INTRODUCTORY

“I am convinced she rivalled, at fifty, the exquisite Diane de Poitiers herself, in the brightness of her wit and the perfection of her form, and might have passed as triumphantly a like test of the marble.”

The Marquis de C—— in his “Foreword.”

If the public seeks any apology for this introduction to it, at a late date, of the extraordinary woman whose self-dictated Memoirs form the staple of the following pages, it must look for it in the references of her contemporaries; it will be far from gathering it from her own autobiography.

Diane Rosemonde de St. Croix (to give her her proper mother-title) considered that she owed to Romance, in a glowing age, what, in a practical one, is conceded by a thousand dull and petty vanities to a vulgar curiosity—her personal reminiscences. She had at least the justification of her qualities, and the good fortune to find, in her latter-day friend, the Marquis de C——, an enthusiastic historian of them. In the question of their appeal, one way or the other, to the English reader, the present transcriber (from the original French notes) must hold himself responsible both for choice and style.

Madame de St. Croix was a “passionist,” as the French called Casanova; and, indeed, she had many points in common with that redoubtable adventurer: an unappeasable vagabondism; a love of letters; an ardent imagination; an incorruptible self-love; and, lastly, what we may term an exotic orthodoxy. If, subscribing to the universal creed which makes man’s soul his fetish, she worshipped an exacting god, she was at least always ready to sacrifice the world to gratify it, and now, no doubt, very logically sings among the angels.

In the matter of her more notorious characteristics, M. de C——, lest her part on earth should suffer misconstruction by the censorious, is so good as to speak with some show of finality. “I deny,” he says, “the title adventuress to my charming and accomplished friend. It is nothing if not misleading. Every day we venture something, for love, for hunger, for ambition. He who deviates from rice and barley-water, venturing on spiced dishes, makes every time an assault on his epigastrium. He who is not content with an ignoble mediocrity, though he do no more than take pains with a letter, is a candidate for fame. And as for love, it does not exist on the highway. Why should it imply distinction to call a man an adventurer, and be invidious to style a woman adventuress? Ulysses dallying in Ææa is surely no more honourable a sight than Godiva traversing Coventry in an adorable deshabille. To have the wide outlook, the catholic sympathy—is that to merit defamation? No, it is to be heroically human. Better sin like an angel, I say, than be a sick devil and virtuous.”

It remains only to mention that the present transcript conducts no further than to the finish of a dramatic period of Madame de St. Croix’s story; and to that, even, at the expense of a considerable lacuna (referred to in its place), which no research has hitherto been successful in filling. It is hoped, however, that, in what is given, enough will be found to interest.

B. C.

[Note.—An ingenious etymologist supplies a likely derivation for the “duck-stone,” so often mentioned in the text, from the Slavic dook or duk, signifying to spirit away. Accepting this genesis, the duck-stone, given to Mrs. Please by the gypsy, becomes the dook, or bewitching-stone, and is imbued with whatever virtues our faith or our credulity may suggest.]

THE EXTRAORDINARY CONFESSIONS OF DIANA PLEASE[1]

I. I MAKE MY DÉBUT

At my friend M. de C——’s instigation I sit down in the noon of my life to talk of its morning.

I look first to your gallantry, my dear Alcide, to see that this statement is not misconstrued. That I have a past argues nothing of my remoteness from it. In comparison with the immortality which is surely to be mine, everything on this side is youth. I am seventeen, or thirty-seven, or whatever I choose; and I intend that Heaven, whenever it calls me, shall find me irresistible. Possessing all the ages, it cannot grudge me my arbitrary disposition of my own little term.

Now, tell your friends, my dear Alcide, that to succeed in life one must never ask a woman her age or a man his intentions; and so we shall all be comfortable.

I owe my mother the most whimsical of grudges, my existence. I will nickname her the Comtesse de l’Ombre, and so shall abuse no confidences in relating of my debt to her, and to “Lovelace,” her collaborator in the romance of which I am the heroine. She was very beautiful; and he, an English cadet of distinction, was an aristocratic paragon.

