The Catholic World, Vol. 22, October, 1875, to March, 1876 / A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science

by Various

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.

CHAPTER XI.
A DINNER AT THE COURT, WITH AN EPISODE.

Crossing from the station to his brougham, Sir Simon saw Mr. Langrove issuing from a cottage on the road. The vicar had been detained later than he foresaw on a sick-call, and was hurrying home to dress for dinner. It was raining sharply. Sir Simon hailed him:

“Shall I give you a lift, Langrove?”

“Thank you; I shall be very glad. I am rather late as it is.” And they got into the brougham together.

“And how wags the world with you, my reverend friend? Souls being saved in great numbers, eh?” inquired the baronet when they had exchanged their friendly greetings.

“Humph! I am thankful not to have the counting of them,” was the reply, with a shake of the head that boded ill for the sanctification of Dullerton.

“That’s it, is it? Well, we are all going down the hill together; there is some comfort in that. But how about Miss Bulpit? Don’t her port wine and tracts snatch a few brands from the burning?”

“For the love of heaven don’t speak to me of her! Don’t, I beg of you!” entreated the vicar, throwing up his hands deprecatingly, and moved from the placid propriety that seemed a law of nature to him.

“Suppose I had good news to report of her?”

“How so?” cried Mr. Langrove with sudden vivacity. “She’s not going to marry Sparks, is she?”

“Not just yet; but the next best thing to that. She is going to leave the neighborhood.”

“You don’t mean it!”

“I do indeed. How is it you’ve not heard of it before? She’s been pestering Anwyll these two years about some repairs or improvements she wants done in her house—crotchets, I dare say, that would have to be pulled to pieces for the next tenant. He has always politely referred her to his agent, which means showing her to the door; but at last she threatened to leave if he did not give in and do what she wants.”

“Oh! is that all?” exclaimed the vicar, crestfallen. “I might have waited a little before I hallooed; we are not out of the woods yet. Anwyll is sure to give in rather than let her go.”

“Nothing of the sort. He dislikes the old lady, and so does his mother, and so particularly does your venerable confrère of Rydal Rectory. I met Anwyll this morning at the club, and he told me he had made up his mind to let her go. It happens—luckily for you, I suspect—that he has a tenant in view to take her place. Come, now, cheer up! Is not that good news?”

“Most excellent!” said the vicar emphatically. “I wonder where she will move to?”

“Perhaps I could tell you that too. She is in treaty with Charlton for a dilapidated old hunting lodge of his in the middle of a fir-wood the other side of Axmut Common, about twenty miles the other side of Moorlands; it is as good as settled, I believe, and if so we are all safe from her.”

“Well, you do surprise me!” exclaimed Mr. Langrove, his countenance expanding into a breadth of satisfaction that was absolutely radiant. “Who is the incumbent of Axmut, let me see?” he said, musing.

“There is as good as none; it is a lonely spot, with no church within ten miles, I believe. I shrewdly suspect this was the main attraction; for the life of him, Charlton says, he can’t see any other. It is a tumble-down, fag-end-of-the-world-looking place as you would find in all England. It must be the clear coast for ‘dealing with souls,’ as she calls it, that baited her. There is a community of over a hundred poor people, something of the gypsy sort, scattered over the common and in a miserable little hamlet they call the village; so she may preach away to her heart’s content, and no one to compete or interfere with her but the blacksmith, who rants every Sunday under a wooden shed, or on a tub on the common, according to the state of the weather.”

“Capital! That’s just the place for her!” was the vicar’s jubilant remark.

In spite of the pleasure that lit up his features, usually so mild and inexpressive, Sir Simon, looking closely at the vicar, thought him worn and aged. “You look tired, Langrove. You are overworked, or else Miss Bulpit has been too much for you; which is it?” he said kindly.

“A little of both, perhaps,” the vicar laughed. “I have felt the recent cold a good deal; the cold always pulls me down. I’ll be all right when the spring comes round and hunts the rheumatism out of my bones,” he added, moving his arm uncomfortably.

“You ought to do like the swallow—migrate to a warm climate before the cold sets in,” observed Sir Simon; “nothing else dislodges rheumatism.”

“That’s just what Blink was saying to me this morning. He urged me very strongly to go away for a couple of months now to get out of the way of the east winds. He wants me to take a trip to the South of France.” Mr. Langrove laughed gently as he said this.

“And why don’t you?”

“Because I can’t afford it.”

“Nonsense, nonsense! Take it first, and afford it afterwards. That’s my maxim.”

“A very convenient maxim for you, but not so practicable for an incumbent with a large family and a short income as for the landlord of Dullerton,” said Mr. Langrove good-humoredly.

The baronet winced.

“Prudence and economy are all very well,” he replied, “but they may be carried too far; your health is worth more to you than any amount of money. If you want the change, you should take it and pay the price.”

“I suppose we might have most things, if we choose to take them on those terms,” remarked the vicar. “‘Take it and pay the price!’ says the poet; but some prices are too high for any value. Who would do my work while I was off looking after my health? Is that Bourbonais hurrying up the hill? He will get drenched; he has no umbrella.”

“Like him to go out a day like this without one,” said Sir Simon in an accent of fond petulance. “How is he? How is Franceline? How does she look?”

“Poorly enough. If she were my child, I should be very uneasy about her.”

“Ha! does Bourbonais seem uneasy? Do you see much of him?”

“No; not through my fault, nor indeed through his. We have each our separate work, and these winter days are short. I met him this morning coming out of Blink’s as I went in. I did not like his look; he had his hat pulled over his eyes, and when I spoke to him he answered me as if he hardly knew who I was or what he was saying.”

“And you did not ask if there was anything amiss?” said Sir Simon in a tone of reproach.

“I did, but not him. I asked Blink.”

“Ha! what did he say?” And the baronet bent forward for the answer with an eager look.

“Nothing very definite—you know his grandiloquent, vague talk—but he said something about hereditary taint on the lungs; and I gathered that he thought it was a mistake not having taken her to a warm climate immediately after that accident to her chest; but whether the mistake was his or the count’s I could not quite see. I imagine from what he said that there was a money difficulty in the way, or he thought there was, and did not, perhaps, urge the point as strongly as he otherwise would.”

Sir Simon fell back on the cushions, muttering some impatient exclamation.

“That was perhaps a case where the maxim of ‘take it first and afford it afterwards’ would seem justifiable,” observed Mr. Langrove.

“Of course it was! But Bourbonais is such an unmanageable fellow in those things. The strongest necessity will never extract one iota of a sacrifice of principle from him; you might as well try to bend steel.”

“He has always given me the idea of a man of a very high sense of honor, very scrupulous in doing what he considers his duty,” said Mr. Langrove.

“He is, he is,” assented the baronet warmly; “he is the very ideal and epitome of honor and high principle. Not to save his life would he swerve one inch from the straight road; but to save Franceline I fancied he might have been less rigid.” He heaved a sigh, and they said no more until the brougham let Sir Simon down at his own door, and then drove on to take Mr. Langrove to the vicarage.

A well-known place never appears so attractive as when we look at it for the last time. An indifferent acquaintance becomes pathetic when seen through the softening medium of a last look. It is like breaking off a fraction of our lives, snapping a link that can never be joined again. A sea-side lodging, if it can claim one sweet or sad memory with our passing sojourn there, wears a touching aspect when we come to say “good-by,” with the certainty that we shall never see the place again. But how if the spot has been the cradle of our childhood, the home of our fathers for generations, where every stone is like a monument inscribed with sacred and dear memories? Sir Simon was not a sentimental man; but all the tenderness common to good, affectionate, cultivated natures had its place in his heart. He had always loved the old home. He was proud of it as one of the finest and most ancient houses of his class in England; he admired its grand and noble proportions, its architectural strength and beauty; and he had the reverence for it that every well-born man feels for the place where his fathers were born, and where they have lived and died. But never had the lordly Gothic mansion looked to him so home-like as on this cold January evening when he entered it, in all human probability, for the last time. It was brilliantly lighted up to welcome him. The servants, men and women, were assembled in the hall to meet him. It was one of those old-fashioned patriarchal customs that were kept up at the Court, where so many other old customs survived, unhappily less harmless than this. As Sir Simon passed through the two rows of glad, respectful faces, he had a pleasant word for all, as if his heart were free from care.

The hall was a sombre, cathedral-like apartment that needed floods of light to dispel its oppressive solemnity. To-night it was filled with a festal breadth of light; the great chandelier that hung from the groined roof was in a blaze, while the bronze figures all around supported clusters of lamps that gleamed like silver balls against the dark wainscoting. The dining-room and library, which opened to the right, stood open, and displayed a brilliant illumination of lamps and wax-lights. Huge fires burned hospitably on all the hearths. The table was ready spread; silver and crystal shone and sparkled on the snowy damask; flowers scented the air as in a garden. Sir Simon glanced at it all as he passed. Could it be that he was going to leave all this, never to behold it again? It seemed impossible that it could be true.

As he stood once more in the midst of his household gods, those familiar divinities whose gentle power he had never fully recognized until now, it seemed to him that he was safe. There was an unaccountable sense of security in their mere presence; they smiled on him, and seemed to promise protection for their shrine and their votary.

The baronet went straight to his room, made a hasty toilet, and came down to the library to await his guests.

He was in hopes that Raymond would have come before the others, and that they might have a little talk together. But Raymond was behind them all. Everybody was assembled, the dinner was waiting, and he had not yet arrived.

It was a mere chance that he came at all. Nothing, in fact, but the dread of awakening Franceline’s suspicions had withheld him from sending an excuse at the last moment; but that dread, which so controlled his life in every act, almost in every thought, compelling him to hide his feelings under a mask of cheerfulness when his heart was breaking, drove him out to join the merry-makers. It was all true what Mr. Langrove had said. There had been a return of the spitting of blood that morning, very slight, but enough to frighten Angélique and hurry her off with her charge to the doctor. He had talked vaguely about debility—nervous system unstrung—no vital mischief so far; the lungs were safe. The old woman was soothed, and went home resolved to do what was to be done without alarming her master or telling him what had occurred. She counted, however, without Miss Merrywig. That pleasant old lady happened from the distance to see them coming from the doctor’s house, and, on meeting the count next morning, asked what report there was of Franceline. Raymond went straight to Blink’s.

“I ask you as a man of honor to tell me the truth,” he said; “it is a matter of life and death to me to know it.”

The medical man answered his question by another: “Tell me frankly, are you in a position to take her immediately to a warm climate? I should prefer Cairo; but if that is impossible, can you take her to the South of France?”

Raymond’s heart stood still. Cairo! It had come to this, then.

“I can take her to Cairo,” he said, speaking deliberately after a moment’s silence. “I will take her at once.”

He thought of Sir Simon’s blank check. He would make use of it. He would save his child; at least he would keep her with him a few years longer. “Why did you not tell me this sooner?” he asked in a tone of quick resentment.

“I did not believe it to be essential. I thought from the first it would have been desirable; but you may recollect, when I suggested taking her even to the South of France, your daughter opposed the idea with great warmth, and you were silent. I inferred that there was some insuperable obstacle in the way, and that it would have been cruel as well as useless to press the matter.”

“And you say it is not too late?”

“No. I give you my word, as far as I can see, it is not. The return of the spitting of blood is a serious symptom, but the lungs as yet are perfectly sound.” M. de la Bourbonais went home, and opened the drawer where he kept the blank check; not with the idea of filling it up there and then—he must consider many things first—but he wanted to see it, to make sure it was not a dream. He examined it attentively, and replaced it in the drawer. A gleam of satisfaction broke out on the worn, anxious face. But it vanished quickly. His eye fell on Sir Simon’s letter of the day before. He snatched it up and read it through again. A new and horrible light was breaking on him. Sir Simon was a ruined man; he was going to be turned out of house and home; he was a bankrupt. What was his signature worth? So much waste paper. He could not have a sixpence at his bankers’ or anywhere else; if he had, it was in the hands of the creditors who were to seize his house and lands. “Why did he give it to me? He must have known it was worth nothing!” thought Raymond, his eyes wandering over the letter with a gaze of bewildered misery.

But Sir Simon had not known it. It was not the first time he had overdrawn his account with his bankers; but they were an old-fashioned firm, good Tories like himself. The Harnesses had banked with them from time immemorial, and there existed between them and their clients of this type a sort of adoption. If Sir Simon was in temporary want of ready money, it was their pleasure as much as their business to accommodate him; the family acres were broad and fat. Sir Simon was on friendly but not on confidential terms with his bankers; they knew nothing of the swarm of leeches that were fattening on those family acres, so there was no fear in their minds as to the security of whatever accommodation he might ask at their hands. When Sir Simon signed the check he felt certain it would be honored for any amount that Raymond was likely to fill it up for. But since then things had come to a crisis; his signature was now worth nothing. Lady Rebecca, on whose timely departure from this world of care he had counted so securely as the means of staving off a catastrophe, had again disappointed him, and the evil hour so long dreaded and so often postponed had come. Little as Raymond knew of financial mysteries, he was too intelligent not to guess that a man on the eve of being made a bankrupt could have no current account at his bankers’. Dr. Blink’s decree was, then, the death-warrant of his child! Raymond buried his face in his hands in an agony too deep for tears. But the sound of Franceline’s step on the stairs roused him. For her sake he must even now look cheerful; love is a tyrant that allows no quarter to self. She came in and found her father busy, writing away as if absorbed in his work. She knew his moods. Evidently he did not want her just now; she would not disturb him, but drew her little stool to the chimney corner and began to read. An hour passed. It was time for her father to dress for dinner; but still the sound of the pen scratching the paper went on diligently.

“Petit père, it is half-past six, do you know?” said the bright, silvery voice, and Raymond started as if he had been stung.

“So late, is it? Then I must be off at once.” And he hurried away to dress, and only looked in to kiss her as he ran down-stairs, and was off.

“Loiterer!” exclaimed Sir Simon, stretching out both hands and clasping his friend’s cordially.

“I have kept you waiting, I fear. The fact is, I got writing and forgot the hour,” said the count apologetically.

Dinner was announced immediately, and the company went into the dining-room.

They were a snug number, seven in all; the only stranger amongst them being a Mr. Plover, who happened to be staying at Moorlands. He was an unprepossessing-looking man, sallow, keen-eyed, and with a mouth that superficial observers would have called firm, but which a physiognomist might have described as cruel. His hair was dyed, his teeth were false—a shrunken, shrivelled-looking creature, whose original sap and verdure, if he ever had any, had been parched up by the fire of tropical suns. He had spent many years in India, and was now only just returned from Palestine. What he had been doing there nobody particularly understood. He talked of his studies in geology, but they seemed to have been chiefly confined to the study of such stones as had a value in the general market; he had a large collection of rubies, sapphires, and diamonds, some of which he had shown to Mr. Charlton, and excited his wonder as to the length of the purse that could afford to collect such costly souvenirs of foreign lands simply as souvenirs. Mr. Plover had met his host accidentally a week ago, and discovered that he and the father of the latter had been school-fellows. The son was not in a position either to verify or disprove the assertion, but Mr. Plover was so fresh in his affectionate recollection of his old form-fellow that young Charlton’s heart warmed to him, and he then and there invited him down to Moorlands. He could not do otherwise than ask Sir Simon to include him in his invitation to the Court this evening; but he did it reluctantly. He was rather ashamed of his pompous, self-sufficient friend, whose transparent faith in the power and value of money gave a dash of vulgarity to his manners, which was heightened by contrast with the well-bred simplicity of the rest of the company. He had not been ten minutes in the room when he informed them that he meant to buy an estate if he could find an eligible one in this neighborhood; if not, he would rent the first that was to be had on a long lease. He wanted to be near his young friend Charlton. Sir Simon was extremely civil to him—surprisingly so.

