The Catholic World, Vol. 17, April, 1873 to September, 1873 / A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science

by Various

CHAPTER I.

CRICHTON, AND THE CRICHTONIANS.

The delicate exuberance of a New England spring was making amends for the rigor of a New England winter, and for its own tardy coming. Up through the faded sward pushed multitudinously all the little budding progeny of nature; out through rough bark burst the tender foliage; and all the green was golden-green. Light winds blew hither and thither; light clouds chased each other over the sky, now and then massing their forces to send a shower down, the drops so entangled with sunshine as to look like a rain of diamonds. Birds soared joyously, singing as they flew; and the channels of the brooks could scarcely contain their frolicsome streams. Sometimes a scattered sisterhood of snowflakes came down to see their ancestresses, and, finding them changed into snowdrops, immediately melted into an ecstasy, and so exhaled.

This vernal freshness made the beautiful city of Crichton fairer yet, with curtains waving from open windows, vines budding over the walls, and all the many trees growing alive. It set a fringe of grasses nodding over the edges of three yellow paths ravelled out from a new road that, when it had travelled about a mile westward from the city, gave up being a road for the present. One of these paths started off southward, and sank into a swamp. In summer, this swamp was as purple as a ripe plum with flower-de-luce, and those who loved nature well enough to search for her treasures could find there also an occasional cardinalflower, a pink arethusa, or a pitcherblossom full to the brim with the last shower, or the last dew-fall. The second path ran northward to the bank of the Cocheco River, and broke off on the top of a cliff. If you should have nerve enough to scramble down the face of this cliff, you would find there the most romantic little cave imaginable, moss-lined, and furnished with moss cushions to its rock divans. A wild cherry-tree had in some way managed to find footing just below the cave, and at this season it would push up a spray of bloom, in emulation of the watery spray beneath. Fine green vines threaded all the moss; and, if one of them were lifted, it would show a line of honey-sweet bell-flowers strung under its round leaves.

The third path kept on westward to a dusky tract of pine-woods about two miles from the town. No newly-sprouting verdure was visible amid this sombre foliage; but there was a glistening through it all like the smile on a dark face, and the neighboring air was embalmed with its fine resinous perfume.

Out from this wood came sounds of laughter and many voices, some shrill and childish, others deeper voices of men, or softer voices of women. Occasionally might be heard a fitful song that broke off and began again, only to break and begin once more, as though the singer’s hands were busy. Yet so dense was the border of the wood with thick, low-growing branches that, had you gone even so near as to step on their shadows, and slip on the smooth hollows full of cones and needles they had let fall, not a person would you have seen.

A girlish voice burst out singing:

“‘The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled.
The lark’s on the wing,
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in his heaven—
All’s right with the world!’

Only day is not at the morn,” the voice added correctingly; “for it is near sunset. But,” singing again,

“‘The year’s at the spring;
The lark’s on the wing;
God’s in his heaven—
And all’s right with the world!’

—which may be called making a posy out of a poem.”

A young man’s voice spoke: “All will soon be wrong in a part of the world, Pippa, if I do not call the sheep to fold.” And immediately a loud bugle-call sounded through the forest, and died away in receding echoes.

Presently a Maying-party came trooping forth into sight.

First, stooping low under the boughs, a score of boys and girls appeared, their cheeks bright with exercise and pure air, their silken hair dishevelled. After them followed, more sedately, a group of youths and maidens, “Pippa,” otherwise Lily Carthusen, and the bugler, among them. All these young people were decked with wreaths of ground pine around their hats, waists, and arms, and they carried hands full of Mayflowers.

Lastly, two gentlemen, one at either hand, held back the branches, and Miss Honora Pembroke stepped from under the dark-green arch.

If you are a literal sort of person, and make a point of calling things by their everyday names, you would have described her as a noble-looking young woman, dressed in a graceful brown gown, belted at the waist, after a Grecian fashion, and some sort of cloudy blue drapery that was slipping from her head to her shoulders. You would have said that her hair was a yellowish brown that looked bright in the sun, her eyes about the same color, her features very good, but not so classical in shape as her robe. You might have added that there was an expression that, really—well, you did not know just how to name it, but you should judge that the young woman was romantic, though not without sense. If you should have guessed her age to be twenty-eight, you would have been right.

If, on the other hand, you are poetically Christian, ever crowning with the golden thorns of sacrifice whatever is most beautiful on earth, you would have liked to take the Mayflower wreath from this womanly maiden’s hand, place the palm-branch in its stead, and so send her to heaven by the way of the lions. Her face need hardly have changed to go that road, so lofty and delicate was the joy that shone under her quiet exterior, so full of light the eyes that, looking straight before her into space, seemed to behold all the glory of the skies.

The girl who came next was very different, not at all likely to suggest poetical fancies, though when you looked closely you could see much fineness of outline in the features and form. But she was spoilt in the coloring—a sallow skin, “sandy” hair, and light eyes giving a dingy look to her face. She was spoilt still more by the expression, which was superficial, and by being overdressed for her size and the occasion, and a little ragged from the bushes. This is Miss, or, as she likes to be called, Mademoiselle, Annette Ferrier. If at some moment, unawares, you should take the liberty to call her Niñon, with an emphatic nasal, she would forgive you beamingly, and consider you a very charming person. Mademoiselle, who, like three generations of her ancestors, was born in America, and who had spent but three months of her life in France, had no greater ambition than to be taken for a French lady. But do not set her down as a simpleton. Her follies are not malicious, and may wear off. Have you never seen the young birds, when they are learning to fly, how clumsily they tumble about? yet afterward they cleave the air like arrows with their strong pointed wings. And have you not seen some bud, pushing out at first in a dull, rude sheath that mars the beauty of the plant, open at last to disclose petals of such rare beauty that the sole glory of the plant was in upbearing it? Some souls have to work off a good deal of clinging foolishness before they come to themselves. Therefore, let us not classify Miss Ferrier just yet.

She had scarcely appeared, when one branch was released with a discourteous haste that sent it against her dress, and a gentleman quickly followed her, and, with a somewhat impatient air, took his place at her side. Mr. Lawrence Gerald had that style of beauty which suggests the pedestal—an opaque whiteness of tint as pure as the petal of a camellia, clustering locks of dark hair, and an exquisite perfection of form and feature. He and Miss Ferrier were engaged to be married, which was some excuse for the profuse smiles and blushes she expended on him, and which he received with the utmost composure.

The second branch swung softly back from the hand that carefully released it, and Mr. Max Schöninger came into sight, brushing the brown pine-scales from his gloves. He was the last in order, but not least in consequence, of the party, as more than one backward glance that watched for his appearance testified. This was a tall, fair-haired German, with powerful shoulders, and strong arms that sloped to the finest of sensitive hands. He had a grave countenance, which sometimes lit up beautifully with animated expression, and sometimes also veiled itself in a singular manner. Let anything be said that excited his instinct of reserve or self-defence, and he could at once banish all expression from his face. The broad lids would droop over those changeful eyes of his, and one saw only a blank where the moment before had shone a cordial and vivid soul.

When we say that Mr. Schöninger was a Jew who had all his life been associated more with Christians than with his own people, this guarded manner will not seem unnatural. He glanced over the company, and was hesitatingly about to join Miss Pembroke, when one of the children left her playmates, and ran to take his hand. Mr. Schöninger was never on his guard with children, and those he petted were devotedly fond of him. He smiled in the upturned face of this little girl, held the small hand closely, and led her on.

The order of march changed as the party advanced. Those who had been last to leave the wood were made to take precedence; the youths and maidens dropped behind them, and, as both walked slowly forward, the younger ones played about them, now here, now there. It was like an air with variations.

The elders of the company were very quiet, Miss Carthusen a little annoyed. She need not have wasted her eloquence in persuading Mr. Schöninger to come with them, if he was going to devote himself to that baby. Miss Carthusen was clever, and rather pretty, and she liked to talk. What was the use of having ideas and fancies, if one was not to express them? Why should one go into company, if one was to remain silent? She considered Mr. Schöninger too superb by half.

The sun was setting, and it flooded all the scene with a light so rich as to seem tangible. Whatever it fell upon was not merely illuminated, it was gilded. The sky was hazy with that radiance, the many windows on the twin hills of Crichton blazed like beacons, and the short green turf glistened with a yellow lustre. Those level rays threw the long shadows of the flower-bearers before them as they walked, dazzled the faces turned sidewise to speak, turned the green wreaths on their heads into golden wreaths, and sparkled in their hair. When Miss Pembroke put her hand up to shade her eyes in looking backward, the ungloved fingers shone as if transparent. She had been drinking in the beauty of the evening till it was all ready to burst from her lips, and there seemed to be no one who perceived that beauty but herself. She would have liked to be alone, with no human witness, and to give vent to the delight that was tingling in her veins. A strong impulse was working in her to lift a fold of her dress at either side, slide out that pretty foot of hers now hidden under the hem, and go floating round in a dance, advancing as she turned, like a planet in its path. It would have been a relief could she have sung at the very top of her voice. She had looked backward involuntarily at Mr. Schöninger, expecting some sympathy from him; but, seeing him engrossed in his little charge, had dropped her hand, and walked on, feeling rather disappointed. “I supposed he believed in the creation, at least,” she thought.

Miss Pembroke was usually a very dignified and quiet young woman, who said what she meant, who never effervesced on small occasions, and sometimes found herself unmoved on occasions which many considered great ones. But when, now and then, the real afflatus came, it was hard to have her lips sealed and her limbs shackled.

As she dropped her hand, faintly and fairylike in the distance she heard all the bells of Crichton ringing for sunset.

Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, she sang softly, clasping her hands, still walking forward; and so went on with the rest of the hymn, not minding where the others of the party were, or if there were any others, till she felt a little pull at her dress, and became aware that Mr. Schöninger’s young friend had urged him forward to hear the singing, and was holding up her hand to the singer. But the Jew’s visor was down.

Miss Pembroke took the child’s hand, which thus formed a link between the two, and continued her singing: Benedictus qui venit in nomini Domini. She felt almost as if the man, thus linked to her by that transparent, innocent nature of the little girl between them, were spiritually joining her in the Hosanna. How deep or bitter his prejudices might be she knew not. Their acquaintance had been short, and they had never spoken of their theological differences. That his unbelief could be profound, yet gentle and tolerant toward her belief, had never occurred to her mind. She would have been scarcely more shocked than astonished could she have known the thought that almost escaped his lips. “She is too noble to be a worshipper of strange gods,” he thought. “When will this miserable delusion be swept away!”

A slim, light hand stole into Miss Pembroke’s arm on the other side, and Miss Carthusen’s cheek pressed close to her shoulder. Miss Carthusen was a foundling, and had been adopted by a wealthy and childless couple. Nothing whatever was known of her parentage.

“Lady Honora,” she whispered, “this scene reminds me of something. I am like Mignon, with my recollections gathering fast into a picture; only my past is further away than hers was. I almost know who I am, and where I came from. It flashes back now. We were dancing on the green, a ring of us. It was not in this land. The air was warm, the sward like rose-leaves; there were palms and temples not far away. I had this hand stretched forward to one who held it, and the other backward to one who held it, and so we danced, and there were wreaths on our heads, vine-leaves tangled in our hair. Suddenly something swept over and through us, like a cold wind, or a sharp cry, or both, and we all became fixed in a breath, the smile, the wreath, the tiptoe foot, and we hardened and grew less, and the air inside the ring died with our breaths in it, and the joy froze out of us, and the recollection of all we were faded. We were like flames that have gone out. There was nothing left but an antique vase with Bacchantes dancing round it in a petrified circle. Have you ever seen such a vase, with one figure missing?”

“Silly child!” said Honora, smiling, but shrinking a little. This girl was too clinging, her imagination too pagan. “It is said that, at the birth of Christ, that wail was heard through all the hosts of pagan demons. ‘Pan is dead!’ they cried, and fled like dry leaves before a November wind. Pan is dead, Lily Carthusen; and if you would kindle his altars again, you must go down into the depths of perdition for the spark.”

She spoke with seriousness, even with energy, and a light blush fluttered into her cheeks, and faded out again.

Miss Carthusen, still clinging to the arm she had clasped, leaned forward to cast a laughing glance into the face beyond. “To Mr. Schöninger,” she said, “we are both talking mythology.”

Miss Pembroke freed her arm decidedly, and stepped backward, so as to bring herself between Miss Ferrier and Lawrence Gerald. She took an arm of each, and held them a moment as if she were afraid. “Annette, Lily Carthusen must not help us to trim the altar,” she said. “It is not fitting. We will do it ourselves, with Mother Chevreuse.”

“But Lily has such taste,” was the reluctant answer. “And she may be displeased if we do not ask her.”

