[NOTE]

Acknowledgments are made to the editors of “The Pall Mall Magazine,” “The Illustrated London News,” “The World,” “Black and White,” “The London Magazine,” “The English Illustrated Magazine,” and “The Bystander,” to the hospitality of whose pages a number of the stories here reprinted were first invited.

LOAVES AND FISHES

A GALLOWS-BIRD

In February of the year 1809, when the French were sat down before Saragossa—then enduring its second and more terrific siege within a period of six months—it came to the knowledge of the Duc d’Abrantes, at that time the General commanding, that his army, though undoubtedly the salt of the earth, was yet so little sufficient to itself in the matter of seasoning, that it was reduced to the necessity of flavouring its soup with the saltpetre out of its own cartridges. In this emergency, d’Abrantes sent for a certain Ducos, captain on the staff of General Berthier, but at present attached to a siege train before the doomed town, and asked him if he knew whence, if anywhere in the vicinity, it might be possible to make good the deficiency.

Now this Eugène Ducos was a very progressive evolution of the times, hatched by the rising sun, emerged stinging and splendid from the exotic quagmires of the past. A facile linguist, by temperament and early training an artist, he had flown naturally to the field of battle as to that field most fertile of daring new effects, whose surprises called for record rather than analysis. It was for him to collect the impressions which, later, duller wits should classify. And, in the meantime, here he was at twenty a captain of renown, and always a creature of the most unflagging resourcefulness.

“You were with Lefebvre-Desnouettes in Aragon last year?” demanded Junot.

“I was, General; both before the siege and during it.”

“You heard mention of salt mines in this neighbourhood?”

“There were rumours of them, sir—amongst the hills of Ulebo; but it was never our need to verify the rumours.”

“Take a company, now, and run them to earth. I will give you a week.”

“Pardon me, General; I need no company but my own, which is ever the safest colleague.”

Junot glared demoniacally. He was already verging on the madness which was presently to destroy him.

“The devil!” he shouted. “You shall answer for that assurance! Go alone, sir, since you are so obliging, and find salt; and at your peril be killed before reporting the result to me. Bones of God! is every skipjack with a shoulder-knot to better my commands?”

Ducos saluted, and wheeled impassive. He knew that in a few days Marshal Lannes was to supplant this maniac.

* * * * *

Up and away amongst the intricate ridges of the mountains, where the half-unravelled knots of the Pyrenees flow down in threads, or clustered threads, which are combed by and by into the plains south of Saragossa, a dusky young goatherd loitered among the chestnut trees on a hot afternoon. This boy’s beauty was of a supernal order. His elastic young cheeks glowed with colour; his eyebrows were resolute bows; his lips, like a pretty phrase of love, were set between dimples like inverted commas. And, as he stood, he coquetted like Dinorah to his own shadow, chasséd to it, spoke to it, upbraiding or caressing, as it answered to his movements on the ground before him—

“Ah, pretty one! ah, shameless! Art thou the shadow of the girl that Eugenio loved? Fie, fie! thou wouldst betray this poor Anita—mock the round limbs and little feet that will not look their part. Yet, betray her to her love returning, and Anita will fall and kiss thee on her knees—kiss the very shadow of Eugenio’s love. Ah, little shadow! take wings and fly to him, who promised quickly to return. Say I am good but sad, awaiting him; say that Anita suffers, but is patient. He will remember then, and come. No shadow of disguise shall blind him to his love. Go, go, before I repent and hold thee, jealous that mine own shadow should run before to find his lips.”

She stooped, and, with a fantastic gesture, threw her soul upon the winds; then rose, and leaned against a tree, and began to sing, and sigh and murmur softly:

“ ‘At the gate of heaven are sold brogues

For the little bare-footed angel rogues’—

Ah, little dear mother! it is the seventh month, and the sign is still delayed. No baby, no lover. Alack! why should he return to me, who am a barren olive! The husbandman asks a guerdon for his care. Give me my little doll, Santissima, or I will be naughty and drink holy-water: give me the shrill wee voice, which pierces to the father’s heart, when even passion loiters. Ah, come to me, Eugenio, my Eugenio!”

She raised her head quickly on the word, and her heart leaped. It was to hear the sound of a footstep, on the stones far below, coming up the mountain side. She looked to her shirt and jacket. Ragged as they were, undeveloped as was the figure within them, she had been so jealous a housewife that there was not in all so much as an eyelet hole to attract a peeping Tom. Now, leaving her goats amongst the scattered boulders of the open, she backed into the groves, precautionally, but a little reluctant, because in her heart she was curious.

The footsteps came on toilfully, and presently the man who was responsible for them hove into sight. He wore the dress of an English officer, save for the shepherd’s felt hat on his head; but his scarlet jacket was knotted loosely by the sleeves about his throat, in order to the disposition of a sling which held his left arm crookt in a bloody swathe. He levered himself up with a broken spear-shaft; but he was otherwise weaponless. A pistol, in Ducos’s creed, was the argument of a fool. He carried his ammunition in his brains.

Having reached a little plateau, irregular with rocks shed from the cliffs above, he sat down within the shadow of a grove of chestnut and carob trees, and sighed, and wiped his brow, and nodded to all around and below him.

“Yes, and yes, and of a truth,” thought he: “here is the country of my knowledge. And yonder, deep and far amongst its myrtles and mulberries, crawls the Ebro; and to my right, a browner clod amongst the furrows of the valleys, heaves up the ruined monastery of San Ildefonso, which Daguenet sacked, the radical; whilst I occupied (ah, the week of sweet malvoisie and sweeter passion!) the little inn at the junction of the Pampeluna and Saragossa roads. And what has become of Anita of the inn? Alack! if my little fille de joie were but here to serve me now!”

The goatherd slipped round the shoulder of a rock and stood before him, breathing hard. Her black curls were, for all the world, bandaged, as it might be, with a yellow napkin (though they were more in the way to give than take wounds), and crowned rakishly with a dusky sombrero. She wore a kind of gaskins on her legs, loose, so as to reveal the bare knees and a little over; and across her shoulders was slung a sun-burnt shawl, which depended in a bib against her chest.

Now the one stood looking down and the other up, their visions magnetically meeting and blending, till the eyes of the goatherd were delivered of very stars of rapture.

Was this a spirit, thought Ducos, summoned of his hot and necessitous desire? But the other had no such misgiving. All in a moment she had fallen on her brown knees before him, and was pitifully kissing his bandaged arm, while she strove to moan and murmur out the while her ecstasy of gratitude.

“Nariguita!” he murmured, rallying as if from a dream; “Nariguita!”

She laughed and sobbed.

“Ah, the dear little happy name from thy lips! A thousand times will I repeat it to myself, but never as thou wouldst say it. And now! Yes, Nariguita, Eugenio—thine own ‘little nose’—thy child, thy baby, who never doubted that this day would come—O darling of my soul, that it would come!”—(she clung to him, and hid her face)—“Eugenio! though the blossom of our love delays its fruitage!”

He smiled, recovered from his first astonishment. Ministers of coincidence! In all the fantastic convolutions of war, the merry, the danse-macabre, should not love’s reunions have a place? It was nothing out of that context that here was he chanced again, and timely, upon that same sweet instrument which he had once played on, and done with, and thrown aside, careless of its direction. Now he had but to stoop and reclaim it, and the discarded strings, it seemed, were ready as heretofore to answer to his touch with any melody he listed.

He caressed her with real delight. She was something more than lovable. He made himself a very Judas to her lips.

“Anita, my little Anita!” he began glowingly; but she took him up with a fevered eagerness, answering the question of his eyes.

“So long ago, ah Dios! And thou wert gone; and the birds were silent; and under the heavy sky my father called me to him. He held a last letter of thine, which had missed my hands for his. Love, sick at our parting, had betrayed us. O, the letter! how I swooned to be denied it! He was for killing me, a traitor. Well, I could not help but be. But Tia Joachina had pity on me, and dressed me as you see, and smuggled me to the hills, that I might at least have a chance to live without suffering wrong. And, behold! the heavens smiled upon me, knowing my love; and Señor Cangrejo took me to herd his goats. For seven months—for seven long, faithful months; until the sweetest of my heart’s flock should return to pasture in my bosom. And now he has come, my lamb, my prince, even as he promised. He has come, drawing me to him over the hills, following the lark’s song of his love as it dropped to earth far forward of his steps. Eugenio! O, ecstasy! Thou hast dared this for my sake?”

“Child,” answered the admirable Ducos, “I should have dared only in breaking my word. Un honnête homme n’a que sa parole. That is the single motto for a poor captain, Nariguita. And who is this Señor Cangrejo?”

Some terror, offspring of his question, set her clinging to him once more.

“What dost thou here?” she cried, with immediate inconsistency—“a lamb among the wolves! Eugenio!”

“Eh!”—he took her up, with an air of bewilderment. “I am Sir Zhones, the English capitaine, though it loose me your favour, mamsellee. Wat! Damn eet, I say!”

She fell away, staring at him; then in a moment gathered, and leapt to him again between tears and laughter.

“But this?” she asked, her eyes glistening; and she touched the bandage.

“Ah! that,” he answered. “Why, I was wounded, and taken prisoner by the French, you understand? Also, I escaped from my captors. It comes, blood and splint and all, from the smashed arm of a sabreur, who, indeed, had no longer need of it.”

“For the love of Christ!” she cried in a panic. “Come away into the trees, where none will observe us!”

“Bah! I have no fear, I,” said Ducos. But he rose, nevertheless, with a smile, and, catching up the goatherd, bore her into the shadows. There, sitting by her side, he assured her, the rogue, of the impatience with which he had anticipated, of the eagerness with which he had run to realize this longed-for moment. The escapade had only been rendered possible, he said truthfully, by the opportune demand for salt. Doubtless she would help him, for love’s sake, to justify the venture to his General?

