratic leader had in this respect contradictorily altered with his fortunes; that according as these were ascendant his spirits had become depressed. How was it that this man so dauntless when playing an up hill and almost desperate game, should appear to lose courage now that a fair field and favourable opportunities were before him?

Aware that his discouragement could but suggest such thoughts he made an effort. He was himself again. He resumed the boastful confidence which had so often cheered his followers in adversity, and now sounded in their ears an augury of triumph. But in the very midst of this burst, a voice, to which he was painfully sensitive, caught his ear amidst the sounds of altercation in the anteroom.

A stranger, whom his well-tutored attendants dared not violently eject from the house of their popular master, sought resolutely and was stoutly denied admission.

At that voice Invective faltered and turned pale, and then hastened to the door with a few words of apology to his guests.

Need the reader be told that it was Tempest?

The cold self-possession of his mien, and his passionless brevity of speech, struck Invective with a feeling of awe against which he vainly struggled, because it strengthened a conviction, which unnerved him, of the real, and not as he strove to believe, of the adventitious superiority of Tempest.

"You must not close your doors in future against the people's friend, as long as you are the people's servant," said Tempest.

"If I had known," replied Invective "that you came as a——friend."

"No, not as a friend," said Tempest, "friendship—at best the partial exercise of an invidious philanthropy—would be difficult between us, but I came as a colleague—not as an enemy."

"You are welcome," answered Invective. "We live in a strange world and in strange times; but since we are to act henceforward in concert, I rejoice at this opportunity, I rejoice that you have come to determine the basis of our future intercourse."

"Invective Rabid," said Tempest gravely. "The conditions of that intercourse have been already determined. They are simply that I shall command, and you obey. I come to exact a proof of your submission; it is an instalment of the debt of expiation you owe to the state and to me."

"Command whatever I can do in reparation of the past. What would you have of me?"

"That you should usher me into public life," replied Tempest.

"Undoubtedly," said Invective, "but if to escape one humiliation I am to expose myself to another—"

"I understand you; but fear not. So long as you obey, so long as you do not swerve directly or indirectly, it will be to my interest to uphold the character of a champion of the people's cause. Alone together—I am the master—you the servitor. In public I treat you with a deference, politic if undeserved."

"And how—in what character would you have me introduce you to the public notice?"

"As a representative of the people."

"Whenever a general election takes place," said Invective, "in a year or so, you may count upon my influence."

"No," answered Tempest, "not in a year or two—at once."

"But," said Invective, "it is out of my power; there is no constituency unrepresented."

"There is one seat vacant now."

"One was vacant," said Invective, "it is still, constitutionally speaking, disposable; but I have promised it—my word is past."

"You must revoke your promise—you must break through your word."

"My plighted word?"

"If you had never done so beneath the eye of heaven, you need not now before the face of man. I cannot brook delay. The time lost in my cell must be retrieved even though to your inconvenience. Now—at once—from this spot you must proceed to act with me as your candidate. Such is my decision. I will it should be so." And Tempest spoke in an accent of command and with an expression of resolution before which Invective's dejected spirit quailed in silence.

A few minutes after, Invective Rabid appeared leading Tempest into the circle he had quitted. His partisans appeared surprised at the introduction of a stranger at so confidential a meeting; but what was not their surprise when the democratic leader announced the unknown as his nominee for the vacant borough?

There followed expostulation from the friends of the rejected, indignant remonstrance from those of the favoured candidate. Invective Rabid, profoundly humiliated and chagrined, took refuge in haughty taciturnity, vouchsafing no explanation beyond the following:—

"When I made that promise, gentlemen, it was under the supposition that my friend could not have availed himself of the opportunity. His services being now disposable, I should neglect a duty to my country if I fail to secure them in its cause. This stranger, though unknown to you, will not long remain so either to yourselves or to the world. You will soon hail in him a new champion, and if you will address to him the murmurs with which you are assailing me, he may perchance convince you now of the superiority which justifies the preference. I have given him over you."

Nothing could exceed the mixed dissatisfaction and wonder occasioned by this abrupt apparition of Tempest on the political scene, in which though lost in conjecture as to its nature, it did not escape the penetration of Invective's intimates, that the democratic leader took some painful interest.

That night as Invective mused in restless gloom, which Myrrah found only irritated by her efforts to soothe, he suddenly started from his reverie, and answering the questions she had asked some hours before, exclaimed,

"What would you of the wild steed which champs the bit for the first time?—what of the snared lion? Can you not conceive the narrow restraint after the boundless freedom? Can you understand what it is for him who has owned no law, to breathe by another's breath, to move by another's motion? to know that even death, the refuge of the slave, affords no sanctuary, because having learned to live in the thoughts of others, the grave still leaves vulnerable a memory which may be defamed!"

"What do you mean?" said Myrrah, "why not confide in me, the devoted handmaiden of your glory?"

"What did I mean?" replied Invective, "nothing, Myrrah—what did I say? mere idle words—let us forget them in love, wine, and music."

CHAPTER XX.

TEMPEST.

A space brief in itself, but pregnant with change has elapsed. A few months have passed by, and the condition both of society at large and of the chief personages who have been introduced to the reader during the progress of this story is singularly altered, though that modification is but the development of effects whose causes were in active operation when this narrative was interrupted.

Eustatius has not only succeeded to the full measure of his father's power, but he ostentatiously exercises that which his father so carefully concealed. Sir Jasper has met with bitter disappointment. His political pupil, escaping from the tutelage which he flattered himself to have inextricably imposed upon him, has called Middleman Cautious to share his councils; and though either separately might have rendered their patron a mere tool, the competition of their rivalry has degraded them into mere instruments of the man whose capacity they alike despise. Nothing is easier than to rouse the suspicion of a fool! and Eustatius has been led so far to mistrust both his advisers that the influence of each, is chiefly limited to thwarting the views of the other. Hence the son of old Cash pursues, without remonstrance, a course which the experience of either would have led them to condemn as reckless; whilst Sir Jasper has been outbidding Middleman Cautious, and whilst Middleman Cautious has been outbidding Sir Jasper in acquiescence with the views of Eustatius, Eustatius has progressed to a stolid self-confidence which it is now utterly beyond their power to bridle.

But on the other hand, besides fighting under his true colours, the son of old Cash has to contend with a very different adversary from any who opposed his father.

Three months have sufficed to raise Tempest from obscurity to fame. Three months have sufficed to bruit his name as widely as the reputation of his deceased persecutor; and Tempest is the formidable champion who supported by the hopes and fears, and gratitude of the multitude, now assails his son's supremacy.

Tempest had burst upon the world like a meteor—dazzling and sudden—which leaves no track in the dark ether through which it has passed, whereby its origin, may be retraced, and which gives no indication of its destination through its gloom. Everything concerning him was, to the world, alike novel, unfathomable, and unprecedented.

His career had been one succession of marvels, his genius a wonder, his life was still a mystery.

When the astonishment excited by his abrupt introduction into the political arena had subsided, his exposition of the causes of the murrain attracted universal notice. It was at a season when the insect pest was decimating millions through the agency of the famine it occasioned. Men listened eagerly, rather on account of the fearful interest of the subject, and because of the novelty of the idea, than with the most remote belief.

It was judged the wild hallucination of a mind over-wrought—the crotchet of a genius. Conviction followed, forced upon incredulity by irresistible proof.

The existence of ravages of the insect were popularly no less demonstrable than the discovery of air, gas, electricity, and such fluids and agencies as had escaped detection during ages.

Tempest rendered them tangible to the million, and the million wondering that they had so long escaped its notice, was filled with dread and horror.

But when the share of old Cash in this calamity was denounced by Tempest, the supporters of government, though no longer able to contest the organic nature of the plague, retiring behind their next entrenchment, stoutly denied all participation in the extension of the murrain by the ruling family. Not that they expressed in private circles, this incredulity which the agitation of the masses prompted them to avow in public. "Eustatius Cash," they said, "had only inherited his father's property, not his guilt," and when it was argued that the wealth in question was the fruit of the old man's transgression, they answered with alarm "that the whole proceeding had been lawful, if not philanthropic—that interference with his acquisitions would infringe the sacred rights of property, that on the security of property all credit was based," whilst it must be remembered that they were utterly dependent upon the public credit.

At this stage the career of Tempest might have been arrested by a stretch of authority which was in contemplation; but then took place his greatest triumph.

The long vigils which still blanched his cheek, and the solitude in which he lived amidst a public life, brought forth their fruit. He had discovered the object of his almost hopeless search. He had found, if not a means of extirpating his predecessor's creation, a fresh antidote to arrest the course of its ravages, unrestrainable as they had been deemed.

Tempest published his discovery to the world. Its gratitude and applause rendered him for a time unassailable even by the overgrown power of Eustatius. His praises burst from millions of lips, qualified only by the regrets of his friends.

Who could not but lament that when they had reckoned on a bent purely political, in their favourite, he should have taken a scientific turn.

"His discovery," they said, "is useful, very useful, and no doubt conducive to his present popularity, but it will prove eventually injurious to his credit as a politician. It is a change of line. He will rank certainly next to Doctor Jenner, as a public benefactor and all that sort of thing. He may acquire an immortality in pocket books, and find the date of his birth, death, or of his discovery recorded in the margin of the lined pages which chronicle such events as the roasting of an ox upon the Thames, the attempt made by Margaret Nicholson on the life of George the Third, the birth of a son to the Duke of Cambridge, or a dreadful hurricane in the Barbadoes—but, poor fellow! he might have been a statesman!"

As for Eustatius, he was outraged beyond expression at the discovery of Tempest, and it required the combined influence of Middleman Cautious and of Sir Jasper to restrain him from attempting to resent, in some arbitrary manner,—what he considered an infraction of his rights.

"We shall come to that," expostulated Sir Jasper, blandly, "but just now—in the present state of feeling—believe me, it would still be premature."

"What, and must I submit to have filched from me a privilege on which all the wealth of my house has been founded? Is not that murrain and its remedy a family property? and if others are allowed to interfere in it what becomes of all patent laws? what becomes of the distinctions of meum and tuum, what becomes of the sacred rights of ownership?"

"Very true," replied Middleman Cautious, "only, though the murrain was once your chief instrument of acquisition, it is worthy of remark, that its productive value has ceased. Your possessions are so vast that by the natural process of accumulation in a very brief space they will have absorbed the remainder. The murrain could have done no more, whilst the prospect of its future ravages might at least have damaged its reversionary value."

"Well, gentlemen," said Eustatius, "no one can say that your zeal outruns your discretion. But when I am lord of the last remaining acre, do you know what I will prove to the world? I will tell you. That I know at least how to do what I like with my own."

CHAPTER XXI.

TEMPEST AND MYRRAH.

Wrapped in study—overwhelmed with occupation—and unaccustomed to social intercourse, the time of Tempest was divided between the senate, the council, and the seclusion of his cabinet.

