"I think I am mad," said Vivian to him- | had been a baby towards the Mill Farm, merely "Come along, Mary." How long he sat uninterrupted beneath this great plane-tree he did not know. Fallen into So quickly did the rustic young giant stride a hopeless lethargy, he remained there apathetic-along that Mary found it hard to keep up with ally, though the night had changed, though the stars were drowned in vapors, though a small misty rain was falling. By-and-by he was aroused by a hand upon his arm, by a voice in his ear. Then he leaned back against the trunk of the great plane-tree, and relapsed into his former apathy. Poor Mary Ashow, who had of course heard all the details of the Broadoak tragedy, had just caught the news that Lady Eva was dead. This seemed worse to her than all. She had so vivid a recollection of the lady of Broadoak in her vigor and beauty: to think of her as dying, falsely accused, seemed a thing too terrible. She could not stay quietly at home. She crept up to the terrace of the great house to gain some information, hoping against hope that what she had heard might be untrue; and the first person she saw was her old acquaintance Vivian, whose appearance startled her terribly. For, though the moon was hidden by misty clouds, her light filled the air as water fills a sponge, and Mary Ashow could see that Vivian's luxuriant hair was turned white, every thread of it. The farmer's daughter, I imagine, saved his life. The apathy into which he had fallen was like that which comes on men who can fight no longer against snow-drifts. When he had uttered those three terrible words-Yes, quite dead -he fell back helplessly against the trunk of the plane-tree. Mary tried to waken him; it was vain. "What am I to do?" she exclaimed. "He is dying!" At that moment there loomed through the mist a huge human form, to wit, that of John Grainger. The good fellow was in the habit of following his little mistress, dog-like, at long distances. She was wont to scold him for so doing, in a pretty piquant way which he by no means disliked. But now she did not scold him. "Oh, John," she cried, "look at poor Mr. Vivian. Look at his hair. What is the matter with him? What shall we do ?" John Grainger answered the question practically. He lifted Vivian from the seat under the plane-tree, and carried him away as if he him. But she managed to do it; and Vivian was soon placed in the softest of down beds, with cooling drinks at hand, and bonny Mary Ashow close to his pillow in the capacity of nurse. Her nursing capacity was amply tested. For weeks he lay powerless and unconscious at Broadoak Mill Farm. The anguish of his Cousin Eva's death had sorely smitten him; it was evident to those who watched him that no other thought approached his brain. He spoke sometimes, but it was only to say over and over again, Quite dead, yes, quite dead. When awake, his large steel-blue eyes seemed always to gaze on some strange sight far away. They guessed that he beheld his cousin; at any rate, he beheld no living creature. Not even Earine. The Greek girl came to his bedside, and helped Mary Ashow to tend him. When the news of his sudden illness reached Broadoak, Jack Eastlake of course came down at once, and took with him Earine. With him also went Dr. Fownes, who declared that Vivian could not be moved. Besides, whither to move him? When the sad funeral business was over, the great house would be left in the hands of servants, to await the coming of the heir—a first cousin of the Squire's, at that time travelling in Syria. Jack Eastlake and Farmer Ashow, who took to one another at first sight, different as were their temperaments, settled it between them. The worthy farmer was a little puzzled at first as to Miss Delisle's relation to the sick man; but it may well be supposed that the impetuous Earine would not leave the man she loved, and Eastlake made Ashow dimly understand that she was in some way or other Vivian's ward. And so it came to pass that Vivian lay in the quietest chamber of the Mill Farm, where no sound came to him save the slumberous rush of the mill-race and the soft susurrus of the wind in the great limes by the Avon. The wild spirit was quenched in him. The vivid, eccentric temper was tamed. One idea, one only, was stamped upon his brain—the idea of Eva Redfern lying dead. He had loved his cousin with the love which one bears to a sister; her sudden and unhappy death had torn his heart-strings. Day after day the doctors visited him, and sagaciously shook their heads, and talked wisely of catalepsy, and doubted whether he ever would recover. Isolation is the law of humanity. Every one of us is an island, though not without the feeling that once these sporadic isles formed a single continent. But there is no isolation so marvellously complete as that which is effected when a malady of the brain shuts out the great panorama of life, and leaves the spirit of man as of old; the voices of beloved friends murmur outside, but are wholly unheard; all the artillery of all Europe's armies shall not wake that sleeper. He is as if shut in a granite vault, with a mighty block of the primal stone set over him to keep his ghost from walking. He has dropped out of the world into the universe-out of the commonplace realm of circumstance into the land that is very far off. CHAPTER XXII. JOHN GRAINGER. Quite contrary!" YES, our