But, at that, she stared at him, troubled, and her lip began to quiver.

“Ah, God!” she cried; “then it was not I in the first place! Go thy ways, love; but for pity’s heart-sake let me weep a little. Yes, yes, there is salt in the mountains, that I know, and where the caves lie. But there are also Cangrejo—whom you French ruined and made a madman—and a hundred like him, wild-cats hidden amongst the leaves. And there, too, are the homeless friars of St. Ildefonso; and, dear body of Christ! the tribunal of terror, the junta of women, who are the worst of all—lynx-eyed demons.”

He smiled indulgently. Her terror amused him.

“Well, well,” he said; “well, well. And what, then, is this junta?”

“It is a scourge,” she whispered, shivering, “for traitors and for spies. It gathers nightly, at sunset, in the dip yonder, and there waters with blood its cross of death. This very evening, Cangrejo tells me——”

She broke off, cuddled closer to her companion, and clasping her hands and shrugging up her shoulders to him, went on awfully—

“Eugenio, there was a wagon-load of piastres coming secretly for Saragossa by the Tolosa road. It was badly convoyed. One of your generals got scent of it. The guard had time to hide their treasure and disperse, but him whom they thought had betrayed them the tribunal of women claimed, and to-night——”

“Well, he will receive his wages. And where is the treasure concealed?”

“Ah! that I do not know.”

Ducos got to his feet, and stretched and yawned.

“I have a fancy to see this meeting-place of the tribunal. Wilt thou lead me to it, Nariguita?”

“Mother of God, thou art mad!”

“Then I must go alone, like a madman.”

“Eugenio, it is cursing and accurst. None will so much as look into it by day; and, at dusk, only when franked by the holy church.”

“So greatly the better. Adios, Nariguita!”

It took them half an hour, descending cautiously, and availing themselves of every possible shelter of bush and rock, to reach a strangely formed amphitheatre set stark and shallow amongst the higher swales of the valley, but so overhung with scrub of myrtle and wild pomegranate as to be only distinguishable, and that scarcely, from above. A ragged track, mounting from the lower levels into this hollow, tailed off, and was attenuated into a point where it took a curve of the rocks at a distance below.

As Ducos, approaching the rim, pressed through the thicket, a toss of black crows went up from the mouth ahead of him, like cinders of paper spouted from a chimney. He looked over. The brushwood ceased at the edge of a considerable pit, roughly circular in shape, whose sides, of bare sloping sand, met and flattened at the bottom into an extended platform. Thence arose a triangular gibbet, a very rack in a devil’s larder, all about which a hoard of little pitchy bird scullions were busy with the joints. Holy mother, how they squabbled, and flapped at one another with their sleeves, it seemed! The two carcasses which hung there appeared, for all their heavy pendulosity, to reel and rock with laughter, nudging one another in eyeless merriment.

Ducos mentally calculated the distance to the gallows below from any available coign of concealment.

“One could not hide close enough to hear anything,” he murmured, shaking his head in aggravation; “and this junta of ladies—it will probably talk. What if it were to discuss that very question of the piastres? Nariguita, will you go and be my little reporter at the ceremony?”

Anita, crouching in the brush behind him, whispered terrified: “It is impossible. They admit none but priests and women.”

“And are not you a woman, most beautiful?”

“God forbid!” she said. “I am the little goatherd Ambrosio.”

He stood some moments, frowning. A scheme, daring and characteristic, was beginning to take shape in his brain.

“What is that clump of rags by the gallows?” he asked, without looking round.

“It is not rags; it is rope, Eugenio.”

He thought again.

“And when do they come to hang this rascal?” he said.

“It is always at dusk. O, dear mother!” she whimpered, for the young man had suddenly slipped between the branches, and was going swiftly and softly down the pit-side.

Already the basin of sand was filled with the shadows from the hills. Ducos approached the gibbet. The last of the birds remaining arose and dispersed, quarrelling with nothing so much as the sunlight which they encountered above.

“It is an abominable task,” said the aide-de-camp, looking up at the dangling bodies; “but—for the Emperor—always for the Emperor! That fellow, now, in the domino—it would make us appear of one build. And as for complexion, why, he at least would have no eyes for the travesty. Mon Dieu! I believe it is a Providence.”

There was a ladder leaned against the third and empty beam. He put it into position for the cloaked figure, and ran up it. The rope was hitched to a hook in the cross-piece. He must clasp and lever up his burden by main strength before he could slacken and detach the cord. Then, with an exclamation of relief, he let the body drop upon the sand beneath. He descended the ladder in excitement.

“Anita!” he called.

She had followed, and was at hand. She trembled, and was as pale as death.

“Help me,” he panted—“with this—into the bush.”

He had lifted his end by the shoulders.

“What devil possesses you? I cannot,” she sobbed; “I shall die.”

“Ah, Nariguita! for my sake! There is no danger if thou art brave and expeditious.”

Between them they tugged and trailed their load into the dense undergrowth skirting the open track, and there let it plunge and sink. Ducos removed the domino from the body, rolling and hauling at that irreverently. Then he saw how the wretch had been pinioned, wrists and ankles, beneath.

Carrying the cloak, he hastened back to the gallows. There he cautiously selected from the surplus stock of cord a length of some twelve feet, at either end of which he formed a loop. So, mounting the ladder, over the hook he hitched this cord by one end, and then, swinging himself clear, slid down the rope until he could pass both his feet into the lower hank.

“Voilà!” said he. “Come up and tie me to the other with some little pieces round the waist and knees and neck.”

She obeyed, weeping. Her love and her duty were to this wonder of manhood, however dreadful his counsel. Presently, trussed to his liking, he bade her fetch the brigand’s cloak and button it over all.

“Now,” said he, “one last sacramental kiss; and, so descending and placing the ladder and all as before, thou shalt take standing-room in the pit for this veritable dance of death.”

A moment—and he was hanging there, to all appearance a corpse. The short rope at his neck had been so disposed and knotted—the collar of the domino serving—as to make him look, indeed, as if he strained at the tether’s end. He had dragged his long hair over his eyes; his head lolled to one side; his tongue protruded. For the rest, the cloak hid all, even to his feet.

The goatherd snivelled.

“Ah, holy saints, he is dead!”

The head came erect, grinning.

“Eugenio!” she cried; “O, my God! Thou wilt be discovered—thou wilt slip and strangle! Ah, the crows—body of my body, the crows!”

“Imbecile! have I not my hands? See, I kiss one to thee. Now the sun sinks, and my ghostly vigil will be short. Pray heaven only they alight not on that in the bush. Nariguita, little heroine, this is my last word. Go hide thyself in the bushes above, and watch what a Frenchman, the most sensitive of mortals, will suffer to serve his Emperor.”

It was an era, indeed, of sublime lusts and barbaric virtues, when men must mount upon stepping-stones, not of their dead selves, but of their slaughtered enemies, to higher things. Anita, like Ducos, was a child of her generation. To her mind the heroic purpose of this deed overpowered its pungency. She kissed her lover’s feet; secured the safe disposition of the cloak about them; then turned and fled into hiding.

* * * * *

At dusk, with the sound of footsteps coming up the pass, the crows dispersed. Eugène, for all his self-sufficiency, had sweated over their persistence. A single more gluttonous swoop might at any moment, in blinding him, have laid him open to a general attack before help could reach him from the eyrie whence unwearying love watched his every movement. Now, common instance of the providence which waits on daring, the sudden lift and scatter of the swarm left his hearing sensible to the tinkling of a bridle, which came rhythmical from the track below. Immediately he fell, with all his soul, into the pose of death.

The cadence of the steely warning so little altered, the footsteps stole in so muffled and so deadly, that, peering presently through slit eyelids for the advent of the troop, it twitched his strung nerves to see a sinister congress already drawn soundless about the gibbet on which he hung. Perhaps for the first time in this stagnant atmosphere he realized the peril he had invited. But still the gambler’s providence befriended him.

They were all women but two—the victim, a sullen, whiskered Yanguesian, strapped cuttingly to a mule, and a paunchy shovel-hatted Carmelite, who hugged a crucifix between his roomy sleeves.

Ducos had heard of these banded vengeresses. Now, he was Frenchman enough to appreciate in full the significance of their attitude, as they clustered beneath him in the dusk, a veiled and voiceless huddle of phantoms. “How,” he thought, peeping through the dropped curtain of his hair, “will the adorables do it?” He had an hysterical inclination to laugh, and at that moment the monk, with a sudden decision to action, brushed against him and set him slowly twirling until his face was averted from the show.

Immediately thereon—as he interpreted sounds—the mule was led under the gallows. He heard the ladder placed in position, heard a strenuous shuffling as of concentrated movement. What he failed to hear (at present) was any cry or protest from the victim. The beam above creaked, a bridle tinkled, a lighter drop of hoofs receded. A pregnant pause ensued, broken only by a slight noise, like rustling or vibrating—and then, in an instant, by a voice, chuckling, hateful—the voice of the priest.

“What! to hang there without a word, Carlos? Wouldst thou go, and never ask what is become of that very treasure thou soldst thy soul to betray? The devil has rounded on thee, Carlos; for after all it is thou that art lost, and not the treasure. That is all put away—shout it in the ears of thy neighbours up there—it is all put away, Carlos, safe in the salt mines of the Little Hump. Cry it to the whole world now. Thou mayst if thou canst. In the salt mines of the Little Hump. Dost hear? Ah, then, we must make thee answer.”

With his words, the pit was all at once in shrill hubbub, noise indescribable and dreadful, the shrieking of harpies bidden to their prey. It rose demoniac—a very Walpurgis.

“No, no,” thought Ducos, gulping under his collar. He was almost unnerved for the moment. “It is unlawful—they have no right to!”