The austere simplicity, and the inviolable solitude of his private life, did not ill-accord either with his impenetrable antecedents, or with the sudden appearance on the political stage of a celebrity, who, though now bound to every shade of the opposition by all the public ties which connect a successful leader with his party, had never contracted the faintest intimacy with his partisans.

The mystery which attached to his origin, history, and former pursuits, the gravity of his demeanour and his retiring habits, served to invest his character with a halo of interest. Though innocent of having studied to produce this effect, he was not insensible to its advantages.

His extreme youth was forgotten in the singularity which estranged him from the familiar sympathies of life, and the superiority which the mediocrity of riper years, so rarely pardons in the young, gave little umbrage in one who was never seen in his hours of relaxation to abdicate the dignity of his public character.

Without attitudinizing, he seemed to subside from energetic brilliancy into antique simplicity, and the reserve of his privacy, was in strict keeping with the heroic display which he made before the world of his genius and of his daring.

But in truth, it was no premature indifference engendered in perceptive obtuseness, or in philosophic scorn; it was no satiety of the world's untasted pleasures, which rendered Tempest insensible to their enjoyment—from which pride, want of leisure and social ignorance, debarred him. Pride which delights in loneliness; the want of leisure occasioned by the Herculean labours which his restless energy had prompted him to undertake; and social ignorance—the ignorance of little things, neglected in the acquisition of mightier knowledge.

He had passed through childhood mated to senility; youth brought with it for him, no more companionship than Pitt or Condé could have found in the generation of boys they had outstripped, or of envious men whom they had overtaken.

Therefore he stood alone, aloof and awe-inspiring—no less an enigma to the few, than a marvel to the many.

Thus become an object of public interest and wonder, the youthful leader of his party could not fail to excite the curiosity of one, whose sympathies were enlisted in favour of the man whom his sudden reputation had cast into shade. Myrrah had long since recognised in Tempest, the mysterious rival, whose first appearance had stamped the brow of Invective Rabid with the premonition of evil.

A feeling first of hostility towards him who came to thwart the ambition she now shared, arose in her bosom, and then followed a strange longing to see and essay her woman's wit against the intruder's genius. But dames, if less celebrated and fair than Myrrah, still—as the exalted and the highly born—immeasurably her superiors, had crowded to listen to his eloquence, had rushed to waylay his steps, and yet had sought in vain, not only intimacy but even acquaintance with him. But this difficulty served only still farther to pique the curiosity of Myrrah. Her longing settled into a fixed determination. The intimates who now thronged her board, to indulge the whim of Invective Rabid, whose darkening mood craved the relief of social intercourse, had long made this resolution the theme of pleasantry.

Some of these guests were around her—it was evening. The open window overlooked the park and river.

"Myrrah!" said one of her visitors, pointing to the figure of a man emerging from the trees. "As I live there is Tempest. So this is the place of his retirement—this is why you have chosen such a retreat?"

"You are right," said Myrrah. "It is he. I have not been misinformed. During a month past I have been told that after sunset he wanders for an hour along that bank."

"He has been ailing lately," observed one of the guests.

"And is there nothing else brings him here?" asked another.

"Nothing but the quest of relaxation in solitude after the cares of the busy day," replied the first.

"That is to say," observed Invective Rabid, "the wish to avoid you and your fellows."

"He must have need of some repose," said the first speaker.

"He has need of much talent," replied Lord Besom, "to induce one to forgive his presumptuous pretension—the disdain of all companionship—the airs of the veiled prophet which he assumes."

"If one dared obtrude upon him," said a visitor, "but he might think that he was watched and resent it—some clue might be discovered to his mysterious habits. Is it quite sure that there is no fair spirit whom he invokes in the solitude of this retreat?"

"None!" replied Myrrah. "When here he is alone."

"And that," said Lord Besom, "is what I least forgive him. His contempt for men might pass. Most men are contemptible enough, but the affectation of disdaining your sex, Myrrah, is an infirmity which stirs my chivalric bile. I do not wonder that it touches you to think that there is one breast steeled against all feminine attractions, that there breathes one insensible to your charms, and that this youth turns away from woman like a moslemin from a thing unclean."

"Who has told you that he is insensible to my influence?" replied Myrrah. "When has it been tried? If he avoids he fears, and we will test now whether I may not prevail."

"Ah!" said Invective, "that is a triumph beyond your art."

"I will make the trial," said Myrrah. "This is the opportunity I have so much longed for. Though birth the proudest, and beauty the most renowned, are denied access to him, I have discovered that where he thinks himself unknown he is affable to the people. It is my intention to place myself upon his path as he returns from his evening's ramble. If he should not recognise me?"

"If he should fail to recognise, Myrrah," said Lord Besom, "he will be more singular in that than in everything besides."

As Myrrah was speaking she had retired but only to return after a few minutes' absence. How brief the time, yet how complete the transformation!

The very guests she had quitted scarcely recognised her. The actress stood before them now, the impersonation of rustic simplicity and youth.

The trace of passion—the deep lines of irony had vanished from her lip and brow. Years, with their recollections and their guile, seemed banished from that sweet countenance by an effort of volition. Such was the innocence and candour of her aspect—so perfect an ideal of the country maiden did she present—that she was hailed by an involuntary burst of simultaneous applause, which redoubled when curtsying modestly to the company, she addressed them with an enchanting naïveté, and in language just picturesquely tinted with provincialism. There was nothing in fact but the coquetry of her small buckled shoes, and the delicacy of the taper fingers protruding through her mittens by which the most practised eye could have detected the fraud.

"What do you say, gentlemen? How will you wager? Will he avoid me?"

"If he has any regard for his own peace." replied Lord Besom gallantly, "most assuredly he will fly."

* * * * *

Threading that path which meanders through the trees, Tempest, where an abrupt turn displays the river, comes suddenly upon a female figure.

Without other witness than the skies above—the grove around—the stream before her, to which she makes a mute appeal, a whole story is in her attitude and expression.

Her gipsy bonnet is flung upon the grass, the long tresses escaping from restraint, float over her fair shoulders, her hands are clasped, her eyes upturned; and thus bending over the wave in which about to plunge, she looks the living image of despair.

At one bound Tempest is by her side. With a faint scream she springs forward, his grasp restrains her, she is in his arms—insensible.

As he deposits on a mossy bank the inanimate form—as he attempting to revive her chafes the transparent temples and scatters over her brow and bosom the water gathered in his palm—the contemplation of that surpassing loveliness is forced upon him.

It troubles him. He would willingly pass onward, or avert his glance, or turn aside, but as it may not be, that beauty—to which his soul is so susceptible—moves him as he gazes. Pity and admiration mingle in the thought that but for his interference so fair a creature might lie in the cold slime of that river's bed, those delicate proportions bloating into distortion and that dainty frame advancing towards its first livid stage in the loathsome progress of decay.

But to have withheld her from those waters is not to have rescued her from such a fate. He cannot leave her lifeless there, and when her lips murmur, and her eyes opening glance wildly round, and then swim in tears, he cannot leave her—then. He must still save her from herself.

When he seeks to extract the motive of her rash attempt—when he questions her about her home, she answers mournfully "that it is far away." When he asks whither she is going, a bitter smile plays on her lips, and her eye wanders, with involuntary significance, towards the dark surface of the eddying river.

Tempest presses her no further, he seeks only to dissuade her in tones of sympathy and with words of kindness from suicidal despair. There is a persuasive softness in his language which melts the reckless resolution her wild looks convey. He has succeeded in awakening a human interest amidst that desolation. A shower of tears succeeds to the flash of passion, and then—her eyes glance up into his with an expression of wonder, gratitude, and affection, which, as consciousness returns, merges into modest confusion. Yet in that fair heaving bosom the heart of the actress bounds with exultation. Oh! for an amphitheatre dense with human heads witnessing her triumph, for never has she earned so well the tributary tempest of scattered flowers—the plaudits of ten thousand rattling palms!

Myrrah feels that she has triumphed. That the deep, soft, dangerous gaze, never yet turned ineffectually into human eyes, had not been prolonged in vain. That the fascination of its magic splendour has sunk into the recesses of his soul, illumining it with an unconscious ray of love, with a nascent aspiration of desire.

What signifies the tale that Myrrah pours into Tempest's ear, extracted from her gratitude and grief,—amidst sighs and tears,—in broken sentences and abrupt admissions, alternated with wild bursts of pathos?

Suffice to say, that he whose keen glance pierces through the fraud of men grown grey in the art of deceiving, he whose acute perception peers through the mist of ignorance with which the world is enveloped, he believes as implicitly as the child whose credulity no falsehood has ever scared. He believes her to be forlorn, persecuted, and unhappy, but—still to be reconciled with life.

No living soul knows him in this retreat.

To the world, as to her, he is a solitary student. He offers her an asylum. He must depart in a few hours, to pursue his avocations in the busy haunts of men, but to return the following day at sunset. Yielding to his entreaties, she swears that she will do nothing rash till his return, and leaning on his arm allows him to lead her towards his secluded dwelling.

But as they pursue their way, every figure advancing along their path in the declining sunset occasions her alarm and makes her seek nervously to turn aside. Why, therefore, when they come to that lonely footway should she take to the right across the open space fronting the crowded balcony of that villa which her companion seeks to shun?

In that balcony sit the guests she has quitted.

"By heavens! there is Myrrah! That is Tempest! As I live, she leans upon his arm! Oh! for the wit of woman, and the frailty of man's wisdom!"

"Shall we go down to meet them?"

"No! on your lives make not a sign!" replied Invective Rabid. "I told you, gentlemen, that this incomparable Tempest, a giant in some kinds of knowledge, was a child—a fool in others. He never saw Myrrah in his life. It is an admirable jest, but let us keep it to ourselves—let us be prudent, and some good may yet possibly arise from this for all of us."

CHAPTER XXII.

THE BIOGRAPHER AND HISTORIAN.

It is perhaps far advanced into our tale to introduce the reader again into the presence of so discursive a personage as Grubout Florid, the historian and biographer. Nevertheless we are in his study.—Sitting with a companion whose pursuits resemble his own, he discourseth as follows:—

"I am not of your opinion. I still conceive human history to be an onward pilgrimage in the course of which the wanderer man sometimes deviate from the road, but only to retrace his steps and right his course by the immutable star of truth towards which he cannot shape his way without progressing.

"Many stages he has never yet proceeded without turning into some diverging path, but though lost for a space, the prosecution of the wrong at length ensures its detection and he avoids the error, like the traveller, who with the fall of day recognises his true direction by the setting sun or rising moon, and quits the false guidance of the deceptive land marks which have led his steps astray.

"It may be only to lose himself upon the morrow—to wander again and again out of his path, but yet grown more wary as he proceeds, to err less often, and reach eventually the goal to which he aspires.

"A direct advance towards the right—a side-long divergence towards the wrong—marks each succeeding phase of human history, impeding not arresting progress.

"The antique love of equality and freedom never quenched, has been transmitted down to our generation, yet of old—contracting into an exclusive sphere—its results beyond were the Helot's doom, and the oppression which made a Spartacus.