old acquaintance, John Grainger, farmer and wrestler, chemist and mathematician, carried on his stalwart shoulders to the Mill Farm the man whom he hated and despised. John Grainger was rather a curious young So far off was that land whereunto Vivian's fellow. He was ugly and inelegant, as I have spirit wandered, that it was doubtful whether it said; he was by no means brilliant, but rather ever could be recalled. Jack Eastlake, friend- slow and ox-like. On the other hand, he was liest of friends, insisted on calling perpetual as strong as Achilles and Abraham Cann, and councils of doctors. They had nothing to sug- as brave as-I was going to say a lion; but gest; lawyers and doctors are alike in this pain- as lions are sheer cowards, I prefer to sayful sterility of ideas. So the long days and an English mastiff. Further, he was a lover of weeks went on; and Valentine Vivian, kept truth, moral and intellectual: hence his intense alive by essences of game and meat, and love for science, which he studied with a laboridraughts of Champagne, lay in the great bed-ous resolution which compensated for his unroom at the Farm, looking ever straight towards questionable want of brilliancy or originality. one strange sad vision; and the two girls, nursing him carefully, longed for happier days, and meanwhile talked much to each other. They suited each other, even as did Jack Eastlake and the farmer, though wide was the difference between them. Plump Mary Ashow had seldom been outside the boundary of her own parish; slender stately Earine had been in Grecian seas, sailing beneath a pirate's flag. Mary had played at confession, as we know; Earine had felt the discipline in a Rouen convent. Each had something to learn from the other. In their strolls together in the garden of the Mill Farm, where the marigold-Calendula, so called, because it blooms in all calends -had found its way into every border; or by the side of the Avon, where the great white water-lilies, their Parian vases filled with small black flies, rested indolently on the surface of the stream; the two girls interchanged ideas not unserviceably. Each told the other her story; each wondered at the other; and Mary grew wiser and calmer, and Earine began to perceive the prodigious propriety of being commonplace and conventional. Mr. Gladstone has lately written a book (which I don't mean to read) proving a great many things about Homer. Among them, I hear, is this: that the Princess Nausikaa was by no means such an unblushing young lady as the "Odyssey" was supposed to assert, but was very much ashamed indeed of the hero who was thrown naked on the shore of Scheria. We are all of us quite wrong in our notions of Homeric simplicity; they are as polite and refined as we are, those creatures of the past, and Hector's Andromache (ah, divine vision of wifely love!) wore a chignon and crinoline. Thank you, Mr. Gladstone. You flatter yourself you understand the days when Achilles fought and Nestor advised, Odysseus spoke and Thersites satirized. I happen to know that a Nausikaa is possible -for I have known Earine. The life of a young fellow of this order, just on the verge of manhood, isolated from other people both by circumstances and by natural disposition, is not easily to be made intelligible. John Grainger was not a man who could readily understand the world in which he had to live. He was ambitious to take a fitting position in that world, and exaggerated his own disadvantages. He lived, for the most part, a lonely, life; working hard at farming, but aware that Farmer Ashow looked upon him with something like contempt; and studying his favorite sciences throughout the midnight hours. But, dear reader, agriculture and mathematics do not satisfy all the glowing desires of a young man. fancy flies to fairer things; and as to this young man, he lived under the same roof with pretty Mary Ashow, and of course he was in love with her-or thought so. His Here it was especially that John Grainger's science failed him. He could fathom chemical and mathematical difficulties, but a mere girl was too much for him. Why, she was never in the same mood two minutes of the day. Sometimes she was singing like a lark, and the next moment as pensive as a quoist. If she made him a promise, she was sure to break it; if she would not promise what he asked, she very often did it. She was such an odd delicious mixture of caprice and pathos, that the poor boy who loved her was utterly puzzled what to make of her. Of course he knew she despised him—had he not heard her tell Vivian so? A wiser wooer than he would have known that from female lips such words are written in water. He took every thing au grand sérieux. Boys do, or they would not be boys. Of course he had resolved, after that day of the lesson in botany and the fatal spider orchis, never to care for her again. Equally of course, when Vivian had vanished, and she naturally tried again to fascinate John Grainger, he made no resolute resistance. She soon won him back again. Soon! Why, it was done in a minute. Which of us, though as old as Savage Landor when he wrote his last poem, can resist the beseeching eyes and pouting mouth of the creature he loves? Loves! Well, that word must be taken cum grano salis in John Grainger's case. Can a boy of that age love? I doubt it. The movement of mind which such young fellows feel