Blackwood's Magazine.

CHAPTER XXXII.

IN WHICH BARRINGTON DOES A CREAT DEAL OF TALKING.

MISS BARRINGTON proved as good as Two days after the ball she bade a cordial farewell to her friends at Holmhurst, and drove away from the door, her prim, elderly maid facing her on the back seat of the carriage, and her neat luggage following in a cart, under the charge of two servants. The number of hitherto invisible retainers who started up to render Miss Barrington some small service on the last day of her sojourn in any country-house was something astonishing; but she did not object to the practice, and indeed had done something to encourage it, holding, as she did, that one of the few unmixed delights that accrue to the possessor of a full purse is that of indiscriminate tipping.

The Ashleys, one and all, bemoaned her departure loudly; and a perceptible gloom fell upon the household after she had gone. But was this owing solely to grief over the loss of their guest, or had her casual remark that she expected Mademoiselle de Mersac to pay her a visit, early in the ensuing month, any

thing to do with it? It is a fact that Helen had been given to suppose that she, and not her cousin, was to have been thus favored; and if this unexpected change of programme produced some feeling of soreness and disappointment in her breast, and a little anxiety in that of her parents, who can blame them?

It must, at all events, be recorded to their credit that they vented none of the ill-humor they may have felt upon Jeanne, but were only a trifle silent and dispirited during the remainder of the day. Miss Barrington, as they all knew, was a capricious old person, liable to all kinds of passing fancies, which those who valued her friendship must needs put up with. It was certainly not a little vexatious that she should have chosen to defraud Helen of her visit to London, but that she might be contemplating the far more serious injury of robbing her of her potential husband was a notion that had not as yet suggested itself to any one of them.

And to Helen, at any rate, joy came in the morning. For upon her plate at breakfast-time she found a very kind note from her godmother, inclosing a check for fifty pounds, and at the same

time requesting her to order for herself, by way of a Christmas present, two dresses, with regard to the materials and trimmings of which no restriction was laid upon her. The same post brought a little pile of foreign letters to Jeanne, two of which were evidently from M. de Fontvieille and from her brother's bailiff respectively.

Pierre Cauvin's composition was in the highest degree creditable to him. The style of it was ornate, the orthography ingenious if somewhat peculiar, and the ab-. sence of erasures testified that the whole production was probably the result of more than one rough copy. He began by offering humble thanks to Providence for his continued preservation in good health, and likewise for that of all his subordinates, whom he made it a point to mention severally, so that the first page of his letter, with its long string of harshly-sounding Arab names, read not unlike one of the genealogical chapters of the New Testament. This duty accomplished, he went on to express a respectful hope that mademoiselle had not suffered from the effects of the bleak climate of the north. He had taken some pains, he said, since mademoiselle's departure, to discover whether the English winter were as formidable as it had been represented, and had gained a little reassuring information from the captain of a yacht which had lately come into harbor. He is a native of Cahousse, in the island of Quaïte, wrote Pierre, “which, according to him, is one of the British Isles, though I have not been able to discover it upon the map. He tells me that in his part of the country snow and frost are seldom seen, but I have remarked that the stories of sailors should be received with caution. This one would have me believe, for instance, that, during the summer months, there are often as many as a hundred yachts such as his master's-a vessel, mademoiselle, fitted up with inconceivable luxury-lying off the little town where he lives, and that this is but a small fraction of the number of pleasure-ships that carry the English flag. 1 answer him nothing; but mademoiselle is aware that an Auvergnat is not the man to let himself be taken in by an Englishman. I ask pardon of mademoiselle if I seem to speak disrespectfully of the nation to which madame

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her honored mother belonged; but the truth is that Messieurs les Anglais ne sont pas malins"--(the phrase is hardly to be translated satisfactorily). "We have but few of them here this winter, owing to the war; and the shopkeepers and landlords complain much of their absence. The country, mademoiselle, continues to rejoice in a profound tranquillity. The Arabs have not moved as yet; but one must not trust too much to them. The autumn rains have answered to our utmost hopes"-etc., etc., etc. At this point Pierre entered upon agricultural topics, and fell into a more vernacular strain of language.

M. de Fontvieille wrote somewhat de spondently. He was very lonely, he said, very dull, and old age was gaining upon him every day. He had no longer the slightest hope of any successful termination to the war, and foresaw yet worse troubles looming on the horizon. Why he had been destined to live on into these bad times, after nearly all his contemporaries had been removed, was more than he could understand; and he should pray for the end, were it not that he longed to embrace his beloved children once more. He cheered up a little, however, on the last page, and related, with manifest glee, how he had purchased a magnificent pearl necklace from a distressed Moor, and with what crafty devices he had managed to get the better of that needy unbeliever.

And now Jeanne had to open her third letter, which she had reserved for the last, not upon the schoolboy's principle of pudding first and plums afterward, but rather because she had feared that, had she read this letter before the others, the remembrance of it would probably have entirely marred her enjoyment of them, for she had seen at once that it was from M. de Saint-Luc.