"The gospel's law of unresisting love is the point from which fanaticism diverged to depopulate a world—to light the Inquisition's fires to inspire a Mary or Elizabeth, and to prompt the cruel intolerance of a Laud.

"Christianity's simple precepts were the texts from which subtle theologians filled their prolix tomes—seeking to paint the lily and to render more plain the plainest of all truths.

"And yet that law—those precepts—endure and harmonise the world, though fanaticism has passed away, and though theologic disquisitions and church histories are now no longer read or written."

"At least," replied the companion of Grubout Florid, "no more than their literary merits permit and we whose weary trade it is to thumb through the tens of thousands of controversial volumes which they have bequeathed to us, know how truly the curse of dullness has fallen on their craft."

"True," replied the historian, "who has given an interest beyond the hour to the topics they set forth as of eternal import? How many Bunyans have we in that legion? How many are there who even narratively attract our attention now? How many who, like Butler in his 'Lives of the Saints,' have ever rendered the odour of sanctity pleasing? How many who, like McCabe in his 'Catholic History of England,' have known how to raise flowers from the dust of old monkish manuscripts, and to invest the fruit of their erudite research, the legends of

'Grim saints and martyrs hairy.'

with all the interest of romance?

"But I too falling into the habits of life, am digressing. I was contending then against your pessimist impressions, that if we live in an age in which the worship of Mammon is predominant, it is tending, to that absurd extreme from which society will make an abrupt return, into the true path from which it wandered sixty years ago.

"A cross road was before it then, it missed its way, and here we are—not retrograded—not where we were—not where we might have been—but though swamped in a quagmire and drawn up by a dead wall, yet not so far out of the true direction, when we choose to take a short cut into it.

"We have attained the abolition of old abuses, the amalgamation of hostile castes and nationalities; and if this had been brought about by a fraternisation of human interests in accordance with the benevolent inspirations then so rife, the world would not need a revolution now to set it right; but the change was allowed to be effected in the mere spirit of lucre, and that spirit rose into an ascendancy, which has become a greater ill than the evils it removed.

"The Frenchman and the Englishman became one, not as common members of the great human family, but as fellow-shareholders in the paramount rights of property, or as hopeless victims of the same impression. Free trade—which benevolence would have used to level frontiers, became the instrument of a monopoly—the monopoly of the Haves against the Have nots."

"But," said Grubout's companion, "did not this deification of the rights of property—which has led society into its present dilemma, now that property has passed, by virtue of it, into one man's hands—did not this originate in that first half of the last century, to which you look back with such complacence?"

"Because my thoughts recur not to its fatal errors nor to the unhappy spirit which prevailed, but to the militant aspirations which succumbed, at last, yet bid so fair to become triumphant that all parties at one time paid them tribute. There was a period when none dared avow the naked selfishness of principle. When Toryism became Conservatism split off into philanthropic advocacy of free trade, leaving only—as a surviving chip of the original block—protectionist obduracy which itself fought the question of Corn-Law Monopoly. with the arms of Anti-Slavery sympathies.

"The leader of that Young England whose political formula was a vaguely expansive benevolence, was eagerly appropriated by the protectionists, and a sharp weapon the Benjamin of his party became. For protection had figuratively, as well as nominally, its Benjamin—its well beloved in him—no less than its Joseph, in Lord George. At least if to such analogy suffice the monopoly of corn in the land of Egypt, and the coat of many colours now conjectured to have been a racing-jacket, the only reasonable solution, since the alternative of supposing Jacob to have presented his son with a harlequin's coat, would clearly be far from respectful to the memory of that patriarch.

"The protectionists, it may be observed, even in their misfortune—even when Sir Robert Peel had played the Marotto—and even when their old oracles were all struck dumb, exemplified the adage 'that it is better to be born lucky than wise,' for driven to recruit in the stable and on the highway, this party without a leader found in D'Israeli a leader without a party, and lighted on Lord George Bentinck who soon made manifest the truth—which no one conversant with the turf had ever doubted—that its knowing ones were safe to shine amongst statesmen and politicians, though whether statesmen or politicians would cut an equal figure on the turf is still problematical, and no more follows than that because a mare is a horse, a horse should be a mare.

"Even the versatile Lord Brougham (when having purchased at third hand Lord George's stud, he aspired to the sovereignty Lord George had abdicated,) did not succeed in making up a more successful book than his novel of the 'Chateau Lunel, or the Castle of Languedoc' turned out to be.

"Lord George, as far as skill and energy could help him, deserved if he did not command success, but protection was a cocktail jade, whom no jockeying could bring to the winning-post, and he was riding against Free trade carrying feather weight.

"Yet it must be recorded of him, that not only an able, but a consistent man, he proved his moral training by squaring his political conduct according to the principles and experience of his private avocations, since—impressed with the elementary stable-truth that a horse can never be brought into condition without limiting his feeds of corn—the efforts of his policy were directed towards stinting the corn of the people.

"As to the Protectionist Benjamin he was perhaps better fitted than Sir Robert to have transmitted to posterity a name which has only come down to us in connexion with his hostility to that minister whose immortality is due to the greatness of the measures which he passed when they had overtaken him.

"No one had ever held out greater literary and political promise than D'Israeli; gifted with eloquence of pen and tongue, his works impressed you with the conviction of originality and talent beyond those of his most favoured contemporaries—less positively evidenced in his works than irresistibly attributed by the reader to the writer.

"He belonged to a persecuted race, degraded by centuries of oppression, and held in opprobrium for its degradation, yet he made his way by his own talents without denial of his origin—the besetting sin of the Hebrews. On the contrary, he gloried in belonging to a people, who more appropriately might have gloried in its connection with him, since few, even in the Biblical times of its history, could have afforded it such just cause of pride.

"And in saying this, I am not forgetful, even of the poetic genius and traditionary wisdom of David's son.

"I do not know whether there is not more poetry in the works of D'Israeli, than in the songs of Solomon, and as to the sapience of that day, it must have differed as widely from the wisdom of our own, as the speed of those times from what we consider sharp travelling—or else the palm of wisdom could never have been conceded to a monarch so ill-advised as voluntarily to cohabit with six hundred wives, thus incurring the penalty our revised criminal code awards to the Bigamist now condemned to live with the two or more females he has married.

"It is at least doubtful whether Saul would have had the boldness, or Solomon the eloquence to have turned the tables on those illiberally carping at his origin by startling John Bull not only into a salutary conviction of his ill-founded prejudice towards a race maligned, but actually, for a whole week, into the belief that there was neither worth, birth, nor talent out of the Jewish pale.

"Every illustrious name, of which the origin was obscure, he appropriated, for his tribe, till honest John—before the midway truth dawned upon him between depreciation of the Jewish race and this excessive exaltation of the Hebrew horn—was in hourly expectation that the Duke of Wellington and Lord John Russell would next turn out Mosaic Arabs, and the grandfather of Sir Robert prove to have been a son of the circumcised.

"Was it surprising that after accomplishing such a feat he should have gained the ear of England and succeeded in rendering so plain the political ridicules and errors of all shades of opinion, that partisans felt half disgusted with, or quite ashamed of, their respective parties?—or that the Young England banner which he raised should have gleamed spotless and bright as a star of hope amidst the tattered rags to which he had directed public scorn?

"Was it surprising that men should have looked forward to one who had so well exposed the past, as to a guide for the future, and that expectation should have seen in him, the embryo leader of a new and progressive party?

"No man had ever attained, by sheer brilliancy, so remarkable a position, and none ever so signally disappointed the anticipations he had raised.

"In his Coningsby—when breaking a Rigby on his own wheel, he derides the use of italics as the resource of 'Forcible Feebles,' and then resorts to printing words in capitals—the inconsistence is typical of that which his political opinions exhibited. The keen expositor of cant, abuse and wrong, who dragged into light and ridicule the follies of the day, proposes a remedy more monstrous than its worst disease—the revival of institutions tried during centuries, found wanting and condemned by the common accord of all civilised people to whom the choice had ever been given.

"Redoubtable whilst shaking and trampling down, he seemed impotent to construct. When on the blank flag, which the imagination of his admirers had filled with the symbols of their respective faiths, he came dimly to inscribe his own—what did they behold? A fanciful amalgamation of obsolete monarchical and high church traditions, tempered with benevolent aspirations, and tending, if anywhere, towards absolutism—in an age of steam, iron, energy and progression!

"The mountain had brought forth the mouse and the man who had alternately held out the promise of undisputed pre-eminence in the fields of literature and of politics, sunk into the second novelist of his time—the pest of a political adversary, and the pet of a superannuated party.

"The opinion was long entertained by the Protectionists, that Sir Robert Peel was born entirely without a conscience; and if so, it is not improbable that Providence, to render him amenable to some counter-poising sting, raised up a D'Israeli, as the supplementary conscience of a Sir Robert.

"At least, up to 1846, he had played no other part—though I may chance to do his subsequent reputation injustice, as I have not happened to disinter any important record of him after this time."

"But," said the historian's guest, "if you have done, pray what do you intend to prove by all this?"

"Ah," replied the historian, with the air of a man suddenly recollecting himself, "my hobby has run away with me. I was endeavouring to show how the first half of the nineteenth century, before it went so lamentably astray, was manifesting, in innumerable forms, its philanthropic tendencies, whether we refer to anti-slavery or anti-poor-law agitation, whether to temperance movements, or societies to befriend the homeless, to increase the comfort of the poor, or protective of needlewomen, factory children, aborigines, or animals.

"So general was the extension of this feeling that none could any more afford to dispense with benevolent pretensions than with the tricoloured cockade in the reign of terror, or with a holy relic in the middle ages.

"Rosas, an obscure South American despot of those times, thought it necessary to preface his butchery with fair words, and Nicholas, who had peopled more graves than all his contemporary sovereigns put together,—who had transported a quarter of a million of his subjects, into penal banishment,—who owned twenty millions as his private slaves, and in whose dominions more men died annually by the executioner's hand than in all the rest of Europe—even Nicholas found it expedient to join an anti-slavery league, and when the pretence of no punishment of death existing in his dominions would no longer impose upon the civilised world,—when it had learned that the knout was more cruel and no less murderous than the knife or rope—thought fit to change its name, and to substitute the no less fatal plitt which gives the executioner's arm more trouble.

"Even Monsieur Samson was forced to contend that he sharpened the steel of his guillotine through 'zèle humanitaire,' and I have found somewhere in the posthumous memoirs of Mr. Calcraft that he had exercised his calling through mere consideration of the interests of his kind, since his strongly developed organs of destructiveness might otherwise have induced him to destroy some one not otherwise doomed to die."

"Well," said Grubout's companion, "I have small sympathy with the men of your favourite period, for whose errors, according to your confession, we are suffering. If, as you suppose, Great Britain then led the van of civilisation, referring to the daily press of that time and country, what a cowardly truckling to successful crime—a Russian Tsar, or an Egyptian Pacha—what did it signify? Why, a Lord Aberdeen in those days could not have borne to hear that a Khan of Bokhara had behaved in a manner unbecoming a Christian or a gentleman. As Mrs. Norton says, 'he could not have believed it of him.' A true sample of his epoch, he had no censure for any but deposed princes.