“Our Lady thinks more of devotion than of taste, Annette,” Miss Pembroke said earnestly. “It seems to me that every flower ought to be placed there by the hand of faith and love.”

The other yielded. People always did yield when Miss Pembroke urged. And Miss Carthusen, fortunately, saved them the embarrassment of declining her assistance by walking on, engrossed in a gay conversation with the German. When she recollected, they were already far apart. She and her companion were close to the town, and the others had stopped where the three paths met.

The children gathered about Miss Ferrier, and began piling their Mayflowers and green wreaths into her arms; for the flowers were all to decorate the altar of Mary in the beautiful church of S. John the Evangelist. These children were not half of them Catholic; but that made no difference in Crichton, where the people prided themselves on being liberal. Moreover, Miss Ferrier was a person of influence, and could reward those who obliged her.

Then they scattered, dropping into different roads, one by one, and two by two, till only three, heavily laden with their fragrant spoil, were left walking slowly up South Avenue, into which the unfinished road expanded when it reached the city. They were to take tea at Mrs. Ferrier’s, and afterward go to the church; for this was the last day of a warm and forward April, and on the next morning the exercises of the Month of Mary were to begin. At the most commanding spot on the crown of the hill stood Mrs. Ferrier’s house; and one has but to glance at it to understand at once why mademoiselle is a person of influence.

Seventeen years before, those who knew them would have imagined almost any change of fortune sooner than that the Ferriers should become people of wealth. There was Mr. Ferrier, a stout, dull, uneducated, hard-working man, who had not talent nor ambition enough to learn any trade, but passed his life in drudging for any one who would give him a day’s work. A man of obtuse intelligence, and utterly uncultivated tastes, but for the spark of faith left in that poor soul of his, he would have been a clod. But there the spark was, like a lamp in a tomb, showing, with its faint but steady light, the wreck of the beautiful, and the noble, and the sublime that was man as God made him; showing the dust of lost powers and possibilities, and the dust of much accumulated dishonor; showing the crumbling skeleton of a purpose that had started perfect; and showing also, carven deep, but dimly seen, the word of hope, Resurgam!

Those human problems meet us often, staggering under the primal curse, ground down to pitiless labor from the cradle to the grave, losing in their sordid lives, little by little, first, the strength and courage to look abroad, then the wish, and, at last, the power, the soul in them shining with only an occasional flicker through the débris of their degraded natures. But if faith be there buried with the soul in that earthy darkness, the word of hope is still for them Resurgam!

There was Mrs. Ferrier, a very different sort of person, healthy, thrifty, cheerful, with a narrow vein of stubborn good sense that was excellent as far as it went, and with a kind heart and a warm temper. The chief fault in her was a common fault: she wished to shape and measure the world by her own compasses; and, since those were noticeably small, the impertinence was very apparent. She was religiously obedient to her husband when he raised his fist; but, in most matters, she ruled the household, Mr. Ferrier being authoritative only on the subject of his three meals, his pipe and beer, and his occasional drop of something stronger.

And there were five or six young ones, new little souls in very soiled bodies, the doors of life still open for them, their eyes open also to see, and their wills free to choose. These little ones, happy in their rags, baked mud pies, squabbled and made up twenty times a day, ate and slept like the healthy animals they were, their greatest trial being when their faces were washed and their hair combed, on which occasion there was an uproar in the family. These occasions were not frequent.

The Ferrier mansion had but one room, and the Ferrier plenishing was simple. The wardrobe also was simple. For state days, monsieur had a state costume, the salient points of which were an ample white waistcoat and an ancient and well-preserved silk hat which he wore very far back on his head, both these articles being part of his wedding gear. Madame had also her gala attire, with which she always assumed an expression of complacent solemnity. This toilet was composed of a dark-red merino gown, a dingy broché shawl, and a large straw bonnet, most unconsciously Pompadour, with its pink flowers and blue ribbons. For great occasions, the children had shoes, bought much too large that they might not be outgrown; and they had hats nearly as old as themselves. The girls had flannel gowns that hung decently to their heels; the boys, less careful of their finery, had to go very much patched.

On Sundays and holidays, they all walked two miles to hear Mass, and each one put a penny into the box. On Christmas Days, they each gave a silver quarter, the father distributing the coin just before the collector reached them, all blushing with pride and pleasure as they made their offering, and smiling for some time after, the children nudging and whispering to each other till they had to be set to rights by their elders. Contented souls, how simple and harmless they were!

Into the midst of this almost unconscious poverty, wealth dropped like a bombshell. If the sea of oil under their cabin and pasture had suddenly exploded and blown them sky-high, they could not have been more astounded; for oil there was, and floods of it. At almost any part of the little tract of land they had bought for next to nothing, it was but to dig a hole, and liquid gold bubbled up by the barrelful.

Mr. Ferrier, poor man! was like a great clumsy beetle that blunders out of the familiar darkness of night into a brilliantly lighted room. Perhaps something aspiring and only half dead in him cried out through his dulness with a voice he could not comprehend; perhaps the sudden brightness put out what little sight he had: who knows? He drank. He was in a dream; and he drank again. The dream became a nightmare; and still he drank—drank desperately—till at last nature gave way under the strain, and there came to him an hour of such utter silence as he had not known since he lay, an infant, in his mother’s lap. During that silence, light broke in at last, and the imprisoned light shone out with a strange and bewildered surprise. The priest, that visible angel of God, was by his side, instructing his ignorance, calming his fears, calling up in his awakening soul the saving contrition, leaving him only when the last breath had gone.

After the husband went child after child, till but two were left, Annette and Louis. These, the eldest, the mother saved alive.

We laugh at the preposterous extravagance and display of the newly enriched. But is there not something pitiful in it, after all? How it tells of wants long denied, of common pleasures that were so distant from those hopeless eyes as to look like shining stars! They flutter and run foolishly about, those suddenly prosperous ones, like birds released from the cage, like insects when the stone is lifted from them; but those who have always been free to practise their smooth flight through a sunny space, or to crawl at ease over the fruits of the world, would do well not to scorn them.

The house Mrs. Ferrier had built for herself in the newest and finest avenue of Crichton was, it must be confessed, too highly ornamented. Ultra-Corinthian columns; cornerstones piled to the very roof at each angle, and so laboriously vermiculated that they gave one an impression of wriggling; cornices laden with carving, festoons, fancy finials wherever they could perch; oriels, baywindows, arched windows with carven faces over them—all these fretted the sight. But the view from the place was superb.

When our three flower-bearers reached the gate, they turned to contemplate the scene.

All round, a circle of purple hills stood bathed in the sunset. From these hills the Crichtonians had borrowed the graceful Athenian title, and called their fair city the “city of the violet crown.” Forming their eastern boundary flowed the stately Saranac, that had but lately carried its last float of ice out to sea, almost carrying a bridge with it. Swollen with dissolving snows, it glided past, a moving mirror, nearly to the tops of the wharves. Northward was the Cocheco, an untamed little river born and brought up amid crags and rocks. It cleft the city in twain, to cast itself headlong into the Saranac, a line of bubbles showing its course for half a mile down the smoother tide.

The Cocheco was in high feather this spring, having succeeded at last in dislodging an unsightly mill that had been built at one of its most picturesque turns. Let trade go up the Saranac, and bind its gentler waters to grind wheat and corn, and saw logs, and act as sewer; the Cocheco reserved itself for the beautiful and the contemplative. It liked that lovers should walk the winding roads along its banks; that children should come at intervals, wondering, half afraid, as if in fairy-land; that troubled souls, longing for solitude, should find it in some almost inaccessible nook among its crags; but, best of all, it liked that some child of grace, divinely gifted to see everything in God, should walk rejoicingly by its side. “O my God! how sweet are those little thoughts of thine, the violets! How thy songs flow down the waters, and roll out from the clouds! How tender is the shadow of thy hand when at night it presses our heavy eyelids down, and folds us to sleep in thy bosom, or when it wakens us silently to commune with thee!” For such a soul, the river had an articulate voice, and answered song for song.

Yes; that was what it had to do in the world. Away with mills and traffic! Let trade go up the Saranac.

So for three years watery tongues had licked persistently at posts and timbers, legions of bubbles had snapped at splinters till they wore away, and the whole river had gathered and flung itself against the foundations, till at last, when the spring thaw came, over went the mill, and was spun down stream, and flung into the deeper tide, and so swept out to sea. Let trade go up the Saranac!

But the patient Saranac sawed the logs, and carried away their dust and refuse, and took all the little fretted brooks and rivers into its bosom, and soothed their murmurs there. And both did God’s will, and both were good.

Half hidden by the steep slope of the hill, as one stood in Mrs. Ferrier’s porch, was the church of S. John the Evangelist. Only the unfinished tower of it was visible, and a long line of slated roof seen in glimpses between spires and chimneys.

“I really believe, Lawrence, that Crichton is the pleasantest place in the world,” remarked Miss Pembroke, after a short silence.

A servant had taken away their flowers to keep fresh for the evening, and Miss Ferrier had gone in to change her dress. The mother being away, there was no need the other two should enter, when the lovely evening invited them to remain outside.

Receiving no reply, the lady glanced inquiringly at her companion, and saw that his silence was a dissenting one. He had thrown himself into a chair, tossed his hat aside, and was looking off into the distance with fixed and gloomy eyes. The tumbled locks of hair fell over half his forehead, his attitude expressed discontent and depression, and there was a look about the mouth that showed his silence might proceed only from the suppression of a reply too bitter or too rude to utter.

Seeing that her glance might force him to speak, she anticipated him, and continued, in a gentle, soothing tone: “If one loves religion, here is a beautiful church, and the best of priests; if one is intellectual, here is every advantage—books, lectures, and a cultivated society; if one is a lover of nature, where can be found a more beautiful country? Oh! it is not Switzerland nor Italy, I know; but it is delightful, for all that.”

She had spoken carefully, like one feeling her way, and here she hesitated just for a breath, as though not sure whether she had better go on, but went on nevertheless. “Here every one is known, and his position secure. He need not suffer in public esteem from adverse circumstances, if they do not affect his character. There never was a place, I think, where a truly courageous and manly act would be more heartily applauded.”

“Ah! yes,” the young man said, with hasty scorn; “they applaud while the thing is new, and then forget all about it. They like novelty. I don’t doubt that all the people would clap their hands if I should take to sweeping the streets, and that for a week the young ladies would tie bouquets to the end of the broomstick. But after the week was over, what then? They would find me a dusty fellow whose acquaintance they would gradually drop. Besides, their applause is not all. I might not enjoy street-sweeping, even though I and my broomstick were crowned with flowers as long as we lasted.”

Miss Pembroke had blushed slightly at this sudden and violent interpretation of her hidden meaning; but she answered quietly: “No: their applause is not all—the applause of the world is never all, but it helps sometimes; and, if they give it to us for one moment when we start on the right path, it is all that we ought to expect. Life is not a theatre with a few actors and a great circle of spectators: we all have our part to play, and cannot stop long to admire others.”

“Especially when that other is only the scene-shifter,” laughed the young man, throwing the hair back from his face.

“I know well that ordinary, inelegant work would come very hard to you, Lawrence,” she said kindly; “and, if it were to be continued to the end of your life, I might think it too hard. But there must be ways, for other men have found them, of beginning at the lower end of the ladder, even very low down, even in the dust, and climbing steadily to a height that would satisfy the climber’s ambition. It needs only a strong will and perseverance; and I firmly believe, Lawrence, that, to a strong will, almost anything is possible.”

“A strong will is a special gift,” he replied stubbornly.

“Yes; and one for which we may ask,” she said; then, seeing that he frowned, added: “And for you I like Crichton, as I said. One is known here, and motives and circumstances are understood. A thousand little helps might be given which in a strange city you would not have. All would be seen and understood here.”

“All would be seen, yes!” he exclaimed, with a shrug and a frown. “That is the trouble. One would rather hide something.”

She would not be repelled. “There is, of course, sometimes a disadvantage in living where everything is known,” she admitted. “But there must be disadvantages everywhere in the world. Look at the bright side of it. If you were in a great city, where all sorts of crimes hide, where men the most abandoned in reality can for a long time maintain a fair reputation before the world, how your difficulties would be increased! You would not then know whom to trust. Here, on the contrary, no wrong can remain long hidden.”

He had not looked at her before, but at these words his eyes flashed into her face a startled glance. Her eyes were looking thoughtfully over the town.

Feeling his gaze, she turned towards him with a quick change of expression and manner. A friendly and coaxing, almost caressing, raillery took the place of her seriousness: “Come! drive away your blues, Lawrence, and take courage. Study out some course for yourself where you can see far ahead, and then start and follow it, though you should find obstacles grow up in the way. Bore through them, or climb over them. There must be a way. There is something in you for honor, something better than complaining. Cheer up!”