He was twisting again, for all his mad will to prevent it. He would not look, and yet he looked. The monk, possessed, was thrashing the torn and twitching rubbish with his crucifix. The others, their fingers busy with the bodkins they had plucked from their mantillas, had retreated for the moment to a little distance.

Suddenly the Carmelite, as if in an uncontrollable frenzy, dropped his weapon, and scuttling to the mule, where it stood near at hand, tore a great horse pistol from its holster among the trappings, and pointed it at the insensible body.

“Scum of all devils!” he bellowed. “In fire descend to fire that lasts eternal!”

He pulled the trigger. There was a flash and shattering explosion. A blazing hornet stung Ducos in the leg. He may have started and shrieked. Any cry or motion of his must have passed unnoticed in the screaming panic evoked of the crash. He clung on with his hands and dared to raise his head. The mouth of the pass was dusk with flying skirts. Upon the sands beneath him, the body of the priest, a shapeless bulk, was slowly subsiding and settling, one fat fist of it yet gripping the stock of a pistol which, overgorged, had burst as it was discharged.

* * * * *

The reek of the little tragedy had hardly dissipated before Ducos found himself. The sentiment of revolt, deriving from his helpless position, had been indeed but momentary. To feel his own accessibility to torture, painted torture to him as an inhuman lust. With the means to resist, or escape, at will, he might have sat long in ambush watching it; even condoning it as an extravagant posture of art.

With a heart full of such exultation over the success of his trick that for the moment he forgot the pain of his wound, he hurriedly unpicked the knots of the shorter cords about him, and, jumping to the ground, waited until the shadow of a little depressed figure came slinking across the sand towards him.

“Eugenio!” it whispered; “what has happened? O! art thou hurt?”

She ran into his arms, sobbing.

“I am hurt,” said Ducos. “Quick, child! unstrap this from my arm and bind it about my calf. Didst hear? But it was magnificent! Two birds with a single stone. The piastres in pickle for us. Didst see, moreover? Holy Emperor! it was laughable. I would sacrifice a decoration to be witness of the meeting of those two overhead. It should be the Yanguesian for my money, for he has at least his teeth left. Look how he shows them, bursting with rage! Quick, quick, quick! we must be up and away, before any of those others think of returning.”

“And if one should,” she said, “and mark the empty beam?”

“What does it matter, nevertheless! I must be off to-night, after thou hast answered me one single question.”

“Off? Eugenio! O! not without me?”

“God, little girl! In this race I must not be hampered by so much as a thought. But I will return for thee—never fear.”

He still sat in his domino. She knelt at his feet, stanching the flow from the wound the pistol had made in his leg. At his words she looked up breathlessly into his face; then away, to hide her swimming eyes. In the act she slunk down, making herself small in the sand.

“Eugenio! My God! we are watched!”

He turned about quickly.

“Whence?”

“From the mouth of the pass,” she whispered.

“I can see nothing,” he said. “Hurry, nevertheless! What a time thou art! There, it is enough of thy bungling fingers. Help me to my feet and out of this place. Come!” he ended, angrily.

He had an ado to climb the easy slope. By the time they were entered amongst the rocks and bushes above, it was black dusk.

“Whither wouldst thou, dearest?” whispered the goatherd.

He had known well enough a moment ago—to some point, in fact, whence she could indicate to him the direction of the Little Hump, where the treasure lay; afterwards, to the very hill-top where some hours earlier they had forgathered. But he would not or could not explain this. Some monstrous blight of gloom had seized his brain at a swoop. He thought it must be one of the crows, and he stumbled along, raving in his heart. If she offered to help him now, he would tear his arm furiously from her touch. She wondered, poor stricken thing, haunting him with tragic eyes. Then at last her misery and desolation found voice—

“What have I done? I will not ask again to go with thee, if that is it. It was only one little foolish cry of terror, most dear—that they should suspect, and seize, and torture me. But, indeed, should they do it, thou canst trust me to be silent.”

He stopped, swaying, and regarded her demoniacally. His face was a livid and malignant blot in the thickening dusk. To torture her? What torture could equal his at this moment? She sought merely to move him by an affectation of self-renunciation. That, of course, called at once for extreme punishment. He must bite and strangle her to death.

He moved noiselessly upon her. She stood spellbound before him. All at once something seemed to strike him on the head, and, without uttering a sound, he fell forward into the bush.

* * * * *

Ducos opened his eyes to the vision of so preternaturally melancholy a face, that he was shaken with weak laughter over the whimsicality of his own imagination. But, in a very little, unwont to dreaming as he was, the realization that he was looking upon no apparition, but a grotesque of fact, silenced and absorbed him.

Presently he was moved to examine his circumstances. He was lying on a heap of grass mats in a tiny house built of boards. Above him was a square of leaf-embroidered sky cut out of a cane roof; to his left, his eyes, focussing with a queer stiffness, looked through an open doorway down precipices of swimming cloud. That was because he lay in an eyrie on the hillside. And then at once, into his white field of vision, floated the dismal long face, surmounted by an ancient cocked-hat, slouched and buttonless, and issuing like an august Aunt Sally’s from the neck of a cloak as black and dropping as a pall.

The figure crossed the opening outside, and wheeled, with the wind in its wings. In the act, its eyes, staring and protuberant, fixed themselves on those of the Frenchman. Immediately, with a little stately gesture expressive of relief and welcome, it entered the hut.

“By the mercy of God!” exclaimed the stranger in his own tongue. Then he added in English: “The Inglese recovers to himself?”

Ducos smiled, nodding his head; then answered confidently, feeling his way: “A little, sir, I tank you. Thees along night. Ah! it appear all one pain.”

The other nodded solemnly in his turn—

“A long night indeed, in which the sunksink tree very time.”

“Comment!” broke out the aide-de-camp hoarsely, and instantly realized his mistake.

“Ah! devil take the French!” said he explanatorily. “I been in their camp so long that to catch their lingo. But I spik l’Espagnol, señor. It shall be good to us to converse there.”

The other bowed impenetrably. His habit of a profound and melancholy aloofness might have served for mask to any temper of mind but that which, in real fact, it environed—a reason, that is to say, more lost than bedevilled under the long tyranny of oppression.

“I have been ill, I am to understand?” said Ducos, on his guard.

“For three days and nights, señor. My goatherd came to tell me how a wounded English officer was lying on the hills. Between us we conveyed you hither.”

“Ah, Dios! I remember. I had endeavoured to carry muskets into Saragossa by the river. I was hit in the leg; I was captured; I escaped. For two days I wandered, señor, famished and desperate. At last in these mountains I fell as by a stroke from heaven.”

“It was the foul blood clot, señor. It balked your circulation. There was the brazen splinter in the wound, which I removed, and God restored you. What fangs are theirs, these reptiles! In a few days you will be well.”

“Thanks to what ministering angel?”

“I am known as Don Manoel di Cangrejo, señor, the most shattered, as he was once the most prosperous of men. May God curse the French! May God” (his wild, mournful face twitched with strong emotion) “reward and bless these brave allies of a people more wronged than any the world has yet known!”

“Noble Englishman,” said he by and by, “thou hast nothing at present but to lie here and accept the grateful devotion of a heart to which none but the inhuman denies humanity.”

Ducos looked his thanks.

“If I might rest here a little,” he said; “if I might be spared——”

The other bowed, with a grave understanding.

“None save ourselves, and the winds and trees, señor. I will nurse thee as if thou wert mine own child.”

He was as good as his word. Ducos, pluming himself on his perspicacity, accepting the inevitable with philosophy, lent himself during the interval, while feigning a prolonged weakness, to recovery. That was his, to all practical purposes, within a couple of days, during which time he never set eyes on Anita, but only on Anita’s master. Don Manoel would often come and sit by his bed of mats; would even sometimes retail to him, as to a trusted ally, scraps of local information. Thus was he posted, to his immense gratification, in the topical after-history of his own exploit at the gallows.

“It is said,” whispered Cangrejo awfully, “that one of the dead, resenting so vile a neighbour, impressed a goatherd into his service, and, being assisted from the beam, walked away. Truly it is an age of portents.”

On the third morning, coming early with his bowl of goat’s milk and his offering of fruits, he must apologize, with a sweet and lofty courtesy, for the necessity he was under of absenting himself all day.

“There is trouble,” he said—“as when is there not? I am called to secret council, señor. But the boy Ambrosio has my orders to be ever at hand shouldst thou need him.”

Ducos’s heart leapt. But he was careful to deprecate this generous attention, and to cry Adios! with the most perfect assumption of composure.

He was lying on his elbow by and by, eagerly listening, when the doorway was blocked by a shadow. The next instant Anita had sprung to and was kneeling beside him.

“Heart of my heart, have I done well? Thou art sound and whole? O, speak to me, speak to me, that I may hear thy voice and gather its forgiveness!”

For what? She was sobbing and fondling him in a very lust of entreaty.

“Thou hast done well,” he said. “So, we were seen indeed, Anita?”

“Yes,” she wept, holding his face to her bosom. “And, O! I agonize for thee to be up and away, Eugenio, for I fear.”

“Hush! I am strong. Help me to my legs, child. So! Now, come with me outside, and point out, if thou canst, where lies the Little Hump.”

She was his devoted crutch at once. They stood in the sunlight, looking down upon the hills which fell from beneath their feet—a world of tossed and petrified rapids. At their backs, on a shallow plateau under eaves of rock, Cangrejo’s eyrie clung to the mountain-side.

“There,” said the goatherd, indicating with her finger, “that mound above the valley—that little hill, fat-necked like a great mushroom, which sprouts from its basin among the trees?”

“Wait! mine eyes are dazzled.”

“Ah, poor sick eyes! Look, then! Dost thou not see the white worm of the Pampeluna road—below yonder, looping through the bushes?”

“I see it—yes, yes.”