"Now to prove that society knew better, as you are striving, would make it only more despicable. I can see in this subservience to success only a manifestation of the same contemptible spirit which made John Bull bow with such servile delight to every stray prince, and bend, in the worship of title and aristocracy, long after the influence of both had been virtually exploded throughout Europe."

"As to the first part of your argument I have nothing to say," replied the historian "as regards the second, John Bull, before his individuality was merged in the great European family, had undoubtedly a servile hankering after princely and aristocratic greatness. But then he only esteemed aristocracy when really invested with authority and power. He despised a French Count, a German Baron, and an Italian Marquis, to bow to an English Lord, whilst Princes he seems, on the contrary, only to have prized, irrespective of all other qualifications, for sheer novelty. He would have made no invidious distinction between a Russian Tsar and a prince of Monaco, but lavished his enthusiasm with undiscriminating impartiality provided they did not, like the King of Saxony, outstay their welcome. If very outlandish, the son or nephew, or even the representative of a sovereign or ruler sufficed to draw down plaudits. Ibrahim Pacha was quite as welcome as the King of Prussia, and the envoy of the Imaum of Muscat more sought after by John Bull than either, because he had never in his life heard either of the territory or title of the potentate in question. An announcement in the court circular, of the arrival of the King of Cockaigne, or of the grand Panjandrum would at any moment have elicited the liveliest sympathies of the public, and the courtesies of the Lord Mayor, whilst the King of the Mosquito shore, or a distant connexion of that Queen of Madagascar who offered to cede the sovereignty of her dominions to an English merchant captain for the consideration of a bottle of rum and an old red coat, would undoubtedly have been received with more applause than the stale King of the Belgians.

"But this weakness might be referred to the love of cheap sight-seeing which characterised honest John. His warm reception of distinguished visitors owed its sole origin to thankfulness for the gratuitous exhibition with which they favoured him, and as his thoughts reverted to Madame Tussaud's, he regarded the illustrious personages in question with complacence, as the public spirited saviours of his shillings. Hence he looked with disgust upon a Prince who staid too long, or came too often; hence his ardor was damped by a sovereign who wore plain clothes; and hence even when his expectations were overwrought by any great singularity of costume, as in the case of Ibrahim Pacha, he felt disappointed if not aggrieved, when his Highness neither threw somersets on a small carpet, nor played with the cup and balls, nor balanced a dagger on his nose.

"This mania for jumping down the throats of royal lions originated therefore in the same feeling which made the public insist on sixpenny and shilling exhibitions, and crowd to see all gratis sights, and to attend all free meetings. It had nothing to do with John

Bull's tuft-hunting propensities. Ludicrously as these were developed, he confined them to his own aristocracy, which continued to exist in England long after its extinction everywhere besides.

"Now that it is become a thing of the past, whilst we wonder at its perpetuation with so practical a people, at an epoch in which the dawn of a true civilisation had commenced, we may at the same time admit, that the aristocracy to which John Bull bowed the knee, was a very different stamp to that which withered beneath Continental contempt. Now that it no longer bars the way to a happier state of things, nor fills the place of a more perfect social organisation, it must be confessed that mixed up with recollections of its follies and vices, it has bequeathed to posterity some glorious memories. It was not quite unworthy of the race which traversed earth and shore by steam, which subdued and civilised the East, and disseminated, by precept and example through the world, Free Trade, the most fruitful germ of human fraternisation. Small in extent, if it proved a fruitful hotbed of vice, folly, egotism, and meanness, it also brought forward a luxuriant crop of all those qualities of heart, intellect, and imagination, which elevate, dazzle, and refine. From its limited ranks, in the commencement of the nineteenth century, it furnished the greatest poet, the most accomplished captain, the most learned scholar, and the most daring seaman its country ever witnessed; and it sent forth its scions in every enterprise of science, philanthropy, or hardihood.

"Lord Byron, the greatest poet of his age, ranks amongst the first five of any age or country. Wellington, England's greatest Captain, will hold a prominent place amongst those who in times ancient or modern have achieved an imperishable reputation by the sword. Wellesley may assuredly vie with a Richelieu or Ximenes, if thereunto suffice, having played a more successful part upon a wider stage. Lord John Russell shines no less as the historian than as the statesman. Lord Mahon holds a distinguished place amongst contemporary historians. Lord Prudhoe, second in the world as an oriental antiquarian, was second to Champollion. Lord Stanhope made the first material improvements in the printing press. Lord Rosse devoted the ingenuity of years, inventing his own tools and feeling his own way, to accomplish, in the pursuit of science, what mechanical art had never yet achieved, and what states and princes had hitherto left undone. He had the proud satisfaction of extending the vision of his race further than it had ever reached into the regions of immensity.

"At the head of a movement for the protection of factory children, was a Lord Ashley. Presiding over a society for the protection of cruelty to animals, a Lord Carnarvon; devoting his whole existence to the cause of exiled strangers, a Lord Dudley Stuart. A Lord John Manners stood prominently forward in the cause of popular enlightenment.

"If we look for the maritime skill, for the adventurous spirit that won the new world, and for the dauntless enterprise of the Sea King of Old, we shall find all these united to mechanical genius in the Earl of Dundonald.

"When a gallant attempt is made to open a trade in the Eastern Archipelago, it is the scion of a noble house—Mr. Murray—who disdaining to surrender, fights two small vessels through the piratic fleet and perishes in the attempt. In the last struggles of one of the last of the Bourbons, when a prince upholding the monarchical and aristocratic principle could not gather round him half-a-dozen of his own grandees an English nobleman—Lord Ranelagh—ascends the breach of San Mames."

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE TRIAL.

Eustatius Cash, though neither distinguished for intellect nor boldness, still possessed sufficient of both to enable him to perceive the advantages of his position, and prompt him unscrupulously to employ them. Though, with moderate means, he might have been a timid man, the immense resources at his command led him to carry out his views with a reckless hardihood which no intercession could temper, because,—conscious that he might be led,—he was so morbidly suspicious of all influence that he could not be made amenable to any, whether for good or evil.

His first step had been to beggar his father-in-law whose property absorbed, a second time by old Cash, had passed with the untestated wealth of the millionary to his son. His next was against the Lady Calliroë, who boldly threatened to sue him for maintenance, and whom he menaced with divorce.

The Lady Calliroë defied—his counsellors dissuaded—him from prosecution of his suit; but he was inflexible. His fiat went forth. He determined to drag her in the dust, and the green bag was deposited upon the table of the senate.

Thereupon, the Lady Calliroë entered into communication with Tempest. It was not to call on him for the exculpatory evidence he could furnish, but to throw her cause on his political protection. His advocacy was not denied her. Pass we over their mutual thoughts, over the strange memories and association which troubled this young wife and her defender when meeting to concert the defence he had undertaken, because the dark communications made—the subjects dwelt on—in these witnessed interviews, left little room for aught present besides anxiety and horror. The injured lady of Eustatius revealed to Tempest the parricidal scene to which her ears, if not her eyes, had borne witness.

With the accusation of that murder she boldly proposed to meet the calumnious accusations by which her husband sought to disgrace her; and through her the grey hair of her father.

Days passed. The Lady Calliroë's name became the popular watchword. The struggle between the husband and the wife grew to be identified with antagonism between the people and its despot. Expectation was raised to the highest pitch. Fresh efforts were made to induce her to retire from the contest, but she remained inflexible, neither shaken by threats, nor moved by the opprobrium with which the party of Eustatius basely covered her.

Of her means of defence even the senator, her father, was ignorant; but so long used to defer to her sagacity, even he acquired confidence from that which she exhibited, and from the knowledge of Tempest's advocacy which she had secured.

At length the eventful time is come. The capital is crowded, the streets are thronged; the military keep the people in awe. The boys fight in the street for my lady or my lord. The pampered coachmen of the members fillip with their whips such of the mob as toss up their greasy bonnets, and shout for the accused. They have a right to do so. These equipages are mortgaged to their master's master; and, if he wills it, to-morrow their present owners must trudge it on foot, and Jehu's occupation would be no more. Such is the feeling which in an ascending scale inspires the devotion of the husband's party. But there were two exceptions. The Lady Floranthe gorgeously attired waits to receive and congratulate the victor; and, on her part, the Lady Sabina sits throned in state, with her fair, young, gentle daughter by her side, in a like expectation. The triumph of Eustatius will that day leave free his hand, the prize for which they are contending, and Eustatius still pretentious of the character of the Lovelace and Lothario has inspired both with hope.

Within the senate Tempest sits calm but thoughtful. All the sinews of party which furnish his hold on the great body of the people are strained like the tendons of a mighty limb in the repose preceding action. He meditates a daring measure. Why not now, if ever, attempt to break the despot's power? Why not retaliate with an annihilating charge his base attempt to crush a woman? Why not now attack him as the parricide in that assembly, and suddenly hold out to his partisans the seducing prospect of disenthralment from his influence by suggesting the confiscation of his wealth, as a felon's forfeit to the state? This momentous problem the popular leader has solved affirmatively.

He sits with compressed lips expecting the appearance of the Lady Calliroë. It is the eve of the eventful moment in which rising before his peers, the young wife, so renowned for her beauty and her wisdom, has undertaken to denounce to that wonder-stricken assembly the old man's murder and her husband's crime.

The time is come—the minutes are passing—where is she? His eyes are fixed upon that door, through which he expects that she will come sailing in with regal dignity. He saw her not an hour ago she was calm and collected then—no pulse seemed to throb quicker—her demeanor was that of grave, resolute, reflective determination?

Or has her energy, at the eleventh hour, given way! have the feelings she restrained overpowered her! and if so—if in tears—she comes in supported on her father's arm, not as the heroine, but as the woman, that too will tell!

At this moment a paper is put into his hand, can he read aright? The Lady Calliroë declines to fulfil the part she had pledged herself to play! She has deliberately withdrawn from the contest—she submits to the infamy of defeat—she thanks her defender, but is now on her way to seek refuge in obscurity!

There has been no coercion; the trustworthy bearer of that missive saw her pen it—alone—uninfluenced by menace. Whilst Tempest ponders in a state of stupefaction, the appointed representative stands forth into the place of the accused, and declares, that the Lady Calliroë Cash declines to appear, but submits to the contumacious judgment of that august assembly.

He has not yet recovered from the shock when the despot's wife is branded by the recorded vote of that venal senate as the confessed adultress.

The sentence is passed, her civil death decreed. Henceforth devote to infamy her name, whom the representatives of a nation have banned with such solemnity!

Let her reputation—tattered rag—be dragged by malignity through the kennel's mire! Be her shame on every tongue—her ignominy borne on every wind that wafts the insulting cries of the crapulous multitude paid for those shouts that gratify the vindictive husband's ear.