She extended her hand to him impulsively.

“What motive have I?” he asked. But his face had softened, and a faint smile showed that the cloud had a silver lining.

“For your mother’s sake,” she said. “How happy she would be!”

“I can make my mother happy by kissing her, and telling her she is an angel,” he answered.

It was but too true.

“For poor Annette, then. There is a good deal in her, and she is devoted to you.”

He shrugged his shoulders, and lifted his eyebrows: “She loves me as I am, and would love me if I were ten times as worthless, poor silly girl!”

Miss Pembroke withdrew her hand, and retired a step from him. Again he had spoken the truth, this spoiled favorite of women!

“For God’s sake, then.”

He did not dare give another shrug, for his mentor’s face was losing its kindness. “You know I am not at all pious, Honora,” he said, dropping his eyes.

She still retained her patience: “Can you find no motive in yourself, Lawrence? Do you feel no necessity for action, for courageous trial of what life may hold for you?”

His pale face grew bright with an eager light. “If life but held for me one boon! O Honora....”

She made a quick, silencing gesture, and a glance, inconceivably haughty and scornful, shot from her eyes.

“Are you two people quarrelling?” Miss Ferrier inquired, behind them. “If you are, I am in good time. Tea is ready, and I suppose the sooner we are off, the better.”

“I sent the flowers to the church,” she continued, as they went in through the gorgeous hall, “and directed John to tell Mother Chevreuse that we should come down in about an hour. But he brings me word that she is out with some sick woman, and may not come home till quite late. So we are but three.”

Mother Chevreuse was the priest’s mother. It had grown to be a custom to give her that title, partly out of love for both mother and son, partly because Father Chevreuse himself sometimes called her so.

“It will require one person to carry your train, Annette,” Mr. Gerald said, looking at the length of rustling brown silk over which he had twice stumbled. “And that takes two out; for, of course, you can do nothing in that dress. Honora will have the pleasure of decorating the altar, while we look on.”

Only the faintest shade of mortification passed momentarily over the girl’s face, and vanished. She knew well the power her wealth had with this man, and that she could not make it too evident. Miss Ferrier was frivolous and extravagant, but she was not without discernment.

“Did you ever know me to fail when I attempted anything?” she asked, with a little mingling of defiance and triumph in her air. “Honora goes calmly and steadily to work; but when I begin....”

She stopped, embarrassed, for a rude speech had been at her lips.

“You do twice as much as I,” Miss Pembroke finished, with sweet cordiality. “It is true, Annette, though you did not like to say it. You have great energy.”

She put her hand out, and touched caressingly the shoulder of her young hostess in passing. “You are just what Lawrence needs.”

Tears of pleasure filled Annette’s eyes. For all her wealth and the flatteries it had brought her, she had seldom heard a word of earnest commendation.

To be praised by Honora was sweet; but to be praised before Lawrence was sweetest of all.

They hurried through their tea, and went to the church. Mother Chevreuse had not returned home, and the priest also was away. The pleasant task of adorning the altar of Our Lady was left to them.

The stars were beginning to show faintly in the sky when they commenced their work, and all the church was full of that clear yellow twilight. The pillars and walls, snowy white, with only delicate bands of gilding, reflected the softened beams, and seemed to grow transparent in them. But around the side-altar burned a ring of brilliant gas-jets; and through the open door of the sacristy was visible, ruddily lighted, a long passage and stairway leading to the basement.

The light of heaven and the light of earth were thus brought face to face—the one pure, tender, and pervading, the other flaring, thick, and partial. But as daylight faded away, that inner light brought out strange effects. There was no longer anything white in the church: it was all turned to rose-color and deep shadow. Carven faces looked down with seeing eyes from arch, capital, and cornice; the pillars, standing up and down in long rows, appeared to lean together, to move, and change places with each other; there was a tremor in the dimly-seen organ-pipes, as though the strong breath of music were passing through them, and would presently break out in loud accord. A picture of S. John beside the grand altar showed nothing but the face, and the face was as glowing as if it had just been lifted from the bosom of the Lord to look into the Lord’s eyes.

One might fancy that this fair temple in which God had taken up his dwelling only waited for those three to go away, that it might break into joy and adoration over its divine Guest.

On a pedestal at the gospel side of the altar stood the statue of Our Lady, lovely eyelids downcast, as she gazed on those below, loving hands and arms outstretched, inviting all the world to her motherly embrace. An arch of white lilies had already been put up against a larger arch of green that was to be set with candles and a crown of light. They were now engaged in putting under the lilies a third and smaller arch of Mayflowers, that the whole might be like the Lady it was meant to honor—radiant with glory, mantled in purity, and full of tender sweetness.

Annette had redeemed her promise of usefulness. Her long train was pinned about her, leaving a white skirt with the hem close to her ankles, and the flowing drapery of her sleeves was bound above the elbow, her arms being quite free. Mounted on the topmost step of an unsteady ladder, she fastened the higher flowers; lower down, at either side, Lawrence Gerald and Honora tied the lower ones. Not much was said, the few necessary words were lowly spoken; but they smiled now and then in each other’s lighted faces.

It was ten o’clock when they went out through the basement, leaving a man to extinguish the gas and lock the door. On their way to the street, they passed the priest’s house. Only one light was visible in it, and that shone in a wide-open stairway window. The light, with a shadow beside it, was approaching the window, and presently a man’s head and shoulders appeared above the high sill. Father Chevreuse had returned home, and was going up to his chamber. He stopped, holding a candle, and put out his right hand to close the window, but paused, hearing a step outside. “Who’s there?” he asked authoritatively, peering out, but seeing nothing in the darkness.

“Three friends who are just going home,” answered a voice.

“And who are the other two, Honora Pembroke?” demanded the priest.

“Annette and Lawrence. We have been arranging flowers for Our Lady.”

“That’s well. Good-night!”

He pulled the sash down with a bang; but Honora, smiling in the dark, still held her companions beneath the window. It opened again with another bang.

“Children!” he called out.

“Yes, father!”

“God bless you! Good-night!”

Again the sash came down, more gently this time, and the light and the kind heart went on climbing up the stairway.

“He wouldn’t have slept well to-night if he had not said ‘God bless you!’ to us,” said Miss Pembroke. “And I believe we shall sleep better for it, too, God bless him!”

They walked up the steep hillside from the lower part of the town toward South Avenue. Half-way up the hill, on a cross-street that led out toward the country, was the cottage in which Lawrence Gerald lived with his mother, his aunt, and Honora Pembroke. As they approached this road, Annette Ferrier’s heart fluttered. Lawrence had been very amiable that evening. He had praised her, had twice smiled very kindly, and had put her shawl over her shoulders before they came out, as though he were really afraid she might take cold. Perhaps he would leave Honora at home first, and then go up with her.

What great good this would do her she could not have explained; for seldom had she heard from him a word too tender to be spoken before witnesses. Still, she wished it. He might say something kind, or listen willingly to some word of affection from her. At any rate, she would be a little longer in his company.

Miss Pembroke anticipated her wish, or had some other reason for making the proposal. “Just go as far as the gate with me, and then you can escort Annette,” she said. “You will not mind a few extra steps, Annette?”

“Oh! come up with us,” the young man interposed hastily. “It is a beautiful night for walking, and I know you are not tired yet. You can bear twice the walking that Annette can.”

She hesitated a moment, then went on with them. His request displeased her on more than one account: she did not like his indifference to the company of his promised wife, and she did not like his preference for being with herself. But his mother would be anxiously watching for him; and it would be something if he could be lured in at an early hour after a quiet evening.

Down in the black heart of the town, among the offices, was a certain back room where the windows were not so closely curtained but those who watched outside could see a thread of light burning all night long. To this room men went sometimes in the hope of mending their fortunes, or, after the demon of gambling had caught them fast, to taste of that fiery excitement which had now become to them a necessity. Honora more than suspected that Lawrence Gerald’s steps had sometimes turned in there. A year or two before, in one of his good moods, he had confessed it to her, with an almost boyish contrition, and had promised never to go again. It was his last confession of the sort, but, she feared, not his last sin. Of what worth were the promises of a weak, tempted man who never sought earnestly the help of God to strengthen his resolution? Of no more value than an anchor without a cable. Lawrence needed to be watched and cared for; so she went on with them.

“I am so sorry to trouble you both,” Miss Ferrier exclaimed, in a voice trembling with anger and disappointment. “I could have had John come for me, if I had thought.” She snatched her hand from the arm of her escort, and pulled her shawl about her with nervous twitches.

“It would have been better to have had John,” Honora said; “for he could have gone home with me. I am the troublesome third, as it is. But then,” speaking lightly, “if I am the last, Lawrence will be obliged to go in early.”

With another twitch of her shawl, Annette took her escort’s arm again as abruptly as she had left it, and, held it closely.

Careless as the last words had sounded, she knew their meaning, for there had been something said on this subject before. She chose to take it defiantly now, and it comforted her to do so. Others might blame and doubt him, but she would not. He seemed nearer to her in the light of her superior devotedness than to any one else. She would never fail him; and by-and-by he would know her worth. The glow of this fervent hope warmed the girl’s chilled heart, and gave her a sort of happiness.

And so they reached the house, and, after a quiet good-night, separated.

The walk back was passed in silence; and Miss Pembroke did not choose to lean on her companion’s arm; she wished to hold her dress out of the dust.

The street they went through was one of those delightful old ones which a city sometimes leaves untouched for a long time. Over-arching elms grew thickly on either side, and the houses were all detached.

Midway up this street stood the cottage of the Geralds, with a garden in front and at the back, and a narrow green at right and left. Three long windows in front, lighting the parlor, reached almost to the ground. The steep roof slanted to a veranda at each side, leaving but one upper window over the three—a wide window with casements swinging back from the middle. The cottage was in the shape of a cross, and at one arm of it a lighted window shone out on the veranda.

At sound of the gate-latch, the curtain was drawn aside a little, and a woman looked out an instant, then hastened to open the door.

“Are we late, Mrs. Gerald?” Honora asked, and stepped forward into the sitting-room.

“Oh! no, dear; I did not expect you any sooner.”

Mrs. Gerald lingered in the doorway, looking back at her son as he stopped to leave his hat and overcoat in the entry, and only entered the sitting-room when she had caught a glimpse of his face as he came toward her. He was looking pleasant, she saw, and was contented with that.

“Well, mother!” he said, and sank indolently into the arm-chair she pushed before the open fire for him. It was the only arm-chair in the room.

She drew another chair forward, and seated herself beside him. Honora, sitting on a low stool in the corner, with the firelight shining over her, told what they had been doing that afternoon and evening. The son listened, his eyes fixed on the fire; the mother listened, her eyes fixed on her son.

Mrs. Gerald was an Irish lady of good descent, well educated, and well mannered, and had seen better days. We do not call them better days because in her girlhood and early married life this lady had been wealthy, but because she had been the happy daughter of excellent parents, and the happy wife of a good man. All were gone now but this son; the husband dead for many a year, the daughters married and far away, the wealth melted from her like sunset gold from a cloud; but Lawrence was left, and he filled her heart.

One could read this in her face as she watched him. It revealed the pride of the mother in that beautiful manhood which she had given to the world, and which was hers by an inalienable right that no one could usurp; and it revealed, too, the entire self-forgetfulness of the woman who lives only in the life so dear to her. The face showed more yet; for, hovering over this love and devotion as the mist of the coming storm surrounds the full moon, and rings its softened brightness with a tremulous halo, one could detect even in the mother’s smile the mist of a foreboding sadness.

How ineffable and without hope is that sadness which is ever the companion of a too exclusive affection!

Honora Pembroke looked at the two, and pain and indignation, and the necessity for restraining any expression of either, swelled in her heart, painted her cheeks a deep red, and lifted her lids with a fuller and more scornful gaze than those soft eyes were wont to give. Where was the courtesy which any man, not rudely insensible, should show to a lady? Where the grateful tenderness that any child, not cruelly ungrateful, pays to a mother? This man could be gallant when he wished to make a favorable impression; and she had heard him make very pretty, if very senseless, speeches about chivalry and ideal characters, as if he knew what they were. He had even, in the early days of their acquaintance, maintained for a long time an irreproachable demeanor in her presence. She was learning a doubt and distrust of men, judging them by this one, of whom she knew most. Were they often as selfish and insensible as he was? Were they incapable of being affected by any enchantment except that which is lent by a delusive distance? Here beside him was an ideal affection, and he accepted it as he accepted air and sunshine—it was a matter of course. The mother was in person one who might satisfy even such a fastidious taste as his; for though the face was thin and faded, and the hands marred by household labor, there were still the remains of what had once been a striking beauty. Mrs. Gerald carried her tall form with undiminished stateliness, her coal-black hair had not a single thread of white among its thick tresses, and her deep-blue eyes had gained in tenderness what they had lost in fire. To use one of Miss Pembroke’s favorite expressions, it was not fitting that the son, after having passed a day without fatigue, should lounge at ease among cushions, while the mother, to whom every evening brought weariness, should sit beside him in a chair of penitential hardness.