“Now, follow upwards from the big coil, where the pine tree leans to the south, seeming a ladder between road and mound.”

“Stay—I have it.”

“Behold the Little Hump, the salt mine of St. Ildefonso, and once, they say, an island in the midst of a lake, which burst its banks and poured forth and was gone. And now thou knowest, Eugenio?”

He did not answer. He was intently fixing in his memory the position of the hill. She waited on his mood, not daring to risk his anger a second time, with a pathetic anxiety. Presently he heaved out a sigh, and turned on her, smiling.

“It is well,” he said. “Now conduct me to the spot where we met three days ago.”

It was surprisingly near at hand. A labyrinthine descent—by way of aloe-horned rocks, with sandy bents and tufts of harsh juniper between—of a hundred yards or so, and they were on the stony plateau which he remembered. There, to one side, was the coppice of chestnuts and locust trees. To the other, the road by which he had climbed went down with a run—such as he himself was on thorns to emulate—into the valleys trending to Saragossa. His eyes gleamed. He seated himself down on a boulder, controlling his impatience only by a violent effort.

“Anita,” he said, drilling out his speech with slow emphasis, “thou must leave me here alone awhile. I would think—I would think and plan, my heart. Go, wait on thy goats above, and I will return to thee presently.”

She sighed, and crept away obedient. O, forlorn, most forlorn soul of love, which, counting mistrust treason, knows itself a traitor! Yet Anita obeyed, and with no thought to eavesdrop, because she was in love with loyalty.

The moment he was well convinced of her retreat, Ducos got to his legs with an immense sigh of relief. Love, he thought, could be presuming, could be obtuse, could be positively a bore. It all turned upon the context of the moment; and the present was quick with desires other than for endearments. For it must be related that the young captain, having manœuvred matters to this accommodating pass, was designing nothing less than an instant return, on the wings of transport, to the blockading camp, whence he proposed returning, with a suitable force and all possible dispatch, to seize and empty of its varied treasures the salt mine of St. Ildefonso.

“Pouf!” he muttered to himself in a sort of ecstatic aggravation; “this accursed delay! But the piastres are there still—I have Cangrejo’s word for it.”

He turned once, before addressing himself to flight, to refocus in his memory the position of the mound, which still from here was plainly visible. In the act he pricked his ears, for there was a sound of footsteps rising up the mountain path. He dodged behind a boulder. The footsteps came on—approached him—paused—so long that he was induced at last to peep for the reason. At once his eyes encountered other eyes awaiting him. He laughed, and left his refuge. The new-comer was a typical Spanish Romany—slouching, filthy, with a bandage over one eye.

“God be with thee, Caballero!” said the Frenchman defiantly.

To his astonishment, the other broke into a little scream of laughter, and flung himself towards him.

“Judge thou, now,” said he, “which is the more wide-awake adventurer and the better actor!”

“My God!” cried Ducos; “it is de la Platière!”

“Hush!” whispered the mendicant. “Are we private? Ah, bah! Junot should have sent me in the first instance.”

“I have been hurt, thou rogue. Our duel of wits is yet postponed. In good time hast thou arrived. This simplifies matters. Thou shalt return, and I remain. Hist! come away, and I will tell thee all.”

Half an hour later, de la Platière—having already, for his part, mentally absorbed the details of a certain position—swung rapidly, with a topical song on his lips, down the path he had ascended earlier. The sound of his footfalls receded and died out. The hill regathered itself to silence. Ducos, on terms with destiny and at peace with all the world, sat for hours in the shadow of the trees.

Perhaps he was not yet Judas enough to return to Anita, awaiting him in Cangrejo’s eyrie. But at length, towards evening, fearing his long absence might arouse suspicion or uneasiness, he arose and climbed the hill. When he reached the cabin, he found it empty and silent. He loitered about, wondering and watchful. Not a soul came near him. He dozed; he awoke; he ate a few olives and some bread; he dozed again. When he opened his eyes for the second time, the shadows of the peaks were slanting to the east. He got to his feet, shivering a little. This utter silence and desertion discomforted him. Where was the girl? God! was it possible after all that she had betrayed him? He might have questioned his own heart as to that; only, as luck would have it, it was such a tiresomely deaf organ. So, let him think. De la Platière, with his men (as calculated), would be posted in the Pampeluna road, round the spur of the hill below, an hour after sunset—that was to say, at fifteen minutes to six. No doubt by then the alarm would have gone abroad. But no great resistance to a strong force was to be apprehended. In the meantime—well, in the meantime, until the moment came for him to descend under cover of dark and assume the leadership, he must possess his soul in patience.

The sun went down. Night flowing into the valleys seemed to expel a moan of wind; then all dropped quiet again. Darkness fell swift and sudden like a curtain, but no Anita appeared, putting it aside, and Ducos was perplexed. He did not like this bodiless, shadowless subscription to his scheming. It troubled him to have no one to talk to—and deceive. He was depressed.

By and by he pulled off, turned inside-out and resumed his scarlet jacket, which he had taken the provisional precaution to have lined with a sombre material. As he slipped in his arms, he started and looked eagerly into the lower vortices of dusk. In the very direction to which his thoughts were engaged, a little glow-worm light was burning steadily from the thickets. What did it signify—Spaniards or French, ambush or investment? Allowing—as between himself on the height and de la Platière on the road below—for the apparent discrepancy in the time of sunset, it was yet appreciably before the appointed hour. Nevertheless, this that he saw made the risk of an immediate descent necessary.

Bringing all his wits, his resolution, his local knowledge to one instant focus, he started, going down at once swiftly and with caution. The hills rose above him like smoke as he dropped; the black ravines were lifted to his feet. Sometimes for scores of paces he would lose sight altogether of the eye of light; then, as he turned some shoulder of rock, it would strike him in the face with its nearer radiance, so that he had to pause and readjust his vision to the new perspective. Still, over crabbed ridges and by dip of thorny gulches he descended steadily, until the mound of the Little Hump, like a gigantic thatched kraal, loomed oddly upon him through the dark.

And, lo! the beacon that had led him down unerring was a great lantern hung under the sagging branch of a chestnut tree at the foot of the mound—a lantern, the lurid nucleus of a little coil of tragedy.

A cluster of rocks neighboured the clearing about the tree. To these Ducos padded his last paces with a cat-like stealth—crouching, hardly breathing; and now from that coign of peril he stared down.

A throng of armed guerrillas, one a little forward of the rest, was gathered about a couple more of their kidney, who, right under the lantern, held the goatherd Anita on her knees in a nailing grip. To one side, very phantoms of desolation, stood Cangrejo and another. The faces of all, densely shadowed in part by the rims of their sombreros, looked as if masked; their mouths, corpse-like, showed a splint of teeth; their ink-black whiskers hummocked on their shoulders.

So, in the moment of Ducos’s alighting on it, was the group postured—silent, motionless, as if poised on the turn of some full tide of passion. And then, in an instant, a voice boomed up to him.

“Confess!” it cried, vibrating: “him thou wert seen with at the gallows; him whom thou foisted, O! unspeakable, thou devil’s doxy! on the unsuspecting Cangrejo; him, thy Frankish gallant and spy” (the voice guttered, and then, rising, leapt to flame)—“what hast thou done with him? where hidden? Speak quickly and with truth, if, traitor though thou be, thou wouldst be spared the traitor’s estrapade.”

“Alguazil, I cannot say. Have mercy on me!”

Ducos could hardly recognize the child in those agonized tones.

The inquisitor, with an oath, half wheeled.

“Pignatelli, father of this accursed—if by her duty thou canst prevail?”

A figure—agitated, cadaverous, as sublimely dehumanized as Brutus—stepped from Cangrejo’s side and tossed one gnarled arm aloft.

“No child of mine, alguazil!” it proclaimed in a shrill, strung cry. “Let her reap as she hath sown, alguazil!”

Cangrejo leapt, and flung himself upon his knees by the girl.

“Tell Don Manoel, chiquita. God! little boy, that being a girl (ah, naughty!) is half absolved. Tell him, tell him—ah, there—now, now, now! He, thy lover, was in the cabin. I left him prostrate, scarce able to move. When the council comes to seek him, he is gone. Away, sayst thou? Ah, child, but I must know better! It could not be far. Say where—give him up—let him show himself only, chiquita, and the good alguazil will spare thee. Such a traitor, ah, Dios! And yet I have loved, too.”

He sobbed, and clawed her uncouthly. Ducos, in his eyrie, laughed to himself, and applauded softly, making little cymbals of his thumb-nails.

“But he will not move her,” he thought—and, on the thought, started; for from his high perch his eye had suddenly caught, he was sure of it, the sleeking of a French bayonet in the road below.

“Master!” cried Anita, in a heart-breaking voice; “he is gone—they cannot take him. O, don’t let them hurt me!”

The alguazil made a sign. Cangrejo, gobbling and resisting, was dragged away. There was a little ugly, silent scuffle about the girl; and, in a moment, the group fell apart to watch her being hauled up to the branch by her thumbs.

Ducos looked on greedily.

“How long before she sets to screaming?” he thought, “so that I may escape under cover of it.”

So long, that he grew intolerably restless—wild, furious. He could have cursed her for her endurance.

But presently it came, moaning up all the scale of suffering. And, at that, slinking like a rat through its run, he went down swiftly towards the road—to meet de la Platière and his men already silently breaking cover from it.

And, on the same instant, the Spaniards saw them.

* * * * *

“Peste!” whispered de la Platière “We could have them all at one volley but for that!”

Between the French force, ensconced behind the rocks whither Ducos had led them, and the Spaniards who, completely taken by surprise, had clustered foolishly in a body under the lantern, hung the body of Anita, its torture suspended for the moment because its poor wits were out.

“How, my friend!” exclaimed Ducos. “But for what?”