The other faces we know: Mr. Langrove, bland, serious, mildly exhilarated just now, like a man suddenly relieved of a toothache—Miss Bulpit was going from the parish; Mr. Charlton running his turquois ring through his curly light hair, and agreeing with everybody all round; Lord Roxham, well-bred and lively; Sir Ponsonby Anwyll, a pleasant sample of the English squire, blond-visaged, good-tempered, burly-limbed, and displaying a vast amount of shirt-front; M. de la Bourbonais, a distinct foreign type, amidst these familiar English ones, the face furrowed with deep lines of study, of care too, unmistakably, the forehead moulded to noble thought, the eyes deep-set under strong projecting black brows, their latent fire flashing out through the habitually gentle expression when he grew animated. He was never a talkative man in society, and to-night he was more silent than usual; but no one noticed this, not even Sir Simon. He was too much absorbed in his own preoccupation. Raymond sat opposite him as his alter ego, doing the honors of one side of the hospitable round table.

The conversation turned at first on generalities and current events; the presence of Mr. Plover, instead of feeding it with a fresh stream, seemed to check the flow and prevent its becoming intimate and personal. Sir Simon felt this, and took it in his own hands and kept it going, so that, if not as lively as usual, it did not flag. Raymond looked on and listened in amazement. Was yesterday’s letter a dream, and would this supreme crisis vanish as lesser ones had so often done? Was it possible that a man could be so gay—so, to all appearance, contented and unconcerned, on the very brink of ruin, disgrace, beggary, banishment—all, in a word, that to a man of the baronet’s character and position constitute existence? He was not in high spirits. Raymond would not so much have wondered at that. High spirits are sometimes artificial; people get them up by stimulants as a cloak for intense depression. No, it was real cheerfulness and gayety. Was there any secret hope bearing him up to account for the strange anomaly? Raymond could speculate on this in the midst of his own burning anxiety; but for the first time in his life bitterness mingled with his sympathy for the baronet. Was it not all his own doing, this disgrace that had overtaken him? He had been an unprincipled spendthrift all his life, and now the punishment had come, and was swallowing up others in its ruin. If he had not been the reckless, extravagant man that he was, he might at this moment be a harbor of refuge to Raymond, and save his child from a premature death. But he was powerless to help any one. This is what his slavish human respect had brought himself and others to. A few hundred pounds might save, or at any rate prolong for perhaps many years, the life of the child he professed to love as his own, and he had not them to give; he had squandered his splendid patrimony in the most contemptible vanity, in selfish indulgence and unprofitable show. And there he sat, a piece of tinsel glittering like true gold, affable, jovial, as if care were a hundred miles away from him. M. de la Bourbonais felt as if he were in a dream, as if everything were unreal—everything except the vulture that was gnawing silently at his own heart.

The conversation grew livelier as the wine went round. Mr. Plover was attending carefully to his dinner, and was content to let others do the most of the talking. A discussion arose as to a case of something very like perjury that a magistrate of the next county had been involved in. Some were warmly defending, while others as warmly condemned, him. Mr. Plover suspended the diligence of his knife and fork to join with the latter; he was almost aggressive in his manner of contradicting the other side. The story was this: A magistrate had to judge a case of libel where the accused was a friend of his own, who had saved him from being made a bankrupt some years before by lending him a large sum of money without interest or security. The evidence broke down, and the man was acquitted. It transpired, however, a few days later, that the magistrate had in his possession at the time of the trial proof positive of his friend’s guilt. In answer to this charge he replied that the evidence in question had come to his knowledge under the seal of confidence; that he was therefore bound in honor not only not to divulge it, but to ignore its existence in forming his judgment on the case. The statement was denied, and it was affirmed that the only seal which bound him was one of gratitude, and that he was otherwise perfectly free to make use of his information to condemn the accused.

The dispute as to the right and the wrong of the question was growing hot, when Sir Ponsonby Anwyll, who noticed how silent Raymond was, called out to him across the table:

“And what do you say, count?”

“I should say that gratitude in such a case might stand in the place of a verbal promise and compel the judge to be silent,” replied Raymond.

“The temptation to silence was very strong, no doubt, but would it justify him in pronouncing an acquittal against his conscience?” asked Mr. Langrove.

“It was not against his conscience,” replied the count; “on the contrary, it was in accordance with it, since it was on the side of mercy.”

“Quite a French view of the subject!” said Mr. Plover superciliously, showing his shining teeth through his coal-black moustache. “If I were a criminal, commend me to a French jury; but if innocent, give me an English one!”

“Mercy has perhaps too much the upper hand with our tender-hearted neighbors,” observed Sir Simon; “but justice is none the worse for being tempered with it.”

“That is neither here nor there,” said Mr. Plover. “Justice is justice, and law is law; and it strikes me this Mr. X—— has tampered with both, and it’s a very strange thing if he is not tabooed as a perjurer who has dodged the letter of the law and escaped the hulks, but whom no gentleman ought from this out to associate with.”

“Come, come, that is rather strong language,” said Mr. Langrove. “We must not outlaw on mere inferential evidence a man who has borne all his life a most honorable name; and if worse comes to worst, we must remember it would go hard with the best of us to put a social brand on a friend that we were deeply indebted to, if we could by any possibility find a loophole of escape for him. A man may remain strictly honest in the main, and yet not be heroic enough not to save a friend on a quibble.”

“Why, to be sure; there are honest men and honest men,” assented Plover. “I’ve known some whose moral capacity expanded to camels when expediency demanded the feat and it could be done discreetly. It’s astounding what some of these honest men can swallow.”

Sir Simon felt what this speech implied of impertinence to Mr. Langrove, and, indeed, to everybody present. “Roxham,” he said irrelevantly, “why is your glass empty? Bourbonais, are you passing those delectable little patés de foie gras?”

Raymond helped himself mechanically, as the servant presented again the rejected dish.

“It would be a nice thing to define exactly the theory of truth and its precise limits,” observed Mr. Langrove in his serious, sententious way, addressing himself to no one in particular.

“One should begin by defining the nature of truth, I suppose,” said Mr. Plover. “Let us have a definition from our host!”

“Oh! if you are going in for metaphysics, I hand you over to Bourbonais!” said Sir Simon good-humoredly. “Take the pair of them in hand, Raymond, and run them through the body for our edification.”

Raymond smiled.

“I should very much like to have the count’s opinion on this particular point of metaphysics or morals, whichever it may be,” said Mr. Plover. “Do you believe it possible for a man to effect such a compromise with his conscience, and yet be, as our reverend friend describes him, a blameless and upright man?”

“I do,” answered M. de la Bourbonais with quiet emphasis. “I doubt if any simple incident can with safety be taken as the key of a man’s character. One fault, for instance, may stand out in his life and color it with dishonor, and yet be a far less trustworthy index to his real nature than, a very slight fault committed deliberately and involving no consequences. We are more deliberate in little misdeeds than in great ones. When a man commits a crime, he is not always a free agent as regards the command of his moral forces; there are generally a horde of external influences at work overpowering his choice, which is in reality his individual self. When he succumbs to this pressure from without, we cannot therefore logically consider him as the sole and deliberate architect of his sin; hard necessity, fear of disgrace, love of life, nay, some generous feeling, such as gratitude or pity, may hurry a man into a criminal action as completely at variance with the whole of his previous and subsequent life as would be the act of a Christian flinging himself out of the window in a fit of temporary insanity.”

“Subtly put,” sneered Mr. Plover. “If we were to follow up that theory, we might find it necessary on investigation to raise statues to our forgers and murderers, instead of sending them to the hulks and the gallows.”

“It opens a curious train of thought, nevertheless,” remarked Lord Roxham.

“I don’t fancy it would be a very profitable one to pursue,” said Plover.

“I have sometimes considered whether it may not on given occasions be justifiable to do evil; I mean technically evil, as we class things,” said Lord Roxham.

“For instance?” said Mr. Langrove.

“Well, for instance—I’ll put it mildly—to convey a false idea of facts, as your friend X—— seems to have done in this libel business. I suppose there are cases where it would be morally justifiable?”

“To tell a lie, you mean? That is a startling proposition,” said the vicar, smiling.

“It has the merit of originality, at least,” observed Mr. Plover, helping himself to a tumblerful of claret.

“I’m afraid it can’t boast even that,” said Lord Roxham; “it is only an old sophism rather bluntly put.”

“I should like to hear the Count de la Bourbonais’ opinion on it,” said Mr. Plover, rolling the decanter across to his self-elected antagonist.

Raymond had feigned unconsciousness of the stranger’s insolent tone thus far, though he had detected it from the first, and was only too deeply possessed by other thoughts to resent it or to care a straw for what this stranger or any human being thought of him or said to him. But the persistency of the attack forced him to notice it at last, if not to repel it; he was not sufficiently interested in the thing for that. But he was roused from the kind of stinging lethargy in which he had hitherto sat there, nibbling at one thing or another, oftener playing with his knife and fork, and touching nothing. He laid them down now, and pushed aside his glass, which had been emptied to-night oftener than was his wont.

“You mean to ask,” he said, “if, according to our low French code of morals, we consider it justifiable to commit a crime for the sake of some good to ourselves or others?”

“I don’t go quite that length,” replied Mr. Plover; “but I assume from what you have already said that you look on it as permissible to—tell a lie, for example, under given circumstances.”

“I do,” said Raymond.

There was a murmur of surprise and dissent.

“My dear Bourbonais! you are joking, or talking for the mere sake of argument,” cried Sir Simon, forcing a laugh; but he looked vexed and astonished.

“I am not joking, nor am I arguing for argument’s sake,” protested Raymond with rising warmth. “I say, and I am prepared to prove it, that under given circumstances we are justified in withholding the truth—in telling a lie, if you like that way of putting it better.”

“What are they?”

“Prove it!”

“Let us hear!”

Several spoke together, excited and surprised, and every head was bent towards M. de la Bourbonais. Raymond moved his spectacles, and, fixing his dark gray eyes on Mr. Plover as the one who had directly challenged him, he said:

“Let us take an illustration. Suppose you entrust me with that costly diamond ring upon your finger, I having promised on my oath to carry it to a certain person and to keep its possession a secret. We will suppose that your life and your honor depend on its being delivered at its destination by me and at a given time. On my way thither I meet an assassin, who puts his pistol to my breast and says, ‘Deliver up your purse and a diamond which I understand you have on your person, or I shoot you and take them; but if you give me your word that you have not got it, I will believe you and let you go.’ Am I not justified, in order to save your honor and life and my own in answering, ‘No, I have not got the diamond’?”

“Certainly not!” cried Plover emphatically, bringing his jewelled hand down on the table with a crash.

“My dear sir!…” began some one; but Raymond echoed sharply:

“‘Certainly not!’ Just so. But suppose I draw my pistol and shoot the robber dead on the spot? God and the law absolve me; I have a right to kill any man who threatens my life or my property, or that of my neighbor.”

“You have! Undoubtedly you have!” said two or three, speaking together.

“And yet homicide is a greater sin than a lie!” cried Raymond. He was flushed and excited; his eye sparkled and his hand trembled as he pushed the glasses farther away, and leaned on the table, surveying the company with a glance that had something of triumph and something of defiance in it.

“Well done, Bourbonais!” cried Sir Simon. “You’ve not left Plover an inch of ground to stand on!”

“Closely reasoned,” said Mr. Langrove, with a dubious movement of the head; “but.…”

“Sophistry! a very specious bit of sophistry!” said Mr. Plover in a loud voice, drowning everybody else’s. “Comte and Rousseau and the rest of them in a nutshell.”

“Crack it, then, and let’s have the kernel!” said Lord Roxham. He was growing out of patience with the dictatorial tone of this vulgar man.

“Just so!” chimed in Mr. Charlton, airing a snowy hand and signet gem, and falling back in his chair with the air of a man wearied with hard thinking.

“It’s too preposterous to answer,” was Plover’s evasive taunt; “it’s mere casuistry.”

“A very compact bit of casuistry, at any rate,” said Sir Simon, with friendly pride in Raymond’s manifest superiority over his assembled guests; “it strikes me it would take more than our combined wits to answer it.”

“Egad! I’d eat my head before I’d answer it!” confessed Ponsonby Anwyll, who shared the baronet’s personal complacency in the count’s superior brain. But Raymond had lapsed into his previous silent mood, and sat absently toying with a plate of bonbons before him, and apparently deaf to the clashing of tongues that he had provoked. There was something very touching in his look, in the air of gentle dejection that pervaded him, and which contrasted strikingly with the transient warmth he had displayed while speaking. Sir Simon noticed it, and it smote him to the heart. For the first time this evening he bethought him how his own cheerfulness must strike Raymond, and how he must be puzzled to account for it. He promised himself the pleasure of explaining it to his satisfaction before they parted to-night; but meanwhile it gave him a pang to think of the iron that was in his friend’s soul, though it was part of his pleasant expectation that he would be able to draw it out and pour some healing balm on the wound to-morrow. He would show him why he had borne so patiently with the vulgar pedagogue who had permitted himself to fail, at least by insinuation, in respect to M. de la Bourbonais. The pedagogue meanwhile seemed bent on making himself disagreeable to the inoffensive foreigner.

“It is a pity X—— was not able to secure Count de la Bourbonais as counsel,” he began again. “In the hands of so skilful a casuist his backsliding might have come out quite in a heroic light. It would have been traced to his poverty, which engendered his gratitude, and so on until we had a verdict that would have been virtually a glorification of impecuniosity. It is a pity we have missed the treat.”

“Poverty is no doubt responsible for many backslidings,” said Raymond, bridling imperceptibly. He felt the sting of the remark as addressed to him by the rich man, or he fancied he did. “The world would no doubt be better as well as happier if riches were more equally divided; but there are worse things in the world than poverty, for all that.”

“There is the excess of riches, which is infinitely worse—a more unmitigated source of evil, taking it all in all,” said Mr. Langrove.

“Well said for a professional, my dear sir,” laughed Mr. Plover; “but you won’t find many outsiders to agree with you, I suspect.”

“If by outsiders you mean Turks, Jews, and Hottentots, I daresay you are right,” said the vicar good-temperedly.

“I mean every sensible man who is not bound by his cloth to talk cant—no offence; I use the word technically—you won’t find one such out of a thousand to deny that riches are the best gift of heaven, the one that can buy every other worth having—love and devotion into the bargain.”

“What rank heresy you are propounding, my dear sir!” exclaimed Sir Simon, taking a pinch from his enamelled snuff-box, and passing it on. “You will not find one sane man in a thousand to agree with you!”

“Won’t I though? What do you say, count?”

“I agree with you, monsieur,” said Raymond with a certain asperity; “money can purchase most things worth having, but I deny that it can always pay for them.”

“Ha! there we have the sophist again. It can buy, and yet it can’t pay. Pray explain!”

“What do you mean, Raymond?” said Sir Simon, darting a curious, puzzled look at his friend.