After all, it proved to be only a friendly but formal reply to one which, in a fit of compunction, she had addressed to him soon after her arrival in England It opened with "Dear Mademoiselle," and closed with an assurance of the writer's respectful homage; it contained little information of a personal kind, except the modest mention of a slight wound, already nearly healed, and a pardonable self-congratulation upon the conduct of the regiment, which was now

serving under General Bourbaki; it dwelt at some length upon the gallantry and cheerful endurance displayed by Léon; it touched briefly upon the prospects of the campaign; and was, in short, as unlike the missive of a lover to his affianced bride as any thing could well be. Nothing could have been more discreet, nothing less calculated to ruffle the susceptibilities of the lady to whom it was addressed; yet, in spite of its matter-offact tone-perhaps in consequence of it -it caused Jeanne to feel some sharp twinges of conscience.

It was not because her whole heart belonged to Barrington that she reproached herself she had been quite clear in her mind, from the first, that nothing in the nature of love was due from her to M. de Saint-Luc. Nor did she deem herself much to blame in that she had left her future husband for so long without any direct news of her or inquiry after his safety. But what troubled her was an uneasy feeling that this man, whom she had always despised, was treating her with a generosity which she had certainly not deserved at his hands. Hitherto she had looked forward to her marriage simply and solely with reference to its bearing upon Léon's fortunes and her own. Of M. de Saint-Luc she had thought as little as a patient for whom leeches have been prescribed is apt to think of the suffering in store for those loathsome creatures, who, however, have obviously not altogether the best of it in the unpleasant business. To her he had been only a means-and a most distasteful means-toward an end. But now she began to wonder whether, after all, it were worthy of her, or even just, to regard him in this light. M. de Fontvieille and the Curé of El Biar had both given her to understand-though not perhaps in so many words-that it was permissible to marry one man and to love another; but when they had thus soothed her scruples, that other had been many hundred miles away, which certainly made a difference. Neither of them would have been likely to sanction those long rides of which mention has been made; even less would they have approved of the dialogues between their protégée and the Englishman, in which so little of importance was said, and so much inferred. The truth was that

Jeanne had, for some time, been unconsciously stifling a conviction that out of all this some issue must come; that she would scarcely be able to part from Barrington without some sort of mutual avowal; and Saint-Luc's letter was but as a flash of additional light thrown suddenly upon the point from whch she had, until now, sedulously averted her eyes. Not that she actually faced it even yet. She did not say to herself that Barrington loved her, or that he must have conjectured what her feelings were toward him. She did not dwell upon the thought that, if he and she were really all in all to one another, nothing-not even Léon's interests-ought to keep them apart. How could she, when the man whom she loved had as yet given her no right to do so? But as the upshot of a good deal of confused and perplexed self-communing, she did determine that the chestnut mare should return forthwith to the Broadridge stables, where, if she had only known it, Barrington and Leigh were, at that very moment, deep in a conversation, in the course of which her naine had recurred at tolerably frequent intervals.

The two friends had visited every stall and loose-box, had duly criticised the condition of their occupants, had seen some of the horses go out for exercise, and now Leigh had seated himself upon an upturned bucket before the stabledoor, and was puffing at a short wooden pipe, while, with half-closed eyes and patient mien, he listened to a protracted discourse from his host, who was pacing to and fro as he talked, and pausing, every now and then, in front of his auditor, to emphasize a point or round a period.

"I admit the justice of your arguments," the orator was saying "I admit that there are serious objections to my marrying a lady who is not English by birth, and who will of course be, all her life, more or less under the influence of the priests. I don't mind going even further, and allowing that there are certain subjects upon which she and I might very possibly not find ourselves in complete sympathy. Moreover, I fully agree with you in thinking that such a girl as Helen Ashley is far better fitted to become the wife of an English countrygentleman than Mademoiselle de Mersac, and that, in the matter of marriage, a

wise man will pay more heed to the long years to come than to the passion of the present.

"Didn't know I'd said all that," remarked Leigh parenthetically; "but it sounds very sensible."

it.

"It is sensible, and therefore you said Or else you said it, and therefore it is sensible. A Yarmouth bloater is not more impregnated with salt than you are with common-sense. You are the best of fellows, my dear old Leigh, but you are a Philistine of the Philistines."

Ah, I don't understand that kind of slang; but if a Philistine means a man who does his best to see facts as they are, instead of perpetually trying to mystify himself and everybody about him, I glory in being one.'

"Of course you do, and quite right too. I never said there weren't good points about a Philistine. We are what we are; we can't help our natures, and may as well be proud of our several excellences. I, for instance, am not commonplace, and I am glad of it. Jeanne is not commonplace; our intercourse has not been commonplace; and why, in Heaven's name, are we to hurry it into a commonplace ending?"

Leigh knocked out the ashes from his pipe against the heel of his boot, and looked up with an air of wearied toleration.

"If I can make out what you are driving at, may I be-married myself!" he ejaculated. "When you began to talk, I certainly understood that what you were arguing to prove was that you would be doing a wise thing in marrying this French girl, though the rest of the world would probably think otherwise. Now, as far as I can see, you are protesting against such a commonplace' notion. But if you don't intend marriage, what on earth do you intend? You say you are not going in for a mere flirtation; you are forever swearing that you can't live without the girl; and yet, you know, you won't be able to go on galloping about the country with her, and larking over fences till the end of your life, unless you get at least as far as an engagement. And in the mean time, as a matter of detail, she happens to be engaged to another fellow."