“The girl, that is all.”

“She will feel nothing. No doubt she is half dead already. A moment, and it will be too late.”

“Nevertheless, I will not,” said de la Platière.

Ducos stamped ragingly.

“Give the word to me. She must stand her chance. For the Emperor!” he choked—then shrieked out, “Fire!”

The explosion crashed among the hills, and echoed off.

A dark mass, which writhed and settled beyond the lantern shine, seemed to excite a little convulsion of merriment in the swinging body. That twitched and shook a moment; then relaxed, and hung motionless.

THE RAVELLED SLEAVE

Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care.

I should like to preface my subject with a Caractère, in the style of La Bruyère, as thus:—

Pamphilus is what the liberal call a reserved man, and the intolerant a secretive. He certainly has an aggravating way of appearing to make Asian mysteries of the commonplaces of life. He traffics in silence as others do in gossip. The “Ha!”, with which he accepts your statement of fact or conjecture, seems to imply on his part both a shrewder than ordinary knowledge of your subject, and a curiosity to study in you the popular view. One feels oddly superficial in his company, and, resentful of the imposition, blunders into self-assertive vulgarities which one knows to be misrepresentations of oneself. Do still waters always run deep? Pamphilus, it would appear, has founded his conduct on the fallacy, as if he had never observed the placid waters of the Rhine slipping over their shallow levels. One finds oneself speculating if, could one but once lay bare, suddenly, the jealous secrets of Pamphilus’s bosom, one would be impressed with anything but their unimportance. Yet, strangely, scepticism and irritation despite, one likes him, and takes pleasure in his company.

Possibly the fact that he cultivates so few friends makes of his lonely preferences a flattery. Then, too, loquacity is not invariably a brimming intellect’s overflow. It is better, on the whole, if one has very little to say, to keep that little in reserve for a rainy day. Too many of us, having the conceit of our inheritance, think that we, also, can feed a multitude on five loaves and a couple of fishes. But we must adulterate largely to do it.

Pamphilus, again, has the winning, persuasive “presence.” He is thirty-three, but still in his physical and mental attributes a big-eyed wondering boy. You can mention to him nothing so ordinary, but his eager “Yes? Yes?” startles you into trying to improve upon your subject with a touch of humour, a flower of observation, for his rare delectation. Is he worth the effort? You don’t know. You don’t know whether or not he wants you to think so, or is really instinctively greedy for the psychologic bonne bouche. He is tall, and spare, and interesting in appearance. In short, he lacks no charm but candour; and I am not sure but that the lack is not a fifth grace. He is, finally, “Valentine,” and the subject of this “Morality.”

It may have been a year ago that, coming silently into my rooms one night, Valentine “jumped” me, to my dignified annoyance. I hate being so taken off my guard. Generally, I hold it that a man’s consideration for his fellow-creatures’ nerves is the measure of his mental endowment. Valentine, however, does not, to do him justice, make these noiseless entrances to surprise one, so much as to entertain himself with one’s preoccupations. Mine, as it happened, was the evening paper.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, breathing the monosyllable suddenly over my shoulder, like an enlightened ghost. The characteristic note was, I supposed, in allusion to the paragraph which engaged my attention at the moment. It was headed “The Brompton Sleeping Girl.”

I started, of course; and, in the instant reaction of nerve, flew to an extreme of rudeness.

“Yes,” I drawled; “an interesting case, isn’t it? Supposing it had been a private letter, how long would you have stood before shouting your presence into my ear like that?”

He laughed as he moved away (he had not shouted at all, by the by); then, as he sat down opposite me in the shadow, appeared for the first time to realize my meaning.

“Just long enough to recognize the fact,” he said quietly. “What do you mean by the question?”

Thus rebounding, my own rudeness struck me ashamed. I had no real justification for the insult, anyhow that I could call into evidence.

“O, nothing!” I mumbled awkwardly; “except that you made me almost jump out of my skin.”

It was characteristic of him, and a further puzzle, that in spite of his self-suggested consciousness of superiority he was easily depressed by a snub. We sat for a little in a glowering silence, and perhaps with a mutual sense of injury.

“Yes, an interesting case,” he said at length with an effort. “A trance, isn’t it?”

“Something of the sort,” I replied. “I saw the girl yesterday.”

He looked up interested.

“Yes?”

“She is in a private ward of B—— Hospital. I know the house surgeon. He took me to see her.”

“Well! How does she look?”

“Seen the St. Amaranthe at Tussaud’s—the one whom, as children, we used to call the Sleeping Beauty? Not unlike her: as pretty as wax and as stiff: just breathing, with pale cheeks and her mouth a little open.”

“The fit—I seem to remember—was brought on by some shock, wasn’t it?”

I growled—

“According to report, concealment of birth. I conclude she was put to shame by some rogue, and couldn’t face the music. The child was found, three or four months ago, on a doorstep or somewhere, and traced to her. When the police entered, I suppose she feared the worst, and went off. Odd part is, that the infant itself was intact—as sound as a bell. But all that’s of little interest. It’s the case for me; not the sentiment.”

“Ah?” said Valentine.

He leaned forward, resting his long arms on his knees and gently clicking his fingers together. His eyes were full of an eager light.

“Johnny, I wonder if you could get me a sight of her?”

“Why not?” I answered. I felt that I owed him some atonement. “I’ll ask C—— if you like.”

II

C—— demurred, hummed and hawed, and acquiesced.

“Your friend must keep in the background,” he said. “He’s not a backstair reporter, I suppose?”

“He’s an independent gentleman, and either a poet or an ass—I don’t know which.”

“Same thing,” said this airy Philistine; “but no matter, so long as he don’t talk.”

“He won’t talk.”

“Very well, bring him up. Fact is, we’re trying an experiment this afternoon. Aunt’s brought the baby—sort of natural magnetism to restore the current, cancel the hiatus—see? I’ve not much belief in it myself.”

I fetched Valentine, and we followed C—— up to the ward. There were only present there—one, a list-footed nurse; two, a little shabby-genteel woman, with a false tow-like front over vicious eyes, who carried a flannelled bundle; and three, the patient herself.

She had not so much as stirred, to all appearance, since I last saw her. We, Valentine and I, took up our position apart. Some accidental contact with him made me turn my head. He was quivering like a high-strung racer for the start. This physical excitability was news to me. “H’mph!” I thought. “Is there really that in you which you must keep such a tight rein on?”

The nurse took the infant, and placed it on the sleeping girl’s breast. It mewed and sprawled, but evoked no response whatever.

“She’d never a drop of the milk of kindness in her,” muttered the little verjuicy woman.

“Hold your tongue!” said the doctor sharply.

He and the nurse essayed some coaxing. In the midst, I was petrified by the sight of Valentine going softly up to the bed-head.

“May I whisper a word?” he said. “It may fail or not. But I don’t think you can object to my trying.”

And actually, before his astonished company could move or collect its wits, he had bent and spoken something, inaudible, into the patient’s ear.

Now, I ask you to remember that this girl had been in a cataleptic sleep for not less than three months, under observation, and with no chance, so far as I knew, to cozen her attendants; and believe me then as you can when I tell you that, answering, instantly and normally, to Valentine’s whisper, she sighed, stretched her arms, though at first with an air of some lassitude and weakness, and, opening her eyes, fixed them with a sort of suspended stare upon the face of her exorcist. Gradually, then, a little pucker deepened between her brows, and instantly, some shadow of fright or uneasiness flickering in her dark pupils, she turned her head aside. Obviously she was distressed by the vision of this strange face coming between the light and her normal, as it seemed to her, awaking.

Valentine immediately stood away, and backed to where she could not see him.

C——, obviously putting great command on himself, since circumstances made it appear that some damned “natural magic” had got the better of his natural science, took the situation in hand professionally, and frowned to the aunt, to whom the baby had been restored, to show herself. The woman, rallying from the common stupefaction, gave an acrid sniff and obeyed.

“Well, Nancy!” she said, in a tone between wonder and remonstrance.

The girl looked round again and up, with a little shock. Immediately her dilated pupils accepted with frank astonishment this more familiar apparition.

“Gracious goodness, Aunt Mim!” she whispered; “what have you got there?”

Then she turned her face on the pillow, with a smile of drowsy rapture.

“Anyhow, you’ve found your way to Skene at last,” she murmured, and instantly fell into a natural sleep, from which, it was evident, there must be no awaking her.

C—— wheeled upon my friend.

“I suppose you won’t part with your secret?” he asked drily.

It was a habit with Valentine, not his least aggravating, composedly to put by any unwelcome or difficult question addressed to him as if he did not hear it.

“Skene’s in Kent, isn’t it?” he asked, ostensibly of the aunt, though he looked at me. I could have snapped at him in pure vindictiveness. He wasn’t inscrutable, any more than another. What was his confounded right to pose as a sphinx?

“She fancies she’s there,” he said. “Why?”

I turned dumbly with the question to the little woman creature. I don’t know if she supposed I was in some sort of official authority to cross-examine her. She had powder on her face, and a weak glow mantled through it.

“It was there she met her trouble, sir,” she said, hesitating. “She’d gone down to the hop-picking last September, and I was to follow. But circumstances” (she wriggled her shoulders with an indescribable simper) “was against my joining her.”

“Well,” broke in C——, suddenly and rather sharply, “you must take the consequences, and, for the present anyhow, the burden of them off her shoulders.”

“Begging your pardon, sir?” she questioned shrewdly.

“The child,” said the doctor, “the child. Everything, it appears, relating to it is for the moment obliterated from her mind. She takes up existence, I think you’ll find, last autumn, at this Skene, with expecting you. Well, you have come, and returned to London together. You understand? The time of year is the same. None of all this has for the moment happened.”

There was an acrid incredulity in his hearer’s face as she listened to him.