But even while she criticised him, he looked up from the fire, his face brightening with a sudden pleasant recollection.

“O mother! I had almost forgotten,” he said, and began searching in his pockets for something. “Neither you nor Honora mentioned it; but I keep count, and I know that to-day your ladyship is five times ten years old.”

He smiled with a boyish pleasure more beautiful than his beauty, and the little touch of self-satisfaction he betrayed was as far as possible from being disagreeable. He could not help knowing that he was about to give delight, and cover himself with honor in the eyes of these two women.

“Now, mother,” opening a tiny morocco case, “this is the first ring I ever gave any woman. The one I gave Annette was only a diamond of yours reset, and so no gift of mine. But this your good-for-nothing son actually earned, and had made on purpose for you.”

He drew from the case a broad gold ring that sparkled in the firelight as if set with diamonds, and, taking the trembling hand his mother had extended caressingly at his first words, slipped the circlet onto her finger.

“I had no stone put in it, because I want you to wear it all the time,” he said. “Doesn’t it fit nicely?”

“My dear boy!” Mrs. Gerald exclaimed, and could say no more; for tears that she wished to restrain were choking her.

A fiftieth birthday is not a joyful anniversary when there is no one but one’s self to remember that it has come. Just as the mother had given up hope, and was making to herself excuses for his not remembering it, her son showed that it had been long in his thought. The joy was as unexpected as it was sweet.

When she said her prayers that night, Mrs. Gerald’s clasped hands pressed the dear gift close to her cheek; and no maiden saying her first prayer over her betrothal-ring ever felt a tenderer happiness or more impassioned gratitude.

“Dear Lawrence! it was so nice of you!” whispered Honora, and gave him her hand as she wished him good-night.

He threw himself back in the arm-chair again when he was left alone, and for a few minutes had a very pleasant sense of being happy and the cause of happiness. “Who would think that so much fun could be got out of a quiet evening spent in tying Mayflowers round a pole, and giving a gold birthday ring to one’s mother?” he mused. “After all, the good people have the best of it, and we scape-graces are the ones to be pitied. If I were rich, I should be all right. If I had even half a chance, I would ask no more. But the poverty!” He glanced about the room, then looked gloomily into the fire again.

Yes; poverty was there—that depressing poverty which speaks of decayed fortunes. The carpet, from which the brilliant velvet pile was worn nearly off, the faded and mended covers of the carved chair-frames, the few old-fashioned ornaments which had been retained when all that would sell well had gone to the auction-room, each showed by the scrupulous care with which it had been preserved a poverty that clung to the rags of prosperity in the past because it saw no near hope of prosperity in the future. Miles of unbroken forest could be seen from the cupolas of Crichton; yet in this room the very stick of wood that burned slowly on the andirons was an extravagance which Mrs. Gerald would not have allowed herself.

“Yes; the good ones have the best of it,” the young man repeated, rousing himself.

He drew the andirons out, and let the unconsumed stick down into the ashes, lighted a candle, and turned the gas off. Then, candle in hand, he stood musing a moment longer, the clear light shining over his face, and showing an almost childlike smile coming sweetly to his lips. “After all,” he said softly, “I haven’t been a bad fellow to-night,” and with that pleased smile still lingering on his face, went slowly out of the room.

And so the stillness of night descended, and deep sleep brooded over the town as the lights went out.

Crichton was a well-governed city: no rude broils disturbed its hours of darkness. Decency was in power there, and made itself obeyed. You might see a doctor’s buggy whirl by, like a ghost of a carriage, its light wheels faintly crunching the gravel; for only the business streets were paved. Now and then, on still nights, might be heard the grating of ropes, as some vessel sailed up to the wharf after a long ocean voyage. Perhaps a woman in one of the houses on the hill above would hear that sound through her dream, and start up to listen, fancying that, in the word of command the soft breeze bore to her casement, she could detect a familiar voice long unheard and anxiously waited for. Perhaps the sailor, whose swift keel had shot like an arrow past the heavy junk of Chinese waters, and scattered, as it approached the shore, clear reflections of tufted palms and dusky natives—perhaps he looked eagerly up the hill to that spot which his eyes could find without aid of chart or compass, and saw suddenly twinkle out the lamp in the window of his home.

But except for such soft sounds and shadowy idyls, Crichton was at night as still as sleep itself.

The Crichtonians had a pleasant saying that their city was built by a woman, and the best compliment we can pay them is that they made this saying proudly, and kept in honored remembrance the hand of the gentle architect. But not so much in brick and stone was it acknowledged, though they owed to her their first ideas of correct and symmetrical building: in their society, high and low, in many of their pretty customs, in their tastes, in their freedom from bigotry of opinions, even in their government, they felt her influence.

While the city lies sleeping under the stars, strong, adult, and beautiful, full of ambitious dreams, full, too, of kind and generous feeling, let us go back to the time when, an infant town, it began to use its powers, and stammer brokenly the alphabet of civilization.

Hush, fair city, all thy many thousands, while the angels watch above thee! and, sweeter marvel yet! while the dear Lord waits unsleeping in thy midst, where that solitary taper burns. Sleep in peace, “poor exiled children of Eve,” and be grateful at least in dreams.

Not very long ago, this place was a wild forest, with a rude little settlement hewn out of it on the river’s banks. It was shut in from the world, though the world was not far distant. But the river was broad and deep, the ocean only ten miles away, and within a few miles were large and growing cities. Soon the sound of the axe and the saw were heard, and little craft, sloops and schooners, floated down the Saranac laden with lumber till the water rippled close to the rails. The story of her growth in this regard is the story of a thousand other towns. The vessels grew larger, their voyages longer, more houses were built, some men became comparatively wealthy and gave employment to others, while the majority kept the level of the employed. Social distinctions began to show themselves, detestable ones for the most part, since there was no social cultivation. Indeed, this poor settlement was in a fair way to become the most odious of towns. The two meeting-houses began to be called churches by the aspiring; the leading woman of the town ventured to call her help a servant (on which the indignant “help” immediately deserted her); and the first piano appeared. But let us mention this piano with respect, for it was the pioneer of harmony.

When Crichton had about fifteen hundred inhabitants, a stranger came there one day, as a passenger on board a bark returning from a distant city. This bark was the chief vessel, and was owned by the three chief men of Crichton. It had gone away laden with laths, and it brought back tea, coffee, sugar, and other foreign groceries; and, more than all, it brought Mr. Seth Carpenter. He was not, apparently, a very remarkable man in any way, except as all strangers were remarkable in this young town. He was plain-looking, rather freckled, and had a pair of small and very bright eyes which he almost closed, in a near-sighted way, when he wished to see well. Behind those eyes was a good deal of will and wit, and the will to put the wit into immediate practice. Moreover, he knew how to hold his tongue very cleverly, and baffle the curious without offending them. Nothing but his name transpired. He might be a mountebank, a detective, a king’s son—how were these people to know?

In fact, he was nothing more mysterious than a respectable young man twenty-five years of age, who, having his fortune to make, had thought best to leave his prim, sober, native town, where nothing was being done, and where the people were mummies, and seek what, in modern parlance, is called a “live” place. In his pockets he had nothing but his hands; in his valise was a single change of linen.

The very morning of his arrival at Crichton, Mr. Seth Carpenter went to the highest hill-top, and from it viewed the town, the river, and the receding forests. He then strolled down to the river, and looked through the mills, and from there sauntered to the ship-yard, where he found a ship on the stocks, almost ready to be launched. He walked round the yard, whistling softly, with an air of critical indifference. He paused near two other men who were viewing the ship, and, since their conference was not private, listened to it.

One of these men, a sailor, rather thought he might make up his mind to buy that ship. Did his companion know what was likely to be asked for it? The other reckoned, and calculated, and guessed, and expected, and finally owned that he did not know.

Mr. Carpenter, his eyes winking fast with the sparks that came into them, and his fingers working nervously, walked out of the yard, and found the owner of the ship, and, still with nothing in his pockets but his hands, made his bargain with all the coolness of a millionaire. Before sunset, the ship was nominally his; and, before sunrise, it had changed owners again, and the young adventurer had made five hundred dollars by the bargain.

“I will yet rule the town!” he said exultingly, when he found himself alone; and he kept his word. Everything prospered with him, and in a short time even rivalry ceased. Men who had been proud to add dollar to dollar shrank and bowed before this man who added thousand to unit. Half the men in town, after ten years, were in his employment, and business prospered as he prospered. In another ten years, Crichton was a city, with all barriers down between her and the great world; but a raw, unkempt city; jealous, superficially educated, quarrelsome, pretentious, and rapidly crystallizing into that mould. Only a person of supreme position and character could now change it. Mr. Carpenter had the position, but not the character. He thought only of money-making, and of the excitement of enterprise and power; the rest he viewed with a pleasant indifference not without contempt. At forty-five he was still a bachelor.

We have mentioned the first piano with respect, because others followed in its train, rendering a music-teacher necessary; so that, after a succession of tyros, Miss Agnes Weston came, bringing the very spirit of harmony with her into the town she was to conquer.

She did not come as a conqueror, however; nor probably did she anticipate the part she was to play any more than the Crichtonians did. She came to earn her bread, and, while doing so, was anything but popular. Nothing but her brilliant musical abilities, and the fact that she had been educated at Leipsic, saved her from utter failure. People did not fancy this self-possessed, unpretending young person, who could sometimes show such a haughty front to the presuming, and who was, moreover, so frightfully dark and sallow. They did not understand her, and preferred to leave her very much to herself.

One person only found her not a puzzle. To Mr. Carpenter she was simply a refined woman among uncongenial associates; becoming discontented and unhappy there, too, before many months had passed. He did not choose that she should go away. He had become pleasantly accustomed to seeing her, had sometimes met her on her long walks out of town; and once, when he had politely offered to drive her home—an offer which any other lady in Crichton would have accepted beamingly, without the preliminary of an introduction—had been refreshed by receiving a cold refusal, and a surprised stare from a pair of large black eyes. The great man, surfeited with smiles and flatteries, was immensely pleased by this superciliousness.

But though strangely disturbed at the prospect of Miss Weston’s leaving, he hesitated to speak the word which might detain her. A bachelor of forty-five does not readily determine on making a sensible marriage; it usually needs some great folly to spur him on to a change so long deferred. He had, moreover, two other reasons for delaying: he wanted a charming wife, and was in doubt whether even his power could transform this lady into his ideal: the other reason had blue eyes, and a dimple in its chin, and was a very silly reason.

But no one who knew this gentleman would expect him to remain long in doubt on any subject. Within a month from the day he first entertained the thought of running such a risk, Crichton was electrified by the announcement that Mr. Carpenter was soon to be married to Miss Weston; and, before they had recovered from their first astonishment, the marriage had taken place, and the quiet, dark-faced music-teacher was established as mistress of an imposing mansion on North Avenue.

It was now Mr. Carpenter’s turn to be astonished, and he was enchanted as well. Never had he pictured to himself a woman so charming as this grub, now become a butterfly, proved herself; and never had he imagined that even his wife could obtain so beautiful a supremacy as she gradually established and never lost. She was born to rule, and seldom had such power been placed in any woman’s hands. Mr. Carpenter was the first of her vassals. With a refined and noble arrogance, she esteemed him as the first man in the world, because he had been the first to appreciate and exalt her. For this she gave him a faithful, if condescending, affection, and quoted his wishes and opinions so constantly that one might have thought they were her only guides. So thorough was her tact and her courtesy toward her husband he scarcely guessed his own inferiority, and never dreamed that she was aware of it.

She grew beautiful, too, as well as amiable. Now that the drudgery of toil was lifted from her, and her cramped talents had room for full and exhilarating play, the swarthy skin cleared, showing a peach-like bloom, the fine teeth lit a frequent smile, and the deep voice lost its dull cadence, and took a musical, ringing sound.