“It is very simple. I mean that money may sometimes enable us to confer an obligation which no money can repay. We may, for instance, do a service or avert a sorrow by means of a sum of money, and thus purchase love and gratitude—things which Mr. Plover has included in those worth having, and which money cannot pay for, though it may be the means of buying them.” The look that accompanied the answer said more to Sir Simon than the words conveyed to any one else. He averted his eyes quickly, and was all at once horrified to discover several empty glasses round the table. They were at dessert now.

“Charlton, have you tried that Madeira? Help yourself again, and pass it on here, will you? I shall have to play Ganymede, and go round pouring out the nectar to you like so many gods, if you don’t bestir yourselves.”

And then there was a clinking of glasses, as the amber and ruby liquid was poured from many a curious flagon into the glistening crystal cups.

“Talking of gods, that’s a god’s eye that you see there on Plover’s finger,” observed Mr. Charlton, whose azure gem was quite eclipsed by the flashing jewel that had suggested M. de la Bourbonais’ illustration. “It was set in the forehead of an Indian idol. Just let Sir Simon look at it; he’s a judge of precious stones,” said the young man, who felt that his feeble personality gained something from the proximity of so big a personage, and was anxious to show him off. The latter complacently drew the ring from his finger and tossed it over to his host. It was a large white diamond of the purest water, without the shadow of a flaw.

“It is a beauty!” exclaimed Sir Simon with the enthusiasm of a connoisseur; “only it’s too good to be worn by a man. It ought to have gone to a beautiful woman when it left the god. I suppose it will soon, eh, Plover?”

Mr. Plover laughed. He was not a marrying man, he said, but he would make no rash vows. Then he went on to tell about other precious stones in his possession. He had some amazingly sensational stories to relate concerning them and how he became possessed of them. We generally interest others when we get on a subject that thoroughly interests ourselves and that we thoroughly understand. Mr. Plover understood a great deal about these legendary gems, and the celebrated idols in which they had figured; he had, moreover, imbibed a certain tinge of Oriental superstition concerning the talismanic properties of precious gems, and invested them, perhaps half unconsciously, with that kind of prestige that is not very far off from worship. This flavor of superstition pierced unawares through his discourse on the qualities and adventures of various rubies and sapphires that had played stirring parts in the destinies of particular gods, and were universally believed to influence for good or evil the lives of mortals who became possessed of them.

The company began to find him less disagreeable as he went on. They did not quite believe in him; but when a story-teller amuses us, we are not apt to quarrel with him for using a traveller’s privilege and drawing the long bow.

By the time this vein was exhausted the party had quite forgiven the obnoxious guest, and admitted him within the sympathetic ring of good-fellowship and conviviality. M. de la Bourbonais had become unusually talkative, and contributed his full share to the ebb and flow of lively repartee. He was generally as abstemious as an anchorite; but to-night he broke through his ascetic habits, and filled and refilled his glass many times. It was deep drinking for him, though for any one else it would have been reckoned moderate. Before the dessert was long on the table the effect of the wine was visible in his excited manner and the shrill tone of his voice, that rose high and sharp above the others in a way that was quite foreign to his gentleness. Sir Simon saw this, and at once divined the cause. It gave him a new pang. Poor Raymond! Driven to this to keep his misery from bursting out and overwhelming him!

“Shall we finish our cigars here or in the library?” asked the baronet when his own tired limbs suggested that a change of posture might be generally agreeable.

As by tacit consent, the chairs were all pushed back and everybody rose. The clock in the hall was striking ten.

“Do you know I think I must be going?” said Mr. Langrove. “Time slips quickly by in pleasant company; I had no idea it was so late!”

“Nonsense! you are not going to leave us yet!” protested Sir Simon. “Don’t mind the clocks here; they’re on wheels.”

“Are they?” said the vicar, and innocently pulled out his watch to compare it with the loud chime that was still trembling in the air. “Humph! I see your wheels are five minutes slower than mine!” he said, with a nod and a laugh at his prevaricating host.

“Come, now, Langrove, never mind the time. ‘Hours were made for slaves,’ you know. Come in and have another cigar,” urged Sir Simon.

But the vicar was firm.

“Then I may as well go with you,” said M. de la Bourbonais; “it’s late already for me to be out.”

Sir Simon was beginning to protest, when his attention was called away by Lord Roxham.

“Have you that diamond ring, Harness?”

“What ring? Plover’s? No; I passed it to you to look at, and it didn’t come round to me again. Can it not be found?”

“Oh! it’s sure to turn up in a minute!” said Mr. Plover. “It has slipped under the edge of a plate, very likely!” And he went to the table and began to look for it.

“Come, let us be going, as we are going,” said M. de la Bourbonais to the vicar, and he went towards the door.

“Wait a bit,” replied Mr. Langrove—“wait a moment, Bourbonais; we must see the end of this.”

“What have we to see in it? It is no concern of ours,” was the slightly impatient rejoinder. Raymond was in that state of unnatural excitement when the least trifle that crosses us chafes and irritates. He had nothing for it, however, but to comply with the vicar’s fancy and wait.

“Most extraordinary!” Sir Simon exclaimed, as crystal dishes and porcelain plates were lifted and moved, and silver filigree baskets overturned and their delicate fruits sent rolling in every direction. “It must have dropped; stand aside, everybody, while I look under the table.” Every one drew off. Sir Simon flung up the ends of the snowy cloth, and, taking a chandelier with several lights, set it on the floor and began carefully to examine the carpet; but the ring was nowhere to be seen.

“If it is here, it is certain to be seen,” he said, still bent down. “Look out, all of you, as you stand; you may see it flash better in the distance.”

But no flash was anywhere visible. The wax-lights discovered nothing brighter than the subdued colors of the rich Persian carpet. Sir Simon went round to the other side of the table, and searched with the same care and the same result.

“You are not an absent man, are you?” he said, lifting the chandelier from the ground, and addressing the owner of the missing ring. “You are not capable of slipping it into your pocket unawares?”

“I never did such a thing in my life; but that is no reason why I may not have done it now. Old wine sometimes plays the deuce with one,” said Mr. Plover, and he began to rummage his pockets and turn their contents on to the table-cloth. Its whiteness threw every article into vivid relief; but there was no ring.

“This is very singular, very extraordinary indeed!” said Sir Simon in a sharp tone of annoyance. “Is any one hoaxing? Charlton, you’re not playing a trick on us, are you?”

“What should I play such a stupid trick as that for?” demanded the young man. “I’m not such an idiot; but here goes! Let us have my pockets on the table too!”

And following his friend’s example, he turned them inside out, coat, waistcoat, and trousers pockets in succession; but no ring appeared.

“It is time we all followed suit,” said Sir Simon, and he cleared a larger space by sweeping away plates and glasses. “I am given to absence of mind myself, and, as you say, I may have taken a glass more than was good for me.”

As he spoke he turned out one pocket after another, with no other result than to show the solidity and unblemished freshness of the linings; there was not a slit or the sign of one anywhere where a diamond ring, or a diamond without a ring, could have slipped through.

“Well, gentlemen, I invite you all to follow my example!” said the host, stepping back from the table, and motioning for any one that liked to advance. His voice had a ring of command in it that would have compelled obedience if that had been necessary; but it did not seem to be so. One after another the guests came up and repeated the operation, while the owner of the ring watched them with a face that grew darker with every disappointment. Mr. Langrove and M. de la Bourbonais were standing somewhat apart from the rest near the door, and were now the only two that remained. The vicar came first. He submitted his pockets to the same rigorous scrutiny, and with the same result. A strange gleam passed over Mr. Plover’s features, as he turned his sallow face in the direction of M. de la Bourbonais. Suspicion and hope had now narrowed to this last trial. Raymond did not move. “Come on, Bourbonais; I have done!” said Mr. Langrove, consigning his spectacles and his handkerchief to his last pocket.

But Raymond remained immovable, as if he were glued to the carpet.

“Come, my dear friend, come!” Sir Simon called out, in a voice that was meant only to be kind and encouraging, but in which those who knew its tones detected a nervous note.

“I will not!” said the count in a sharp, high key. “I will not submit to such an indignity; it has been got up for the purpose of insulting me. I refuse to submit to it!”

He turned to leave the room.

“Raymond, you are mad! You must do it!” cried Sir Simon imperatively.

“I am not mad! I am poor!” retorted the count, facing round and darting eyes of defiance at Sir Simon. “This person, who calls himself a gentleman, has insulted me from the moment I sat down to table with him, and you allowed him to do it. He taunted me with my poverty; he would make out now that because I am poor I am a thief! I have borne with him so far because I was at your table; but there is a limit to what I will bear. I will not submit to the outrage he wants to put upon me.”

Again he turned towards the door.

“You shall hand out my ring before you stir from here, my fine sir!” cried Mr. Plover, taking a stride after him, and stretching out an arm as if to clutch him; but Sir Simon quick as thought intercepted him by laying a hand on the outstretched arm, while Ponsonby Anwyll stepped forward and placed his tall, broad figure like a bulwark between Raymond and his assailant.

“Let me go!” said the latter, shaking himself to get free from the baronet’s clasp; but the long, firm fingers closed on him like grim death.

“You shall not touch M. de la Bourbonais in my presence,” he said; “you have insulted him, as he says, already. If I had seen that he detected what was offensive in your tone and manner, I would not have suffered it to pass. Stand back, and leave me to deal with him!”

“Confound the beggar! Let him give me my ring! I don’t want to touch him; but as I live he doesn’t stir from this room till I’ve seen his breeches pocket turned wrong-side out!”

The man had been drinking heavily, and, though he was still to all intents and purposes sober, this excitement, added to that caused by the wine, heated his blood to boiling-point. He looked as if he would have flown at Raymond; but cowed by Sir Simon’s cool self-command and determined will, he fell back a step, fastening his eyes on Raymond with a savage glare.

Raymond meantime continued obstinate and impracticable. Mr. Langrove took his hand in both his, and in the gentlest way entreated him to desist from his suicidal folly; assuring him that he was the last man present whom any one in his senses would dream of suspecting of a theft, of the faintest approach to anything dishonorable, but that it was sheer madness to refuse to clear himself in the eyes of this stranger. It was a mere form, and meant no more for him than for the rest of them. But Raymond turned a deaf ear to his pleading.

“Let me go! I will not do it! He has been insulting me from the beginning. I will not submit to this,” he repeated, and shook himself free from Mr. Langrove’s friendly grasp.

Sir Simon came close up to him. He was pale and agitated in spite of his affected coolness, and his hand shook as he laid it on Raymond’s shoulder.

“Raymond, for my sake, for God’s sake!” he muttered.

But Raymond thrust away his hand, and said with bitter scorn: “Ha! I am a beggar, and so I must be a thief! No, I will not clear myself! Let this rich man go and proclaim me a thief!” And breaking away from them all, he dashed out of the room.

“Hold! Stop him, or by —— I’ll make hot work of it for you!” shouted Mr. Plover, making for the door; but Ponsonby Anwyll set his back to it, and defied him to pass. If the other had been brave enough to try, it would have been a hopeless attempt; his attenuated body was no match for the stalwart limbs of the young squire. He involuntarily recoiled as if Ponsonby’s arms, stoutly crossed on his breast, had dealt him a blow. Lord Roxham and Mr. Charlton pressed round him, expostulating and trying to calm him. This was no easy task, and they knew it. They were terribly shaken themselves, and they felt that it was absurd to expect this stranger, fuming for his diamond, to believe that M. de la Bourbonais had not taken it.

“No one but a madman would have done such a thing, when it’s as certain as death to be found out,” said Sir Ponsonby, whose faith in Raymond was sustained by another faith. “Besides, we all know he’s no more capable of it than we are ourselves!”

“Very fine talk, but where is the ring? Who has taken it, if not this Frenchman? I tell you what, he will be making out that it was his right and his duty to steal from a rich man to help a poor one. Perhaps he’s hard up just now, and he blesses Providence for the opportunity.”

“Remember, sir, that you are speaking of a gentleman who is my friend, and whom I know to be incapable of an unworthy action,” said Sir Simon in a stern and haughty tone.

“I compliment you on your friends; it sha’n’t be my fault if you don’t see this one at the hulks before long. But curse me! now I think of it, I’m at your mercy, all of you. I have to depend on you as witnesses, and it seems the fashion in these parts for gentlemen to perjure themselves to screen a friend; you will most likely refuse to swear to facts—if you don’t swear against them, eh?”

“You must be drunk; you don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mr. Charlton, forgetting to drawl, and speaking quickly like a sensible man. “It is as premature as it is absurd to imagine the ring is stolen; it must be in the room, and it must be found.”

“In the room or out of it, it must and it shall be found!” echoed Mr. Plover, “or if not.…”

“If not, it shall be paid for,” added Mr. Charlton; “it shall be replaced.”

“Replaced! All you’re worth could not buy a stone like that one!”

“Not its duplicate as a god’s eye invested with magical virtue,” said Mr. Charlton ironically; “but its value in the market can be paid, I suppose. What price do you put on it?”

“As a mere stone it is worth five hundred pounds to any jeweller in London.”

“Five hundred pounds!” repeated several in chorus with Mr. Charlton.

Sir Simon said nothing. A mist came before his eyes. He saw Raymond in the grip of this cruel man, and he was powerless to release him. If the dread was an act of disloyalty to Raymond, Sir Simon was scarcely to blame. He would have signed away five years of his life that moment to see M. de la Bourbonais cleared of the suspicion that he had so insanely fastened on himself; but how could he help doubting? He knew as no one else knew what the power of the temptation was which had—had it?—goaded him to the mad act. Its madness was the strongest argument against its possibility. To pocket a ring worth five hundred pounds—worth five pounds—in the very teeth of the person it belonged to, and with the clear certainty of being immediately detected—no one in his right mind would have done such a thing. But was Raymond in his right mind when he did it? Had he been in his right mind since he entered the house to-night? There is such a thing as delirium of the heart from sorrow or despair. Then he had been drinking a great deal more than usual, and wine beguiles men to acts of frenzy unawares. If Sir Simon could even say to this man, “I will pay you the five hundred pounds”; but he had not as many pence to call his own. There had been a momentary silence after the exclamation of surprise that followed the announcement of the value of the diamond. Would Mr. Charlton not ratify his offer to pay for it? And if he did not, what could save Raymond?

“Five hundred pounds! You are joking!” said the young man.

“We’ll see whether I am or not! I had the diamond valued with several others at Vienna, where it was set,” said Mr. Plover.

“Consider me your debtor for the amount,” said Sir Ponsonby Anwyll, stepping forward; “if the ring is not found to-night, I will sign you a check for five hundred pounds.”

“Let us begin and look for it in good earnest,” said Lord Roxham. “We will divide; two will go at each side of the table and hunt for it thoroughly. It must have rolled somewhere into a crevice or a corner.”

“I don’t see how a ring was likely to roll on this,” said Mr. Plover, scratching the thick pile of the carpet with the tip of his patent-leather boot.

“Some of us may have kicked it to a distance in pushing back our chairs,” suggested Mr. Langrove; “let us set the lights on the floor, and divide as Lord Roxham proposes.”

Every one seized a chandelier or a lamp and set it on the floor, and began to prosecute the search. They had hardly been two minutes thus engaged when a loud ring was heard, and after a momentary delay the door opened and M. de la Bourbonais walked in.