Mr. Leigh stated the case quite correctly. His friend had indeed shifted

his ground in the course of argument, as was habitual with him; but Barrington was not the man to be put out by any charge of inconsistency. He simply nored it, and proceeded to follow out his train of thought.

"No doubt," said he, we shall settle down some day, as Mr. and Mrs. Barrington, and have people here to stay with us, and ask the neighbors to dinner once a month, and go to church on Sundays-no, by the bye, I suppose we shall not go to church together. All that will be very delightful, and I ask for nothing better; only don't you see that, when that time comes, there will be an end to the schöne Liebeszeit '? Marriage, which to people of your stamp is the goal and crown of all love-making, is to me simply the death-blow of romance. Not of love, mind you-I don't say that— but unquestionably of one of the subtlest charms of love. Remove the element of uncertainty, and you enter upon an entirely new phase of the sentiment. I am uncertain now, and I rejoice in being so. Suppose I were to ask Jeanne point-blank to-day to be my wife, how do I know that she would not refuse me? How do I know that she would not consider herself bound in honor to this broken-down viveur whom her friends have driven her into accepting? And there again is another argument against hurry. It is quite even betting that M. de Saint-Luc gets knocked on the head before the war is over; and if that happy deliverance should come about, I could step into his place with much greater propriety and less fuss, don't you see? But the fact is, Leigh, that you and I should never see these questions in the same light if we were to talk till Doomsday. Your idea of happiness is a bachelor life. Failing that, you would like to get your courtship over as quickly as possible, and take a fresh start as a pattern husband and father. Your ideal world is a pleasant, fertile valley, neatly marked out into pastures and ploughed fields, with flocks and herds, and crops in due season. You would be quite content to plod along it, in a steady, equable way, for the remainder of your days; and all the time you would be so engrossed in watching your prosperity increase, and your children growing up like what's-his-names about your table, that you would never

once raise your eyes to the measureless blue overhead where the syklarks are trilling, or to the heights where, far removed from the confused chatter, and oaths, and groans, and laughter of men, the snowy summits sleep on, in calm beauty and grandeur, from century to century."

"The right honorable gentleman resumed his seat amidst prolonged cheering, and the proceedings, which had lasted up to an advanced hour, then terminated."

That was all the response that Barrington got from his confidant, who now rose, and sauntered away toward the house. But when he had gone some ten paces on his way he faced about, and called out, "I say, are you really off the day after to-morrow?''

"Yes; I believe so."

"Oh! Well, it's no business of mine, and I don't suppose for a moment that you will be guided by me; but, if I were you, I would have something settled. definitely, one way or the other, before I went." And, with these parting words of advice, Mr. Leigh vanished.

As for Barrington, he shrugged his shoulders with a slight deprecating smile, as who should say, What else could you expect? Does a thorn bear grapes, or a thistle figs?"-and shortly afterward, mounting his horse, rode across the park toward Holmhurst.

He congratulated himself upon his good fortune when he found Jeanne alone in the library; but the manner of his reception was scarcely what he had anticipated. Jeanne was feeling a little nervous and disturbed in mind; and when Mr. Barrington was announced, wished, perhaps for the first time in her life, that he were away. But as there was no getting rid of his physical presence, she set herself to put him at a moral distancea task never very difficult to her. She laid aside the half-written letter upon which she had been engaged, rose, shook hands, and resumed her seat with a certain chilly dignity of demeanor which had often damped Barrington's spirits before now. He did not, however, choose to notice it, but drew a chair up beside hers, and remarked that it was a beautiful day, and that he hoped she was coming out for a ride. She said no; she did not think she would be able to ride that day.

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'You are going to stay with my aunt in January, are you not?" Barrington asked, rather anxiously.

"Perhaps. I have not thought much about it yet. I suppose your friend Mr. Leigh goes away too?"

"Leigh? Oh, yes, he goes, of course. It is a great nuisance. I wish I had not engaged myself to these people.'

Oh, you are sure to enjoy yourself when once you are away," said Jeanne. "But we shall all miss you both," she added politely.

Barrington grunted. "I don't care about being missed in that collective sort of way," he said. After which there was silence for a few moments.

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You will give Zephyr a gallop every day, I hope ?' resumed Barrington presently. Zephyr was the name of the chest

nut mare.

"I think not. I made up my mind this morning, before you came, that I would not ride any more.

Was Barrington very much to be blamed if he fancied that his approaching departure might have something to do with this resolution?

"Riding all by one's self is dull work certainly, he said, while a satisfied smile, which he could not altogether repress, gathered about the corners of his mouth.

"I like riding alone," answered Jeanne. "I have been accustomed to be left to myself all my life, and I often think it is much pleasanter not to be obliged to talk to somebody. But, for several reasons, I do not wish to use your horse any longer. You have been very kind to allow me to keep her all this time.'' Might one venture to reasons?" Barrington inquired. "Well, one of them is that I am afraid

ask your