“Do I understand, or don’t I, sir,” she said, “that her shame is to be my care and consideration? And till when, if you’ll be so good?”

“That I can’t say,” he answered. “Probably the interval, the abyss in her mind, will bridge itself by slow degrees. Her reason likely depends upon your not rudely hastening the process. I warn you, that’s all.”

“And pray,” she said, with ineffable sarcasm, “how is I, as a respectable woman, to account to her for this that I hold?”

“Put it out to nurse.”

“No, sir, if you’ll allow me. The hussy have done her best to bring me to ruin already.”

“Say you’ve adopted it.”

She gave a shrill titter.

“Nanny will have lost her wits, hindeed, to believe that.”

“Well, she has in a measure.”

“And the police?” she said. “Aren’t you a little forgetting them, sir?”

“The police,” said C——, “I will answer for. The case isn’t worth their pursuing, and they will drop it.”

The baby began to wail; and Aunt Mim, with her lips pursed, to play the vicious rocking-horse to it.

III

One evening, a week later, Valentine came quietly into my room. I had not seen him in the interval, and was immediately struck, though it was semi-dusk, by the expression on his face. It was white and smiling, and the eyes more brightly inscrutable than ever.

A storm had just crashed across the town, and left everything dripping in a liquid fog. Looking down, one could see the house-fronts, submerged in the running pavements, become the very “baseless fabrics of a vision.” The hansom-drivers, bent over their glazed roofs, rode each with a shadowy phantom of himself reversed, like an oilskin Jack of Spades. No pedestrian but, like Hamlet, had his “fellow in the cellarage” keeping pace with him. The solid ground seemed melted, and the unsubstantial workings of the world revealed. To souls hemmed in by bricks, there are more commonplace, less depressing sights than a wet London viewed from a third story.

There was a box in my window, with some marguerites in it, the sickly pledges of a rather jocund spring. Valentine, joining me as I leaned out, handled a half-broken stem very tenderly.

“It has been beaten down, like poor Nanny, by the storm,” he said. “We must tie it to a stick.”

I did not answer for a minute. Then very deliberately I drew in my head and sat down. Again like my shadow, in this city of shadows, Valentine did the same. For some five minutes we must have remained opposite one another without speaking. Then sudden and grim I set my lips, and asked the question he seemed to invite.

“Are you the stick?”

He nodded, with a smile, which I could hardly see now, on his face.

“You speak figuratively, of course,” I said, “in talking of tying her to you?”

“No,” he said. “I talk of the real bond.”

“Of matrimony?”

“Certainly.”

With a naughty word, I jumped to my feet, strode the round of the room, sat down flop on the table, put my hands in my pockets, tried to whistle, laughed, and burst out—“I suppose you intend this, in a manner, for a confidence? I suppose you are taking straight up the tale of a week ago? Well, I haven’t lost the impression of that moment, or gone mad in the interval. Do you want me to sympathize with your insanity, or to argue you out of it—which?”

He did not answer. Indeed, the offensiveness of my tone was not winning.

“I am perfectly aware,” I went on, “that the melodramatic unities demand an espousal with the interesting spirit we have called back to life. They have a way, at the same time, of ignoring Aunt Mims. You will, I am sure, forgive me if I say that it is the figure of that good lady which sticks last in my memory.”

Still he did not answer.

“I will put my point,” I continued, growing a little angry—“I will put my point, as you seem to ask it, with all the delicacy I can. You drew an analogy between—between some one and that broken cabbage yonder. The sentiment is unexceptionable; only in France they consider those things weeds.”

“Do they?” he said coolly. “We don’t.”

“No; because we must justify ourselves for exalting ’em out of their proper sphere. They’ll not cease to smell rank, though, however you give ’em the middle place in your greenhouse.”

I struck my knee viciously with my open palm.

“That was in vile bad taste, Val. I beg your pardon for saying it. But, deuce take it, man! you can’t have come to me, a worldling and an older one, for sympathy in this midsummer madness?”

I was off the table again, going to and fro and apostrophizing him at odd turns.

“Let’s drop parables—and answer plainly, if it’s in you. You don’t exhale sentiment as a rule. Did or did not that touch about ‘poor Nanny’ imply a hint of some confidence put in me?”

“I’ve always considered you my closest friend.”

“Flattered, I’m sure; though I didn’t guess it. You put such conundrums—excuse me—beyond the time of a plain man to guess. Well, I say, I’m flattered, and I’ll take the full privilege. It’s natural you should feel an interest in——by the way, I regret to say I only know her as the Brompton Sleeping Girl.”

“She’s Nanny Nolan.”

“In Miss Nolan, then. A propos, I’ve never yet asked, and mustn’t know, I suppose, the secret of your ‘open sesame’?”

“No, I can’t tell you.”

“O, it doesn’t matter! Only, as a question of this confiding friendship——”

“It isn’t my secret alone.”

“Then I’ve no more to say. But I presume she’s the—the flower in question?”

“O, yes! And I’m the stick.”

He said it with a quiet laugh.

“I shouldn’t have supposed it, on my honour,” I assured him. “You can have stuck at very little in a week.”

I took a few turns, and faced him, or his motionless shadow, very solemnly.

“Now,” I demanded, “for the plain speaking. Will you answer me the truth? I brought away an impression, as I said. It might have been, after all, an impertinent one. A man’s a man for a’ that—though I confess I can’t quite apply the moral to a woman. Still, I’ll ask you frankly: How is she socially?”

“Nothing at all. Her father was a colour-sergeant, a red-headed Celt from over the border of dreams. He’s gone to join the Duke of Argyll’s cloud army at Inverary. Her aunt’s an ex-coryphée living on a mysterious pension.”

“Of course; only rather worse than I supposed.”

“Verender, I must tell you the girl is without reproach. Socially, it is true, they are in a very limited way. They eke out existence in a number of small directions, even, as you know, hop-picking.”

“I’ve nothing but respect for Miss Nolan’s virtues. I can even appreciate the appeal of her prettiness to a susceptible nature, which I don’t think mine is. Anyhow, I’m no Pharisee to pelt my poor sister of the gutter because she’s fallen in it. That’s beside the question. But it isn’t, to ask what in the name of tragedy induces you, with your wealth, your refinement, your mental and social amiability, to sink all in this investment of a—of a fancy bespoke—there, I can put it no differently.”

“Call it my amiability, Verender. She’s like the centurion’s daughter. There’s something awfully strange, awfully fascinating, after all, in getting into her confidence—in entering behind that broken seal of death.”

“You’re not an impressionable Johnny—at least, you shouldn’t be. You’ve passed the Rubicon. This child with a child—with Aunt Mim, good Lord! Have you thought of the consequences?”

“Yes; all of them.”

“Of the—pardon me. Do you know who he was?”

“Yes.”

I stared aghast at him—at the deeper blot of gloom from which his voice proceeded.

“And you aren’t afraid—for her; for yourself?”

“You mean, of her relapsing?” he said clearly. “Not when she knows the truth—knows what a poor thing he is.”

“Are you sure you know woman? She is apt to have a curious tenderness for the blackguard who distinguishes her with his most especial brand of villainy. Then she hasn’t learned it—the truth—yet?”

“No. Aunt Mim has been loyal.”

“Well, well she may be, so long as you offer yourself the prize to such a self-denying ordinance. She sees which side her bread’s buttered, no doubt. And how does she account for the little stranger?”

“By adoption. It’s an odd thing, Verender—Verender, it’s a very odd thing, and very pitiful, to see how she—little Nanny—distrusts the child—looks on it sort of askance—almost hates it, I think. I’ve a very difficult part to play.”

I groaned.

“Then why play it? What does it all matter to you? You’ve opened her eyes. Isn’t that enough, without waiting till she’s opened yours?”

“Ah!” he said, obviously not attending to me. “But that isn’t the whole of my difficulty. The truth is, she appears to shrink from me too.”

“You’ll forgive me,” I said grimly. “That’s your first comforting statement.”

“I don’t know how it is,” he continued, in a low voice, self-pondering; “she’s frightened—distressed, before a shadow she can’t define. Sometimes and somehow it seems as if she wants to love me, but can’t—as if she were trying, and vainly, to shape out of a great gloom the obstacle which separates us. And I want to help her; and yet I, too, can’t understand. Shall I ever, I wonder?”

I stared at him. “Isn’t it plain enough? But you have love’s eyes, I suppose.” Then I asked, a little softened, “Does she ever lose herself, trying to piece that broken time?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “She speaks so little. She is like a little shy ghost—half-materialized—fearful between spirit and matter—very sweet and pathetic.”

With the last word he turned abruptly and strode out of the room. I was not so much astonished at his curt conclusion, as at a certain tell-tale cough which accompanied it.

“O, hang the fellow!” I muttered. “If he’s developed tears in his voice, I give him up.”

IV

One afternoon, accident taking me past the Nolans’ house in the Fulham Road, I was disturbed to hear Valentine’s voice hailing me from the parlour window. It was a little cheap tenement, and a curiously shabby frame to his rather distinguished figure as he stood up eagerly to stop me.

“Come in,” he said. “I want you.”

I demurred, in an instant and instinctive panic.

“What for? I’m horribly pressed. Won’t it do another time?”

“It won’t,” he answered. “It’s its way. But go on, if your need is greater than mine.”

“That’s shabby,” I thought; and yielded with the worst grace possible. He retaliated by meeting me all sweetness at the door, and conducting me into the parlour.