* * * * *

It is nearly three quarters of an hour since an old man, accompanied by a female closely muffled up and veiled, and both in humble guise have been journeying towards the station. By this time they should be far away, but whether their driver is drunk or confused by the crowd, or dares not urge his horse past a certain turning, at which the animal resolutely shies, it is certain that they have been retracing their steps, or turning round in a circle.

The mob impedes their progress. Its shouts, its jeers, its comments distinctly reach the ears of those within the now stationary vehicle. Suddenly the old man throws up the sash, he calls for water, his companion is faint and ill. He lifts her out of the vehicle into the air, but she is now insensible, and his arm, enfeebled by age, cannot support her. This scene, which is passing opposite a mansion, attracts the attention of a young girl from the balcony. Aid comes. The sufferer is borne into an apartment of that house, and its benevolent daughter leans over her, and enquires into the nature of what she apprehends to be an accident.

The mother of the fair benevolent comes gently to recall her from her labour of love—but starts with astonishment, and at this moment the stranger opens her eyes. The ribaldry of the crowd is still ringing in her ear—what humiliation is this? Where has her bewildered father led her? How comes the Lady Sabina—and that daughter the reputed cause of her persecution—to be before the Lady Calliroë's eyes?

"Good God," said the Lady Sabina's husband, "this is very awkward."

With a burning brow and a flashing eye the senator's daughter starts up, and meets the mother's glance of scorn, the daughter's gaze of pity. It is her turn now to support the old man's tottering steps over that threshold. There pass no words between them, but when, old Lofty and his child have vanished, the tears rise into the eyes of the Lady Sabina's daughter.

"That is his wife! Oh! is it not pitiful?"

"She was his wife," replied the mother. "As you may be. Therefore such compassion ill becomes you."

"Oh! never," said the young girl with a look of horror, "you would never wish to see me treated thus?"

"She is guilty," said the Lady Sabina.

"Oh! not even if I were ten thousand times guilty!"

"True!" said the Lady Sabina's husband. "It is very sad. She is worse than guilty because condemned—but innocent as you are."

"Impossible!" said the Lady Sabina, conscience stricken.

"As I live she is guiltless," replied the husband. "Have not I been employed to sift the evidence?"

"Then—" said the Lady Sabina, faltering, "this is not an act of stern justice, but a crime."

"Hark!" said the daughter, "how irreverently they shout her name—if they should recognise her, as well turn her loose to a pack of hounds! Perhaps she came to seek refuge from them here. Oh! God if I were hunted thus I should lie down and die."

This image of her daughter in such plight struck home remorse to the mother's heart.

"Good God! and have I refused her shelter? You say guiltless! To profit by such a calumny would be crime. She shall find protection here."

"What! and her husband expected?" said the spouse.

"No," said the Lady Sabina, "Eustatius shall not be received. If innocent, she is still his wife before the face of heaven. My daughter shall never see him more."

"Hush! hush! hush!" said the husband, you are both beside yourselves—both in the other extreme. Refuse to receive Eustatius forsooth!"

But as he speaks, the foot of Eustatius is on the stairs. He comes in all the self-complacent fatuity long since parodied from the demeanour of Julian, and now insufferably increased by the jubilation of triumph. But no felicitations greet him. Is he dreaming? Has he escaped from overwhelming adulation only to plunge into this frigid atmosphere?

The Lady Sabina, cold, haughty, and majestic, as a Medea, meets him with the regret "that she cannot congratulate him on his success."

Eustatius is thunder-stricken—the Lady Sabina's husband deprived of all power of speech, by this astounding rashness. He knows how irrecoverably all is over, for when will Eustatius, who has never pardoned an unintentional slight, forgive a premeditated insult? But in an instant the brow of the suitor darkens.

"Is this my reception, madam! when honouring your roof?"

"I shall esteem my roof none the less honoured, when no longer harbouring successful calumny."

"Your roof!" said Eustatius, pale and almost speechless with anger and surprise. "Your roof! Who has a roof they can call their own? Go into the provinces and learn, madam! or stay here, and by heaven you shall acquire the knowledge!"

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE EXERCISE OF A RIGHT.

What are those wretched beings, men, women, and children, toiling along the road, or encamped by the wayside for miles, moving on wearily in a continuous procession of misery, or straggling in isolated groups, or congregating into crowds to seek repose?

The ashes of innumerable fires—or such traces as they have left, where, without even fuel, they have passed the night, or paused to rest—show that this human stream has been for many weeks been flowing.

It is no pilgrimage like that when a million of votaries hastened in 1844 to visit the holy coat of Treves, because the travel-worn multitude bear with them their household gear and even their domestic animals. Some of the lean kine and valueless beasts of burthen, and here and there a hungry dog follow amidst these Penates.

Though a military force observes and follows those wayfarers—preventing retrogression—it is not a Jewish population, or the inhabitants of a Polish district, driven before the Cossack lances into the waste by the ukase of a Tsar.

The Tsars have been long as completely extinct as the Mammoth—these wanderers are neither quite despoiled, nor chained, and he who sends them forth upon their journey does not regard them as a herd of cattle, arrogating an inhuman property in his fellow men, but only scatters them on that highway in pursuance of his right to do what he thinks fit with what is legitimately his own.

Such a spectacle the population of Athens may have afforded, when gathering in the Piraeus to escape the Persian host—such the nations migrating before the irruption of the Goth, and Hun into the Roman territories—such the multitudes disturbed by the advance of the Tamerlane's exterminating hordes—and such the wayfarers flying from war, pestilence, and famine.

The multitude crowding this road is the wreck of a people whom disease and hunger has decimated, flying from a calamity, and that calamity is the mischance which has transferred the possession of their mother earth to a stranger, and made him merciless.

Eustatius, their landlord, has simply been ejecting them. Here and there he has given a whole province or a whole county notice to quit. They are in arrears, who can dispute his right, and who would dare gainsay it if they could? Has he not the strong arm of the law, the military force at his beck, and—well paid, whilst the general bankruptcy heightens the value of their wages—to whom, if not to him, would his stalwart men be true.

Has he not the example too of the Irish landlord of yore; and better still of the great Western Scottish proprietors, the chiefs of clans, who—owing their lord to the rude devotion of their clansmen's sires—drove them out when they could dispense with their fidelity and their claymore to make place for the sheep and the red deer.

Eustatius Cash, in certain provinces, has warned all trespassers off his grounds—that ground is the whole province. No doubt he has his reasons—but if not—if his mere whim—has he not the right? Why should not he exclude all men, if he thinks proper, from land which is his own, as well as a Duke of Leeds have barred all passages through a district which he hired some sixty years ago?

Country seats abandoned by their ruined owners have been dismantled—whole villages are untenanted—and only here and there the smoke curls jovially up from the chimneys of some tenement, in which the well-paid agents of the landlord, superintending this depopulation, make merry amidst the general desolation.

The deep traces of the railways burrowed through the heart of the hills, and severing their crests, still furrow the surface of the land as indelibly as the convulsions of nature, which have left on it their impress, but the rails are taken up.

The hedge-rows still plot out the fallow field, but the briar is rising densely amidst its weeds.

Do you see that neglected harbour which no mast gladdens now—and across whose mouth the breakers glisten on the bar? That roofless town, over which the crumbling factory chimneys nod, that deserted village in which here and there, some obstinate trespasser—who saw the light in its cottage, and whose sires lie buried in its church-yard—still lingers by stealth? Do you see that baronial castle fast decaying to the ruinous condition in which, sixty years ago, the bankrupt linen—draper purchased it?

The bat flits through its noble galleries—the spider weaves over them its grey pall—the swallow builds within instead of without those paneless windows, and the hooting of the owl responds to the loud wheezing of its solitary and clandestine tenant; the seneschal, Hugh Fitz-Stephen Upland, who has been rendered asthmatic by the dampness of those dilapidated walls.

And do you, Reader, recognise Upland Castle? For those two travellers would not, but for the old oak trees, whose familiar trunks are still the same, and whose unaltered boughs rustle as if in derision of the change surrounding them.

One of these travellers is a woman, young and fair, though care-worn. The other, a man rather old and grey with sorrow than with years, and upon whose countenance, the expression of recent vexation, and present bitterness is mingled with the trace of long and deeply graven humiliation and grief.

That voyager was once the owner of all his humid eyes survey; and—broken, beggared, humbled, on his alienated patrimony—the once proud Lord Lofty, has just been stung by a last instance of what he deems ingratitude.

The old seneschal, who clings with cat-like tenacity to those walls, and who had eaten his bread from childhood upwards, has received his former master, not only with all the stately stiffness with which he was wont to usher an awed visitor into the presence of the castle's lord, but actually with irony and sarcasm.

His devotion had been to the owner of his ancestral castle, and forfeiting that character, the man remained simply odious, as no one who had usurped—and was no longer dignified by—the possession of Upland.

"I beg you to observe," said the old gentleman; "that we have nothing in common, except the fact, that your father and some score of my ancestors once held possession of this domain, and that we are both on some equality now as to worldly wealth;" here the seneschal glanced complacently from his darned trousers' knee at the dusty garments of the way-worn traveller. "Beyond that—all other differences being levelled—there is now, sir, the distinction between my blue blood and your plebeian breeding—"

"This after all my favours—all my condescension?"

"The condescension you will find, I think, to have been on the part of Hugh Fitz-Stephen Upland! You men of the desk and counter, superseded us through your gold, you pinned your faith to gold alone—it has failed you, and you are nothing without it. My ancestors gave this place their name—it grew reputed through their deeds—but you leave neither name nor memory here. You tenanted these halls for a brief space, nothing further, you passed away, and so will he who owns them, but as surely as those old oaks remain, so will the race of Fitz-Stephen Upland, to re-assume it right some day."

And with these words, the old man withdrew after a courtly salutation, but not to see his prediction verified, because that day twelvemonth, an erratic chimney-pot, alighting on his head, extinguished in his person, the ancient line which he had thus far perpetuated.

It had so chanced that the Senator had never till this day returned to Upland, since the deceptive marriage on which he had illusively counted for re-establishment of his fortunes, little imagining that the subtle tempter only gave to take back again the advantages which he had conceded.

The ruin surrounding him where he had left all so prosperous, the associations of a scene which vividly recalled the ambitious hopes he had entertained, and the bitter disappointment of that old man—who now stood beggared on his own hearth with his dishonoured daughter—overcame him with emotion.

He tottered across the park upon his daughter's arm. They reached some dilapidated cottages, and then—feeling faint—he sat down upon a mound of earth, beside the cottage door, over which hung a vine in all the rank luxuriance of unpruned tendrils, with reddening leaves and fruit withering on the stem, or devastated by birds, blight, or insects, excepting one solitary bunch which hung temptingly near the weary wayfarer.

But the full, dark, glossy bulb which he raises to his lips, bursts with a crackling sound. It is not swollen with the juicy pulp which nourishes and refreshes, but filled like the bloated leaves which droop, fruit-like from the hedge-rows—with a black, pungent, bitter dust!