At the age of sixteen, convinced of the hollowness of life, she had taken the veil, and become the Sister Agnès of the Communauté de Madelonnettes, Notre Dame de la Charité, in Paris, whence a year later she was transferred to an English branch of the house. Hence and from her duty my father, whom she had approached upon a begging mission, succeeded unhappily in inveigling her.

To the day of her death my mother bore the disfiguring sign of a little cross on her breast. It has succeeded to me, but in a faint reflection, a grain de beauté, only. I will tell you, in a word, the story of my inheritance.

The ladies of les Madelonnettes had, in inviting all the feminine vices to their inauguration ceremony, with the object to pension them off handsomely, overlooked the bad fairy Jealousy. Thou knowest, Alcide, the meanness of this witch. To revenge herself, she cast Lovelace into their midst, as Eris cast the apple of discord upon the nuptial board of Thetis; and poor de l’Ombre was made the consequent scapegoat. Driven forth in ignominy from the fold, she could not suffer so much but that one, over zealous or jealous, must strike her an envious blow across the bosom, on which she always wore a little crucifix, the gift of her father. The ebony cut in and left an indelible scar, to which I was to succeed in pathetic earnest of my origin. It has never ceased to be a symbol to me of the vanity of self-renunciation. How can we deny ourselves, and not deny One after whose image we are made?

I was born in a lodging at Brighthelmston, whither my father had conveyed my mother. The town, which has always possessed an attraction for me, was at that time a very paltry affair of scattered houses, to which the mumpish or melancholic came periodically to salt their spleens against a fresh course of dissipations. Locality has never, however, influenced my temper. The perfume of contentment breathes from within, and is not to be affected by soil or surroundings. Let us who have good constitutions continue, as the way is, to accept them for virtues, and to abhor the dyspeptic as unclean. Let us have the discretion to ask no questions of our neighbours about what we don’t understand in this entertaining comedy of life. So shall we justify ourselves to ourselves, and avoid being made uncomfortable. Is it not so, my friend?

My mother had never, I do believe, had a doll till I came. She was very young, even then, and could not tire of playing with me in our pretty cottage near the Steine. And I responded in all endearing gaiety and innocence, with the very trustfulness of which she must, I fear, have come to reproach her apostasy.

Maybe she did, for, as time went on, I can recall a cloud settling upon her brow—the shadow, perhaps, of the yoke under which she was passing from girlhood to womanhood. I was already four when she came of age. O, mon chéri! think of the tragedy of those italics! And think of me, a child of a precocious observation, and little ears as pinkly susceptible to murmurs as the inside of a shell, doomed to wake—wake to some misty understanding of the unusual in our relations!

By and by I even confided my suspicions to my father, whom I adored, and who visited us occasionally, coming down from town very elegant and mondain and in great company. He laughed, and then frowned over at mamma, who returned his look steadily.

“Dear sir,” she said only, “the child is growing very critical. Do not encourage her, and make this cross harder than I can bear.”

“But I too have a cross,” I said; “only it is little and faint, and not blushing like maman’s.”

My papa laughed again, and again frowned, saying, “It is a fact, and hard on the infant, who has done nothing to deserve it.”

Then he pushed me from him, and rose, and, going to the door, turned at it with a peevish face.

“I weary of these heroics,” said he. “If you persist in them, remember that you are qualified, more than ever, for les Madelonnettes.”

He went; and she cried out, as if over some dreadful awakening. But thenceforth, for some reason, our confidences grew estranged. I loved my poor mamma so well, that I think she should not have responded by striving to make heir to her melancholy the innocent cause of it. At the root of all our moral revolt is a sense of the injustice of original sin. I, at least, had done nothing to make me unhappy.

Presently I was given a governess, my dear careless father’s nominee. She was French, a ci-devant maîtresse de pension, very lazy and self-indulgent, and, if not sleeping, she was always ogling for unattached beaux. Vicious and insolent, she delighted in prompting me to reflections on my mother’s self-reserve, and “honour” was as much in her mouth as false teeth. I learned nothing from her but indecorum and innuendo.