Mrs. Carpenter used her power well. Crichton was as clay in her hands, and she moulded it after a noble model. What arrogance could never have done was accomplished by tact and sweetness. Her forming touch was strong and steady, but it was smooth, and nothing escaped it. Thoroughly womanly, speaking by her husband’s mouth when she deemed it not fitting that her proper voice should be heard, she could influence in matters where women do not usually care to interfere. She thought nothing out of her province which concerned the prosperity of the town she honored with her presence, and she inspired others with her own enthusiasm. That streets should be wide and well kept, that public buildings should be architecturally symmetrical, that neat cottages for the poor, replacing their miserable huts, should start up sudden as daisies along some quiet road—these objects all interested her, though she worked for them indirectly.

But in social life she ruled openly; and there her good sense and good heart, her gentle gaiety and entire uprightness, became the mould of form. Ill-nature went out of fashion, and, in the absence of charity, self-control became a necessity. When people of opposite creeds met at her house, their feuds had to be laid aside for the time; and, once two foes have smiled in each other’s faces, the frown is not so easy to recall.

Gradually the change which had been imposed outwardly became a real one; and, when Mrs. Carpenter died, full of years and of honors, her spirit continued to animate the place, in its opinions and actions, at least, if some fairer grace of heart and principle were wanting. She died as she had lived, out of the church; though the church had ever found her a friend, bountiful and tenderly protecting. Of its doctrines and authority she seemed never to have thought; but the copy of the Sistine Madonna in her drawing-room had always a vase of fresh flowers before it.

She left no children. A niece whom she had adopted married in Crichton, and had one descendant, a grand-daughter, living there. This grand-daughter was Honora Pembroke.

Wake again, Crichton, for morning is come. Long rays of golden light are shooting out of the east; and down the hillside, in the church of S. John, Father Chevreuse is saying, Sursum Corda!

TO BE CONTINUED.

---

[FONTAINEBLEAU.]

CONCLUDED.

Charles had a dangerous enemy in the person of the Duchesse d’Estampes. She was furious at his being allowed to enter France at all, and still more at his leaving it without paying such a ransom as his host might easily have enforced; but to all her arguments and blandishments Francis was nobly inexorable; he remained true, in this instance at least, to the instincts of his better nature and the promptings of knightly honor. He could not, however, resist saying to Charles, when presenting the duchess to him: “Here is a lady who advises me to undo at Paris the work done at Madrid.” To which the emperor replied coldly: “If the advice be good, you ought to follow it.” The story goes—a most improbable one, considering the position occupied by the Duchesse d’Estampes, whose jewels were worthy of a queen of France—that at supper that same evening, when, according to the complimentary custom of the times, she presented Charles with the urn of perfumed water to rinse his hands, he dropped a diamond ring at her feet, and, on her picking it up and handing it to him, replied: “Keep it, madame; it could not be in fitter hands.” Whether Charles bribed the belle savante with a diamond or any other device, it is certain that, before he left, they had become very good friends, and she had quite adopted the king’s more generous view of the case.

At the close of 1546, Francis fell ill, and was supposed to be dying. The courtiers, true to the traditions of their race, immediately fled from Fontainebleau to greet the Dauphin, who was at Amboise. Francis was conscious enough to notice their disappearance, and to divine the cause of it. It stung him to the quick, and roused him to make a desperate effort to disappoint them. He rallied, and announced his intention of following the procession of Corpus Christi next day. The doctors remonstrated, but in vain; nothing could shake the king’s determination. He dressed himself in his robes of state, had his pale cheeks brightened with rouge, and thus, under a mask of returning health, appeared in the midst of his astonished court, and held the canopy during the procession. But the ceremony was no sooner over than he fell exhausted into the arms of his attendants, and was carried back to bed. He remained for some time unconscious; on recovering his senses, his first exclamation was, “Well, at any rate, I will give them one more fright!” Four months after this childish piece of bravado, he died at the Château of Rambouillet.

The forest of Fontainebleau was infested during his reign with a quantity of noxious vermin—serpents eighteen feet in length, which did great damage, and filled the inhabitants with terror. One of these snakes, by his depredations on man and beast, earned the reputation for himself of a sort of mythological dragon. Some bold men had undertaken to combat him, but all had perished in the attempt. Francis declared at last that he would fight and kill the dragon himself. He equipped himself accordingly in a suit of armor covered all over with long blades as sharp as razors, and, thus armed, sallied forth to the perilous duel. The serpent coiled itself round the glistening blades, and, in clasping his victim, cut himself to pieces. This fantastic exploit of Francis was magnified by the adulation of his courtiers into a deed of supernatural prowess.

The death of Francis was the signal for the downfall of the Duchesse d’Estampes, who retreated like a dethroned sovereign before the now transcendent star of Diana of Poitiers. Diana’s frailty was unredeemed by the intellectual gifts and native kindliness that distinguished her rival. There is no counterpart even in French history to the sway exercised by this Dalila over Henri II. Madame Du Barry’s is the nearest approach to it, but even that falls far short of the precedent. Diana not only ruled the king and the kingdom, but openly usurped the honors, prerogatives, and official state of a legitimate queen. Her cipher, interlaced with Henri’s, was carved and emblazoned on all the public monuments; not a door or gallery of Fontainebleau, aptly nicknamed by the people “the Temple of Diana,” that was not surmounted by the monogram H. D. It was to be seen in the stained glass windows of the chapel, as well as on the plate served on the royal table under the eyes of Catherine de Medicis. Diana appropriated the crown jewels, and appeared at all the public ceremonies decked in the hitherto sacred regalia of the queens of France. Catherine looked on and was silent—she could wait; her hour would come. It came sooner than either she or Diana anticipated. The king fell mortally wounded in a tournament given to celebrate the nuptials of his daughter, the Princesse Elizabeth, with the King of Spain (1559). He was carried to the nearest shelter; Catherine flew to his side, and gave orders that no one should be allowed to approach him; at this crisis, at least, the wife should be supreme. Diana soon presented herself at the door, but the guard refused her admittance; the queen had forbidden it. “And who dares to give me orders?” demanded Diana, with flashing eyes; “if the king breathes, I have no master yet.” Soon he had ceased to breathe, and Diana, without further protest, bowed to the queen’s command, which bade her “restore the crown jewels, and retire forthwith to her Château d’Anet.”

Her beauty was marvellous, and lasted in all its bloom long after the meridian of life was past. Brantôme describes her at the age of sixty-five as “still beautiful as a girl.” The death of Henri II. was the signal for Catherine de Medicis’ real queenhood. Her reign lasted over thirty years, and may be justly styled, in the most comprehensive sense of the word, a reign of terror for the nation. Her first business was to create discord in the family as a prelude to civil war in the state. She imported into France, with the enlightened love of the arts imbibed at the court of the Medicis, their crafty Italian policy; a system of cabal and intrigue which worked well enough in the narrow compass of petty states, but was fruitful of the most disastrous results in a large kingdom where government can only be carried on successfully by well-organized institutions and strong and wise laws justly administered. Catherine was born with a genius for intrigue; her love for conspiracy amounted to a mania. The faculty of dissembling, with which nature had so pre-eminently endowed her, did her good service in the first years of her residence at Fontainebleau. It required all the tact of an accomplished dissembler to steer between the rival powers of the Duchesse d’Estampes and Diana of Poitiers—a feat which the wily pupil of the Medicis achieved with singular success. To the last day of their reign and her own thraldom, she contrived to remain friendly with both. Catherine’s ambition was unbounded, and drove her to excesses of wickedness that have few parallels in modern history. She systematically labored to corrupt the minds and hearts of her children, and to sow dissensions amongst them, so as to draw the power that should have been theirs into her own hands. Jealousy of one son, Francis II., drove her to espouse the cause of the Huguenots for a time; and, when his death placed the sceptre in the hands of his brother Charles IX., she veered round, and persecuted her quondam protégés with cold cynicism and ferocity. Five civil wars can be traced home to the dark intrigues of this unnatural mother—a woman who never took a straight road when she could find a crooked one, who regarded human beings as an apparatus composed of an infinite variety of tools to be used one set against another as the special nature of her work demanded. The massacre of S. Bartholomew was but another manifestation of the same spirit which had led her to stir up the Huguenots to revolt when she thought their rebellion would serve her aims. This sanguinary despot had most of the foibles of a woman, combined with the fiercer passions of a man. Her frivolity and extravagance knew no bounds; and when her ministers ventured to hint to her that the lavish prodigality of her expenditure was exasperating the people, and might lead to trouble, she shrugged her shoulders, and replied, with serene simplicity: “Good heavens! one must live.” The sweet, pathetic face of Marie Stuart appears for a moment at Fontainebleau in the earlier days of Catherine’s rule—a bright meteor flashing on a troubled sky; poor Marie, whose sky was gathering up the storm that was to break at no distant day over her young life, and beat it some twenty years with a fury that was only to be silenced by the great tranquillizer—death. Fierce and long-raging were the storms that swept over Fontainebleau through the same darkling years. Henri de Navarre bears down on it like a whirlwind, and forces the queen, with her son Charles IX., to fly before him and his Huguenots to Melun. They have not taken breath at Melun when the Duc de Guise meets them like a contrary wind, and blows them back to Paris. Soon follows the night of S. Bartholomew, that blackest of black nights, under whose pall, as it has been pithily put by a modern Frenchman, “a few scoundrels killed a few scoundrels.” Its gloom was still hanging over the city when Catherine and the king were bowling along the road to Fontainebleau—he shuddering, a Macbeth terrified at his share in the ghastly deed; she triumphant, unappalled by ghost or conscience, her sharp, elastic mind busy on the next step to be taken. How was she to undo the one awkward consequence of her triumph—the remorse and mistrust of this faint-hearted son? A hundred and fifty maids, miscalled of honor, were recruited from the beauty of France, and brought to Fontainebleau to aid in the task of soothing the king’s scruples and mending the queen’s nets. But her hold upon Charles was loosened, and not all the charms of all the houris of Mahomet’s paradise would lure it to her grasp again. Catherine, however, could accommodate herself to the decrees of fortune, and turn even her own blunders to account. Charles, obdurately sullen, refused to revoke the edict of the pacification of Amboise, thus quenching for once, instead of lighting, the smouldering flames of civil war. Catherine smiled bland approval on her blighted schemes, and was full of satisfaction, as if, instead of chaining the war-dogs, she had been allowed to let them loose. She received the ambassadors in regal state, and laid herself out to captivate all men by her smiles and honeyed courtesies; feuds and jealousies were lulled to sleep with soft music of delight; all the heads of all the factions, civil and religious, turned in the dance till they were giddy, carousing, and embracing, and pledging one another in loving cups, while their followers were cutting each other’s throats hard by; fireworks sent rockets blazing to the sky—merry rockets, red, white, and green; and Fontainebleau was once more a palace of Armida, an Arabian night’s dream, where men came and drank, and were inebriated. A dark and agitated scene is that which France presents at the close of Catherine’s reign. We turn from it with relief to see Henri de Navarre enter his “good city” of Paris. After the peace of Vervins, which put an end to religious wars in France, and allowed Europe to breathe once more, the gay Béarnais came to enjoy his well-won conquest at Fontainebleau. Sully, the true and trusty friend, goes with him, supreme, though not alone, in his influence with the soft-hearted monarch. Gabrielle d’Estrée contests the field with him; but, to Henri’s honor be it said, she is defeated. Gabrielle had, in a weak moment, extracted from the king a promise that he would make her Queen of France—a promise which, as a matter of course, he immediately confided to Sully. The minister burst out into indignant protest, and outswore the Béarnese himself in the vehemence of his indignation. They parted, as usual, in a rage, and, as usual, Henri soon calmed down, and declared that Sully was right. When Gabrielle recurred to the promise, he told her the result of his conversation with “my friend Rosny.” The lady flew into a tantrum, called Rosny hard names, and wound up by insisting that “that valet” should be dismissed from the court. The insolent appellation, coming from such a quarter, roused the king to a sense of his own disgraceful weakness. “Ventre S. Gris, madame,” he cried, “if I must needs dismiss either, it shall be you a thousand times rather than my faithful Rosny—my friend without whom I could not live!” Gabrielle saw that she had overstepped the mark; for Henri, if he had the faults of a man, was no emasculated puppet, like so many of his predecessors, to be bound hand and foot by a Dalila; he had still the spirit of a king. Gabrielle fell at his feet, and begged his pardon, and Sully’s too. Shortly after this incident, Sully’s fears on her account were put an end to by her death. Henri’s grief for a time was so violent as almost to deprive him of his reason. But his fickle heart soon found consolation in a new allegiance. Mlle. d’Entragnes was the next to captivate it. For this fair siren, Henri went so far as to draw out a written promise of marriage. Before, however, giving the document into the hands of the fair lady, he, of course, showed it to Sully, the dauntless Sully, who was the most discreet of confidants, but the most unmanageable of accomplices. This time he was too deeply moved for anger; he did not bully the king, but coolly read the paper twice over, and then, tearing it deliberately into four fragments, he flung it into the fire. “Parbleu, Rosny, you are mad!” cried the king. “Would to God, sire, I were the only madman in France!” replied Rosny. Henri turned on his heel, and there was no more said about that marriage. He married finally Marie de Medicis. She gave birth to the Dauphin Louis XIII. at Fontainebleau. Henri’s joy was unbounded. He made his wife a present on the occasion of the Château of Monceau with its beautiful park and grounds, which had formerly been a gift to Gabrielle d’Estrée. Marie de Medicis was blest with wonderfully robust health—a fact which her husband comments upon rather quaintly in a letter to Sully ten days after the birth of the Dauphin. “My wife,” he says, “dresses her own hair, and talks already of getting up; my friend, she has a terribly robust constitution!” Sad pity that anything should spoil the attractive beauty of Henri IV.’s portrait as it hangs before us in the long gallery of royal sitters at Fontainebleau; but, alas! there it is, the black blot on the bright disk, the treacherous breach of hospitality perpetrated in his name toward an old companion and brother-in-arms. There is abundant proof that the arrest of Maréchal de Biron and his death were repugnant and painful to the king, and that for some days he combated both by every means in his power, stooping to tears and passionate entreaty with Biron, and pleading eloquently in his behalf with his own ministers; and that it was only after all his efforts had failed to convince the latter, or to wring from Biron’s stubborn pride the confession which could have saved him, that Henri’s signature was obtained for the death-warrant. This no doubt absolves him from the odium of a cold-blooded, premeditated act of vengeance; but it is a poor apology to say that he only consented to invite his old brother-in-arms to Fontainebleau, and let him be arrested in a dark corridor at nightfall, and taken to prison, and eventually put to death, because he was overruled and circumvented by the iron will of his wife Marie with the “terribly robust constitution.”