“Good heavens, Bourbonais! is it you?” cried Sir Simon, rising from his knees and hastening to meet him.

But Raymond, with a haughty gesture, waved him off.

They were all on their feet in a moment, full of wonder and expectation.

“I made a mistake in refusing to submit to the examination you asked of me,” said the count, addressing himself to all collectively. “I was wrong to listen only to personal indignation in the matter; I saw only a poor man insulted by a rich one. I have come back to repair my mistake. See now for yourselves, and, if you like, examine every corner of my clothes.”

He advanced to the table, intending to suit the action to the words, when a burst of derisive laughter was heard at the other end of the room. It was from Mr. Plover. The others were looking on silent and confounded.

“Do you take us all for so many born fools?” cried Mr. Plover, and he laughed again a short, contemptuous laugh that went through Raymond’s veins.

He stood there, his right hand plunged into his pocket in the act of drawing out its contents, but arrested by the sound of that mocking laugh, and by the chill silence that followed. He cast a quick, questioning glance at the surrounding faces; pity, surprise, regret, were variously depicted there, but neither confidence nor congratulation were visible anywhere. A gleam of light shot suddenly through his mind. He drew out his hand and passed it slowly over his forehead.

“My God, have pity on me!” he murmured almost inaudibly, and turned away.

“Raymond! listen to me.” Sir Simon hurried after him.

But the door was closed. Raymond was gone. Sir Simon followed into the hall, but he did not overtake him; the great door closed with a bang, and the friend he loved best on earth was beyond his hearing, rushing wildly on in the darkness and under the rain, that was falling in torrents.

The apparition had come and gone so quickly that the spectators might have doubted whether they had not dreamt it or seen a ghost. No one spoke, until Mr. Plover broke out with a hoarse laugh and an oath:

“If the fellow has not half convinced me of his innocence! He’s too great a fool to be a thief!”

“Until he has been proved a thief, you will be good enough not to apply the term to Monsieur de la Bourbonais under my roof,” said Sir Simon. “Now, gentlemen, we will resume our search.”

They did, and prosecuted it with the utmost care and patience for more than an hour; but the only effect was to fasten suspicion more closely on the absent.

Mr. Plover was so triumphant one would have fancied the justification of his vindictive suspicion was a compensation for the loss of his gem.

“Have you a pen and ink here, or shall I go into the library? I want to write the check,” said Ponsonby.

“You will find everything you want in the library,” said Sir Simon, and Ponsonby went in. Some one rang, and the carriages and horses were ordered. In a few minutes Ponsonby returned with the check, which he handed to Mr. Plover.

“If you require any one to attest my solvency, I dare say Charlton, whom you can trust, will have no objection to do it,” he remarked.

“Certainly not!” said Mr. Charlton promptly.

“Oh! it’s not necessary; I’m quite satisfied with Sir Ponsonby Anwyll’s signature,” Mr. Plover replied. And as he pocketed the check he went to the window and raised the curtain to see if Mr. Charlton’s brougham had come round. The rest of the company were saying good-by, cordial but sad. Sir Simon and the young squire of Rydal stood apart, conversing in an earnest, subdued voice.

“Have you a trap waiting, or shall I drop you at the vicarage?” inquired Lord Roxham of Mr. Langrove.

“Thank you! I shall be very glad,” said the vicar. “The night promised to be so fine I said I would walk home.”

“You will have a wet ride of it, Anwyll; is not that your horse I see?” cried Mr. Charlton from the window, where he had followed his ill-omened friend. “Had you not better leave him here for the night, and let me give you a lift home?”

“Oh! thank you, no; I don’t mind a drenching, and it would take you too far out of your way.”

Mr. Plover and Mr. Charlton were leaving the room when Sir Simon’s voice arrested them.

“One moment, Charlton! Mr. Plover, pray wait a second. I need not assure any one present how deeply distressed I am by what has occurred to-night—distressed on behalf of every one concerned. I know you all share this feeling with me, and I trust you will not refuse me the only alleviation in your power.”

He stopped for a moment, while his hearers turned eager, responsive faces towards him.

“I ask you as a proof of friendship, of personal regard and kindness to myself, to be silent concerning what has happened under my roof to-night; to let it remain buried here amongst ourselves. Will you grant me this, probably the last favor I shall ever ask of you?”

His voice trembled a little; and his friends were touched, though they did not see where the last words pointed.

There was a murmur of assent from all, with one exception.

“Plover, I hope I may include your promise with that of my older friends?” continued the baronet, his voice still betraying emotion. “I have no right, it is true, to claim such an act of self-denial at your hands; I know,” he added with a faint laugh that was not ironical, only sad—“I know that it is a comfort to us all to talk of our misfortunes and complain of them to sympathizing acquaintances; but I appeal to you as a gentleman to forego that satisfaction, in order to save me from a bitter mortification.”

As he spoke, he held out his fine, high-bred hand to his guest.

Sir Simon did not profess to be a very deep reader of human nature, but the most accomplished Macchiavellist could not have divined and touched the right chords in his listener’s spirit with a surer hand than he had just done. Mr. Plover laid his shrivelled fingers in the baronet’s extended hand, and said with awkward bluntness:

“As a proof of personal regard for you, I promise to hold my tongue in private life; but you can’t expect me not to take steps for the recovery of the stone.”

“How so?” Sir Simon started.

“It is pretty certain to get into the diamond market before long, and, unless the police are put on the watch, it will slip out of the country most likely, and for ever beyond my reach, and I would give double the money to get it back again. But I pledge myself not to mention the affair except to the officers.”

He bowed another good-night to the company, and was gone. The rest quickly followed, and soon the noise of wheels crushing the wet gravel died away, and Sir Simon Harness was left alone to meditate on the events of the evening and many other unpleasant things.

TO BE CONTINUED.

---

RECOLLECTIONS OF WORDSWORTH.[131]
BY AUBREY DE VERE, ESQ.

PART I.

It was about eight years before his death that I had the happiness of making acquaintance with Wordsworth. During the next four years I saw a good deal of him, chiefly among his own mountains, and, besides many delightful walks with him, I had the great honor of passing some days under his roof. The strongest of my impressions respecting him was that made by the manly simplicity and lofty rectitude which characterized him. In one of his later sonnets he writes of himself thus: “As a true man who long had served the lyre”; it was because he was a true man that he was a true poet; and it was impossible to know him without being reminded of this. In any case he must have been recognized as a man of original and energetic genius; but it was his strong and truthful moral nature, his intellectual sincerity, the abiding conscientiousness of his imagination, so to speak, which enabled that genius to do its great work, and bequeath to the England of the future the most solid mass of deep-hearted and authentic poetry which has been the gift to her of any poet since the Elizabethan age. There was in his nature a veracity which, had it not been combined with an idealizing imagination not less remarkable, would to many have appeared prosaic; yet, had he not possessed that characteristic, the products of his imagination would have lacked reality. They might still have enunciated a deep and sound philosophy; but they would have been divested of that human interest which belongs to them in a yet higher degree. All the little incidents of the neighborhood were to him important.

The veracity and the ideality which are so signally combined in Wordsworth’s poetic descriptions of nature made themselves, at least, as much felt whenever nature was the theme of his discourse. In his intense reverence for nature he regarded all poetical delineations of her with an exacting severity; and if the descriptions were not true, and true in a twofold sense, the more skilfully executed they were the more was his indignation roused by what he deemed a pretence and a deceit. An untrue description of nature was to him a profaneness, a heavenly message sophisticated and falsely delivered. He expatiated much to me one day, as we walked among the hills above Grasmere, on the mode in which nature had been described by one of the most justly popular of England’s modern poets—one for whom he preserved a high and affectionate respect. “He took pains,” Wordsworth said; “he went out with his pencil and note-book, and jotted down whatever struck him most—a river rippling over the sands, a ruined tower on a rock above it, a promontory, and a mountain ash waving its red berries. He went home, and wove the whole together into a poetical description.” After a pause Wordsworth resumed with a flashing eye and impassioned voice: “But nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms! He should have left his pencil and note-book at home; fixed his eye, as he walked, with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy. Then, after several days had passed by, he should have interrogated his memory as to the scene. He would have discovered that while much of what he had admired was preserved to him, much was also most wisely obliterated. That which remained—the picture surviving in his mind—would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so, in a large part, by discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not characteristic. In every scene many of the most brilliant details are but accidental. A true eye for nature does not note them, or at least does not dwell on them.” On the same occasion he remarked: “Scott misquoted in one of his novels my lines on Yarrow. He makes me write,

“‘The swans on sweet St. Mary’s lake

Float double, swans and shadow.’

but I wrote,

“‘The swan on still St. Mary’s lake.’

“Never could I have written ‘swans’ in the plural. The scene when I saw it, with its still and dim lake, under the dusky hills, was one of utter loneliness; there was one swan, and one only, stemming the water, and the pathetic loneliness of the region gave importance to the one companion of that swan—its own white image in the water. It was for that reason that I recorded the swan and the shadow. Had there been many swans and many shadows, they would have implied nothing as regards the character of the scene, and I should have said nothing about them.” He proceeded to remark that many who could descant with eloquence on nature cared little for her, and that many more who truly loved her had yet no eye to discern her—which he regarded as a sort of “spiritual discernment.” He continued: “Indeed, I have hardly ever known any one but myself who had a true eye for nature—one that thoroughly understood her meanings and her teachings—except” (here he interrupted himself) “one person. There was a young clergyman called Frederick Faber,[132] who resided at Ambleside. He had not only as good an eye for nature as I have, but even a better one, and sometimes pointed out to me on the mountains effects which, with all my great experience, I had never detected.”

Truth, he used to say—that is, truth in its largest sense, as a thing at once real and ideal, a truth including exact and accurate detail, and yet everywhere subordinating mere detail to the spirit of the whole,—this, he affirmed, was the soul and essence not only of descriptive poetry, but of all poetry. He had often, he told me, intended to write an essay on poetry, setting forth this principle, and illustrating it by references to the chief representatives of poetry in its various departments. It was this twofold truth which made Shakspere the greatest of all poets. “It was well for Shakspere,” he remarked, “that he gave himself to the drama. It was that which forced him to be sufficiently human. His poems would otherwise, from the extraordinarily metaphysical character of his genius, have been too recondite to be understood. His youthful poems, in spite of their unfortunate and unworthy subjects, and his sonnets also, reveal this tendency. Nothing can surpass the greatness of Shakspere where he is at his greatest; but it is wrong to speak of him as if even he were perfect. He had serious defects, and not those only proceeding from carelessness. For instance, in his delineations of character he does not assign as large a place to religious sentiment as enters into the constitution of human nature under normal circumstances. If his dramas had more religion in them, they would be truer representations of man, as well as more elevated and of a more searching interest.” Wordsworth used to warn young poets against writing poetry remote from human interest. Dante he admitted to be an exception; but he considered that Shelley, and almost all others who had endeavored to outsoar the humanities, had suffered deplorably from the attempt. I once heard him say: “I have often been asked for advice by young poets. All the advice I can give may be expressed in two counsels. First, let nature be your habitual and pleasurable study—human nature and material nature; secondly, study carefully those first-class poets whose fame is universal, not local, and learn from them; learn from them especially how to observe and how to interpret nature.”

Those who knew Wordsworth only from his poetry might have supposed that he dwelt ever in a region too serene to admit of human agitations. This was not the fact. There was in his being a region of tumult as well a higher region of calm, though it was almost wholly in the latter that his poetry lived. It turned aside from mere personal excitements; and for that reason, doubtless, it developed more deeply those special ardors which belong at once to the higher imagination and to the moral being. The passion which was suppressed elsewhere burned in his “Sonnets to Liberty,” and added a deeper sadness to the “Yew-trees of Borrowdale.” But his heart, as well as his imagination, was ardent. When it spoke most powerfully in his poetry, it spoke with a stern brevity unusual in that poetry, as in the poem, “There is a change, and I am poor,” and the still more remarkable one, “A slumber did my spirit seal”—a poem impassioned beyond the comprehension of those who fancy that Wordsworth lacks passion, merely because in him passion is neither declamatory nor, latently, sensual. He was a man of strong affections—strong enough on one sorrowful occasion to withdraw him for a time from poetry.[133] Referring once to two young children of his who had died about forty years previously, he described the details of their illnesses with an exactness and an impetuosity of troubled excitement such as might have been expected if the bereavement had taken place but a few weeks before. The lapse of time appeared to have left the sorrow submerged indeed, but still in all its first freshness. Yet I afterwards heard that at the time of the illness, at least in the case of one of the two children, it was impossible to rouse his attention to the danger. He chanced to be then under the immediate spell of one of those fits of poetic inspiration which descended on him like a cloud. Till the cloud had drifted he could see nothing beyond. Under the level of the calm there was, however, the precinct of the storm. It expressed itself rarely but vehemently, partaking sometimes of the character both of indignation and sorrow. All at once the trouble would pass away and his countenance bask in its habitual calm, like a cloudless summer sky. His indignation flamed out vehemently when he heard of a base action. “I could kick such a man across England with my naked foot,” I heard him exclaim on such an occasion. The more impassioned part of his nature connected itself especially with his political feelings. He regarded his own intellect as one which united some of the faculties which belong to the statesman with those which belong to the poet; and public affairs interested him not less deeply than poetry. It was as patriot, not poet, that he ventured to claim fellowship with Dante.[134] He did not accept the term “reformer,” because it implied an organic change in our institutions, and this he deemed both needless and dangerous; but he used to say that, while he was a decided conservative, he remembered that to preserve our institutions we must be ever improving them. He was, indeed, from first to last, pre-eminently a patriot—an impassioned as well as a thoughtful one. Yet his political sympathies were not with his own country only, but with the progress of humanity. Till disenchanted by the excesses and follies of the first French Revolution, his hopes and sympathies associated themselves ardently with the new order of things created by it; and I have heard him say that he did not know how any generous-minded young man, entering on life at the time of that great uprising, could have escaped the illusion. To the end his sympathies were ever with the cottage hearth far more than with the palace. If he became a strong supporter of what has been called “the hierarchy of society,” it was chiefly because he believed the principle of “equality” to be fatal to the well-being and the true dignity of the poor. Moreover, in siding politically with the crown and the coronets, he considered himself to be siding with the weaker party in our democratic days.

The absence of love-poetry in Wordsworth’s works has often been remarked upon, and indeed brought as a charge against them. He once told me that if he had avoided that form of composition, it was by no means because the theme did not interest him, but because, treated as it commonly has been, it tends rather to disturb and lower the reader’s moral and imaginative being than to elevate it. He feared to handle it amiss. He seemed to think that the subject had been so long vulgarized that few poets had a right to assume that they could treat it worthily, especially as the theme, when treated unworthily, was such an easy and cheap way of winning applause. It has been observed also that the religion of Wordsworth’s poetry, at least of his earlier poetry, is not as distinctly “revealed religion” as might have been expected from this poet’s well-known adherence to what he has called emphatically “The lord, and mighty paramount of truths.” He once remarked to me himself on this circumstance, and explained it by stating that when in youth his imagination was shaping for itself the channel in which it was to flow, his religious convictions were less definite and less strong than they had become on more mature thought; and that, when his poetic mind and manner had once been formed, he feared that he might, in attempting to modify them, have become constrained. He added that on such matters he ever wrote with great diffidence, remembering that if there were many subjects too low for song, there were some too high. Wordsworth’s general confidence in his own powers, which was strong, though far from exaggerated, rendered more striking and more touching his humility in all that concerned religion. It used to remind me of what I once heard Mr. Rogers say, viz.: “There is a special character of greatness about humility; for it implies that a man can, in an unusual degree, estimate the greatness of what is above us.” Fortunately, his diffidence did not keep Wordsworth silent on sacred themes. His later poems include an unequivocal as well as beautiful confession of Christian faith; and one of them, “The Primrose of the Rock,” is as distinctly Wordsworthian in its inspiration as it is Christian in its doctrine. Wordsworth was a “High-Churchman,” and also, in his prose mind, strongly anti-Roman Catholic, partly on political grounds; but that it was otherwise as regards his mind poetic is obvious from many passages in his Christian poetry, especially those which refer to the monastic system and the Schoolmen, and his sonnet on the Blessed Virgin, whom he addresses as

“Our tainted nature’s solitary boast.”