One day—for the moral to her teaching (it was when I was ten years old)—I was playing truant on the downs, when I saw a small smutty baby crawl from under a bush into the road at the very moment that a carriage, wildly driven, was approaching. I had just time to notice the gilded splendour of the equipage, and, perhaps,—let us be frank, my friend,—to be inspired to heroism by the sight, before I leapt and snatched up the child from under the very feet of the galloping horses. As the chariot thundered by, an elegantly groomed head thrust itself from the window, and a ruffled hand, waving to me standing there unhurt but bewildered, flung back a gold coin into the dust. I turned my back immediately, disillusioned, by the insolence of the acknowledgment, as to the disinterested quality of my deed, and the more so as the baby was, parler franchement, decidedly unpleasant. I put the imp down, and began to re-order my little ruffled plumes. Wouldst thou hear what they were, my Alcide? I can recall them at this hour: A dainty gipsy hat knotted to a blue ribbon; a stomacher laced over with silver twist, and a skirt to the ankles, both of flowered lustring; three pair of ruffles at my bare elbows; a black solitaire at my neck, and black shoes with red heels and the prettiest of paste buckles.

Alas! how better than our sins of yesterday do we remember the stockings we wore to sin in! Let me, for penance, concede to history these my failings. I was, in fact, colourless in complexion, like tinted porcelain, with what my detractors used to call spun-glass hair, and the eyes of a Dresden shepherdess. And I was not at that time light on my feet, with which my volatile spirits were always at odds.

Now, as I smoothed my skirt, I was aware of a mad gipsy woman hurrying from the bank towards me, and crying and gesticulating as she came. She caught up the infant, and, finding it unharmed, put it down again, and fawned upon me inarticulate. Then she broke off to curse the distant carriage up hill and down, and finally went to pick up the coin from the very spot where she had not failed to mark its fall.

“It is yours,” she said, striding back to me. “Take it!”

“You can keep it,” I answered, with my little nose in the air. “A lady does not want for money.”

She slipped it into her pocket, and fell on her knees before me.

“Nor beauty, nor love, nor silken raiment,” she cried; “and yet they are not all. Think, my darling! There be no need so wild but the poor grateful gipsy may show a way to gratify it.”

I laughed, half annoyed and half frightened; and then, suddenly and oddly, there came into my head the thought of the stocking needle the gouvernante was wont to stick into my bosom at meals, to prevent me stooping and rounding my back. Must I confess, my Alcide, that there was ever a time when thy Diane was a little less or more than a sylph?

“Make me light,” I said, “so that I can dance without feeling the ground.”

She looked at me strangely a moment, then all about her in a stealthy way, while she slipped her hand into her pocket.

“Hush!” she said. “For none other but you. Only tell not of it.” And she brought up a little greasy packet, of parchment writ round with characters, like a Hebrew phylactery.

“Have you ever heard tell of the duck-stone?” she whispered.

I shook my head, full of curiosity.

“No,” she said, “nor any of thine. It fell from the sky, from another world, deary, that’s strange to ours, and the gipsies found it in the wild places of the woods. There was a smell came from it like the sugar of all flowers, and it was as light as foam and as hard as the beaten rocks.”

She undid the packet while she spoke, and I saw a number of tiny grey cubes, like frothy pumice-stone, one of which she detached, and gave to me.

“It wrought upon them even to madness,” she said, “so that they took and broke it with their mattocks. And, lo! the nameless thing was found in its scattered parts a virtue, even like the poisons which, taken in little, heal. Smell to it when the world is dark, and your brain shall flash into light, like an inn to the tired traveller. Smell to it when your feet go sick and heavy, and you shall feel them like the birds’ whose bones are full of wind. But tell not of the gift or giver, lest I die!”

Involuntarily, as she spoke, I had raised the stone to my nostrils. A faint scent as of menthene intoxicated my brain. The downs and the sky swam before me in one luminous mist. Lightness and delight took all my soul and body with rapture....

A shout brought me to myself. I was sitting on the grass, with the duck-stone still tight in my clutch. The gipsy was gone, how long I could not tell, and up the road was coming a second cortège, more brilliant than the former. A dozen young fellows, all volunteer runners and dressed in white, preceded a coach in which sat a rich-apparelled lady, very bold and handsome, and escorted by a splendid cavalcade of gentlemen. It was the Duchess of Cumberland, who followed her husband to the seaside, as I was to learn by and by; for while I was collecting my drowsy young wits to look, a wonderful thing happened. A horseman drew up with a cry, dismounted, seized and bore me to his saddle, and rode away with me after the carriage. It was my father, flushed and jovial, the pink and Corinthian of his company, as he always was.