towards women with whom they associate is merely a symptom and prelude of the coming passion. The true madness comes later-many years later in most men-if it comes at all. You see this singularly shown in young poets. Mr. Swinburne is a notable example-as also was Keats. Mr. Swinburne professes to be an erotic poet above all things; yet, after reading every line of his published poetry, I am convinced that he has not the faintest idea of the meaning of the word love. As to Keats, his "Endymion" gives one the notion of love-poetry written by girls, in some province of Fairyland where boys had never been heard of. But John Grainger, though a mere boy, had within him the capacity of love; and his gay little capricious mistress whistled him back to her as if he had been a mighty mastiff, which animal he mightily resembled; and he followed her everywhere with the mastiff's fidelity, and so happened to be in time to carry Vivian down to the Farm, thereby doubtless saving his life. And now there came a new era in the life of John Grainger. His had been a very quiet commonplace life, and he had seen few people in any way his own intellectual equals. Earine flashed upon him like some preternatural vision. When she came to stay at the Mill Farm, she seemed to reveal to him a new form of life, a higher and more spiritual sphere of existence. Her marvellous beauty, her tranquil nameless grace, came upon him like a miracle; but there was more, far more, in her perfect simplicity of character, in the absence of all coquetry and caprice. She was to him a new sort of woman, as indeed she would have been to men of far wider experience than his. Mary Ashow and he had been very good friends, and he had tried to carry on with her a little of what he would have styled sweethearting the upper classes call it flirtation. But when he and Mary were together they were always somehow at cross purposes. at Now, when he made acquaintance with Earine, he found that there were no cross purposes. She would have calmly smiled at any attempt "sweethearting;" in fact, her very look showed the impossibility of such a thing. She was surrounded by an atmosphere of perfect simplicity, and talked as freely to John Grainger as if he had been her brother. Grainger, himself possessing the rudiments of a simple and therefore noble character, was wonderfully developed under this Greek girl's influence. He plainly saw within how narrow a segment of the world he hitherto had dwelt. Earine, who, between her own unparalleled experience and the influence of Vivian's wayward genius, differed widely from all other women in the world, took kindly to this new agricultural pupil of hers, whose capacity she readily recognized. The Mill Farm was quite revolutionized. Seldom now did Farmer Ashow get his four o'clock tea to the minute, or his evening stroll with Mary along the margin of the Avon. But the old boy was not on that account unhappy. Well had he loved Squire Redfern, and it gave him infinite satisfaction to have the Squire's friend under his roof, nursed by his daughter. And even on Farmer Ashow-tough as ashEarine had rained influence. There's a poetic corner in every one of us. The farmer could not resist her, and soon gave up the attempt; and she implicitly taught him to understand something of John Grainger's good qualities, which he had hitherto disregarded. I like John Grainger. There are so many men similarly situated, who have to enter the world unaccompanied, by some solitary wicketgate. Most of them take the wrong path, and wander Heaven knows whither. Ah, the divine companionship of youth! These orphaned men, these men who are brotherless, sisterless, loveless, what wonder if they are misled into labyrinths which lead to discomfiture and misery? Little Mary Ashow grew a trifle jealous about this time. She had regarded John Grainger as her own private property; she did not care about him, she thought, but he did care about her, and had no right whatever to care about any one else. But she saw him taking every opportunity to talk ith Earine, while that young lady assuredly did not discourage him. Indeed, they got on very well together. This slow John Grainger, a heavy Ajax among men, was not devoid of capacities unsuspected in him. There was some poetry beneath the crasser material of which he was built. But he did not know it before he met Earine. He had been digging in hard mathematical quarries, and searching for secrets in retort and crucible, unaware of that fairer region of poetry where the air is rich with odor of roses, and filled with the magic music of birds, while the virgin turf whereon you tread is exquisitely colored by a myriad flowers. The blond hair and watchet eyes and softly-rounded form of Mary Ashow had not taught him any thing of that mystic realm. But Earine might have been born there. Those marvellous seablue eyes of hers seemed to reflect divine and distant visions. Nor was this all. Pretty little Mary was a charming capricious creature, intended by nature for a farmer's wife, after a few preliminary flirtations. To fulfill her destiny she needed no particular knowledge or thirst for knowledge, neither would the imaginative faculty be of serious service to her. So she possessed no such perplexing endowments. Otherwise was it with Earine, born in some "fairyland forlorn," who had read Homer in Greek and Shakspeare