He used to say that the idea of one who was both Virgin and Mother had sunk so deep into the heart of humanity that there it must ever remain.

Wordsworth’s estimate of his contemporaries was not generally high. I remember his once saying to me: “I have known many that might be called very clever men, and a good many of real and vigorous abilities, but few of genius; and only one whom I should call ‘wonderful.’ That one was Coleridge. At any hour of the day or night he would talk by the hour, if there chanced to be any sympathetic listener, and talk better than the best page of his writings; for a pen half paralyzed his genius. A child would sit quietly at his feet and wonder, till the torrent had passed by. The only man like Coleridge whom I have known is Sir William Hamilton, Astronomer Royal of Dublin.” I remember, however, that when I recited by his fireside Alfred Tennyson’s two political poems, “You ask me why, though ill at ease,” and “Of old sat Freedom on the heights,” the old bard listened with a deepening attention, and, when I had ended, said after a pause, “I must acknowledge that those two poems are very solid and noble in thought. Their diction also seems singularly stately.” He was a great admirer of Philip van Artevelde. In the case of a certain poet since dead, and little popular, he said to me: “I consider his sonnets to be certainly the best of modern times”; adding, “Of course I am not including my own in any comparison with those of others.” He was not sanguine as to the future of English poetry. He thought that there was much to be supplied in other departments of our literature, and especially he desired a really great history of England; but he was disposed to regard the roll of English poetry as made up, and as leaving place for little more except what was likely to be eccentric or imitational.

In his younger days Wordsworth had had to fight a great battle in poetry; for both his subjects and his mode of treating them were antagonistic to the maxims then current. It was fortunate for posterity, no doubt, that his long “militant estate” was animated by some mingling of personal ambition with his love of poetry. Speaking in an early sonnet of

“The poets, who on earth have made us heirs

Of truth, and pure delight, by heavenly lays,”

he concludes:

“Oh! might my name be numbered among theirs,

Then gladly would I end my mortal days.”

He died at eighty, and general fame did not come to him till about fifteen years before his death. This might perhaps have been fifteen years too soon, if he had set any inordinate value on it. But it was not so. Shelley tells us that “Fame is love disguised”; and it was intellectual sympathy that Wordsworth had always valued far more than reputation. “Give me thy love; I claim no other fee,” had been his demand on his reader. When fame had laid her tardy garland at his feet, he found on it no fresher green than his “Rydalian laurels” had always worn. Once he said to me: “It is indeed a deep satisfaction to hope and believe that my poetry will be, while it lasts, a help to the cause of virtue and truth, especially among the young. As for myself, it seems now of little moment how long I may be remembered. When a man pushes off in his little boat into the great seas of Infinity and Eternity, it surely signifies little how long he is kept in sight by watchers from the shore.”

Such are my chief recollections of the great poet, whom I knew but in his old age, but whose heart retained its youth till his daughter Dora’s death. He seemed to me one who from boyhood had been faithful to a high vocation; one who had esteemed it his office to minister, in an age of conventional civilization, at nature’s altar, and who had in his later life explained and vindicated such lifelong ministration, even while he seemed to apologize for it, in the memorable confession,

“But who is innocent? By grace divine,

Not otherwise, O Nature! are we thine.”[135]

It was to nature as first created, not to nature as corrupted by “disnatured” passions, that his song had attributed such high and healing powers. In singing her praise he had chosen a theme loftier than most of his readers knew—loftier, as he perhaps eventually discovered, than he had at first supposed it to be. Utterly without Shakspere’s dramatic faculty, he was richer and wider in the humanities than any poet since Shakspere. Wholly unlike Milton in character and in opinions, he abounds in passages to be paralleled only by Milton in solemn and spiritual sublimity, and not even by Milton in pathos. It was plain to those who knew Wordsworth that he had kept his great gift pure, and used it honestly and thoroughly for that purpose for which it had been bestowed. He had ever written with a conscientious reverence for that gift; but he had also written spontaneously. He had composed with care—not the exaggerated solicitude which is prompted by vanity, and which frets itself to unite incompatible excellences, but the diligence which shrinks from no toil while eradicating blemishes that confuse a poem’s meaning and frustrate its purpose. He regarded poetry as an art; but he also regarded art, not as the compeer of nature, much less her superior, but as her servant and interpreter. He wrote poetry likewise, no doubt, in a large measure, because self-utterance was an essential law of his nature. If he had a companion, he discoursed like one whose thoughts must needs run on in audible current; if he walked alone among his mountains, he murmured old songs. He was like a pine-grove, vocal as well as visible. But to poetry he had dedicated himself as to the utterance of the highest truths brought within the range of his life’s experience; and if his poetry has been accused of egotism, the charge has come from those who did not perceive that it was with a human, not a mere personal, interest that he habitually watched the processes of his own mind. He drew from the fountain that was nearest at hand what he hoped might be a refreshment to those far off. He once said, speaking of a departed man of genius, who had lived an unhappy life and deplorably abused his powers, to the lasting calamity of his country: “A great poet must be a great man; and a great man must be a good man; and a good man ought to be a happy man.” To know Wordsworth was to feel sure that if he had been a great poet, it was not merely because he had been endowed with a great imagination, but because he had been a good man, a great man, and a man whose poetry had, in an especial sense, been the expression of a healthily happy moral being.

P.S.—Wordsworth was by no means without humor. When the Queen, on one occasion, gave a masked ball, some one said that a certain youthful poet, who has since reached a deservedly high place both in the literary and political world, but who was then known chiefly as an accomplished and amusing young man of society, was to attend it dressed in the character of the father of English poetry—grave old Chaucer. “What!” said Wordsworth, “M—— go as Chaucer! Then it only remains for me to go as M——!”

PART II.

SONNET—RYDAL WITH WORDSWORTH.

BY THE LATE SIR AUBREY DE VERE.

“What we beheld scarce can I now recall

In one connected picture; images

Hurrying so swiftly their fresh witcheries

O’er the mind’s mirror, that the several

Seems lost, or blended in the mighty all.

Lone lakes; rills gushing through rock-rooted trees;

Peaked mountains shadowing vales of peacefulness;

Glens echoing to the flashing waterfall.

Then that sweet twilight isle! with friends delayed

Beside a ferny bank ’neath oaks and yews;

The moon between two mountain peaks embayed;

Heaven and the waters dyed with sunset hues:

And he, the poet of the age and land,

Discoursing as we wandered hand in hand.”

The above-written sonnet is the record of a delightful day spent by my father in 1833 with Wordsworth at Rydal, to which he went from the still more beautiful shores of Ulswater, where he had been sojourning at Halsteads. He had been one of Wordsworth’s warmest admirers when their number was small, and in 1842 he dedicated a volume of poems to him.[136] He taught me when a boy of eighteen years old to admire the great bard. I had been very enthusiastically praising Lord Byron’s poetry. My father calmly replied: “Wordsworth is the great poet of modern times.” Much surprised, I asked: “And what may his special merits be?” The answer was, “They are very various; as, for instance, depth, largeness, elevation, and, what is rare in modern poetry, an entire purity. In his noble ‘Laodamia’ they are chiefly majesty and pathos.” A few weeks afterwards I chanced to take from the library shelves a volume of Wordsworth, and it opened on “Laodamia.” Some strong, calm hand seemed to have been laid on my head, and bound me to the spot till I had come to the end. As I read, a new world, hitherto unimagined, opened itself out, stretching far away into serene infinitudes. The region was one to me unknown, but the harmony of the picture attested its reality. Above and around were indeed

“An ampler ether, a diviner air,

And fields invested with purpureal gleams”;

and when I reached the line,

“Calm pleasures there abide—majestic pains,”

I felt that no tenants less stately could walk in so lordly a precinct. I had been translated into another planet of song—one with larger movements and a longer year. A wider conception of poetry had become mine, and the Byronian enthusiasm fell from me like a bond that is broken by being outgrown. The incident illustrates poetry in one of its many characters—that of the “deliverer.” The ready sympathies and inexperienced imagination of youth make it surrender itself easily despite its better aspirations, or in consequence of them, to a false greatness; and the true greatness, once revealed, sets it free. As early as 1824 Walter Savage Landor, in his “Imaginary Conversation” between Southey and Porson, had pronounced Wordsworth’s “Laodamia” to be “a composition such as Sophocles might have exulted to own, and a part of which might have been heard with shouts of rapture in the regions he describes”—the Elysian Fields.

Wordsworth frequently spoke of death, as if it were the taking of a new degree in the University of Life. “I should like,” he remarked to a young lady, “to visit Italy again before I move to another planet.” He sometimes made a mistake in assuming that others were equally philosophical. We were once breakfasting at the house of Mr. Rogers, when Wordsworth, after gazing attentively round the room with a benignant and complacent expression, turned to our host, and, wishing to compliment him, said: “Mr. Rogers, I never see this house, so perfect in its taste, so exquisite in all its arrangements, and decorated with such well-chosen pictures, without fancying it the very house imaged to himself by the Roman poet when, in illustration of man’s mortality, he says: ‘Linquenda est domus.’” “What is that you’re saying?” replied Mr. Rogers, whose years between eighty and ninety, had not improved his hearing. “I was remarking that your house,” replied Wordsworth, “always reminds me of the ode (more properly called an elegy, though doubtless the lyrical measure not unnaturally causes it to be included among Horace’s odes) in which the Roman poet writes: ‘Linquenda est domus’; that is, since, ladies being present, a translation may be deemed desirable, The house is, or has to be, left; and again,’et placens uxor’—and the pleasing wife; though, as we must all regret, that part of the quotation is not applicable on the present occasion.” The Town Bard, on whom “no angle smiled” more than the end of St. James’ Place, did not enter into the views of the Bard of the Mountains. His answer was what children call “making a great face,” and the ejaculation, “Don’t talk Latin in the society of ladies.” When I was going away, he remarked, “What a stimulus the mountain air has on the appetite! I made a sign to Edmund to hand him the cutlets a second time. I was afraid he would stick his fork into that beautiful woman who sat next him.” Wordsworth never resented a jest at his own expense. Once when we had knocked three times in vain at the door of a London house, I exclaimed, quoting his sonnet written on Westminster Bridge,

“Dear God, the very houses seem asleep.”

He laughed heartily, then smiled gravely, and lastly recounted the occasion and described the early morning on which that sonnet was written. He did not recite more than a part of it, to the accompaniment of distant cab and carriage; and I thought that the door was opened too soon.

Wordsworth, despite his dislike to great cities, was attracted occasionally in his later years

“To the proud margin of the Thames

And Lambeth’s venerable towers,”

where his society was courted by persons of the most different character. But he complained bitterly of the great city. It was next to impossible, he remarked, to tell the truth in it. “Yesterday I was at S—— House; the Duchess of S——, showing me the pictures, observed: ‘This is the portrait of my brother’ (naming him), ‘and it is considered very like.’ To this I assented, partly perhaps in absence of mind, but partly, I think, with an impression that her grace’s brother was probably a person whose face every one knew or was expected to know; so that, as I had never met him, my answer was in fact a lie! It is too bad that, when more than seventy years old, I should be drawn from the mountains to London in order to tell a lie!” He made his complaint wherever he went, laying the blame, however, not so much on himself or on the duchess as on the corrupt city; and some of those who learned how the most truthful man in England had thus quickly been subverted by metropolitan snares came to the conclusion that within a few years more no virtue would be left extant in the land. He was likewise maltreated in lesser ways. “This morning I was compelled by my engagements to eat three breakfasts—one with an aged and excellent gentleman, who may justly be esteemed an accomplished man of letters, although I cannot honestly concede to him the title of a poet; one at a fashionable party; and one with an old friend whom no pressure would induce me to neglect, although for this, my first breakfast to-day, I was obliged to name the early hour of seven o’clock, as he lives in a remote part of London.”

But it was only among his own mountains that Wordsworth could be understood. He walked among them not so much to admire them as to converse with them. They exchanged thoughts with him, in sunshine or flying shadow, giving him their own and accepting his. Day and night, at all hours, and in all weathers, he would face them. If it rained, he might fling his plaid over him, but would take no admonition. He must have his way. On such occasions, dutiful as he was in higher matters, he remained incurably wayward. In vain one reminded him that a letter needed an answer or that the storm would soon be over. It was very necessary for him to do what he liked; and one of his dearest friends said to me, with a smile of the most affectionate humor: “He wrote his ‘Ode to Duty,’ and then he had done with that matter.” This very innocent form of lawlessness, corresponding with the classic expression, “Indulge genio,” seemed to belong to his genius, not less than the sympathetic reverence with which he looked up to the higher and universal laws. Sometimes there was a battle between his reverence for nature and his reverence for other things. The friend already alluded to was once remarking on his varying expressions of countenance: “That rough old face is capable of high and real beauty; I have seen in it an expression quite of heavenly peace and contemplative delight, as the May breeze came over him from the woods while he was slowly walking out of church on a Sunday morning, and when he had half emerged from the shadow.” A flippant person present inquired: “Did you ever chance, Miss F——, to observe that heavenly expression on his countenance as he was walking into church on a fine May morning?” A laugh was the reply. The ways of nature harmonized with his feelings in age as well as in youth. He could understand no estrangement. Gathering a wreath of white thorn on one occasion, he murmured, as he slipped it into the ribbon which bound the golden tresses of his youthful companion,

“And what if I enwreathed my own?

’Twere no offence to reason;

The sober hills thus deck their brows

To meet the wintry season.”

---

SIR THOMAS MORE.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

FROM THE FRENCH OF THE PRINCESSE DE CRAON.

III.

“Ah! well, and so you are going to carry the French birds back!” exclaimed the old keeper Jack, with a loud, coarse laugh, as he leaned against one of the century-old trees in Windsor forest. “Well, well, so be it, my friends; but give us a little drop to drink,” he added in a jocular but self-important tone. As he said these words, he familiarly slapped the shoulder of one of the falconers, who was engaged in fastening the chains again to the feet of the tiercelets, whilst his comrades cut off the heads of the game taken, and threw them as a reward to the cruel birds, who devoured them with avidity.

“After a while,” replied the falconer a little impatiently. “Wait till our work is done, father Jack; you are always in a hurry—to drink. We will take our glass together now directly. See that troop of birds! They must first be chained and put with the others.”

“Well, well!” replied Jack, “provided we lose nothing by waiting. These are beautiful birds, if they do come from France.”