He showed no curiosity over the encounter, nor scruple in taking me with him. He was in wild spirits, laughing and teasing, and sometimes he reeled in his saddle in a way to endanger my balance. But the rush of air restored me to myself, and I had the wit, for all my excitement, to slip my charm, which I still held, into a pocket.

So we raced for the town, and presently drew up at the Castle Tavern, where His Royal Highness and his wife, the late Mrs. Horton, were quartering themselves.

The time which followed is confused in my remembrance. I was put in charge of a chambermaid, given a dish of tea and cake, and presently fell fast asleep, to awake smiling and rosy to the summons of my pleasant Clarinda. A lackey in a magnificent scarlet livery awaited me at the door, received me into his arms, and carried me downstairs to a long room blazing with waxlights, where, at a white table spilt all over with a profusion of fruit and crystal, sat a gorgeous company of gentlemen and ladies. Such silks and laces, such feathers and diamonds, I had never in my young day encountered. It was like the most beautiful fair I had ever seen, and the red faces of the company were the coloured bladders bobbing in the stalls. Still, I had not lost my self-possession, when my father reeled round in his chair, and catching me away from the servant, set me on my feet on the table itself.

I was a little confused by the tumult which greeted my exaltation.

“Diane,” whispered my father in my ear, “go and tell the duke in a pretty speech that I send my love to him.”

I flicked up my skirts, and went off immediately among the fruit and decanters. My progress was a triumph. The women clapped in artificial enthusiasm, and the men stopped me to kiss my little shoes. And presently down that long lane I saw the duke’s smiling face awaiting me. It was not a temperate face, it is true; its thirty-four years were traced upon it in very crooked hieroglyphics. But then—c’est la dernière touche qu’informe—the royal star of the garter glittering on the apricot coat beneath made everything handsome. By his side sat the lady his duchess, née Luttrell, as brand-new as I to her exaltation. But it was the difference between Hebe and Thais. For all my innocence I felt that, and did not fear her rivalry. I dropped a little curtsey amongst the grapes and melons.

“Monsieur,” I said, “my papa wishes to make you a pretty gift, and sends you his love.”

He applauded, laughing, as did all the table, and lifted me down to his lap.

“What price for the love?” he cried. “See, I return him a dozen kisses.”

He kept me, however, plying me with bonbons, while madam tittered and fanned herself vexedly.

“You will make the little ape sick, Enrico,” she said. “Put her down; for shame!”

“I know where to stop,” I retorted; and “By God, you do!” said the duke, with a great laugh, and held me tight.

I had a thimbleful of liqueur from his hand by and by, which made me think of the duck-stone. I was the little queen of the evening, and a delight to my father and all.

“Faith!” said a merry Irish rapparee, a bit of a courtier captain, “man has been vainly trying to fit woman into the moral scheme ever since she made herself out of his ninth rib, and the fashions out of a fig-leaf; and here, in the eighteenth century Anno Domini, is the result.”

I was carried on to the Steine presently by my father, my little brain whirling. The whole of the Castle Tavern, and every house and shop adjacent, were illuminated; and the lights and crowds of people quite intoxicated me. There were sports enacting on all sides, and I screamed with laughter to see a jingling match, played for a laced coat and hat, in which the jingler, hung with bells, dodged and eluded and dropped between the legs of the blindfolded who sought to capture him. Then there was a foot-race, run by young women for a Holland smock; and I jeered at their self-conscious antics with all my little might, as they went giggling into place, coy and hobbledehoy, and pushed and quarrelled secretly, and stopped the starter to do up their greasy tresses, and then, all but the winner, snivelled over the result, pronouncing it unfair.

Presently I was taken to see an ox roasted whole; and it was here, while we were looking on at the lurid tumult, occurred a rencontre which was to alter the whole current of my life. A fat, drunken sweep in his war-paint jostled my father, who, himself in the fury of wine, turned and felled the beast to the ground. We were isolated from our friends at the moment, and a ring was immediately formed, and the sweep called upon to stand up and pay his interest like a man. He rose, nothing loth, it seemed, and faced my father, who was forced to engage.