in English with Vivian among the Cyclades. John a Grainger, full of mathematics and chemistry, the meaning of the word Englishman, as distinct had never read a word of Shakspeare. He had from the word man; for no one knows what it never been to a play. He had learned a little is to be an Englishman until he has read Shakinaccurate Latin, and could construe Virgil speare. Homer was the key to Greece: Shakwith difficulty and a dictionary; but his Greek speare is the key to England. was absolutely nothing. The impetuous youth, suddenly made aware of the wide realms of wisdom and beauty heretofore unknown to him, determined at once to explore them. He took to reading poetry, and neglected. his science. He went right through Shakspeare at a gallop, and was greatly bewildered at the end thereof. Then he got a copy of Pope's "Homer," and read it strenuously, and marvelled how Earine could get out of it the poetic and picturesque visions which she seemed to find there. So he took it to his Grecian instructress, and asked her what it meant. I CHAPTER XXIII. TERESA THE TRAITRESS. "Prima est ulcisci lex, altera vivere raptu, Tertia mentiri, quarta negare Deos." THUS wrote Seneca of the island which produced the Bonapartes-which produced also Teresita the Traitress. His distich may be rather hard upon the majority of Corsicans; but it tersely and accurately describes certain exceptional characters among them, and notVery much perplexed was she. The Homer ably the lady who was known at Broadoak of Pope was not at all the Homer she had learn-Avon as Madame de Petigny Garnuchot. First ed to love. Pope's clever couplets had no such revenge, then theft, then lying, then defiance music as the sonorous hexameter. I don't of the Deity-these were main points of her think blank verse can fairly render Homer. charming character. M. Catelan had told quite can not wholly approve either Lord Derby or accurately the earlier part of her history, while Mr. Ichabod Wright. If the reader who knows her career at the Rouen convent has reached us nothing of the old Greek desires to get a true through Earine's adventures there. How she idea of him from an English version, let him managed to win the confidence of the French try Philip Stanhope Worsley in the Spenserian police is immaterial. Perchance there was in stanza. This is the most Homeric translation certain quarters a liking for Corsicans. of Homer I know; and Professor Conington's part is useful as a foil. But we shall get the English hexameter in time, pace Dr. Spedding. Earine had to teach John Grainger the difference between the Homer of Queen Anne's man and the Homer whom she had known in her girlhood, read in some such type as Browning's sculptor describes- "Somewhat low for ai's and oi's." Yet John Grainger thought he had never heard such music as when Earine read him a bit of Homer in the modern Greek fashion, and made the young British farmer understand how men and women thought and spoke thirty centuries ago. Every body knows the grand sonnet of Keats on Chapman's "Homer." No watcher of the skies startled by a new planet-no wanderer through untraversed lands amazed by the apparition of an unknown ocean-could be more astonished than was John Grainger when he discovered Homer. And then, Earine having "coached" him in Homer, he went back to Shakspeare, and read him in quite another fashion. Then he began to see the significance of England's life and thought wondrously explained by the greatest of poets in his immortal plays. Then he knew Now she was to take her trial for murder in England, where the police encourage no fancies. However, I do not suppose she was greatly frightened. She had the possession of a great experience, and had been in worse positions previously. When her father branded her girlish shoulder, it was a greater terror and shame than any thing which since she had undergone. It was not likely that these too amiable English would do her any such harm as this. The Assize was opened at Riverdale. There The death by poison was a great excitement. of Squire Redfern had caused a strong feeling of horror and amazement throughout the county. Every few days his four-in-hand or Lady Eva's pretty pony-carriage had been seen in the great market-place in Riverdale. And now he was murdered, and his wife, falsely accused, had died of a broken heart, and a vile female Papist and spy was to be tried for murdering him. Such was the notion of the ordinary Riverdale public. Riverdale is a town much given to pugilism, but with a fine healthy hatred of the Papacy. And, as they hang people in the market-place there, and the Frenchwoman was quite certain to be hanged, there was a pleasant sensation through the place when the Assize was opened. Madame de Petigny Garnuchot had quite a strong bar. Her counsel would tolerate nothing irrelevant; and so her youthful career in Corsica, and her subsequent achievements in Rouen, though doubtless the jury knew all about them, were carefully excluded from the case. And the judge summed up entirely in her favor; how could he do otherwise? She had not been proved to possess any of the poison | air of distinction which belongs to a man who which killed Rupert Redfern; she had never entered his room, to the knowledge of any witness; and there was no conceivable reason why she should wish to kill him. She was honorably acquitted, of course, the