The gardens of Fontainebleau are full of delicate and poetic memories of Henri de Navarre in which Rosny plays a prominent part. The courtiers looked on at the familiar, schoolboy friendship between the king and his minister with envious eyes, and set to work with malignant diligence to loosen the bond. They succeeded in getting up such a plausible story against Rosny that the king, who had been some time without seeing him, was staggered; he examined the deed of accusation, and admitted that the circumstances looked badly. The minister was in Paris working away for his master as hard as any galley-slave at the arsenal. Henri sent for him. When he arrived, the king was on the terrace surrounded by the court; he greeted his friend with a gracious formality foreign to the habitual free and easy manner of their intercourse. Sully was pained and mystified. But the restraint was equally intolerable to both. Henri called him aside presently, and they walked up and down an alley in sight of the terrace, but out of ear-shot. The king pulled out the deed of accusation, and handed it to his friend. Rosny cast his eye contemptuously over the paper, and in a few words scattered all its contents to the winds. Henri saw that he had been the dupe of a base, designing jealousy, and broke out into bitter self-reproach at having been led to doubt even for a moment the fidelity of his tried and faithful servant. He held out his hand; Sully, overcome with emotion, was about to fall on his knees to kiss it; but, quick as lightning, the king caught him in his arms, exclaiming: “Take care, Rosny! Those fellows yonder will fancy I am forgiving you.”

The visit of the Spanish ambassador to Fontainebleau led to the construction of the large and handsome Chapel of the Trinity. After going all over the interminable galleries and halls of the vast edifice, they came to the chapel. It was very pretty, but quite out of keeping with the space and splendor of the rest of the building. Don Pedro’s minister was scandalized at the irreverence implied in the contrast, and, with the impulse of a Spaniard, exclaimed, looking round at the narrow walls of the little sanctuary: “Your house would be perfect, sire, if God were as well lodged in it as the king.” Henri was pleased with the outspoken rebuke, and at once set about building a temple worthier of the divine worship.

His ungovernable passion for the chase was a frequent cause of altercation between himself and Sully, who shared his master’s love for the sport, but, unlike him, knew where to stop in the indulgence of it. The title of Grand Veneur,[127] attached to the office of master of the royal hounds, dates from Henri’s time, and takes its rise from a phantom which made its appearance in the forest in the shape of a man larger than life, dressed in black, and surrounded by a pack of hounds, and who vanished as soon as the spectator tried to approach him. Sully had long laughed at the story of this spectre, but, once coming to meet the king, he came face to face himself with the grand veneur; he owned to the fact, but was still sceptical, though unable in any way to explain away the mysterious apparition, which he took great pains to do.

Louis XIII. resided much at Fontainebleau, and continued the work of embellishment, which needed little now to make it perfect. Anne of Austria enriched the new chapel with many valuable paintings. For a period, Richelieu is the presiding genius of the grand old palace. Then he passes away, and makes room for Mazarin, who received here Henrietta of England with a splendor becoming her double majesty of misfortune and royalty.

The first time that Louis XIV. honored the palace with his presence was on the occasion of signing the marriage contract between Ladislas of Poland and Marie de Gonzagne (1645); the marriage itself was celebrated at the Palais Royal.

Christina of Sweden furnishes one of the most thrilling chapters in the history of Fontainebleau. This eccentric woman, whose ambition it was to entwine the laurels of Sappho with the jewels of her crown, gave up the throne of Sweden to wander about the world like an Arab. That sort of eccentricity being rarer in those days than in our own, it passed for genius, wisdom, anything the owner chose to call it. Christina gained the reputation of possessing extraordinary erudition, and a mind gifted with the powers of a man, as well as adorned with the graces of an accomplished woman. Anne of Austria was filled with admiration for the queen who cast away a crown to go in pursuit of science and philosophy; and, when Christina announced her intention of visiting France, the regent made preparations to receive her which surpassed anything that Fontainebleau had witnessed since the reception of Charles V. by Francis I. Christina made her entry on horseback, surrounded by a guard of honor composed of the highest nobles of the kingdom, all magnificently attired, and followed by a cortége of noble dames, some riding on horses caparisoned in housings of cloth of gold and silver, others drawn in chariots of state. The fêtes given for the royal Sappho’s entertainment were on a scale equal to the splendor of this reception. She showed her sense of Anne of Austria’s appreciation of her superior merits by making herself very agreeable to her; but she earned the dislike of the young king by ridiculing openly his boyish love for Marie Mancini, and pointing an epigram at the fair Italian. Lo, when, on her return from Italy, she intimated her intention of again coming to France, Louis sent word that he placed the Palace of Fontainebleau at her disposal, but begged she would not show herself in Paris. During this second visit, Christina committed the crime which has so irretrievably damned her memory. Monaldeschi, who had been her pampered favorite for years, rightly or wrongly incurred her displeasure. Christina determined that he should die, and did not pause to consider that it was adding a darker hue to her crime to perpetrate it under the roof of a brother king. The hour suited her vengeance—that was enough. The whole thing was planned with a business-like coolness worthy of Louis XI. in his best days. The queen ordered her victim to be taken to the galerie des cerfs, and herself gave the most minute instructions as to how he was to be killed, and by whom: he was not to be despatched by one or even a few successive blows, but struck a great many times and at short intervals, in hopes of extracting certain avowals from him. Christina then retired to an adjoining room, and remained in animated conversation with her entourage while the horrible tragedy was going on close by. Occasionally she sent in to ask if Monaldeschi were dead; when the answer again and again came back that he was still struggling, she expressed first surprise, and then impatience, and at last, unable to brook the delay, she rose and opened the door of the gallery; Monaldeschi, on beholding her, stretched out his arms in an attitude of supplication, but the queen exclaimed sharply, “What! thou art not yet dead?” and, walking up to where he lay writhing on the ground, she slapped him on the face “with that hand,” says Voltaire, “which had loaded him with benefits.” Monaldeschi had cried out for a priest to help him to die, and this last grace had been granted. Christina stood by till her victim was dead, and then quietly paid the assassins, and went back to her conversation. The news of the abominable deed of blood travelled quickly to Paris; as soon as Mazarin heard it, he sent her a peremptory order to leave Fontainebleau and France forthwith, adding that the King of France harbored no assassins as his guests; to which Christina returned the contemptuous reply that “she was queen wherever she was, and took no orders from the King of France, and was accountable for her acts neither to him nor any one else.” It is curious to observe how little horror seems to have been produced in the public mind by this execrable murder, committed under circumstances which rendered it tenfold more revolting; the ladies and courtiers of the time make no more than a passing mention of it in their letters, and, in speaking of Christina, reserve their sharpest criticism for her style of dressing her hair and her manner of dancing, which they condemn as “fantastic and awkward.” Two years after this event, we find Christina abjectly begging for an invitation to the carnival ballet in which Louis XIV. was to dance! The fact of the invitation being granted is perhaps as significant as that of its being asked for. It was accompanied, however, with the condition that the Queen of Sweden should only remain in Paris the three days that the ballet lasted; this she agreed to, and Mazarin’s apartments at the Louvre were placed at her disposal.

Louis XIV. restored Catherine de Medicis’ pavilion at Fontainebleau, called the Pavillon des Poêles,[128] for Mary of Modena, and fitted it up in a style of elegance and splendor befitting rather a royal bride of France than an exiled queen. But all his graceful gallantry to the beautiful exile, and professions of brotherly love to her husband, did not prevent Louis from signing in 1698 the treaty whereby he pledged himself to recognize the Prince of Orange, and not to disturb him in the possession of his kingdom.

Louis XV. was married in the chapel at Fontainebleau to Marie Leczinska (1725). He never cared for the palace as a residence, and merely used it as a hunting-lodge. His first-born son died there. Shortly before his death, the young prince, leaning over a balcony from one of the upper rooms of the palace which looked towards Paris, was heard saying to himself with a deep-drawn sigh: “What delight the sovereign must feel who makes the happiness of so many men!” A great deal has been built on this exclamation—regrets for the blighted promise which the feeling that prompted it held out to France. But twenty years before, Louis XV. had said as much, and felt it, very likely, just as sincerely. Fontainebleau was spared the shame of the saturnalian orgies that profaned Versailles and Trianon under the reign of Du Barry. The grim towers that had sheltered Francis, and the Medicis, and Henry de Navarre had many tales to tell that were better left untold, but at their worst they showed white beside the vulgar blackness of the Pompadour and Du Barry chronicles.

Louis XVI., who seldom visited Fontainebleau, has left no mark of his passages there. Under the Revolution, it was used as the military school which has since been transferred to St. Cyr. Napoleon compensated the royal old château for the neglect of his predecessors; he preferred it, next to St. Cloud, to all the other palaces of which France had given him temporary possession, and repaired it with elaborate magnificence, adhering rigidly to the original style in every detail. He also added a stirring chapter to its history. When, by his orders, General Radet scaled the walls of the Quirinal at three o’clock in the morning, and, attended by a band of soldiers, brutally dragged Pius VII. from his bed, it was to Fontainebleau that the venerable pontiff was conveyed; here he was kept in close confinement, and fed upon the bread of insult, with which it was Napoleon’s wont to nourish his captives; but Pius VII., disarmed, isolated from friends and counsellors, surrounded by spies paid to interpret his every word and gesture according to the interests and wishes of their paymaster, broken in bodily health, his mind bending under the accumulated weight of every torture that ingenious cruelty could devise, was still a greater conqueror, in the noblest sense of the word, than Napoleon ever was on the field of battle. Moreover, a day of reckoning was at hand. Fontainebleau, which had been the theatre of so many of Napoleon’s most gorgeous pageants of the melodramatic and sentimental kind—for he could be sentimental, this great butcher of men and despoiler of crowns; he could, “with delicate forethought, and at vast expense, cause a multitude of pine-trees to be planted” amidst the elms and the oaks of the sombre Medicean forest, in order that his young Austrian bride might find some reminiscence of home when she walked out for her evening stroll—Fontainebleau was to witness the going down of his sun. Fortune, exasperated at last by the excesses of her spoilt child, plucked the brilliant meteor from the sky, and cast it out into the darkness. Once, in an interview with Pius VII. during his captivity, Napoleon, after lavishing all his art of flattery on the pope, stooping to tender caresses and the most winning attitude of supplication to wrest from his captive the coveted concession of the Concordat, presently paused to see the effect of the experiment. Pius VII. was silent awhile, then, looking up at the emperor with a smile of withering scorn, he answered: Commediante![129] Like lightning the tactics were changed; curses rained where kisses had been showered; threats and gestures fierce as blows succeeded to bland entreaties; the actor struck his forehead with clenched fists, stamped, grew red and white in turn, and swore that a thunderbolt should be hurled by the Tuileries at the Vatican which should crush her defiant pride, and bury all Christendom under its ruins. Again he “paused for a reply.” Pius raised his eyes, and, looking fixedly at Napoleon, murmured, this time with no smile: Tragediante![130] The whole life and character of the man are summed up in those two epithets: commediante, tragediante. But if Bonaparte played comedy well, tragedy was his forte, and his last appearance at Fontainebleau was a splendid farewell representation. It is a little past mid-day. A bright April sun pours down from a cloudless sky upon the courtyard of the palace; the horse-shoe staircase, bathed in the unmitigated sunshine, gleams white and majestic—a stage of the antique fashion well suited for the closing act about to be played upon it. The audience are already gathered to the place; thousands of the inhabitants have flocked in from the town and neighborhood, but the inner circle, the reserved seats, are filled by the grenadiers of the guard, the Old Guard of a hundred battles and as many victories, and by the marines of the young guard. The time seems long, for every heart is beating in sympathetic emotion with the coming crisis. At last the curtain rises. The doors opening on the horse-shoe staircase are thrown back, and Napoleon comes forward. A cry goes up to him from the depths of those many thousand hearts. But hush! He waves his hand for silence. He is going to speak. The crowd sways to and fro, a human wave ebbing at the base of an adamantine rock, whence its idol of twenty years looks down upon it.