“My little ’orse and cart to a red-un that I whop ye!” cried the sweep.

“Done!” answered my father, and they fell to.

I was sure of the result, and stood by quite self-possessed and eager while they fought. A round or two settled it, and there sat the sweep, unable to rise again, with a white tooth dropped on his coat-front.

When my father came away, I clung to him and kissed him in ecstasy. He was quite cool, and only a little breathed; and when, for the honour of sport, he had settled for the sweep’s trap to be driven round to his door in the morning, intending to put it up to auction, he shouldered me laughing, and carried me away amidst cheers.

It was near midnight by then, and, happening upon a royal servant, he gave me into the man’s charge, and, in spite of my remonstrances, bade him convey me home. I sulked all the way, and was in no mood, after my excitement, to sympathise with my mother’s agitated reception of her truant. She had been near distracted all these hours, thinking me drowned or kidnapped, and could not control a gust of temper upon hearing how I had been employed.

“O, my maman,” I said saucily, “you must understand I have never been in a convent, and so know how to take care of myself.”

It was wicked; but it was my governess speaking, not I.

II. I AM ABDUCTED

My mamma questioned me again in the morning about my adventures. She was very hollow-eyed and nervous, which offended me; for for her to appear ill in body or ill at ease in mind seemed to make my own young sanity something that it was wrong or selfish in me to enjoy. I was inconsiderate, no doubt; yet tell me, my Alcide, is it, on the other hand, considerate of dyspepsia to be always wet-blanketing health and contentment? Is not the human the only animal permitted of right to inflict his sickness on his fellows, while in every other community the invalid is “out of the law” of nature? It is thus, undoubtedly, that deterioration is provided against. To be attracted to the sweet and wholesome, and repelled by distemper, is that selfishness? If it is not, then am I content to be misunderstood by all others, so long as Heaven will recognise the real love of humankind which inspires my wish to secure its untainted image in myself. There must be a divine virtue in health, seeing how disease is the heir of sin. Is not to sympathise, then, with depression, to condone evil?

I leave the answer to profounder moralists than I, content, in default, to admit that the misery which now befell me was the direct consequence of my wickedness.

“Papa,” said I, tossing my head, “gave me to the beautiful duke, and he took me in pledge of the love papa bears him. Will he come and fetch me, do you think, mamma? I shall be glad to belong to one who does not have headaches whenever the sun shines.”

She went quite white, and broke into a torrent of French invective.

“I do not understand these hard words,” I said. “Is it so they pray in les Madelonnettes?”

My sauciness took her completely aback. She stared at me for some moments in silence, and then cried out suddenly, “God forgive you, Diane, and the vile creature who has instructed you to this, and your father, who I am going at once to ask that she may be removed!”

And she went out, unconsciously consigning me to my fate; and I never saw her again, may Heaven pardon her!

I was a little frightened, though still defiant; and I loitered about the house, singing in my small voice, which, though never an “organ,” has always been attractive, so people say.

Presently I remembered my duck-stone, and thought I would seek a case for it. I was alone in the house, for our one maid was gone marketing, and the governess not yet arrived. I went upstairs, and rummaged in my mother’s bureaux, and by and by found a tiny silver vinaigrette into which the stone fitted beautifully. Then I went and sat in our little front garden which overlooked the road running to the downs, and there rocked and mused amongst the flowers in a recovered temper. I hoped my father would fetch me again; I expected he would; and so, smiling and dreaming, put up the vinaigrette half-consciously, and sniffed at it. In a moment all sense of my surroundings went from me, and sky and flowers and the grey downs were blended in a rapture of unreality.

I came to myself amidst an impression of jolting. I thought it was night, and that I was suffocating in my bedclothes. I threw something from my face, saw daylight, and cried out incoherently.

Immediately the jerky motion ceased, and a horrible mask looked over and down at me. It was fat and sooty, with a handkerchief, startlingly white by contrast, going obliquely across its forehead.