judge summing up dead in her favor. She dined the very same evening at the house of the Lord-Lieutenant of the county. has mixed on equal terms with the greatest, who has ruled a nation and led a Parliament, whose name, in the very prime of his life, is already historic. When Lord Tullochgorum found that M. Catelan had called to remonstrate with him on his patronage of Madame Garnuchot, he naturally stood upon his dignity. No one had a right to dictate to him, he maintained, as to whom he should receive at his table. "No one assumes such a right," said Catelan quietly. "At the same time a peer of England and Lord-Lieutenant of a county must surely be reluctant to extend hospitality to a felon. I know this woman's career from her childhood. She is simply infamous. To allow her to enter your house-a creature who has committed the vilest crimes, and who is employed in the infamous occupation of a spy-is to insult every one else whom you invite." The Earl was very angry, so angry that he forgot the dignity which he spent his life in cherishing. The remonstrance had its effect, notwithstanding. Madame Garnuchot did not find herself received quite so warmly as heretofore, and Riverdale and its neighborhood soon lost sight of her altogether. I am sorry to say that the illogical public did not t approve the verdict. They called the judge an old woman, and the jury a dozen donkeys. This, even if true, was inexcusably irreverent. But it was not true. At this period of my story, knowing more than the reader does, I feel sure that Madame de Petigny Garnuchot committed that murder; but I may be wrong. Anyhow, the Riverdale judge and jury were right. There was not a jot of circumstantial evidence against her. So, though the populace of that enlightened town were greatly disgusted, and got up a mild riot, and burnt the Pope and Madame Garnuchot in effigy in the marketplace, I don't quite see how Madame could have been hanged. That she deserved to be hanged was my opinion when I first met her. However, at present, she suffered a minor punishment-she only had to dine with the Lord- Such people as she are not, however, easily Lieutenant. It was the Earl of Tullochgorum, annihilated. Adventurous spirits, lovers of exwho sits in the House of Peers as Baron Whig-citing enterprise, when they are disappointed maleery. The Earl took the interesting French- in one career, they very quickly turn to another. woman in to dinner. It occurred to Madame that she should like to remain still in England; for, though the police of Paris had treated her with marvellous kindness, she had no especial wish to trust herself again within their reach. It also occurred to her that her next adventure had better be at some distance from Riverdale, and she naturally looked towards London. To that city of refuge fly men and women of all classes, more and more various than those whom the indiscriminate hospitality of Romulus attracted to the great asylum. Thither fled Madame in a first-class carriage by express train, and, arriving in the afternoon, she took up her quarters at the Colossus Hotel which, as every body knows, is close to the terminus. But the name which she gave How this came about I can not precisely explain; but certain it is that by some mysterious influence Madame de Petigny Garnuchot obtained some very valuable friends. She was received into quite the best society; newspapers which, before the trial, had (with careful avoidance of libel) built sensation articles upon her career, changed their tone entirely, and described her as an innocent sufferer by circumstantial evidence. But the populace of Riverdale, with Great British obstinacy, adhered to their first opinion, and indifferently abused the lady and the Pope, whom they regarded as her accomplice. M. Achille Catelan, who had once been a Minister of France in days not imperial, was hereat intensely disgusted. He called on my Lord Tullochgorum, and frightened that excellent Whig peer from his propriety. The interview was not without humor. The Earl was a florid and portly gentleman, with a very decided opinion of his own importance; all his life he had voted with his party, and he was firmly convinced that he ought to have been a cabinet minister. However, all that he got by his loyalty to the said party was the Lord-Lieutenancy of the county; and this appointment gave him the more satisfaction because there were several resident nobles who had a much higher claim to it than he. But, when Lord Tullochgorum and M. Catelan met in the Earl's drawing-room, you might have taken the latter for a prince and the former for a valet. to the obsequious "manageress" who received her was, for some reason, not that to which she had given lustre at Riverdale-it was Madame de Longueville. Spies are always watched by spies. It is like Dean Swift's rhymes concerning creatures far less noxious: "Fleas there are that live on men, Those fleas have other fleas again, Those lesser fleas have fleas that bite 'em, Not unaware was Madame de Longueville of this law of her existence. On the platform of Riverdale her quick eye had glanced through the crowd, but noticed no one who looked as if he belonged to her own profession; and when her luggage was taken to the Colossus, no other passenger by the train came in the same direcStill, Madame was far too well aware of Catelan had the unmistakabletion. |