Sometimes, in the tempestuous strife of jarring elements—amidst the wreck of navies going down—some perishable relic floats safely on the wild waves to the shore. And in the same manner trivial incidents—forgotten on the morrow—sometimes rise uppermost in the memory, after the grave vicissitudes which have marred a life.

Whilst that bitterness is still upon his loathing lips, there flashes across his memory a recollection no less bitter, as he suddenly recalls the bunch of grapes he had refused the dying man. On principle it was true—the principle which had made him that which he was now. In some of these cottages, too, he now remembered that the old man had lived—and died perhaps for he had never inquired.

"Get up! get up!" mumbled a cracked voice in his ear, as his spare arm was clasped by a still bonnier hand, "you mustn't sit there upon my neighbour. That is no seat for tramps and idlers. That is a grave! 'Bury me there, dame Gabble, where my chair was used to stand in the sunset, and plant a thorn at my head, and a vine-slip at my feet,' the old man used to say, and there he lies, God rest him! we digged him in with a broken spade—the youth and I—he sleeps outside, and the youth sleeps in; you must not disturb either," said the old crone pointing into her cottage.

Dame Gabble was little changed in person or condition. How could she alter much?

What could the desolation around add to her loneliness? Of what could the myrmidons of Eustatius deprive her? Her life cannot long interrupt the solitude, and therefore they have left her its only privileged denizen.

But though she has a memory her perception is imperfect and slow. The Lady Calliroë cannot induce her to bring water, she steps into the cottage—and lo! the old crone has spoken truth—the old galvanist's companion—Tempest—lies extended there, not in the arms of death but of sleep!

Even the intrusion of her light footstep rouses him. He recognises and addresses her. His travelling dress, the associations which invest that locality with so deep an interest for him, no less than for her account for his presence there.

"How strange that we should thus meet Lady!" said Tempest, "after all the search that I have set on foot."

"Why should you have sought one who deceived her generous defender, one who fled ignominiously from the contest she had invoked, and whose flight must have thrown on her the imputation of guilt?" Asked the Lady Calliroë with fluttering heart for now—come to a sense of the vanity of that ambition which had inspired her when she quitted this spot to go forth into the world—it had become keenly susceptible of impressions which even then had left on it a trace indelible.

"No," said Tempest, "always incredulous of your guilt, I have recently seen your innocence proven. I have learned how—to avert disgrace and danger from a father's head—you have bowed your own to obloquy. A deed was done, just as the doom which stays the incendiary's hand—dark as the murder which avenges murder—or base as the guilt which slays but to despoil—according to the spirit of those participating in it.

"Whilst that deed was committing your cries awakened one who slept—you told him through the door that barred all passage outwards what was being done. He fled for succour—his hand had grasped the bell—he could have summoned aid, when his arm was staid not by a blow—but by a suggestion. A conspirator had reached him, too late to impede, yet not too late to tempt him.

" 'In whose favour was the old man's will made? Who would inherit his wealth, that boundless wealth?' His hand let fall the rope. That act was an assassination!"

The Lady Calliroë bowed her head with an affirmative expression of grief and shame, but answered nothing.

"Yet there is one thing inexplicable to me still," said Tempest, "why not have come to the resolution you adopted before the eleventh hour?"

"My father," replied the Lady Calliroë, "had simply a blind confidence, no knowledge of my plans, and I was ignorant till the last of that which I dare not characterise, yet on which I have acted. With that horrible instrument—on the threshold of action—his ministers prostrated my unblenching resolution and made me what I am, the outcast and the fugitive."

"Listen!" said Tempest, "we are on the eve of great events, and if there be no predestination,—if the wrong be not doomed to triumph,—if the narrowest egotism be not fated to prevail against the cause of human perfectibility—I will restore that name, which calumny has blackened, to all the spotless purity of its innocence, and the daughter's virtue shall be the oblivion of the sire's transgression. If so, believe me, we shall not have met in vain, either now or at a time which you may scarce remember—which I have not forgotten—when—restoring to me my belief in my own kind—you saved me from the contagious misanthropy of that charred and blackened heart to whose weird shrine my steps have now almost involuntarily led me."

"No," said the Lady Calliroë, "that interview I have never forgotten. Your solitary image has risen in all its simple grandeur, amidst the hollow greatness which led my thoughts astray before I had learned to know that the sole ambition which is not barren for woman is that which centres in another—when that other is great and good—I have none now but in your success. My own, I feel, would not have given me peace; but you, I trust, have found happiness in your glory."

"What happiness I have found," said Tempest, with a sigh, "has been disconnected with—adverse to—my ambition. If we had met oftener, more freely—if we had read each other's thoughts—but what matter, the past can never be recalled!"

CHAPTER XXV.

EUSTATIUS DOES WHAT HE LIKES WITH HIS OWN.

How, it will be asked, could Eustatius Cash have been so blind to his own interest, as to depopulate provinces which were his private property?

"How," it may be asked in reply, "can it be believed that slave-owners should ever have maltreated their slaves, or men their cattle, or despotic princes their subjects?" Because other passions in the full scope which irresponsible power affords, blind men to their grovelling interests, even as every vicious impulse blinds them to their true interest...virtue.

Besides—Eustatius has his peculiar views, his opinions, and his arguments. Why should he not be allowed to entertain and practise them on what is undeniably his own?

He is sitting with a map before him. Middleman Cautious stands at the same table. His speech is curt and laconic. His master has grown morose; and even when most eager for information, dislikes to hear his servants talk. To read is still more trouble than to listen.

"You have consulted the law officers of the crown?"

Middleman pointed to a bundle of opinions which he had deposited upon the table.

"Now, constitutionally," said Eustatius, (he was a great stickler for the constitution,) "constitutionally speaking—the rights of property are paramount to all other. This wise principle was, I think, first practically sanctioned by what is vulgarly called the Bastille Poor Law, nearly three quarters of a century ago?"

"Exactly," replied Middleman, "since sanctioned by repeated enactments, renewed with all imaginable solemnity during the administration of your late father."

"Ah!" said Eustatius, who winced a little, but affected no longer to avoid this theme. "He was not without foresight. From that principle, proceeded the representation not of individuals but of property. It grew to be proportioned to its amount. The deduction was logical. A given whole represented society, and every fractional sum a proportional fragment of its authority. A very comfortable arrangement now that the whole is my own. You know that as there is no property which is not mine—if I choose to claim it, there can be no votes but my own, I, therefore—the one constituent—the incarnation of property, elect all members, and if they attempt to act against my will, I break them like a reed; because, having no bona fide property, they are all elected under disqualification. They cannot, therefore, vote away my money. Now, as I being property am also law—if I do not choose to assess or tax myself, how are the poor to be supported?"

"The poor are the nation," answered Middleman Cautious.

"I know it," replied Eustatius. "But now mark me, if I exclude them from my lands and houses, they must take to the high roads, and from the high roads I can expel them as vagabonds, without any legitimate object, threatening my property with depredation?"

"Undoubtedly," replied Middleman Cautious. "This process you have carried out in several districts."

"Good," replied Eustatius, running his finger over the map of Europe. "Let us now suppose, for argument sake, these intruders on my domain—what matter whether tens of millions?—driven from province to province, till an island or continent is cleared—then—even when crowded into a narrow corner they are still trespassing. To get rid of them, I must embark them for another coast, at their cost, if they could pay, at my own if they cannot. Am I correct thus far?"

"Undeniably."

"But—" continued Eustatius, "supposing every continent, every island, every known land, to be in the same manner my property—supposing the whole earth mine, and that I choose to warn everybody off it, since they could go nowhere without trespass, and since trespassing where they remain—what if I drive them into the sea?"

"It would be murder," answered Middleman.

"Agreed," said Eustatius, "but how does the law assist me in such a case?"

"That," said Middleman Cautious, after a pause; "is a question for the twelve judges."

"Then," continued Eustatius, "I will show you how I can solve it. Though it may be murder to drive your pauper into the river or the sea, it is none to starve him; he was often starved before the rights of property were rigorously defined, when the sentimentalist was still abroad.

"I am not bound to waste my substance upon the multitude any more than upon the individual, therefore I may pen it up and cease to feed it, and so I might legally and constitutionally remain the last man if I chose."

"I cannot gainsay your theoretic right," said Middleman Cautious, "but economically considered the exercise of it would be suicidal to your own interests.

"The ejectment of the inhabitants from the depopulated districts will give you the measure of its mischievous results. The rents its population paid you, I am aware, were paid in monies doubly due. I am aware that the lands which no one can buy of you being at any rate unsaleable have the same value tenanted or untenanted, but still the people occupying it were incessantly creating fresh wealth!"

"Stay," replied Eustatius, "you have forgotten one thing in your economical estimate which I remember. If there were anything left for me to acquire, gold to accumulate, or land to purchase that conversion of the earth's produce into other forms through the intermedium of man's labour, which you designate the creation of property might serve as a means of procuring whatever wealth I was not yet possessed of. But there is not. Where is the land that does not or will not own me as its Lord? Where is the wealth that is not or will not inevitably be mine? The rich man values his securities because convertible into gold, the gold into corn or labour, but without ever intending to turn them into either.

"For me it is enough to know that the earth can feed and breed men, and that men can create wealth on its surface. That capability constitutes its value in my eyes. I have no motive for testing it, particularly to the benefit and advantage of mankind—who, I think, you will admit, owe me, in the aggregate, no good will.

"The districts I have depopulated no longer require armed force or superintendence; they are no longer dangerous; they no longer disquiet me. There may be risk in depopulating, but I am satisfied less peril than in allowing men to multiply—less, whilst one individual armed can coerce a hundred,—whilst armed men can be hired as drovers of their kind, and then decimated and redecimated in their turn by the potency of gold.

"Great change is naturally the work of time, which may fail us completely to accomplish it; but this, mark me, is the ideal of my policy. That the world is my own, and man a trespasser on its surface!"

CHAPTER XXVI.

MYRRAH AND TEMPEST.

The life of day is hushed, the denizens of night not yet awakened. It is the hour when the weary sun sinks down, when the bee is in its hive, the bird upon its bough; when the moon has not yet risen, when the stars are not yet twinkling—the hour which poets choose for meditation—the hour when lovers give language to their love.

No Paphian bower, of which the spontaneous flowers sprang up beneath Cytherea's tread, ever afforded scene more meet for love's impassioned utterance or silent ecstasy, than the sweet spot, by that fountain's side, whose silvery spray is still warm with the last roseate hues that linger in the twilight—where the moss is so soft and green—where rose, jessamine, and woodbine wreathe into one, and blend their odours—where the flowers seem to distil double honey—to emit a two-fold fragrance—where innumerable birds attune their song by day—where the glowworm sparkles in the violets, and the nightingale pours out its wild melody through the live-long night.

Here Tempest slumbers. Here Myrrah watches him, smoothing those locks which the voluptuous breath of evening disarrays and scatters on his cheek.