“Officers, non-commissioned officers of the Old Guard, I bid you farewell!... For twenty years you have given me satisfaction. Be faithful to the new sovereign whom France has chosen. Grieve not for my fate; I might have died, nothing would have been easier to me—but, no; I shall to the last tread the path of honor. I will write what we have done together....” Sobs, such as break the stout hearts of warlike men, interrupt him. He waits for a moment, and then resumes: “I cannot embrace you all, but I will embrace your general. Approach, General Petit.” The general advances, and Napoleon clasps him in a long embrace. “Bring me the eagle!”

They bring it. He gathers the colors to his heart, and kisses the symbol passionately.

“Dear eagle! May these kisses find an echo in the hearts of every brave man!... My children, farewell.” The voice that had electrified them on a thousand battle-fields ceased to speak; it has stirred those brave hearts to their depths; the veterans sob like women. Napoleon descends the monumental steps of the horse-shoe, and passes through the midst of them in silence. Bertrand is waiting for him at the gate. He gets into his carriage, and drives away. Thus the unrivalled actor took his leave of the world-stage on which he had figured so long and so brilliantly. The colors which he clasped in that last touching embrace were henceforth treasured as a sacred thing; half a century later, they were laid on his tomb at the Invalides.

The gallery of Diana, which had been left unfinished by Napoleon, was completed after the restoration of the Bourbon. Louis XVIII. has commemorated the achievements on a slab bearing in golden letters the date of the completion of the gallery—“in the 20th year of my reign!” And on the table on which Napoleon signed his abdication he caused the following to be engraved: “The 5th of April, 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte signed his abdication on this table in the king’s cabinet, the second after the bedroom, at Fontainebleau.” With the singular mixture of obstinacy and simplicity which characterized his Bourbon mind, he systematically ignored in conversation and in all official deeds the reign of Napoleon altogether, and continued to the last to date as if that stormy meteor had never broken in upon the dull horizon of his sovereignty. Those inscriptions are the only two traces of Louis XVIII.’s passage which are to be found at Fontainebleau.

Charles X. never resided there, and seldom even visited the palace. It fell into sad neglect, but was entirely restored by Louis Philippe, not only the edifice, but the pictures and costly works of art with which a long line of sovereigns had so magnificently endowed it.

Under the Empire, Fontainebleau came in for the share of imperial favor which was so impartially divided amongst the still habitable castles of France. Every autumn it was the scene of brilliant hunting-parties and varied hospitalities.

We will close this fragmentary record of the past of Fontainebleau by an incident, which, though not yet within the range of history, may one day take its place there, and be quoted with interest as an indication of the character of one destined, for aught we know, to play his part in the annals of the coming age.

The Prince Imperial, then a mere child, was playing one day in the galerie des cerfs with a little friend of his, the son of an officer of the household. Suddenly, in the midst of their game, the latter rather irrelevantly remarked: “This is where Queen Hortense killed a man.” “Queen Hortense was my grandmother,” retorted the young prince indignantly; “she never killed anybody!” “Oh! but she did, though,” persisted his companion; “she killed one somewhere hereabouts; I’ve read it in a book.”

This was too formidable an argument to be met by mere words; the descendant of the injured Hortense clenched his little fist, and laid on vigorously to the traducer of his grandmother. The noise of the battle soon drew the attention of some ladies who were at the other end of the gallery; they ran to separate the combatants, and inquire the cause of the row; but the young prince, crimson with rage, and with the big tears rolling down his cheeks, broke away from them, and rushed to his mother, who was somewhere in the neighborhood.

“He says that my grandmother killed a man,” cried the child out loud, “and I say it is a lie!” Then, throwing his arms round the empress’ neck, he whispered: “It’s not true, is it, that she ever killed anybody?”

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[LAUGHING DICK CRANSTONE.]

It was not that soft, white, feathery stuff that flutters to the ground pleasantly and lighter than the fall of a rose-leaf; that, dancing and darting around and about everywhere with gleaming whiteness and varied and graceful motion, makes the empty air seem a living thing smiling at its own frolic. No; the snow was not of that character at all. It was a sharp, fierce storm that made at you in a determined manner, as though it had a sort of spite against you and the whole human race generally for bringing it down out of its bed somewhere up there among the clouds; that, as it was compelled to make the journey, made up its mind to let you and everybody else have the full benefit of it. So down it came fiercely in bitter lines so regular that a William Tell might shoot an arrow through them without touching a single flake. It rushed at you, it beat you in the face, it snarled around your legs, it powdered your hair, and made for the small of your back; it peeped up your sleeves, and made acquaintance with the inside as well as outside of your boots, as though it thought of getting a pair itself, and wished to examine your shoemaker’s handiwork. It laughed at umbrellas, and made such a savage assault on your overcoat and waterproof that it was plainly as enraged as it could be at being foiled, and in revenge settled down on them, till it made you look from top to toe as though you had been just rolled in feathers, minus the tar.

Ah! it was a dreary day—a day that made one shiver and think of the poor, and shiver again. It spoiled the play of the children, and little Bessy would sit “anyhow,” as her nurse termed it, in her chair, with one hand mechanically endeavoring to pull the cane at the back of it to pieces, while her big round blue eyes would look out in silent wonder at the ugly day; and little Benny would flatten his already flat nose in desperation against the window-pane, creating quite a little atmosphere of fog around him; while Harry, the big brother, ten years old last birthday, would make a false attempt to keep up his spirits by riding that imaginary horse round and round the room, making him curvet and caper, and shy at that corner, and evince a particular dislike to the nurse, and kick so furiously at the door-key, till a crack of the whip suddenly brought the restive animal to his senses, and Harry would be still a moment, and gaze silently with the rest of the world out at the cheerless snow.

Was it the snow that Cranstone of Cranstone Hall was gazing at so fixedly out of the library window? Was it the snow that made those cheeks so deadly white, save for the two little purple spots on each of them? Was it the snow that made him clench his hands till the nails almost tore the flesh? What was he looking at so fixedly out there in the Park? What did he see out in the blinding snow, driving down on his own meadow-lands, and draping the strong forms of his ancestral oaks in mystic drapery, while from the bottom where the river ran, stole up a snaky mist in curling ashy-gray folds? He saw no snow, no mist, no oaks: he looked through them, beyond them, straight out at a tall form striding along, its back to Cranstone Hall, and its face to the wide, wide, bitter, cold world—striding on, and on, and on, and never looking back to the home where he fell one day like one of these little snowflakes out of heaven, and grew up straight, and tall, and honest, and true, and manly, with a head, and a handsome head too, on his shoulders, and such a heart in his bosom!—the pride of all the country-side, and the heir of Cranstone Hall. It was Dick Cranstone whose figure his father was gazing at so fixedly, though that figure had been gone three hours, and was far out of sight—Dick Cranstone, his father’s only son, the only relic of his dead mother, the boy on whom all the father’s strong heart was now set, who was striding along through the snow and the mist out into the bleak world on that winter morning, cast out from his father’s hearth and heart, driven away with a bitter curse.

What had Dick Cranstone done to bring down this curse and chastisement on his handsome young head? Dick and his father had been companions as well as father and son, for Ralph Cranstone was still a youngish man, and bore such years as he had well. His heart and his hopes were centred in this boy, whose mother had been snatched away so early; and when he saw the bright-eyed, laughing lad ripen into a great, handsome, clever young fellow, who rode with him, and played cricket with him, and scoured over the country neck and neck with him—for there was a dare-devil drop in the Cranstones—it would be hard to find a happier man in this world than Ralph, or a more loving son than Dick; in fact, “Oh! they’re as fond of each other as the Cranstones” had grown into a proverb in all the country-side. What, then, was Dick’s great crime that left him in a day fatherless, and his father childless, and rent asunder with a fierce wrench two hearts which all their lives had run together?

The Cranstones were an old family, older than Elizabeth, though it was at her time that Cranstone Hall first came into their possession. That was a good reign for people blessed with an elastic conscience. The Elizabethan Cranstone was a Catholic. He had the choice of running his neck in a noose and dying a martyr for his faith, or renouncing the religion he believed in, and taking instead the goodly Abbey of Cranstone, with its river, meads, and all its appurtenances. He did not hesitate long. Like most of his countrymen, he threw up his religion, and took to the abbey, turned out the monks, became a bitter persecutor of the church, changed the name of the place to Cranstone Hall, lived to a good old age, and the rich man died and was buried—in Cranstone churchyard. The old country folk round about tell you that this particular old Cranstone, whom they look upon as the first of the race, “died a-yellin’ for holy water like hell-foire”; but then, such people are always foolish. However, to come back to the story, the Cranstones remained from that day out a flourishing, wealthy family, strongly devoted to church and state, fierce persecutors of the Catholics whilst persecution was the fashion; when not so, what Catholics call bigoted Protestants.

Ralph was no exception to the rule. He honored the queen, and hated the pope and Papistry as genuinely as the old Elizabethan Cranstone had professed to do. He thought the country was going to ruin when he found Papists throwing up their heads, and walking about on English ground, just as though they had as much right there as anybody else. And when his old friend and neighbor Harry Clifford, who had been at Eton and Oxford with him, and whom Ralph had pronounced over and over again “the best fellow going,” turned Catholic one fine day, as soon as Ralph heard of it, and met Harry by chance at a friend’s, he turned on his heel, and walked out of the house, leaving the latter standing there with the old friendly hand outstretched towards him. From that day out, all intercourse ceased between the Cliffords and Cranstones, and the old friends were as dead to each other as though they had never met.

In good time, Dick went off to Oxford, with an Eton fame as a good bat and all-round cricketer, a handy man at the oar, the best runner and jumper in the school, added to the lesser reputation of being able to knock off the best Latin poem in the college, and running Old Barnacles hard for the head of the class—Old Barnacles, who did nothing but grub at his books night and day, and who sucked at Greek roots as little chaps would at lollipops. He made one of “the eleven” that year against Cambridge at Lord’s, and saved the game from becoming a disastrous defeat to his university by his plucky and cool play against that terrible left-hand bowler. How proud his father was of him that day! He could almost have gone up and shaken hands with Harry Clifford, whom he saw there with his wife and a beautiful young lady in the carriage, so divided in looks between Harry and his sweet wife that she could have belonged to no one else but to them. “A Clifford to the tip of her nose!” he kept repeating to himself, as he stole a sly glance at them now and then, and yearned for a grasp of his old friend’s hand; but the stubborn Cranstone blood was too strong within him, and he turned away slowly to watch the game.

It was going badly for Oxford in the second innings; the Cambridge men had a hard hitter in, who hit so hard and so furiously, and had so completely “mastered the bowling,” that the score mounted rapidly, and every new hit elicited shouts of applause for Cambridge. All over the field flew the ball, sometimes in among the rows of carriages which lined the ground. “They’ll never get him out,” said the spectators one to another, as the Cantab struck away right and left as freely as though he were playing with the bowlers. “There she goes! Bravo! Well hit!” they shouted, as the ball flew from the bat right across the field, straight and furious, full at the carriage where were seated the Cliffords. “Look out there! Look out—look out!” they shout, as the carriage party, conversing together, are utterly unconscious of the danger approaching them. It takes a long time to tell this here, though it was all over in half a minute. The cricket-ball was flying at lightning speed straight at the head of the young lady, who at the moment was looking in another direction, inattentive to the warning cries that rose from all parts of the field. The shouts were hushed into that deadly silence that will settle so awfully over a vast assembly when every eye is bent in one direction, and every heart beats as one great one with the expectation of immediate disaster. All saw the danger of the young girl, but no one could prevent it, when suddenly there is a rush of something white, a leap in the air, a bare arm flashes in the sun, and the ball is clasped in the hand of one who never missed a catch yet, as he falls back over the side of the carriage, right in among the party, holding the ball all the while, and the great Cantab is out.