“Stow that, my pigeon!” it said hoarsely and shortly. But at the first sound of its voice, black inspiration had come upon me in a flood. It was the sweep of my last night’s adventure, and he was bearing me away captive in the very little cart he had lost to my father. Whether he had driven that up, sportingly, to time, or was merely escaping in it, I never learned. Anyhow, temptation had come to him recognising me lying there, senseless and unprotected, in the garden, and moved, perhaps, by some sentiment between cupidity and revenge, he had seized the opportunity to kidnap me.

He swung his fat legs over the sitting board, and lifted me up from the midst of the empty bags where he had concealed me. We were in the thick of a little wood, and the pony was quietly cropping at the trackside grass. The sense of loss and isolation, the filth of my condition, the terror of this startled awakening from happy dreams, wrought a desperation in me that was near madness. I screamed and reviled and fought. The man opposed to my struggles just his two hands; but their large persuasive strength, unctuous as they were with soot, was more deadly than any violence. Alas! how the star that lit last night’s heaven may be found fallen in the mud to-day, my Alcide!

When I was quiet, he put me up between his knees, and smacked my face twice, deliberately, on either side—not hard, but in a lustful, proprietary way.

“Blow for blow,” says he, and lifted the bandage a little from his eye. It was horribly swollen and discoloured.

“Knew how to handle his morleys,” he said. “D’ee see’t? Now it be my turn.”

“What are you going to do with me?” I sobbed.

“Make ’ee my climbing boy,” he answered promptly, and with a hideous grin. “You’re my luck. D’ee see? Say you’re a gurl, and I’ll”— He hissed in his breath, and looked at me like a beast of prey.

“There,” he ended; “get under, and so much’s sniff at your peril!”

Some distant sound, perhaps, startled him. He stuffed me into my former position, and, covering me again with the bags, turned and clicked up his pony. I lay in a half faint, scarce daring to breathe, so utterly had this monster succeeded in subduing me. I cried, incessantly but quietly, hearing hour by hour the wheels grind under my ear, till the sound and physical exhaustion induced in me a sort of delirium. All this time, the hope of pursuit and rescue never occurred to me, I believe. Did they occur to Proserpine having once felt the inhumanity of her sooty abductor?

But now all of a sudden the anguish grew unendurable. I must move or die. And at the moment I became conscious of the vinaigrette still clutched convulsively in my little fist.

Sure never death offered a sweeter release. Very softly I raised it, and found oblivion. I might have sought to use it on my enemy, and escape; but, alas! the unsophisticated mind of the child could compass no such artifice.

We went on all day, as I realised during the intervals of my waking, by the unfrequented roads, jolting, loitering, sometimes in lonely places halting to rest the pony. The moral force my master (as I must now call him) put upon himself to avoid the wayside taverns, is the most convincing proof of his tenacity.

At last, a thicker darkness descended upon me, lying there in hopeless apathy, and night and sleep stretched their shroud over my miseries.

I awoke to rough movement and the sound of voices. My master was carrying me into a little ill-lighted cottage, which stood solitary upon the edge of a common. Sharp and brilliant, at no great distance, in a soughing night, sparkled the first lamps of a town.

I was borne into a tiny room, where something, covered with a cloth, lay stretched upon a rickety table. My master put me to the ground, and stood back to regard me. Another man, an expressionless sweep like himself, but gaunt and bent-shouldered, joined silent issue in this scrutiny.

“Well,” said the latter at length, “they’ll fit right enow; but damn the exchange!”

He stopped to cough rendingly; then went on—

“If you mean a deal, I’m game for half a bull, and there’s my word on it. But burn them duds, Johnny! I won’t take the risk on ’em.”

My master considered.

“Mayhap you’re right,” said he. “Call it done.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth before the other had jerked the cloth from the table. And there underneath lay the dead stiff body of a little sooty boy. His hands were griped at his chest, as if in agony of its œdematous swelling, and his bared eyeballs and teeth were as white as porcelain.

I could not cry out, or do anything but stare in horror, while the gaunt man, with some show of persuasion, began to strip the little body of its coat and vest and trousers—all its poor harness. Then, in a sickness beyond words, I comprehended. I was to be made exchange, for these foul vestments, my own pretty silken toilet.