Victim of her own wiles—ensnared in her own spell—she loves, unfortunate!

That blissful contemplation in which she indulges now is chequered by the disquieting consciousness of what she is, and what he deems her.

Whilst her eyes are humid with emotion—which seems happiness—look at the motion of that hand, tremulous with the apprehension which haunts her dreams, which disturbs her mid-day reverie!

He will awaken soon, to greet her passionate glances with looks of tenderness, to breathe endearing words into her ear, to press her lips with his warm kisses; but yet she knows that death and poison lurk amongst the flowers—the death of her fond hopes—the poison of a word—distracting thought!—that poison would be the name of Myrrah breathed into his ear!

She starts. Do you see that gigantic figure in the dim twilight beckoning her imperiously away? With a shudder—a blush of shame—a look of loathing—letting gently down upon a cushion Tempest's head, she rises to obey that hated summons.

"Softly!" said Invective Rabid, "he must not be disturbed till we have conversed together."

"Speak then," replied Myrrah, "he may awaken every instant, and he might suspect—"

"Suspect!" said Invective raising his voice purposely to a louder pitch. "How should he suspect, who, for three months long has believed in the innocent simplicity of Myrrah?"

"Hush! in pity's name hush!" said Myrrah with such an agonising look—in such a tone of imploration that Invective ceased his cruel pleasantry.

"Fear not. Though undertaking to lead this youth astray by your syren wiles, through devotion to my fortunes, and then capriciously transferring your affection to his person—believe me—in complacent consciousness of my superior inaccessibility to your influence, I have found compensation for his conquest. If you have neglected this time to play the Delilah—you are—you must continue—the true Armida of our Rinaldo. He has forgotten name, fame, and party in your arms. One effort more and I am satisfied."

"What?" gasped Myrrah. "What treachery do you seek to urge upon me now? I laid you bare the history of my life, the secrets of my soul—I showed you how, sated with admiration, the wish to love which buds in girlhood's spring, only marked my woman's summer.

"I did not deceive you; you were the object of its vague desire,—the hero of the imagination you had dazzled, masked in another mind—till my enthusiasm—turned from its false worship—found its god, and my heart, for the first time, its mate!

"I have thrown myself on your generosity. I have implored your mercy. You know that I love him better than my life, that I would yield it up, that I would scatter my happiness to the winds, that I would fling my soul into the abyss, that I would even part sooner than that injury should come to him through me—but you know that I cannot bear the thought of his lost love, and thus you have urged me to betray him—thus you have infused treachery into each caress—remorse into every hour of love, thus you have made each blandishment a snare, these arms the toils in which that fame, which to him is life, was ignominiously perishing! Tempt me no more—seek not in me an accomplice further!"

"All that you say, Myrrah, you have done. The masses, deserted by their idol, have fallen back on their old chief. Lulled into false security, persuaded into disgust, Tempest waits in retirement, till the times are rife for action. He slumbers on the battle's eve—the multitude has risen against the one, and I, not he, must lead it to the conquest. Still—at the eleventh hour—when face to face with the peril, the cravens, who have gloried in his absence, clamour for his countenance—they may strive to summon him—vague rumours may rouse his suspicion, if he stirs abroad. It is your part, Myrrah, now to watch over, to detain him—to shield your minion from the danger—to prolong his slumbers, and not to let him waken till the world is lost or redeemed without his aid!"

"What!" said Myrrah, "that he may rise to curse me! No, lost as I am, never! never!"

"To curse," repeated Invective, ironically, "men reserve curses to express their hate, not as the language of contempt. Shall I arouse him now and brand the courtesan?"

"Oh! no! no!" said Myrrah, in a voice inarticulate, with anguish, as she grasped Invective's arm convulsively.

* * * *

The moon has risen, and by its light Tempest looks into Myrrah's eyes where the tears have gathered.

"Why should you, dearest, dwell on such a painful theme? What pity can restore its whiteness to the tainted snow—its delicacy to the trampled lily? How would you answer your own question?"

"I perhaps," said Myrrah, "I should recall the words of some one who has said or sung,

"The unblemished dew, bright, round, and clear,
Whose rays the sight allure,
When glittering like an angel's tear,
It shines from leaf or bough,
Is Woman innocent and pure.
That dew-drop mingled with the dust,
And trampled in the slough,
Blent with defilement in disgust,—
Is woman after the sad fall,
No human art can more recall.

Yet from that reeking mire,
The sun's warm beams give birth,
To exhalations which aspire,
And pristine purity restore,
To the foul slime of earth,
Making—like love grown out of lust,—
The dampness of that humid dust,
The heavenly dew it was before.

"But look," said Tempest, "what is that? Do you see those fires on the horizon? Do you hear those sounds like the booming of distant guns!"

"What should they be?" answered Myrrah, whose pallor was not discernible in the moonlight, "what but the bonfires and the idle rejoicings of some holiday?"

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE LAST SCENE.

If the maladies of free states are chronic, the convulsions of despotism are usually sudden. The masses have arisen from their long slumber. Tens of thousands are in arms. The government, though not able to prevent the insurrection, is strong enough to quell it. The insurgents are put down in detail, excepting the main body, who had taken possession of the capital, from which defeat has expelled them. They were desperate men, and they have fought hard—so hard, that they have gained breathing time, as they pursue, almost without a hope, their retreat through the devastated country.

With a kind of order in their disarray, they troop through deserted villages and ruined towns, their number thinned on the one hand by the chances of the road, and on the other, recruited from the misery of the localities they traverse.

They are a gaunt multitude, still imposing from their numbers, but whose masses, long privation has enfeebled—whom hunger decimates now, whom small hope cheers in their onward progress—and upon whose rear the foe hangs threatening.

The skies are dark and lowering. Heavy clouds mark the horizon, and when a halt is made the bray of the enemy's trumpet sounds in the distance, and the gleam of arms flashes further than the van of the pursuing host can be discerned.

In the despot's forces there may not be one willing heart, but there are eager heads and hands. The soldiers of the state are well fed and paid, and consequently faithful—fling man his bone, and when is he not ready to play the sleuth-hound or the sheep-dog? Their arms and equipments are complete, the soldiers fresh, the leaders confident.

On the popular side the motley assembly of their chiefs exhibit profound dejection. The representatives of extinct parties figure in that melancholy procession. The once exclusive oligarch—the ruined senator—the formal moderate, mingle despondently with the disheartened demagogue. There is only Invective Rabid, who, with brow erect, and threatening eye, and boastful speech, still cheers his followers, and sometimes instills into their breasts an evanescent hope, by his undaunted bearing.

He has come to a halt upon an eminence with his host. He is no soldier, but he has a soldier's eye, and he questions closely two advisers of military experience by his side.

The enemy's van is in sight. Ten thousand glittering horsemen whom their brilliant leader deploys at the base of the hill to strike terror into that crowd whom he dares not attack unsupported. What is to be done? the multitude require repose; but if it rests here to-night, how on the morrow cross the wide plain behind it to the undulating ground beyond, in the face of that daring cavalry? There is but one expedient, which Invective adopts, sure to be disastrous with such motley forces, that of encamping and silently resuming his march at midnight. But if they can reach the passes, a stand may yet be made, and they may possibly recruit their strength from the districts beyond.

Of all the evils that follow in the train of a dispirited host there is but one that Invective does not dread—desertion; because it is known that the pursuing army makes no prisoners.

"Why, in fact," says Eustatius, "should food, denied the pauper, be wasted on the criminal or the rebel?"

The morning dawns. The night and the enemy have done their work conjointly. Slain, scattered, broken, wildly flying, the popular masses strew that boundless plain.

Pharoah's army, when the Red Sea's waves engulfed it, the fugitive myriads of the Persian King, Napoleon's army retreating across the Beresina, can alone convey some faint image of the uproar and devastation of that scene.

One little band seems alone to have crossed the fatal level. Emerging—like the survivors of a shipwrecked crew from the overwhelming flood—they pause upon the hill-side, and overlook, with stupefaction and dismay, the destruction from which they have been thus far rescued, but whose rising tide threatens to suck them back into the remorseless deep.

Invective Rabid still heads this fragment of a people's strength. He is now without hope or fear, as he glances over the scene before him with a sullen and savage curiosity.

The pale, bespattered, and blood-stained companions who dejectedly surround him—though the last in arms—are not even the bravest of the embattled thousands who yesterday obeyed his bidding. The bravest lie cold and mangled upon yonder plain; and therefore, in the group gathered about him, the men of words—orators, oligarchical and democratic—predominate over men of action. They are there, not because they have hewn their way through the perils of that night but because they have followed with confidence, him who did so.

Their glances wander alternately from the face of their leader—who disregards them with a brutal contempt—to the field before them—where, by slow degrees, the dark masses of the pursuing army advance with fearful regularity to hem in their position.

As the bristling columns move in their certain progression, like the finger on a dial—never retarded or receding—isolated horsemen scour the plain, and careering squadrons advance and then retire. Now, in a glittering mass, they sweep dangerously close to the base of that hill of refuge, whose rugged flank is inaccessible to horsemen, and then come to a sudden halt.

Their brilliant leader addresses them; an audible murmur rises from their line—a wavering of its ranks indicates some hesitation—and then, its chief—distinguishable by his white steed and waving plume—accompanied by a few followers, spurs straight upon the rebel entrenchments.

He is pursued—his companions are cut down—and thanks only to his charger's speed—breathless and disarrayed—alone—a fugitive he gains the popular line.

It is Julian. His tale is soon told. Unemployed, in penury, he was sought out in this sudden necessity of the state, to be placed high in the command of its armies.

They all know, he says, how he has borne himself in the field. Little heed had he of the right in that or any other strife, but he had no heart for unresisted slaughter—he has let escape many of his prisoners—amongst whom, some of consequence. This dereliction of duty, he has just learned, has reached the despot's ear—it would have been sternly visited on his head; and, therefore, he has chosen rather to come where he may die with a sword in his hand, than trust to the mercies of his implacable master. The faint hope which this accession to the popular ranks had inspired, gives place to profound discouragement. It is not the only accession. Having been a few hours stationary, troops of children, women, and fugitives, come pouring in, snatching, like drowning wretches, at the last plank. Grown selfish and cruel in their extremity, the companions of Invective propose that no more shall be admitted within their line—that group is about to be turned mercilessly away when the sentinels fall back, and a murmur of surprise passes from lip to lip—Tempest—their long lost leader—is amongst them!

Yesterday that announcement would still have electrified them with hope—yesterday it might still have moved Invective's jealousy. Now there is no more room for hope or jealousy. The crowd make way apathetically, and Invective stepping forward grasps his hand—a tear glistens on his rough eyelid and he says with emotion,

"You are come to die amongst us! but you cannot forgive us?"

"No!" said Tempest, "I have come to lead you to the victory you would have stolen without me. Listen. I have learned as we came along that there is consternation in the enemy's camp. The Tyrant himself is missing. In two hours more that host will disband like a mass without coherence."