“No, no, you shall lose nothing by waiting,” cried the second falconer. “Come here; I will let you taste a liquid that these birds have brought over under their wings, and we will see then if you have ever drunk anything equal to it since you drew on your boots in the service of his majesty.”

And he poured out of a canteen that hung from his shoulder-belt a very acid gin, filling, until it foamed over, a large pewter cup, which he handed to father Jack.

It was swallowed at one draught.

“Oh! superb, superb!” cried the old keeper, returning the cup and smacking his lips. “During the five-and-forty years past that I have had the honor of keeping Windsor, I have drunk nothing better. Let’s go! That strengthens a man’s courage and warms up his old blood! I believe the deer will give us a hard drive to-day; I have seen the tracks of fourteen or fifteen at least.” And saying this, he remounted his old wind-broken mare.

“Wait, father Jack, wait for us! We will all go together,” exclaimed the gens de l’equipage; for Jack contributed much to their amusement. When they had mounted their horses, they followed the keeper, getting off a hundred jokes on the old mare, to which he was much attached.

They very soon passed by two young lords who had halted near the verge of the forest, and were engaged in conversation.

One of them held in leash four beautiful greyhounds, especial favorites of the king because of their great sagacity and swiftness in the chase. Their keeper, however, was obliged to use the lash, in order to stop their clamorous baying.

“You have seen her, then?” he remarked to his companion.

“Yes, I have seen her down yonder. She crossed the road with all of her ladies,” replied the latter, who belonged to Wolsey’s household and wore his livery. “She was dressed in a black velvet cap and green riding-habit and she is really charming!”

“Well, my poor friend,” replied the other, “but do you know I have serious fears that your cardinal will soon fall into disfavor? But a moment ago, as they passed by here, I heard the Duke of Norfolk remark to a lady that the red cloak was decidedly out of style, and altogether it was at this time so completely used up that he did not think it could ever again be mended. The lady smiled maliciously, and said he was right—she believed the green mantle would eventually end by tearing the red to pieces! And pointing to the young Anne Boleyn, who was not far off, she made a sign that left no doubt on my mind it was that lady she meant to designate as the destroyer.”

“Truly,” replied the young domestic,[137] “what you tell me is anything but encouraging. And so our dear duke must have his finger in the pie! I shall be very sorry for all this if it happens, because my own clothes, are made of scarlet, you see; and when one has succeeded, in the course of time, in getting a suit well made up, he doesn’t like the trouble of having to commence again and make it over.”

As he said this a cloud of dust arose, and a troop of horsemen passed at full gallop and with a terrible hue and cry.

“My dogs! my dogs!” cried the king in the midst of the crowd. “Let loose my dogs! The deer makes for the ponds. Let them hasten to tell the ladies, that they may be in at the death.”

He disappeared like a flash of lightning, of which we obtain but a glimpse ere it is gone. The shrill notes of the hunter’s horn resounded from afar, awaking countless echoes through the forest.

“Let us go,” exclaimed the two young men simultaneously. “We will then get rid of these accursed hounds.”

“To the ponds! To the ponds!” they cried. “The ladies, to the ponds! The ladies, to the ponds!” And they started on, laughing and shouting.

“What is that you are shouting down there?” cried a huntsman from a distance, whose horse had just made him roll in the dust.

“To the ponds! My lord, to the ponds!” they cried.

The retinue surrounding the Duke of Suffolk put whip to their horses and followed in a sweeping gallop. From every side of the hills surrounding these ponds there appeared, at the same moment, troops of eager hunters, panting and covered with dust. The different roads traversing the forest in every direction converged and met on the banks of the ponds that slept in the basin thus formed.

The ladies had already assembled, and nothing could have been more entertaining than the rapid and eager movements of the remainder of the hunters as they came galloping up. The king arrived before any of the others. He excelled in exercises of this kind, and took great delight in ending the chase in a brilliant manner by shooting the deer himself. On this occasion he had decided that, contrary to the usual custom, it should be taken alive; consequently, they hastened to spread in every direction the nets and fillets.

In this case the skill of the hunters consisted in driving the game into the snare.

Very soon the deer made his appearance, followed by a multitude of hounds, who pursued him so furiously, and crowded so closely one against the other, that, to use a familiar expression of the hunters, they could have been covered with a table-cloth.

At sight of the nets the beautiful animal paused for an instant. He shook his horns menacingly, and stamped the ground with his feet; then suddenly, feeling already the scorching breath of the infuriated pack of hounds about to seize him, he made a desperate effort, and, leaping at a single bound the entire height of the fillets, threw himself into the lake. Instantly a loud and deafening shout arose, while the furious hounds, arrested in their course by the nets, uttered the most frightful howlings on seeing their prey escape.

“My cross-bow!” cried the king. “Quick! my cross-bow!” and he drew it so skilfully that at the first shot he pierced the flank of the poor animal, who immediately ceased to swim.

Satisfied with his brilliant success, the king, after having heard the plaudits of the ladies and received the congratulations of the hunters, proceeded to the pavilion, constructed of evergreens and foliage, as elegant as it was spacious, which he had had erected in the midst of the forest, in order to dine under cover.

The Duchess of Suffolk did the honors of the festival, taking the place of Queen Catherine, who, under the pretext of bad health, declined appearing at these hunting parties, the noisy sports having become insupportable to her.

Meanwhile the courtiers were greatly excited by observing a roll of paper the extremity of which projected from the right pocket of the king’s hunting-jacket; on one of the leaves, a corner of which was turned down, two words were visible—the name of “Wolsey” and that of “traitor.” Each one sought to approach the king or pass behind him in order to assure himself of the astonishing fact, of which they had the temerity to whisper mysteriously together.

But in spite of all their efforts, they were unable to discover anything more; the day and the festival ended with numerous conjectures—the fears and hopes excited in the minds of that court where for so long the learned favorite had ruled with as much authority as the king himself.

At daybreak on the morning succeeding the festival the gates were thrown open, and a carriage, bearing the royal arms and colors, drove from the great courtyard of Windsor Palace.

While the postilion trotted leisurely along, looking around from time to time as he wonderingly reflected why the horse on his right grew constantly lean in spite of the generous addition he had made to his rations, the two occupants of the carriage engaged in the following conversation:

“It is cold this morning,” said one of them, wrapping his cloak more closely about him.

“Yes; and how this fog and the heavy dew covering the earth remind one of the bivouac!”

“It does indeed,” responded Norfolk to his companion; “but such souvenirs are always agreeable, and carry us back to the happiest days of life—years spent amid the tumult and vicissitudes of the camp. Eighteen! that impulsive, impetuous age, when presumptuous courage rushes headlong into danger, comprehending nothing of death; when reckless intrepidity permits not a moment’s reflection or hesitation, transported by the ardent desire of acquiring glory; the intoxicating happiness of a first success—such are the thrilling emotions, the brilliant illusions of youth, which we shall experience no more!” And the old warrior sorrowfully bowed his head.

“Ah! well, others replace them,” replied Suffolk.

“Yes, to be displaced and disappear in their turn,” answered the duke, brushing back the white locks the wind had blown over his forehead, on which appeared a deep scar.

“Well, my lord,” exclaimed the Duke of Suffolk, “do not spoil, by your philosophic reflections, all the pleasure we ought to enjoy in the thought that, thanks to the influence and good management of your charming niece, we are now going to inform Monseigneur Wolsey that the time has at last arrived for him to abdicate his portion of the crown.”

“Yes, perhaps so,” replied the duke. “And yet I don’t know. Yesterday, even, I detested this man, and desired most ardently his ruin; to-day—no, no; an enemy vanquished and prostrate at my feet inspires only compassion. Now I almost regret the injury my niece has done him and the blow she has struck.”

“Come, come, my lord, do you not know that an excess of generosity becomes a fault? We have nothing to regret,” continued Suffolk, with an exulting laugh. “I only hope he may not be acquitted (and thus be able to settle the scores with us afterwards); that Parliament will show him no mercy. Death alone can effectually remove him. The little memorandum you have there contains enough to hang all the chancellors in the world.”

“It is very certain,” replied the Duke of Norfolk, abstractedly turning the leaves of the book he held in his hand (the same that had excited such eager curiosity among the courtiers)—“it is certain this book contains grave accusations. Nevertheless, I do not think it has entirely accomplished the end proposed by the author.”

“In truth, no,” answered Suffolk; “for Wiltshire counted very certainly on replacing Wolsey. He will be astounded when he learns of the choice of the king.”

“Although Wiltshire is a relative of mine,” replied the duke, “I am compelled to acknowledge that it would have been impossible for the king to have made a better selection or avoided a worse one. Wiltshire is both ignorant and ambitious, while Thomas More has no superior in learning and merit. I knew him when quite a child, living with the distinguished Cardinal Morton, who was particularly attached to him. I remember very often at table Morton speaking of him to us, and always saying: ‘This young boy will make an extraordinary man. You will see it. I shall not be living, but you will then recall the prediction of an old man.’”

“Extraordinary!” replied Suffolk in his habitual tone of raillery; “most extraordinary! We are promised, then, a chancellor of a peculiar species! I suppose he will not be the least astonished at receiving so high and singular a favor. But, the devil! he will need to be a wonderful man. If he sustains himself on the throne ministerial, he will find a superior degree of wisdom necessary. Between the king, the queen, the council, Wiltshire, the Parliament, the clergy, and the people, I would not risk my little finger, brother-in-law of his majesty although I have the honor to be.”

And he began laughing as he looked at Norfolk, although, out of deference to him, he had not included in the list of difficulties the most formidable of all, and the one that carried all others in its train—his niece, Mlle. Anne.

“In the sense you use the word,” the duke answered coldly, “I believe, on the contrary, he is by no means an astute man. The intrigues of court will be altogether foreign to his character; but otherwise, in science and learning, he has no equal. He is in possession of all that a man is capable of acquiring in that direction, and no man has made a more profound study of the common law and the statutes of the kingdom. Morton placed him at Oxford, then at the Chancellors’ College at Lincoln, and he achieved the most brilliant success.”

“Admirable!” exclaimed Suffolk, laughing.

“Since that time,” pursued the Duke of Norfolk, “his reputation has continued to increase. When he lectured in S. Lawrence’s Church, the celebrated Dr. Grocyn and all of our London savants crowded eagerly to hear him.”

“Well! well! I knew nothing of these most agreeable particulars,” said Suffolk; “I only knew that it was he who induced Parliament to refuse the subsidy demanded for the Queen of Scots. If he continues to repeat such exploits as that, I venture to predict he will not be chancellor very long.”

“Oh! as to that,” replied the duke, “he is a man who will never compromise his conscience. Yes, yes, I recall distinctly the enraged expression of the present king’s father when Mr. Tyler came to inform him that the House of Commons had rejected his demand, and a beardless youth had been the cause of it. I have not forgotten, either, that Henry VII., of happy memory, well knew how to avenge himself by having an enormous fine imposed on Sir Thomas’ father.”

“Well,” replied Suffolk, “but it was not always expedient for the House of Commons to raise money in that way.”

The conversation was continued in this manner, as the hours glided by, until at length the glittering spires of the London churches appeared in the distance, and very soon the carriage had entered the narrow, gloomy streets of that great city.

Just at this time the soul of Wolsey was replenished with an inexpressible quietude and contentment. “At last,” he said to himself, “my enemies have all been confounded. I can no longer entertain a doubt respecting my power, after the most gracious manner in which the king has treated me at Grafton. I trust the influence of Anne Boleyn has diminished in the same proportion that mine has increased. Now she wants Sir Thomas Cheney recalled; but I shall not consent to that. Campeggio goes loaded with honorable presents. The influence of the mistress will soon cease, and that ambitious fool Wiltshire will lose the fruit of his intrigues.…” As the Cardinal of York consoled himself with these agreeable reflections, the arrival of the Venetian ambassador was announced.

“Ah! so he presents himself at last,” Wolsey exclaimed. “He has been a long time demanding an audience!” And he ordered him to be introduced.

Wolsey received him in the most gracious manner. After the usual compliments were exchanged, he proposed showing him the honors of the palace. He had spent his life in embellishing and adorning it with wonderful treasures of industry and art, of which he was the enlightened and generous protector, bestowing on them from his own purse the most liberal encouragement.

Numerous galleries, in which an exquisite taste had evidently directed even the most trivial ornamentation, were filled with paintings, statues, and precious antique vases. Superb Flanders tapestries gleamed on all sides, covered the panels, were disposed around the windows, and fell in heavy drapery before the openings of the doors to conceal the entrance. These precious cloths, then of inestimable value, were only found in the palaces of kings. They usually represented some historical or poetical subject; and sometimes landscapes and the rarest flowers were wrought and tinted with reflections of gold. Finally, Wolsey took occasion to point out, among all these treasures, the presents he had received at different times from the various princes of Europe who had sought to secure his influence.

Charmed with the order, taste, and beauty that reigned throughout the palace, the Italian admired everything, surprised to find in this foreign clime a condition of luxury that recalled the memory, always pleasing, yet sometimes sad, of his own country.

“Alas!” he exclaimed at length, “we also were rich and happy, and reposed in peace and security in our palaces, before this war in which we have been so unfortunate as to rely on the King of France for assistance. He has abandoned us; and now, compelled to pay an enormous tribute, the republic finds itself humiliated in the dust beneath the sceptre of the haughty emperor!”

“Such is the right of the conqueror,” replied Wolsey. “You are fortunate, inasmuch as he is forced to use that right with moderation.”

“It seems a heavy burden to us, this moderation!” replied the ambassador. “He not only exacts immense sums of money, but compels us to surrender territory we have conquered with our blood. Florence is placed under the dominion of the Medici, and all of our Italian princes are reduced to a condition of entire dependence.”

“Which, of course, they will shake off at the first opportunity,” interrupted Wolsey. “Charles V. is too shrewd not to foresee that. Be assured he will endeavor to secure your good-will, because your support is indispensable to enable him to resist the formidable power of the Sultan Soliman, and the invasions of the barbarians subject to his authority.”

“In that we have placed our last hope. If our services can be made available, then from vanquished enemies we may become united allies. Already the emperor foresees it; for he overwhelms Andrew Doria and the republic of Genoa with favors. He seems to have forgotten the injuries he suffered from Sforza; he received him most affably at court, and promised him the Princess of Denmark, his niece, in marriage.”

“I am informed,” said Wolsey, “that he is deeply afflicted by the death of the Prince of Orange.”

“Very much,” replied the ambassador. “The prince was a valiant captain. He leaves no children; his titles and landed property will descend to the children of his sister Rénée, the Countess of Nassau.”

“And they are all German princes who have thrown themselves headlong into the Lutheran heresy. They will endeavor to cast off the yoke of the emperor, and become altogether independent.”

“They have no other intention,” replied the ambassador; “and by separating from the Church of Rome they hope more surely to effect their purpose. However, the decree laid before the diet against the religious innovations has passed by a large majority.”

“Yes,” replied Wolsey; “but you see the Elector of Saxony, the Marquis of Brandenburg, the Landgrave of Hesse, the Dukes of Luneburg, and the Prince d’Anhalt are all leagued against the church, with the deputies of fourteen imperial cities, and are designated by no other name than that of Protestant.”