It was an impossible room—I may say it at once—quite the typical tawdry boudoir of an ex-coryphée. She was not there, I was relieved to find, in person; but her multiplied presentment simpered and abashed one from a dozen places on walls and mantelpiece. “Claudine” (she might have been a hair-wash, and enjoyed the same sort of popularity) posed, for all the blind purposes of vanity, in the tights and kid boots of a past generation. Looking from queer old daguerreotypes, in skirts like curtailed crinolines; ogling from wreaths, her calves, crossed to display their strength, in disfiguring proportion with the thin bosom above, she seemed to make an outrage of the dear ungainly sanctities which appeal to us, in pegtops and voluminous skirts, from the back parts of our albums. There are certain people who, with the best intention in the world to be held sweet, are unsavoury; and Aunt Mim was one of them. All the more wonder that such fruit could be born of her stock.

For she was certainly attractive, was the girl—pure and pretty and unaffected. I had to own it grudgingly to myself, as I bowed to her, and turned interrogatively to my friend.

He had gone to the back of her chair, where she sat away from the open window. There was some discarded work in her lap, and in her eyes some look of a vague sadness and bewilderment.

“Nanny,” he said softly, “this, Mr. Verender, is my great friend—my counsel out of Court. Will you just do this for me—make him yours, too? Will you try to explain to him, while I go away, what you find it so hard to explain to me—your sense of the something that keeps us apart?”

I made an instant but faint demur. Nanny, as faintly, shook her head.

“O,” he said, “but he will listen to you, I know! Because I am unhappy, and you are unhappy, and I love you so, Nanny, and he is my best friend. Try to explain to him, dear, the difficulty of your case.”

This novel enlargement on our relations, his and mine, vaguely annoyed me.

“Why should there be any?” I put in impatiently. “Our friend can give you great social and other advantages, Miss Nolan. If he is decided on this course—you don’t dislike him, I think—forgive me, I can see no reason for objection on your part.”

She rose, as if scared, to her feet. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Hush!” he said. “Be just to me, and try to tell him.”

He left the room and the house; and I was in two minds about following him. Was ever man put in a more ridiculous position? Yet the look of the girl gave me pause. She seemed to me to be yet only half awake; and indeed, I think, that is something to understate the case.

“Well,” I said stumblingly, as she stood before me. “You heard what he said, Miss Nolan?”

I was not sympathetic. I knew it. Perhaps, having once asserted myself, I might have grown so. But she would not give me the opportunity. In the meantime, I did not feel the less the full force of this mismatch.

She put her hand in a lost way to her forehead.

“I will try,” she said, in a low voice, “because he asked me. There—there was a great trouble—O! it was so far back. I can’t remember it—and then everything went.”

“He is willing, it appears, to take that interval, that trouble, on trust,” I said. “He only asks you, it seems, to repay his confidence. What you are is what he desires. Cannot you consider yourself new-born into his love?” (I positively sneered the word to myself.)

“There is something stands between us,” she only murmured helplessly.

“He doesn’t admit it for himself,” I insisted irritably. “It might be the ruin of his career, of his position, as foreseen by his friends. I suppose he wishes to assure you that that counts for nothing with him, if by any chance the bar between you lies in your dim consciousness of such a sentiment.”

I had been brutal, I admit it. I can only palliate my behaviour by confessing that it was intended to sound the first note of my moral surrender to the appeal of those poor, pain-troubled eyes. Now, at least, I had got my shaft home. She looked up at me with a light of amazed knowledge in her face.

“Thank you,” she said. “I knew there was a right reason; and all the time I have been hunting for a fancied one.”

I suffered an instant reaction to dismay. I had had no right whatever to make this point. Whatever my private opinion of Valentine’s folly, I had allowed myself to be accredited his ambassador.

“Come; it is no reason at all,” I said. “There is no such thing as a misalliance in love” (I threw this atrocious sop to my own panic). “If only the practical bar between you could be as easily disposed of.”

“The practical bar?”

She turned upon me with a piteous pain in her voice. I had opened a door of release to her, I suppose, and before she could escape shut it again in her face. I was stumbling weakly on an explanation, when suddenly from somewhere above the baby began to wail. Instantly her face assumed the strangest expression—a sort of exalted hardness. She put up her hand, listened a moment, then, without another word, glided from the room. I am ashamed to say that I seized the opportunity to put an instant period to my visit.

I expected to meet Valentine loitering without; but to my relief he did not appear. So I went on my way fuming. What right had the man to try to inveigle me into seeming to sanction his idiotcy by claiming me its advocate? He wanted to buy justification, I suppose. There are certain natures which cannot properly relish their own grief or happiness unless a witness be by to report upon them. Such was Valentine’s, I thought; and the thought did not increase my respect for my friend. I fancied I had already plumbed the shallows of that pretentious reserve, and was angry and half contemptuous that he had so soon revealed himself to me. There was certainly something attractive about the girl; but—well, he had not been the first to discover the fact, and, when all was said, his infatuation showed him a fool in my eyes.

That evening, when I was sitting alone writing, she suddenly stood before me. My first shock of amazement was followed by a glow of fury. I felt that I was being persecuted.

“Well, what is it?” I said harshly.

“I only wanted to tell you,” she said low, panting as if she had run; “I wanted you to tell him that—that I know now what it is. I found out the moment I left you; and I came to say—but you were gone.”

“Well?”

“It is the child, sir.”

“Yes, you are quite right—it is the child.”

No sooner had I said it, than I felt the weight of my self-commitment. Had she discovered—remembered all? Did she conceive the impediment as associated with some scandal attaching to the ineffable Aunt Mim? or was the baby, in her clouded soul, but an unattachable changeling, which had come to disrupt the kind order of things and brand their household with a curse?

“Yes, it is the child,” I said, and leaned my forehead into my hand while I frowned over the problem.

She made no answer. When I looked up at the end of a minute, she was gone.

I started to my feet, and went up and down. I made no attempt to follow. “It is better,” I thought angrily, “to let this stuff ferment in its own way. I could have given no other answer.”

At the twentieth turn I saw Valentine before me, and stopped abruptly.

“Well,” he said; “were you able to get it out of her?”

“What?” I asked defiantly.

“The reason—the impediment, you know?” he answered.

“Sit down, Valentine,” I said. “I will tell you the truth. I hinted that the mésalliance might be her unconscious consideration.”

“She is not so proud,” he said quietly; “though I’m unworthy to buckle her little shoe for her.”

I positively gasped.

“O! if that’s your view! But, anyhow, she was seeming to accept mine, when the infant hailed her, and she left me, and I bolted. You put too much upon me—really you do, Val; and here’s the sequel. Ten minutes ago she appeared in this room and told me that she had discovered the reason—the real one this time.”

“And it was?”

“The baby—no less.”

“What! Does she——?”

“I don’t know from Adam. I was thinking over my answer; and when I looked up, she was gone.”

“And you gave her no reply?”

“O yes! I told her I entirely agreed with her. I had to be honest.”

“Verender! You must come with me!”

“Go with you!”

“You’ve called the tune; you must pay the piper.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I’ll see you—cremated first!”

He stared at me a moment, his teeth showing, his eyes rounding in the dusk, his fists clinching and unclinching; then he, too, was gone. And I went and stood at the window, slinking into the curtains, and feeling myself the most abused cur in all London.

V

For a fortnight this state continued in me, through alternations of depression, self-accusation, and savage bursts of rebellion. On the sixteenth day a brief note, begging me to call at his rooms, reached me from Valentine.

“I won’t go,” I swore through my teeth, feeling an inclination to tear the paper in them; and five minutes later was on my way.

“He shall justify me to myself,” I had thought. “I’ll let my conscience be his footstool no longer.”

The fellow lived en prince in Piccadilly. I found him in the midst of a litter—boxes and packages and strewed floors—evidently on the eve of a journey. He greeted me, twinkling, in high excitement—not a trace of grievance or embarrassment in his manner.

“Leave those things, Phillips,” he said to his staid valet. “We’ll finish by and by.”

The man left the room; and his master took me by the sleeve, while I held myself in reserve—unconsciously, at the same time, softening to his geniality.

“We’re off to Capri—Egypt,” he said, “following our late summer with the swallows.”

“You and—Phillips?” I asked.

“I and my wife,” said he, with a laugh. “Hush! She’s seeing the baby to sleep.”

He could say it without a blush; and they had been married, as I came to learn, just a week! He led me on tiptoe to a distant room, and bade me look through the opened door. Nanny, crowned, proud as any young queen, with conscious maternity, was bent, singing softly, above a little cot. The sight of her—Val’s wife—restored me at once to my self-respect. I had done nothing after all, it seemed, but help to precipitate an event I deplored. My shout had brought down the avalanche. Henceforth my position was to be that of the amused onlooker.

He let me stare; then led me away with all his old affectation of pregnant mystery. We went out together—I don’t know why—into the Green Park. It seemed remote and silent, and the better shadows of night were beginning to troop under its trees. Then he spoke to me, as follows:

“Verender, you have a right to know. You remember what you told me that evening? I wasn’t just to you, perhaps. I foresaw issues to which you must necessarily be blind. The baby stood between us, you said. It did, but not in the way you meant to imply. I am its father.”

I listened perfectly silent, and very grave, as we stepped on together.

“I will say of, not for, myself,” he continued, “that I had known nothing of the fruits of a little moonlight idyll out in that Kent village. I was hop-picking, as she was, but for a worser reason. Our encounter in B—— Hospital was my first intimation of the truth. Till that moment I had never considered, at least had been careless of, a sequel; had never, of course, had a shadow of thought to identify the patient with my victim. Then in a moment—Verender, her helplessness found all that wasn’t bad in me. She didn’t know me—the curtain was too thick. I determined to woo and win, as a stranger, what was already my own. Was I right?”

I nodded. “Yes, you were right.”

“Then came the strange part,” he said—“a sort of subconsciousness of an impediment she could not define. It was her dishonour, Verender—my God! Verender, her dishonour!—that found some subtle expression in the little life introduced into her home. She always feared and distrusted the child; and I tell you I lived in horror that some day her witlessness would arm her gentle hand to do it a hurt. For she wanted to come to me, Verender, she wanted to come, and it was as if she couldn’t, and nobody would tell her why.