“Come along, Georgy,” wheedled his late master. “You wouldn’t be so unhandsome as to deny a lady, and she doing you honour to accept of them.”

He rolled the body gently from side to side, so coaxingly forceful and intent, that someone, bursting in upon him at the moment, took him completely by surprise.

It was a wretchedly clad woman, with resinous blots of eyes in a hungry face, and a little black moustache over a toothless mouth—strange contrast!—that was never more still than a crab’s.

“So he’s dead, you dog!” she cried, seeming to feed on the words; “and you druv him to his death; and may God wither you!”

The bent man jumped, like a vulture, from the body, and hopped and dodged, keeping it between him and the woman.

“You took the odds!” he cried, coughing, and kneading his cracking knuckles together, “you took the odds, and you mustn’t cry out like a woman if they gone agen ye. I did no more’n my duty, as the Lord hears me!”

“Both on us,” said the woman. “Well, speak out!”

“He stuck,” said the sweep. “He stuck beyond reason. It were a good ten-inch square, for all it were a draw-in bend. I were forced to smoke him; but his lungs were that crowded, there was no loosening the pore critter till they bust and let him down. He were a good boy, and worth a deal to me.”

“That’s true,” put in my master. “A man, though he be a flue-faker, don’t cut off his nose to spite his face, missus.”

She made no answer, staring fixedly at the corpse.

“He were my seventh,” she said. “He made no cry when you come and took him away from me—a yellow-haired devil. Did he cry for his mammy, chokin’ up in the dark there?”

“No,” said the man—“an unnat’ral son!”

She threw up her hands with a frightful gesture.

“I could have borne it if he had—I could have borne it, and cut my throat. What were you doing with him?”

The sweep hesitated; but my master took the word from him.

“It’s a question of his slops, missus.” (He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at me, where I stood in the background paralysed with terror.) “Half a bull or nothing, and you and him to share.”

The woman put her arms akimbo.

“Ho, indeed!” she said. “And where does he come in?”

“It’s my own smalls,” swore the man, excited and truculent at once. “I won’t bate an inch of ’em, if I’m to die for it.”

They were facing each other across the body like tom cats, when my master pulled his friend aside, and whispered in his ear.

“Amongst ladies and gentlemen,” said he, and waited, smiling and oily, while the other fetched a black bottle from a cupboard. The woman visibly relaxed at the sight of this. Its owner uncorked it, and putting it to his mouth, gurgled, and smacked his black lips.

“The deal passes!” cried my master; and he snatched the bottle, and handed it to the woman with an ingratiatory smile.

It was the psychologic moment, which loosened and harmonised their tongues. They waxed confiding and genial. Presently the woman, commissioned politely to effect my transformation, swaggered across to me with devil-daring eyes, and began roughly to pull off my clothes.

“Damn you!” she said, with such a heat and violence of hate that my very sobs were withered in my throat. “Come up, you young limb! What the deuce! We’ll cry quits for my Georgy when the black smoke finishes your ladyship.”

She never had had a doubt of the meaning of my presence in that vile den, but my beauty and refinement and helplessness were only so many goads to her implacability. Her fingers were like rakes in my tender flesh. She would have torn me with her teeth, I believe, if any had been left to her. And I could only shrink and shiver under her hands, terrified if they wrung so much as a gasp from me.

When I was stripped, she seized a blunt dinner knife, and sawed off all my golden hair close to my head, a horrible experience. The tears gushed silent down my cheeks. They might have moved the heart of a wolf.

“There!” she said, when finished; “chuck us the duds!” and as she received them, scrubbed my face with the filthy tatters before she vested me in them.

I had hoped, perhaps, until thus hopelessly transformed; and then, at once, I hoped no more. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’ entrate—I was behind the bars; I wore the devil’s livery. O, my Alcide! Pity this poor little Proserpine so ravished from her Plains of Enna.

III. I ESCAPE

Hast thou the nerve to follow me, my friend? My martyrdom was severe, but, after all, brief. Comfort thyself with the thought of the brilliant moth which is to emerge from this sad chrysalis.