“I am aware of that,” replied the ambassador. “It will greatly increase the difficulties in carrying out the emperor’s secret project,” he continued after a moment’s silence. “Perhaps, however, he may succeed in making the crown hereditary in his family.”

“That is what we shall have to prevent!” cried Wolsey vehemently, who, at the words of the ambassador, felt all his old hatred toward Charles V. revive. “We will never suffer it, neither will France. No, no; I am very certain France will never permit it.”

“Ah!” replied the ambassador, shaking his head with a doubtful air, either because he was not convinced, but more probably because he was well pleased to arouse against the conqueror of Venice the animosity of England (still, as he considered, entirely governed by the will of the minister who stood before him).

“I assure you of it most positively,” answered Wolsey; “and I wish you to bear it in mind.” And he regarded him with an expression of perfect confidence and authority.

“I hope it may be so,” said the ambassador in an abstracted manner. “We certainly desire nothing more.”

“Ah! if he had only you to oppose him,” answered Wolsey, resuming his usual haughtiness, “I should doubt of success. See where you stand,” he continued, with the secret satisfaction of national pride. “Invaded on all sides, Italy can oppose but a feeble barrier to the power of two such bold and daring pirates. Is it not a shame, then, to see these obscure and cruel robbers, sons of a Lesbian potter—two barbarians, in fact—reigning sovereigns of the kingdom of Algiers, which they have seized, and from whence they fearlessly go forth to destroy the Christian fleets on every sea? When would you be able to conquer these ocean pirates—you, who have but a gibbet for your couch and a halter for your vestment? Justice would be kept a long time waiting!”

The Italian reddened and bit his lip. He vainly sought words in which to reply, and was relieved of his embarrassment when the door opened and admitted the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk.

They entered without the usual ceremonies or salutations, and Wolsey, surprised at seeing Suffolk, whom he had not met since the altercation at Blackfriars, regarded them with astonishment. He arose, however, and advanced toward them. Suffolk, with a disdainful gesture, referred him to the Duke of Norfolk.

Astonished at the coldness of the one, the brusque impoliteness of the other, and embarrassed by the presence of the ambassador, the cardinal stood motionless, undecided what to think or say.

“My lords,” he at length exclaimed, “what do you desire of me?”

“We want you to deliver up the seal of state,” replied Norfolk, without changing countenance.

“What do you say, my lord?” cried Wolsey, stupefied with astonishment.

“The king has ordered it,” continued the duke with the same imperturbable manner.

“The king! Can it be possible?” said Wolsey, dismayed, and in a voice almost inaudible. “The seal of state! And what have I done? What? Can this be true? No, my lord, no,” he suddenly exclaimed with an expression of indescribable terror; “it cannot be true! You have mistaken the king; I do not deserve any such treatment. I pray you let me see him; let me speak to him for a moment—one single moment. Alas! alas!”

And he glanced at the ambassador, who, astounded himself at first, and feeling himself out of place in the presence of this mighty downfall, had involuntarily withdrawn towards the door.

“It is no longer a question to be submitted to the king,” cried Suffolk in a threatening and defiant manner; “it is only necessary now to obey him, and he orders you instantly to deliver up the seal.”

“The order is imperative,” added Norfolk in a cold and serious manner. “I regret being charged with a commission which to you, my lord, must be so painful.”

He said no more. But Suffolk, base and jealous in his nature, was not ashamed to add to the humiliation of the unfortunate cardinal.

“Come, my good friend,” he said in an ironical voice, “why do you beg so imploringly? One would suppose we had demanded the apple of your eye. You have been putting the seal so long now on our purses and tongues, you ought not to be surprised nor annoyed that we feel like using it awhile ourselves.”

This cowardly insult exasperated Wolsey, but his courage was roused with his indignation.

“My Lord Suffolk,” he answered with dignity, “I am sorry for you and for the prompt manner in which you seem to forget in their misfortune those who in days of prosperity were always found ready to come to your assistance. I hope you may never experience how painful it is to endure a similar cruel ingratitude.”

He immediately withdrew, and returned with the richly-adorned casket containing the great seal of state.

Holding it in his trembling hand, he avoided Suffolk, and, advancing rapidly toward the Duke of Norfolk, handed it to him.

“My lord,” he said, “here are the seals of the kingdom of England. Let the king’s will be done. Since I received them from his hand, fifteen years ago, I am conscious of having done nothing to merit his displeasure. I trust he will one day deign to render me full justice, for I have never proved myself unworthy of his favor.”

As he uttered the last words, he was unable to restrain the tears which involuntarily arose to his eyes.

Although the cardinal was by no means a favorite with the Duke of Norfolk, he was moved with compassion, and sadly reflected that he had still more painful intelligence to communicate.

He glanced at his companion, but, fearing the bitter and poignant irony in which Suffolk never failed to indulge, he hastened to prevent it in order to spare Wolsey.

“My lord cardinal,” he said, “you ought to reflect that the king is too just and impartial to withdraw the favor he has so long bestowed on you without having weighed well the reasons and necessities requiring such a course. Nevertheless, his goodness has not abandoned you; he permits you to select such counsel as you may desire to defend you against the accusations presented against you to Parliament.”

“To Parliament!” murmured Wolsey, terror-stricken; for the duke’s last words suddenly disclosed the depth of the abyss into which he had fallen. “To Parliament!” he repeated. The shock he had experienced was so violent that his pride of character, the sense of personal dignity, the presence of his enemies, were all forgotten in a moment, and he abandoned himself to despair. Unable longer to sustain himself, he sank on his knees. “I am lost!” he cried, weeping and extending his hands toward his persecutors. “Have pity on me, my Lord Norfolk! I give up all to the king! Let him do with me what he will! Since he says I am culpable, although I have never had the intention, yet I will acknowledge that I am. But, alas! of what do they accuse me?”

“Of having violated the statutes of præmunire,” replied Norfolk.

“And betraying your country,” continued Suffolk, “by carrying on a secret correspondence with the King of France. You well remember that it was you who had me recalled at the moment when, having become master of Artois and Picardy, I had the Parisians trembling within their walls? Will you dare deny that you were the cause of it, and that it was the prière d’argent of Mme. Louise[138] induced you to give the order for me to retire? The king has been already long enough your dupe, and our duty was to enlighten him. As to the rest, my lord cardinal, you understand the proceedings; your advocate ought to be here, and you should immediately confer with him with regard to the other charges herein contained.”

As he said this, he threw on the cardinal’s table the bill of presentment, which contained no less than forty-four chief accusations.

They then took possession of all the papers they could find, carrying away the seal of state, and left Wolsey in a condition deserving pity.

As they retired, they proposed sending in the advocate, who was waiting in an adjoining apartment conversing with Cromwell.

“Ha! ha! you are here, then, Sir Cromwell,” said the Duke of Suffolk, laughing. “Go in, go in there at once,” he cried, pointing to the door of Wolsey’s cabinet. “The cardinal needs you; I fear he will be hard to console.”

Cromwell watched with great anxiety the course of events, and, not knowing to which side to turn, determined at least to secure for himself the appearance and merit of fidelity to his benefactor. Without reflecting on the consequences, he hastily replied that he would not leave Wolsey, would never abandon him, but follow him to the end.

“You will follow him to the end, eh?” replied Suffolk. “When you know his intended destination, I doubt very much if you will then ask to follow him.”

As he said this, he made a gesture giving Cromwell to understand that his master, besides losing place and power, was also in danger of losing his head.

“High treason, my dear sir, high treason!” cried Suffolk. “Do you hear me?”

“High treason?” repeated Cromwell slowly. “Ah! my lord duke, how could he be guilty?”

He hastened to rejoin Wolsey, whom he found bathed in tears and endeavoring to decipher the act of presentment.

“Ah! Cromwell,” exclaimed the unhappy cardinal on seeing him, “my dear friend, you have not then forsaken me! But, alas! I am lost. Read here for yourself—read it aloud to me; for my sight is failing.”

Cromwell seized the paper and commenced reading the accusation. On hearing that it was based principally on the violation of the statutes of præmunire,[139] Wolsey was unable to control his indignation.

“How,” he cried, “can the king be induced to sanction such unparalleled injustice? It is true that in receiving from the pope the title of legate, and exercising throughout the kingdom the authority conferred by that title, I have been brought in opposition to the precautionary statutes of King Richard; but still I have not violated them, since the king himself has sanctioned that power and recognized it by appearing in his own person before the court. Is he not more to blame, then, who desired and ordered it, than I, who have simply been made a party to it? I can prove this,” he cried—“yes, I can prove it; for I have still the letters-patent, signed by his own hand, and which he furnished me to that effect. Cromwell, look in my secretary; you will find them there.”

Cromwell opened the secretary, but found nothing.

“There is not a single paper here,” he said. “Where could you have placed them?”

“Indeed!” exclaimed the cardinal. “Then they have all been carried away! All!” he repeated. “I have no longer any means of defence; I am lost! They are all arrayed against me; they have resolved upon my death. O Henry! O my king! is it thus you forget in one moment the services I have rendered you? Cromwell,” he continued in a low voice and gloomy, abstracted manner—“Cromwell, I am lost!”

The same evening another messenger came to inform the unhappy cardinal the king wished to occupy, during the session of Parliament he was about to convene, his palace of York (the object of his care and pride), and that in leaving it he could retire to, and have at his disposal, a house about eight leagues from London, entirely abandoned, and belonging to the bishopric of Winchester.

The night, already far advanced, found Sir Thomas More still seated in his cabinet, conversing with the Bishop of Rochester, who had arrived at Chelsea very late that morning.

A light was burning on a long table encumbered with books and papers; several high-backed chairs, covered with black morocco, cast their shadows on the walls; a capacious rug of white sheep-skin was spread before the hearth, where the remains of a fire still burned in the grate.

Such was the simplicity of the home of Sir Thomas More.

“And why, my dear friend,” asked the Bishop of Rochester, “will you consent to take upon your shoulders so terrible a responsibility? Once become chancellor, have you fully considered that you will be surrounded by enemies, who will watch your every movement and pursue you even to your death? Have you reflected well that you acknowledge no other laws than those of your own conscience, and feel no remorse unless for not having spoken your views with sufficient candor? Is it thus you hope to resist—thus you hope to escape the snares that will continually surround you?”

“I fear nothing,” replied More; “for I believe in God! And you yourself—would you not blame such weakness? In refusing the king I refuse the queen. Would not Catherine then declare that the trusted servant, even he who had been called her friend, had sacrificed her interests to his love of ease? He had declared his life should be devoted to her cause, and now had abandoned and deprived her of the only hope of relief Providence seemed to have left her! No, Fisher, friendship has rights too sacred for me not to respect them.”

“Then,” cried the bishop, “if you respect the rights of friendship, listen to my appeal! I ask you to decline a dignity that will prove destructive to you. In the name of all that you hold most dear, in the name of all that is good and beautiful in nature, in the entire universe, I conjure you to refuse this fatal honor! It is more than probable the very seal they wish now to place in your hands will be very soon affixed to your death-warrant! Believe me, my friend, all will unite against you. A deep conviction has taken possession of my soul, and I see, I feel, the wrath of this prince, as violent as he is cruel, ready to fall upon your devoted head. You will be crushed in this struggle, too unequal to admit for an instant the hope of escape.”

“Ah! well,” replied More laughingly, “instead, then, of simply inscribing on my tombstone ‘Here lies Thomas More,’ there will appear in pompous style the inscription, ‘Here lies the Lord High Chancellor of England.’ Assuredly, I think that would sound much better, and I shall take care to bequeath my first quarter’s salary to defray the expense of so elegant an inscription.”

“More!” cried the Bishop of Rochester with impatience, “I cannot suffer you to jest on a subject of such grave importance. Do you, then, desire to die? Would you ruin yourself? Trust to my experience. I know the heart of Henry thoroughly; your attempt to save the queen will be vain, and you will inevitably be involved in her ruin. I conjure you, then, accept not this office. I will myself carry your refusal to the king.”

“No, no!” exclaimed More. “I have decided—decided irrevocably.”

“Irrevocably?” repeated Rochester, whom the thought reduced almost to despair. “More, I see it. You have become ambitious; the vainglory of the world, the fatal infatuation of its honors, have taken possession even of the soul of Thomas More! Your heart no longer responds to mine; your ear remains deaf to all my solicitations! Ah! well, since the desire of being honored among men, and to have them grovel at your feet, has made even you despise my counsel and advice, then listen, listen well, and God grant that I may be able to destroy in your heart the poison that pride has poured into it! You are willing to sacrifice to your vanity all the happiness, all the quiet and peace, of your future; know, then, what recompense will be meted out to you. Yesterday Wolsey was in a manner driven from his palace, and descended the Thames in a common boat, Cromwell alone accompanying him; for all have deserted him except his enemies, who, in order to enjoy his calamities, crowded the river in boats and followed after him. They hoped to see him arrested and carried to the Tower, the report having been circulated that he would be taken there. Wolsey—he whom you have so often seen make his appearance in Parliament, surrounded by an almost royal pomp and splendor—is now a fugitive, alone, abandoned, without defence, of the clamorous insults and bitter scorn of a populace always eager to feast their eyes on the ruins of fallen greatness. The air around him resounded with their maledictions. ‘Here is the man who fattened on the blood of the poor,’ they cried. ‘The taxes will be reduced now,’ exclaimed others, ‘since he will have no farther use for palaces and gardens’; and all, in their ignorance, abused him as the cause of the wrongs and oppressions which it was probably not in his power to have averted. At length, overwhelmed with insults and outrages, he was landed at Pultney, and, in order to escape the mob, was hurriedly conducted to his house at Asher, where he has been banished. Such is the reward you will receive in the service of an avaricious prince and a blind infatuated multitude!”

He paused, overcome by anxiety and excitement.

“My dear Fisher,” responded More, deeply moved, “our hearts and thoughts are always in unison; you have only represented to me a second time the picture I had already painted myself.”

“Indeed!” cried Rochester; “and do you still hesitate?”

“What!” replied More, resolutely, “and does it require so much hesitation to sacrifice one’s self? I would not wish to live dishonored; and I should consider myself guilty if I forgot my duty toward my sovereign and the honor of England!”

“So you are resolved! Ah! well, let your sacrifice be accomplished,” said the saintly bishop; “but then may God, whose goodness is infinite, hear my vows and grant my prayer: may the same dangers unite us; side by side with you may my last sigh be breathed out with yours; and if the life of the aged man is not extinguished before that of the man in his prime, then may the stroke of death cut us down at the same moment!”

“My dear friend,” cried More, “the many years that have passed over your head and blanched your locks have not yet ripened your judgment, since you can believe it possible that the king’s anger, although it may one day fall on me, could ever be permitted to overtake you, the counsellor of his youth, whom he has so often called his father! No, I can conceive of no such fearful possibility; the wise, the virtuous Bishop of Rochester can never be involved in the misfortune that would crush Thomas More.”

“Ah!” replied Fisher, “but I shall understand how to call down on my head the vengeance with which he may hesitate to strike me. Believe me, More, a man scarcely reaches the prime of life before he feels himself, as it were, daily beginning to fail. Just as in the autumn days the sun’s light rapidly diminishes, so the passing years despoil his body of physical strength and beauty; but it has no effect upon his soul. The heart—no, the heart never grows old! It loves, it suffers, as in the early morning of life; and when at last it has reached the age when wisdom and experience have destroyed the illusions of the passions, friendship, strengthened by so many blessed memories, reigns there alone and entire, like a magnificent flower that has been sheltered and preserved from the destroying worm.