“Bravo, Cranstone! Bravo, Cranstone!” What a shout from the Oxonians! What a shout and a rush from all sides of the field to applaud the young fellow whose Eton fame had not belied him for speed, and whose swiftness and agility, and that high leap in the air and splendid catch, had perhaps saved a young girl’s life, while it rid his side of a terrible foe, and revived the hopes of Cambridge! But Cranstone never heeded the shouts; he lay back there in the carriage, lifeless, his head on Harry Clifford’s knee, his eyes closed, and his face white, while the frightened ladies, who scarcely yet knew from what a danger they had escaped, bent over him in terror. He had fallen heavily on the side of the carriage, and the shock caused him to faint.

The crowd is parted by a strong man, who rushes wildly to the spot. “Dick, my boy, Dick, are you hurt? Good God! Harry, it’s my son. Water, some of you—water. Clear away there, and let him have air!” The water is brought, and in a few moments he revives, to open his eyes on a pair of the tenderest blue eyes looking pityingly and frightened into his. A shake or two, like a strong mastiff, and he is all right again; the game goes on, and, though Oxford was beaten, that catch lives in men’s memories; while Ralph Cranstone and Harry Clifford were old friends again, and Mr. Dick Cranstone was reintroduced to his old playmate, Miss Ada Clifford.

Dick went back to Oxford that year with another feeling creeping into his heart side by side with the great love for his father which had hitherto possessed it. He was not over head and ears in love with Ada Clifford, nor, since it must be confessed, she with him; but his father and himself rode over often that vacation, and Dick found the family one of the most agreeable in every way that he had ever met, while Ralph atoned for his former rudeness in a thousand ways that come with such an indescribable charm from a strong nature. Dick took back this memory with him to the university, and perhaps it saved him from getting among the “fast men”—a society only too fascinating for young fellows blessed with health, strength, good nature, good looks, and money.

Without actually giving up his practices of muscular Christianity, association with more intellectual minds brought him soon to perceive that there was a higher ambition in this life for a young man than being the captain of a cricket eleven, the “stroke” of a university eight, the best pigeon shot, or the proprietor of the most startling “turn-out” on the road. Association with intellectual men brought with it intellectual thoughts, inquiries, pursuits; while under all happily ran the boy’s innate love of honor, of what was fair and truthful, supporting him somewhat, and keeping him, on the whole, straight in the midst of the dangerous speculations and vexed problems which were being agitated around him, and discussed with all the boldness natural to undisciplined minds.

His Oxford course was drawing to a close, and he began to think of adopting some career, though the wealth and property to which he was heir necessitated no pursuit at all other than that of a quiet country gentleman living on his estates. During his last year particularly he had read and studied much, and the result of his studies and inquiries always came home to him in the form of the old question of Pilate, What is truth? He was, like his father, a loyal Englishman, a supporter of the state, rather because he found it there established, and could see no better, than for any divine right which, in his father’s mind, and in the minds of so many Englishmen, the glorious British Constitution possesses. But the church was another affair. That question puzzled him sorely. That it might be a very fine institution, that it had given birth to many splendid minds, that it still possessed many very amiable and worthy followers, he did not deny; but that an institution which was at best a very mixed affair, which was not believed in by the majority of his countrymen, which had been patched, and stretched, and mended, and cobbled to meet the exigencies of every changing hour, which was not believed in even by so many of its professed members and teachers, was in any sense a divine institution, he could not concede. To his truthful mind, it dated from Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, not from Jesus Christ; it was simply in its present form an amiable machine of state, not a divine organization which should command the approving consent of all were it what men who believed in salvation ought to follow. As for the rest of the wrangling sects, he looked upon them as so many ecclesiastical tinkerings, better calculated to bore holes in the edifice of faith than to build up a system strong, enduring, and right.

Filled with thoughts of this description, he came home restless, dissatisfied, questioning; too true and too earnest to throw quite overboard all belief as a sham, and take the world as he found it—a mixture of good and bad, inexplicable save as a result of chance and conventionality. He visited the Cliffords, and they found laughing Dick Cranstone an altered man, somewhat graver, and evidently unsettled. One day, when his father was not present, he unbosomed himself to Mr. Clifford, who was a very intellectual man. The latter listened kindly to the boy, though he knew the story well; he had gone through it all himself. He did not try to explain matters there and then; he merely told him that what he was then experiencing was the exact counterpart of what he himself had experienced. “If you like to come over in a few days, I expect to have F. Leslie here, a Jesuit, and a convert like myself. He will explain matters to you much better than I can, if you are not afraid of meeting a Jesuit, Richard.”

Dick winced a little at this proposal; he had never in his life met with a Jesuit, and his opinion of the society was formed on what he had read of them as the most deceitful, crafty, and cunning set of men ever organized to blind men’s eyes and lead them astray from freedom and light; though, when he came to think the matter over, he could not bring to mind a single case of any of his friends who had come across them and been converted to Catholicity, as some of them had, turning out fiends or blind enthusiasts. So he resolved to meet F. Leslie.

It was the old story. After due inquiry and preparation, he was converted, and immediately after went straight to his father, and told him all.

To describe Ralph Cranstone’s wrath at the news would be impossible. He only saw one terrible fact—his family disgraced for ever in the person of their last descendant his son, from whom he had hoped so much. The line of the Cranstones was poisoned, defiled in the person of one who could thus turn traitor to his queen and country. A Cranstone a Papist! And that Cranstone his son Dick! He did not ask him to retract—he rose up and cursed the boy, and turned him out of the house.

Protestant friends, this part of the story, though inwoven with fiction, is a very hard fact. It is not of unfrequent occurrence; the writer to-day has friends who in their own persons can corroborate it.

Ralph Cranstone could have borne anything rather than this—that his son should turn Papist. He might become an infidel, and believe in no God at all; he might join any one he chose of the sects, however low; he might even turn Mussulman or Jew—but a Cranstone a Papist! Good God! it were better that he had never been born.

And so Ralph sat there looking out into the storm, where the form of his brave, handsome boy had vanished. He was conscious only of the storm raging in his own breast, of the terrible curse he had uttered out of his heart on the head of the one he had loved more, infinitely more, than himself. That curse was ringing around the room still, and seemed to mock him like a fiend. He rose at last, and staggered to his room, not noticing the tearful old housekeeper, who knew that something dreadful had happened, and who came timidly asking him to take something to eat, for the day had gone. His day had gone out with his boy, and the light of his life went out with Dick into the winter storm, to be swallowed up and buried away in it for ever.

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Dick had a hard time of it. He refused all offers of assistance tendered him by Mr. Clifford. He would not even go down to visit them; he would not appear in the neighborhood; for he could not meet his father again. He wrote to him many times, but his letters were always returned unopened. He soon received news from Mr. Clifford that his father had broken up his home, left the neighborhood, and gone no one knew whither. He could only pray for him to the God to whom, for the first time in his life, he found he could pray with a strong faith and earnest belief. He still would not go to the Cliffords’, though he corresponded with them from London, and saw them now and then when they came up. He had friends on the press, and with their assistance managed to eke out enough to live upon by means of his pen. He worked away, sustained, in his loss of father, fortune, and place, by the religion of Jesus Christ, discovering each day new wonders in an exhaustless region. His father he never heard from, nor gained any intelligence of his whereabouts, nor whether he was living or dead. The trial was a sore one, but he felt that perhaps he was in some small degree atoning for all the evils which had followed that first defection of his family from the religion to which they belonged. And so he worked away, and rose; for he had talent, and soon attained a position which relieved him from all fears of absolute want, though still poor enough.

The Cliffords were a great comfort to him, and the thought of Ada often inspired the weary pen to fresh exertion when it flagged from sheer fatigue. The more he found the love of her growing upon him, the more he avoided the presence of the family; for his poverty set a boundless sea, in his imagination, between himself and her. He excused himself for not calling on them by a thousand reasons—press of business, and the usual excuses; till at last their intercourse almost ceased, and poor Dick, laughing Dick, became wretchedly miserable, and began to look upon the world as a poor sort of place after all, while Cranstone Hall would force itself upon his mind, dreary and deserted, the garden weedy, and the oaks lonely, with that terrible, heartless curse hanging over all.

One night, while seated in his room thinking such thoughts as these, a hasty knock came to the door, and, opening it, the old housekeeper fell forward almost fainting in his arms, with the exclamation:

“O Master Richard! Master Richard, dear! he’s come back at last.”

Dick staggered as though the old woman’s trembling voice had been a giant’s arm which smote him.

“Yes, yes,” he murmured.

“For God’s sake and your dear mother’s, Master Richard, fly! He’s ill—he’s dying—he’s raving of you!... At the Hall.... Yes. Go, go, or you’ll be too late.”

He rushed into the street, she following him. The snow was falling again as bitterly as on the day when he last saw his father. The train, though it flew along, seemed to him to travel at a snail’s pace. The snow blocked the roads leading to the Hall: the chaise could not advance. He leaped out, unyoked one of the horses, bade the driver follow as best he could with the housekeeper, mounted the animal, and, by what means he never knew, found himself at the Hall. He was about to dash up to his father’s rooms, when a light in the library window attracted his attention. Mother of God! can that be his father?

The brown curls bleached to snow, the face white, and thin, and bloodless, the eyes staring wildly straight out of the window, the form shrunk, the mouth mumbling some incoherent words. The light of a candle shone full on his father’s face, altered to that of a ghost.

Dick entered trembling, uncertain whether it was a spirit or his father himself whom he saw before him.

“I want my boy, my Dick, my brave, handsome son. Bring him back to me. You stole him away. Where is he?”

“Father, he is here. Look at me, father. Here I am, Dick—your own son Dick, come back to you. Do you not know me?”

“You? You’re not my son. I’ve got no son. He went away from me. He hates his father—his poor father. I—I—cursed him, when I could have blessed him, and he believed me; and Dick’s gone—gone—gone.” And the poor creature moaned, and covered his crazed head with his hands, while the sharpest pang that ever rent his boy’s heart rent it at that moment with the thought that, perhaps, it was all his fault, and that, had he only forced himself upon him, his father might have forgiven him, all might have gone well, and he would not now have been summoned to the side of the lost wreck before him.

They bore him back to the bed whence he had stolen while those who should have watched him had dozed a little. The next day the Cliffords came over, and took up their abode in the old Hall, where Ada and her mother watched and tended the sufferer as only women can do. Dick was around them and about them, and in and out, and happy and miserable, and all contraries in a breath. Ada alone could set him right, and prevent him from going as mad as his father.

Ralph lay long between the two worlds. His strong reason; once forced out, seemed sullen to return. But it did come at last, and his weak eyes opened on his son, while the heart of the father, with all the pent-up feelings of these years, gushed out over his boy. He had gone away and wandered everywhere. He drank till his brain gave way, and only enough reason was left to lead him home to die.

But death seems a long way off from Ralph Cranstone yet. The saying is oftener than ever on people’s lips, “They’re as fond of each other as the two Cranstones.” Old Cranstone’s face—the Elizabethan—has taken a new scowl, for underneath his picture rises up an ivory crucifix which Ralph himself set there. The snow falls merrily and cheerily; the old oaks smile in their winter garb; no mist rises up from where the river runs. Yes; that’s young Ralph there dashing out of the hall door to meet his uncle and papa; there he goes climbing up uncle’s legs, and shaking him as though he were a telegraph post set up there for him to shake; and, if ever there was a happy couple, that couple is Ada and laughing Dick; and the old Cranstone frowns down on it all out of his dim canvas, for the Cranstone line has gone back to its old faith.

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[SONNET]

TO A BOOK OF IMAGINATION; OR, THE LITERATURE OF THE FUTURE.

Go forth, fair book! Go, countenanced like that man
Upon whose brow all Eden’s light was stayed;
Beauteous as truth, go forth to cheer and aid,
Breathing of greatness ours ere sin began;
With angel-wing from eyes earth-wearied fan
Convention’s mist; revive great hopes that fade;
Bid nature rule where reigned but masquerade;
Bear witness to the joy divine that ran
Down to Creation’s heart, while, bending o’er it,
The great Creator saw that all was good—
The mightier joy, when, dying to restore it,
He rose who washed it in his conquering blood.
Go forth, a seer in minstrel raiment clad;
Say to the meek, “Be strong”; the poor, “Be glad!”

—Aubrey de Vere.

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[THE PRESENT GREATNESS OF THE PAPACY.]

FROM THE CIVILTA CATTOLICA.