"In two hours more," said Invective, "we shall lie stark and cold. Do you see that bristling wall closing in upon us? those squadrons that will trample us—those batteries preparing to mow us down beneath their iron shower. They will listen to no parley; they shoot down our flag of truce; as well reason with the wild waves!"

"Then," replied Tempest, "be we the rock on which those breakers shiver. Have you faith in me? Will you obey me?"

"Now and ever more," said Invective Rabid. "Through life—till death—come when it may!"

And the accent of his enthusiastic conviction touched a corresponding fibre in every bosom.

* * * *

Invective Rabid, detached in advance with a small band, occupies a position beyond the protection of the broken ground. Tempest is stationed on the hill crest. For the first time he has resolved to concentrate those powers derived from knowledge of nature's secrets to a purpose destructive—even though destructive to preserve. The mysterious appliances are prepared, the crowd looks on with the same wonder as the Syracusans on the contrivances of Archimedes to defend their threatened walls. There are men of science there, who could at other times have proved to you the futility of his pretensions, only that just now—with a merciless foe in front—they cling to any hope like a dying man to the promises of an empiric.

The masses of the enemy who had halted within cannon shot, are now in decisive motion.

A movement to the right isolates Invective Rabid. Cut off—surrounded—his position is like an island in a hostile sea.

The time is come to discharge the destroying fluids over whose subtle nature Tempest holds mastery. The words of warning are spoken—the signal is given. The electrical flame flashes from the operator's hand—it bounds—it crackles—it plays amongst the lurid clouds, and then dies away innocuously on the horizon. The schemer's art has failed!

Invective and his band—lost, surrounded, overwhelmed—disappear the next moment in the wild rush which accompanies the shout by which the foe responds to Tempest's harmless demonstration.

At this sight no longer doubt but despair seizes his followers. With a curse—on his head—on their own credulity—they fly, and with a roar of triumph, prolonged and deafening, the mighty masses of the victorious host sweep onward to engulf the last relic of resistance.

Alone, undaunted, Tempest remains to make a final effort. The destroying fluid hurtles and hisses from his hand; flash succeeds flash: at length the true direction is gained; it speeds away in full projectile energy! The effect is magical. A wild dismay seizes upon that host. It dissolves like a snow flake in the furnace. Its marshalled ranks scatter and divide—the affrighted steeds—bursting all bonds trample down the yelling infantry, or drag the limbered guns at a fatal gallop, crushing and mangling as they speed. The prostrate rider groans beneath the steed's hoof—the leaders are stretched upon the field, or borne away in their chargers' mad career. The soldiers—tearing off their equipments and their clothes,—overturn each other as they attempt to fly.

In a few seconds that admirably organised force has ceased to be. That army, is a panic-stricken mob.

Everything metallic in its equipment or arms is molten. The iron of the firelock has poured in hot streams from the charred stock—the steel of the blade on to the hand that grasped it—the cuirass on the rider's body—the helm on his scorched brain—the bit in the jaws of the maddened steed—have all eaten in like living fire!

"Now!" said Tempest, "follow me, but no bloodshed. Remember that we are armed against unarmed men."

One of the first obstacles which Tempest encounters, as he leads the way through the mangled corpses of his detachment, and the confusion of shattered defences and cannon overturned—is a body still breathing, though irrecognisable, but for its gigantic proportions, amidst the defilement of mud and gore.

He attempts to step aside, but the eyes of the dying Invective open, and raising his brawny hand to his Herculean chest; he utters through the crimson foam frothing on his lips:

"Turn not aside! Stop not here—pass on to victory!—be this the expiation—"

* * * * *

Thus far the field is won. The affrighted soldiery embrace the popular cause by thousands; the news arrives that Eustatius himself has been made prisoner. Returned from pursuit, the victors at mid-day are gathered round their leader. Children, fugitives, and warriors are there—all, who have not perished in the untoward mischance which marked so inauspiciously the opening of that day—yet the eyes of Tempest wander wistfully in search of something absent.

At length a litter—in which a female figure reclines, and which another accompanies,—is borne along, and set down almost in the middle of the crowd.

The Lady Calliroë,—to whom all honour!—walks beside that bier. It is she whom Julian clandestinely liberated. It is she, by whose persuasion Tempest came to the people's succour; it is she to whose innocence—falsely condemned—the first act of the people will be a glaring tribute!

But who is that she tends so kindly! One who, in the wanderings of delirium, tears aside the veil which covers her and extends her arms at the sound of Tempest's voice—

"What Myrrah!" exclaim the bystanders with one accord.

"Myrrah!" repeated the Lady Calliroë, with a start of horror as if told of some unclean thing in contact with her person.

An expression of disgust and pain breaks from the crowd.

"Stay," said Lord Besom, who had just been explaining to a knot of listeners the rationale of the power employed by Tempest, "stay,—just now—a leader—the saviour of a people,—it is bad taste to commit yourself in public with such a personage as Myrrah."

"Myrrah!" said Tempest stupefied. "The actress,—the notorious?—"

"The notorious courtesan," added Lord Besom, "surely you have found out who she is by this time!"

"Speak!" said Tempest, appealing to Myrrah, as if so monstrous an assertion were incredible from any other lips.

Myrrah could only conceal her face. But when—with a glance of scorn—Tempest strode away, overcoming her shame, she raised herself upon the brancard and uttered so piteous a cry that the Lady Calliroë hastened to her aid, and then Tempest's heart—crushed and sickened as it was—was touched with compassion.

"Death is in her face!" said the Lady Calliroë, beckoning them to bear her out of the crowd, and as Tempest turned his eyes upon Myrrah, the traces of so fatal an alteration were visible on her features, that he followed into the dwelling in which the bier was deposited.

"Oh, Tempest!" said Myrrah, "unworthy as I may be, turn not thus away from me—at least till you know all! I am indeed Myrrah—the notorious Myrrah. I have deceived you—I have sinned against your fame; but if the most fearful sacrifice ever made by woman be any atonement, that atonement I have made. I knew that to let you learn my name was to change love into obloquy, passion into loathing. Yet she will tell you how deliberately I have done so—and if she will not speak, death will soon speak for me.

"It was such bliss to live and to be loved, yet I resolved to die rather than peril your glory—to expire with a blessing from your lips, rather than live and love betraying you—but this humiliation I had hoped would have been spared me—only that it seems as if life would linger where you are—for I am poisoned, Tempest and ready to die happy in the rapturous memory of my love—so that you do not loathe me now—so that you dismiss my soul with a word of kindness."

* * * * * * *

"My dear fellow," whispered Lord Besom, "you really are more impressionable than discerning—you forget that that woman is the first actress we have—that she is, perhaps, performing now."

"No," said Tempest, gloomily, "she is dead!"

Lord Besom was silenced.

* * * *

Eustatius is, indeed, a captive. He fled from his camp, but his flight was in nowise occasioned by the events which have been recorded. On the eve of that eventful day, whilst his arms were triumphant, he had mysteriously vanished from his tent. He is, at length, discovered by those who scour the field, sitting with his feet in the water by the pool-side. When spoken to, he only answers with the inane smile of idiotcy. His intellect is gone for ever.

Is it the aberration which drove Nebuchadnezzar to eat grass with the beasts of the field; the idiotcy that stamped the House of Hapsburg, the insanity of the Romanoffs—that curse which is so often to despotism, what despotism is to the human race?

No—Tempest discerns amidst the symptoms of approaching dissolution in that captive, whom he regards rather as a patient than an enemy, the signs of a new and unexpected calamity to mankind.

The institutions hostile to man's progress, are now levelled with the dust—no force or fraud will interfere now with ameliorations founded on the accumulating experience of the past—the plague once threatening his physical existence, has ceased to be; but though famine and pestilence have been subdued, and though it seemed as if nothing could ever more cloud the destiny of the human kind with barbarism and woe—yet lo! even in that hour of self-gratulation, the galvanist's creation—the insect—baffled but not destroyed, re-appears in a form more terrible. Driven from the organic forms of plants and animals, its haunt is now in the human brain. Into that brain which philosophy has deemed secretive of thought—the plague which is thought's progeny penetrates. Eustatius is its first victim. Whether the last, or whether one link in an extended chain embracing all humanity, is the momentous problem which, in the midst of triumph, fills Tempest's mind with dread and anguish, suggesting the humiliating apprehension, that, though the power of thought, accumulated by intercommunication, must inevitably rise in an ascending scale, further than thought can limit,—that it is still liable, from association with matter, to those maladies which have prostrated, enfeebled, or swept off from the earth whole species of its organic creations!

* * * * *

In that disheartening doubt—proceeding to reform, re-model, and re-construct—we leave him between hope and fear, with tender memories of the dead, and gentle thoughts—not unreciprocated—towards one living.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

CONCLUSION.

Of the old galvanist, John Cash, Invective Rabid, and Myrrah, we have seen the fate. Eustatius did not long linger after them.

Of others who have figured in this tale, little remains to be recorded.

Sir Jasper and Middleman Cautious, expelled from public life, have retired into privacy, and meet nightly to renew upon the chess-board the ingenuity of their political combinations.

To the Lady Floranthe we had almost forgotten to relate that Eustatius, subsequently to his wife's condemnation and after his coolness with the Lady Sabina, had repaired with a matrimonial proposition, accepted before he specified that it was—not for the mother's—but for the daughter's hand!

Nevertheless to secure such an alliance in the family was a success—a success not destined to be realised. The neglected daughter had ruined her mother's plan by a clandestine marriage with Tempest's companion of the Tuilleries—the Count of Paris. The Lady Floranthe lived on for sometime in her widowhood, but at length was induced to bestow her hand upon James Cash, the last scion of his house and consequent inheritor of his aunt's still vast fortune.

Grubout Florid continued his biographical pursuits until his death. The last work on which he was engaged was a republication, with commentaries and notes, of the "Age of Pitt and Fox," but his rival Niebuhr St. Thomas almost immediately proved that the work in question was a fiction in the prevalent taste of that day, after the fashion of the "Sixty Years Hence," and that both Pitt and Fox were clearly allegories—relating rather to fable than to history.

"The deep pitt getting the better of the fox—the pitt into which the fox tumbled—a revival of the snake and the file.—Pshaw! what could be more obvious?"

Mrs. Cash, who had been confined by Eustatius, like Josephine at Malmaison, and who lived in the belief that her husband had caught his death from damp feet, and Eustatius his fatal malady from neglecting the use of a comforter, long wore her mourning and her widow's weeds, but not for ever.

Her mansion, its princely grounds, its "turpentine walks, and revenues of trees," as she expressed it, felt lonely to her, and she took unto herself another Lord.

John Cash, her lamented first, she said emphatically was "a man," she did not hope to meet his like again, and therefore as a "pease alley" (pis-aller) determined to select for mate at least a gentleman.

Her second is not unknown to the reader—less proud of his lady than his lady of him, he has grown bashful, or we might bid him stand forward and shake hands with the once gay Julian whom her fortune has tempted.

THE END.