“Having almost arrived at the end of his career, he often takes a survey of the road he has passed over. He loves to recall his joys and his sorrows, and to weep again for the friends he has lost. I know that presumptuous youth imagines that the prudence he refuses to obey is the only good that remains after the labors of life have been terminated by time.

“Your feelings are not in unison with those of an old man. It is because you do not understand them. He lives in memory, and you in hope. You pursue a phantom, a chimera, the nothingness of which he has already experienced; you accuse him, he complains of you, and often you do not deign to regard the last bitter tear that is drawn from him at the sight of the tomb into which he must soon descend.”

“Oh!” exclaimed More, “you whom I venerate as a father and love as a friend—can you doubt for one moment the truth of a heart entirely devoted to you? Confirmed by your example, guided and sustained by your counsels, what have I to fear? Banish from your mind these sad presentiments. Why should this dread of the future, that perhaps after all is only chimerical, destroy the extreme happiness I enjoy in seeing you?”

For a long time they continued to converse, until the light of early morning at length succeeded the uncertain glimmer of the candle, now flickering in its socket.

“My friend, I must leave you,” said Rochester. “The day already dawns. God grant the sun may not this morning arise on the beginning of your misfortunes!”

“Oh! no,” replied More, “this is my fête to-day. S. Thomas will pray for and protect us.”

The good bishop then descended to the courtyard and mounted his mule; but More, unwilling to give him up, walked on by his side as far as the road followed the course of the river. When they reached the cross-road where the bishop turned off, More shook his hand and bade him farewell.

A great wooden cross stood near the roadside, on which was suspended a wreath of withered leaves; and More, seating himself on one of the stone steps upon which the cross was elevated, followed the good bishop with his eyes until he had disappeared in the distance.

He then rested his head sadly on his hands, and recalled to mind all this venerable friend had said to him.

“He is right!” he mentally exclaimed. “How clear-sighted his friendship renders him! Into what a sea of agitation, malignity, and hatred I shall be plunged! And all for what? In order that I may be lord chancellor of the kingdom through which this road passes. Behold, then, beside the highway,” he added, looking around him, “my lord the great high chancellor, shivering in the cold morning air just as any other man would do who had gone out at this hour without putting on his cloak!… Yes, I can understand how social distinctions might cause us to scorn other men, if they exempted us from the inconveniences of life. We might then perhaps believe that we had different natures. But let us change our garments, and we fall at once, and are immediately confounded with the common herd.”

While making these sad reflections upon the follies of human nature, More arose and returned to the house, where his wife and children and his aged father—simple and peaceable old man, happy in the favor of the king and the virtues of his son—were all wrapped in profound slumber.

In a spacious apartment, of which the dark and worm-eaten ceiling, ragged tapestry, and dilapidated windows presented the appearance of a desolate and abandoned edifice, a fragment of broken furniture still remained, upon which was placed a small piece of bread. Numberless crumbs strewed the dusty floor and were eagerly devoured by a little mouse, but recently the only inhabitant of the place. To-day, however, he had the company of a man whose extraordinary mind had conceived vast projects and executed great and useful enterprises—the Archbishop of York, Cardinal Wolsey. Seated upon the edge of a wooden stool which he had placed in the embrasure of a window, he held his hands crossed one upon the other, and bitterly reflected upon his unhappy destiny. Regrets, of which he felt all the impotency, pressed upon his agitated soul. It seemed to him that he still heard the cries and menaces of the furious populace that exulted in his distress, and to which perhaps, alas! he would again be subjected. At one time filled with courage and resolution, at another humble and cast down, the anxieties of his mind seemed wholly without measure. His eyes, wearied with straying listlessly over the plain which extended before him, beheld only a single laborer ploughing the field. “Man is small,” said he, “in presence of immensity; the point which he forms in space is imperceptible. Entire generations have passed away, have gathered the fruits of the earth, and now sleep in their native dust. My name has been unknown to them. Millions of creatures suffer, where I exist free from pain. Coming up from the lowest ranks of society, I have endeavored to elevate myself above them. And what has my existence signified to them? Has not each one considered himself the common centre around which all the others must revolve?”

Here Wolsey, impelled by extreme hunger, approached the little worm-eaten table, and took up the morsel of dry bread left from his repast the evening before.

Just as he was raising it to his mouth a man entered, dressed in the most scrupulous manner, and enveloped in an ample cloak of the finest material.

Wolsey was startled, and gazed at him in astonishment.

“What! Arundel,” he exclaimed at last, “what could have brought you to this place?”

“Yourself,” replied Arundel, in a frank, abrupt manner. “You have lost everything, and have never informed me by a word! Do you think, then, I have forgotten all you have done for me?”

“The favors I have conferred on you were so slight,” replied Wolsey, “that it would have been natural you should have no longer remembered them, especially since many who owe their wealth, and perhaps their lives, to me have so completely forgotten it.”

“I have never learned how to flatter nor to wear velvet gloves,” replied Arundel; “but I am still more ignorant of the art of forgetting past favors. No, it has never been my custom to act thus; and you have offended me more than you imagine by proving you believed me capable of such baseness.”

As he said this, Arundel took from his bosom an immense purse of red satin, filled with gold, and laid it on the dilapidated table beside a package of clothing which he had thoughtfully added to his gift.

“There are no acknowledgments to be made,” he remarked; “it is essential first of all that you be made comfortable. You can return this when it suits your convenience. Now let us say no more about it.”

“Alas!” cried Wolsey, “are you not aware, then, that I may never be able to return it? They will divide my ecclesiastical benefices among them. The Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Wiltshire have already been put in possession of the revenue from my bishopric of Winchester. This is the only food I have had since I came here,” he added, showing him the bread he still held in his hand.

“Indeed! It is not very delicate,” replied Arundel; “but it is your own fault. When one has friends, he should not neglect them, and that is just what you have done.”

“Misfortune often renders us unjust,” answered the cardinal, deeply moved by the generous frankness and brusque proceedings of Arundel, whom he had always, until now, regarded as being haughty and ungrateful, because he had never observed him among his crowd of fawning courtiers. “I must confess that I could not endure the thought of being repulsed by those for whom I have done everything. I do not believe that among the immense number of those who daily wearied me with protestations of their ostentatious regard there is to-day one who has condescended to think of me in my misfortunes. You only have thought to succor me in my distress—you, who, without my being aware of it, have doubtless been all the while the most sincere among them all.”

“I cannot believe,” replied Arundel, without appearing to notice the acknowledgments with which Wolsey continued to overwhelm him, “that they would all thus have abandoned you had they known the extreme severity with which you have been treated; it would be too foul a blot upon the name of humanity. Notwithstanding they laugh at our misfortunes, I think it appears worse to us than it really is. No, be assured you will find some faithful friends who will defend you. For instance, Sir Thomas More, your successor, whose fortune you have made, cannot fail to use his influence in your favor.”

“More owes me nothing,” replied the cardinal. “I have not made his fortune; when I proposed him to the king as Treasurer of the Exchequer, he had for a long time been acquainted with his rare merits. Knowing that the appointment would prove both useful and agreeable to the king, I recommended him to make it; but really it was more for the king’s benefit than More’s. Besides, I am aware that More is one of the most zealous partisans of Catherine. Thus, you see, there exists no reason why he should feel inclined to assist me. I am only surprised that a man of his exalted integrity should accept a position where he will necessarily be compelled to act in opposition to his convictions.”

“It is with the eager desire of ultimately being able to convert all the world and to correct all consciences,” replied Arundel with a smile of derision; for he never lost an occasion of ridiculing the importance which many attach to political intrigues, and, as they say, to the public good, in whose management they pretend to take a hand, in order to win admiration at any cost for their talents. “And verily, he will find it difficult to sustain his position, unless he becomes the very humble servant of my Lady Anne, regent of the kingdom; for nothing is done but what she ordains, and her uncle, whom she has appointed chief of the council, executes the orders which the king claims the honor of communicating to him. Oh!” continued Arundel in the same ironical tone, and without perceiving the painful effect his words produced on the unhappy cardinal, “truly it is a very great advantage, and above all highly honorable for England, to see her king put in tutelage to the caprices of a woman as weak and vain as she is arrogant. If he was absolutely determined to go into leading-strings, why did he not beseech the good Queen Catherine to take charge of him? She, at least, would have been careful to hold the reins equally on both sides, so that the swaddling could have been made to walk straight.”

“A swaddling,” repeated Wolsey, “… who devoured his nurse!”

“Hold, my dear lord,” continued Arundel; “it cannot be denied that you have made a great mistake in encouraging the king in his divorce project—yes, a great mistake, which they now begin to discover. But I do wrong, perhaps, to reproach you, since you are the first to be punished for your manner of seeing things. But listen to me; as for myself, if, in order to avoid dying of starvation, or being compelled to subsist on just such bread as you have there, I had been obliged to accept the place of lord chancellor, on the day when I found myself relieved of so burdensome and exacting an office I should have cried aloud: ‘Thank heaven that I am again seated by my own fireside, where in peace and quiet I can get up at my leisure and contemplate passing events.’ For myself, these are my principles: to have nothing to do is the first essential to happiness; nothing to lose, the second; nothing to disturb or annoy, the third; and upon these rest all the others. Such is my system—the best of all systems, the only.…”

Arundel would have still continued explaining the numerous theories he had originated for securing happiness for an indefinite length of time, perhaps, but he suddenly perceived that Wolsey no longer heard him, but, with his head sunk on his breast, seemed absorbed in thought.

“Well, my lord,” said Arundel, “you are not listening to me, it seems? Really, it is not worth while to explain to you the true method of being happy.”

“Ah! my dear Arundel,” replied Wolsey, aroused by the exclamation of his visitor, “how could you expect me to think of profiting by your lessons, or to make an application of your theories of happiness, when at this very moment, perhaps, I have been condemned to death by Parliament?”

“There is no proof of that,” replied Arundel. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil—gloomy apprehensions profit us nothing; they do not delay the progress of events; on the contrary, they send them on us in advance, and only serve to aggravate the consequences. Moreover, I must not forget to suggest that if it would be more agreeable for you to be with your friends, there are many who will be happy to receive you, and offer you a mansion as commodious, although less sumptuously furnished, than your palace of York or that of Hampton Court, the latter of which I have never liked since you added the gallery.”

“What is that gallery to me now? I surrender it up to you,” said the cardinal.

The endless arguments of Arundel began to weary him exceedingly. In spite of the extreme gratitude he felt for his sincere and generous offers, Wolsey could not divest himself of the conviction that Arundel belonged to that class who, while in other respects full of good impulses and laudable intentions, are so entirely wanting in tact and delicacy, and contend so urgently for their own opinions, that the consolations they would force you to adopt, far from alleviating your sufferings, only augment them and render their sympathy irksome and oppressive. This feeling was experienced by Wolsey, uncertain as he was what fate was reserved for him, trembling even for his life, while Arundel endeavored to paint for him a minute picture of the happiness and tranquillity enjoyed by a man living in peace and quiet, with nothing to disturb him in the enjoyment of his possessions.

“Alas!” he exclaimed at length impatiently, “why has not kind Providence blessed me with a nature like yours? I should be less unhappy, nor every instant see yawning before me the terrible depths of the precipice on which I now stand. I could catch, at least, at the branches of absurdity, until the moment when I should be dashed to pieces! But no, I cannot; I am too well acquainted with men and things to expect the slightest assistance. They are always ready to strike those who are falling, but never attempt to raise them up. Yesterday, only yesterday, the commissioners of Parliament demanded of me the letters-patent I had received from the king in order to exercise my authority as legate, although every one knew that, as he had given them to me, it was his right alone to take them away again. Ah! well, they have persisted in their demand, and have refused to believe me on oath! No, I will indulge in no more illusions; my enemies have sworn my death, and they will obtain it! And the king, the king my master, after fifteen years of the most faithful service, he delivers me up, helpless and defenceless, to all the cruelties their hatred may inspire; and yet you, Arundel, think that I should still indulge in hope?”

“But all this will be arranged, I tell you,” replied Arundel with an imperturbable coolness. “You should not trouble yourself in advance, because, if the worst should happen, it will change nothing; and if it does not, your present suffering will have been needless.”

As Arundel finished this wise reasoning, Cromwell appeared.

He came from London, where he had been, he said, to defend Wolsey before the Parliament.

On seeing him enter the cardinal was seized with an uncontrollable alarm, thinking his fate had been decided.

“Cromwell!” he cried, and could say no more.

“Ah!” replied Cromwell, “you should not thus give way to your apprehensions, although.…” He paused on seeing the cardinal grow deadly pale. “You need have no uneasiness, because the king has sent Norris to bid me assure you he would take you under his protection.”

“I have been condemned, then!” cried the unhappy Wolsey. “Speak, Cromwell, speak; conceal nothing from me. I am not a child,” he added with firmness.

“You have been condemned by the Star Chamber, but the king says he will have the bill rejected in the House of Commons,” replied Cromwell.

“He will not do it!” cried Wolsey, the tears coursing rapidly down his cheeks. “He will sacrifice me, Cromwell, I know it; he has no longer any use for me, and my past services have left no impression on his mind. But how far has their rage carried them? To what have they condemned me?”

“You have been placed beyond the protection of the king, and all your property confiscated.”

“The king’s protection is already recovered,” gently interrupted Arundel, who had listened until this time in silence. “As for the confiscation, that will be more difficult, inasmuch as they are generally more ready to take than to give. However, my dear cardinal, you should despair of nothing; then let us try and console you. They cannot confiscate me, who have never had anything to do with the gentlemen of the council. I have a good house, an excellent cook; you will come home with me, and, my word for it, you shall want for nothing.”

“Arundel,” interrupted the cardinal, “I am deeply grateful for your kind offer; but believe me, they will not leave me the choice of profiting by it.”

“Why not? why not?” exclaimed Arundel. “The devil! Why, these gentlemen of the council are not wild beasts! A little avaricious, a little ambitious, a little envious, and slightly selfish, but they are at least as accommodating as the devil!”

“No!” replied Wolsey.

“I assure you, before receiving the king’s message,” said Cromwell, “I was in despair, for they spoke of having you arrested and immediately urging the accusation of high treason; but since the king has declared you under his protection, I do not believe that all is entirely lost. Norris has repeated to me twenty times: ‘Say positively to the cardinal that the king advises him not to be troubled, and to remember that he can give him, any moment he pleases, far more than they can take away.’”

“I hope I may be mistaken, dear Cromwell,” replied the cardinal with a sombre air; “but I fear a momentary compassion only has excited the king to say what you tell me, and it will not be long before that wicked night-bird[140] will again have possession of his ear. She will not fail to use her influence in defaming me and blackening anew all my actions, until the king will cease to oppose the wicked designs they have conceived against me.”

Saying this, he buried his face in his hands and sank into a state of despondency impossible to describe.

Cromwell made no reply, and Arundel silently took his leave, inwardly congratulating himself, as he returned home, upon the tranquil and happy life he knew so well how to lead, and censuring those who would not imitate his example; without once reflecting that few were in a position so agreeable or independent as his, and consequently were not able to enjoy themselves equally nor after his own deliberate fashion.

TO BE CONTINUED.

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