“You told her, you old rascal! And with what result, do you think? When I followed her, I found her gone—she had taken the baby from its cot, and hurried out. The old harpy was there, raving and gobbling beyond reason. I had her down on her knees to confess. She admitted that the girl had come in, in a fever to proclaim her knowledge of the bar which separated us. Nanny had rounded upon her, it appeared, and accused her, Aunt Mim, of wantonly causing the scandal which had brought this shadow into her life. And then—perhaps it wasn’t to be wondered at—Auntie exploded, and gave up all.”

“The truth?”

“All of it but what the old hag herself didn’t know—the name of the villain. That, circumstances had kept from her, you see. She let loose, did Auntie—we’ll allow her a grain of justification; to have her forbearance turned upon herself like that, you know!—and screamed to the girl to pack, and dispose of her rubbish somewhere else. And Nanny understood at last, and went.”

“Where?”

“Ah, where? That was the question. I’d only one clue—Skene and the river; but I seized upon it, and my inspiration proved right. She’d gone instinctively to the only place where, it seemed, her trouble could be resolved. You see, she hadn’t yet come to identify me with it. But I followed, and I caught her in time.”

He hung his head, and spoke very low.

“I took the next train possible to Skene. Verender, I’m not going to talk. It was one of those fainting, indescribable experiences, like the voice in the burning bush. Cold dawn it was, with a white bubbling river and the ghost of an old moon. She had intended to commit it to the water—the fog wasn’t yet out of her brain—and then, all in an instant, the mother came upon her, and the memory of me; and she ran to cast herself in instead, and saw me coming.”

There followed a long interval of silence.

“And Aunt Mim?” I asked drily, chiefly to keep up my character.

He laughed.

“O! we’ve added an honourable moiety to a dishonourable pension, and settled her,” he said.

Another silence followed.

“Well, I apologize,” I said grumpily.

THE SOUL OF THE PROFESSOR

John Stannary hungrily paced his laboratory, awaiting an expected advent. A brilliant coronal of candles, concentrated within a shade and pendent from a black beam over the dissecting table, regularly identified him as he came within its radiance, and as regularly, when he had passed without it, returned to its scrutiny of the empty slab beneath, as if it were trying to trace on that blank surface the unwritten hieroglyphics of his development. Yet, if each of its half-score fiery tongues had been as polyglot as the Apostles’ tongues of flame, it could have found among them all no voice to dispute his lifelong consistency with himself. From the hard, ungracious child, who had rejoiced to discomfit the love which sought to hedge him; from the cynic schoolboy, to whom to awaken and analyze pain in the living had been the only absorbing sport; from the unimpassioned student, who had walked the hospitals like a very spectre of moral insensibility; from the calculating libertine, whose experimental phase of animalism had been as brief as it was savage; from the lust of life, soon spent, to the bloodless analysis of its organic motives; from the soulless child to the virile monster of science; from nothingness to a great early reputation, to honours, to a fine house, to his present self and condition, in short, Professor Stannary’s progress had been entirely and unerringly consistent. He was one of those born to account for results, not by any means with a view to clearing the stream of tendency by cleansing its source. On the contrary, he never would have hesitated further to contaminate it, could he by so doing have evolved some novel epidemic. His fight was not to win Nature to God, but to the laboratory; and, if he had a conqueror’s ambition, it was to die gloriously upon a protoplast, at that beginning of things which his fathers had struggled through æons to forget. To have called him a dog nosing back for a scent, would have been to libel the sorriest of mongrels with an inch of tail to wag at a kind word. Yet he had routled so much, nevertheless, that his eyes were inflamed, and his features pimpled, and his nose itself sharpened as with much whetting on carrion. And, still unappeased, he paced his shambles that evening like a caged ravening jackal.

In those early decades of the nineteenth century, anthropophagous science, especially when non-official, was often hard put to it for a meal. The “ringing grooves of change” were sounding; discovery was a new-risen star; ghoulish explorers shouldered one another in their struggle for the scientific pabulum which the grave afforded. But the supply, die as men would, was unequal to the demand. The hospitals kept their own; the others, à contre-cœur, must keep the resurrection-men. They pulled the blinds down on their consciences; they were willing to accept the least plausible of explanations, for the Cause was paramount. But, indeed, we are all casuists when we want to justify our lusts to ourselves. Still the material lacked, only, according to the universal law of necessity, to evolve its more desperate instruments of supply. And then at last, hard-driven, first one, and after him another and another, had the panic courage to pull up those blinds, and let in the light on some very shocking suspicions—with the result that Burke was hanged in Edinburgh, and Bishop and Williams in London.

Professor Stannary was not of these white-livers. He pulled up no blind, for the simple reason that he had let none down. He would have diagnosed conscience as a morbid disease characterized by a diathetic condition, and peculiar to fools of both sexes and all ages. He would have said that to ask any question in this world was to invite a lie, and that in all his thirty years’ experience he had found none but the dead to answer back the unswerving truth. Well, if they did? Did it matter to them, being dead? But it mattered greatly to the cause of science to get at the truth; and he, for one, was certainly not going to question the means so long as the results came to justify them.

While yet, however, the blinds were down and the pitch-plaster but an ugly suspicion, the competition for material had not so ceased of its keenness but that Professor Stannary had found himself checked, one day, under the very near-conquered crest of a physiological peak, for want of the final clue to that crowning achievement—a clue which, like Bluebeard’s key, turned upon nothing so intimately as dead bodies. Step by step he had reasoned his way to this position, only, when within touch of the end, to find himself held up, tantalized, irritated by an inability to proceed farther until a nice necessity should be provided. His material, in fact and in short, had given out at the psychologic moment. His laboratory was already a museum of shredded particles—the pickings from much inevitable waste of dead humanity. There needed only the retraversing of certain nerves, or ducts, or canals to put the finishing touches to a great discovery. And then—the summit, the tribune, as it were, from which he was engaged to announce on the morrow to the Royal Society the triumphant term to his investigations.

Already, pacing to and fro, eager and impatient, in the silent room, he foresaw himself the recipient of the highest honour it was in the power of that body to bestow. He was not above desiring it. He was not himself so superlatively rational but he could covet applause for knocking yet another long nail into the coffin of irrationality; could expect the recognition of the world for his services in helping to reduce it, its passions and its hopes and its pathetic fallacies, to some mathematical formulæ. There is nothing so incomprehensible to the men of science as the reluctance of the unscientific to part with their doting illusions. To be content to rejoice or sorrow in things as they seem, and not to wish to know them as they are—that, they think, is so foolish as to justify their hardest castigation of the folly. At least so thought John Stannary, as, with his lips set sourly, he paused, and consulted his watch, and listened for a sound of expected footsteps shuffling down the hang-dog passage which skirted that wall of the house, and into which his laboratory door conveniently opened.

Not a whisper, however, rewarded him. He put his ear to the panels. Even then, the surf-like murmur of distant traffic—or the thud of his own excited heart, he could not tell which—was the only articulate sound. He glanced up angrily at the shortening candles before resuming his tramp. As he passed to and fro, from dusk to light, and into dusk again, he seemed to be demonstrating to a theatre of spectral monstrosities the hieroglyphics of that same empty slab. For the central core of radiance, concentrating itself with deadly expectancy upon its surface, had, nevertheless, its own ghostly halo—a dim auditorium, tier over tier, peopled with shadows of misbegotten horrors. Sets of surgical steel in the pit, arrayed symmetrically on a table as if for a dinner party of vampires; nameless writhed specimens on cards or in bottles, standing higher behind the dry sleek of glass; over all, murderous busts in the gallery, the dust on their heads and upper features giving them the appearance of standing above some infernal sort of footlights—with such shapes, watchful and gloating in suggestion, was the man hemmed in. They touched his nerves with just such an emotion as the ordinary citizen feels towards his domestic lares; they affected him in just such proportion as he was moved by the thought of the possible manner in which an order he had given to some friends of his that morning might be executed. That is to say, his feeling towards these dead members, as towards the means taken by others to procure him the use of them, was utterly impersonal. He had had at this pass a great truth to demonstrate. “A body, this night, at any cost,” he had simply ordered, and had straightway shut the door on his caterers. He had had no thought of scruple. His responsibility in these matters was to the ages; never to the individual.

A low tap sounded at the door. He was there in three strides, and opening swiftly, let in two men, the one shouldering a sack, the other hovering about his comrade in a sort of anxious moral support.

Professor Stannary, without a word, pointed to the table. The laden one, as mutely, shuffled across, backed, heaved his burden down, and stood to take off his hat and mop his brow. He was a burly, humorous-looking fellow, with a sort of cheerful popularity written across his face—an expression in strong contrast with that of the other, who, tall and stealthy, stood lank behind him, like his shadow at a distance, watching the persuasive effect of his principal on the customer. It was he who had closed the door gently upon them all as soon as they were in, and now stood, his teeth and eyeballs the prominent things in him, softly twirling his hat in his hand.

“Take away the sack,” said the Professor quietly.

The burly man obeyed, sliding it off like a petticoat; and revealed the body of a young woman. Lowering and rubbing his jaw, the Professor stood some moments pondering the vision. Then he turned sharply.

“You are late. I expected you sooner.”

“The notice was short, sir,” answered the man coolly. “These ’ere matters can’t be accommodated in a moment. As it is she’s warm. I bought the body off of——”

The other interrupted him—

“I don’t want to know. You can hold your tongue, and take your price, and go.”

“Short and sweet,” said the man.

He laughed, and his friend laughed in echo, putting his long hand to his mouth as if in apology for such an unpardonable ebullition of nature.

“As to the price,” said the former, “taking into consideration the urgency, and the special providence, so to speak, in purwiding, at a moment’s notice too, this ’ere comely young——”