My master was an itinerant sweep. He jogged from town to village and from village to town in his little cart, an untaxed Bohemian, and carried me always with him. I had wild weepings at first, and frantic schemes of escape, and fits of sullen rebellion; but they were all persuaded out of me presently by his thick black hand. Then, as the past grew obscured behind me in ever-densifying clouds of soot, I came by degrees provisionally reconciled to my destiny, and even—canst thou believe it?—to some enjoyment of its compensations.

These were its changefulness, its irresponsibility, its little adventures, that always had our bodily solace for their end. We pilfered orchards, snatched an occasional fat duckling from a pond, smoked hives at night and carried away the dripping comb to eat under warm ricks in the moonlight. And I had little to complain of ill-treatment, except when engaged professionally. My master’s ample receptivities laughed and grew fat on self-indulgence. Liquor made him, to my good fortune, beatifically helpless; rich meats, paternally benevolent, and even poetical. It was only in business that he chastised, with a large and incorruptible immorality.

I learned the jargon more readily than I did the practice of my abominable trade. My first ascent of a chimney was a hideous experience—an ascent into hell, reversing all geographical orthodoxy. But my particular devil was a Moloch, who would either be served by exaltation or vindicate his majesty in smoke and fire. He was diplomatic to put me through my first paces, so to speak, in a dismantled vicarage that was in preparation for a new tenant. He simply thrust an iron scraper into my hand, and, with the briefest directions, drove me up. I was refractory, of course; and at that, without wordy persuasion, he lit a brand of tow and applied it to my bare ankles. The pain made me scream and writhe, as he had philosophically counted upon its doing. Involuntarily I found myself ascending the flue, as an awn of barley travels up inside one’s sleeve. The very ease of it made me rebel, and I stopped. Immediately the brand below, flaring at the end of a stick, was lifted to spur me. Frenzied and sobbing, I felt its hot rowel, and struggled on. The soot, with which the chimney was choked, began to fall upon me, half stifling, and filling my pockets. Then self-preservation, the great mother, recalled to me my directions. I looked up, and saw a far eye of light denoting freedom, and I began desperately to scrape clear my passage towards it, letting always the black raff descend between my knees before I rose to take its place. The eye enlarged, and with it grew the dawn of a strange new enthusiasm. I rose to it, like a fish to the angle, as my master had calculated I should. These fiends bait their hooks with heaven.

Suddenly, the last feet were conquered, and I emerged, and saw below me a beautiful village prospect of trees and homesteads.

Did I then sit there and weep? On the contrary, I was radiant. Account for it, thou fripon, as thou wilt. Thou knowest, Better the devil to applaud us than none at all. I swear to thee that, for the moment, I coveted nothing but my master’s admiring praise. Breathless as I was, I bent and uttered down the chimney the shrill cry “All up!” as he had bidden me. A little strained laugh came back, and, with an oath of distant approval, a command to descend. But at that, oddly enough, the horror came. I could not stomach the evil pit, with its reeling return into a night from which I had mounted to heaven. My knees trembled beneath me. I sat crying and shivering, while my master stormed thin gusty blasphemy up the flue. At length I remembered my duck-stone. It was in my trousers pocket, safe in its silver case, which, having dropped in the cart, I had found again to my delight lying undiscovered amongst the soot bags. I took it out, let myself down gingerly to the arm-pits, clutched it tightly in my hand, and sniffed, but not vigorously. I awoke to find myself sitting on the hearth, and smiling foolishly into the frightened face of my master. He recovered himself at the moment I did, and was the implacable martinet again and at once.

“Why, you cust little back-slummer!” he said, “to let loose and think to take a chalk of me like that! I’ll larn your nerves!”

And he pulled me to my feet, with his hand raised, but thought better of it, and gave me another chance. Chimney after chimney I must mount, till, fagged and heart-broken, I stood rebellious against his extremest persuasion, and he was obliged, with at least a few healing words of commendation, to postpone the finish of his job.

So began this terror of my new life, and so fortunately ended within a period that was not stretched beyond my endurance.

In this phase of it, after the first, there were no compensations, but only degrees of misery. If my master had ever thought to make capital out of my restoration, he soon abandoned the idea as impracticable, and devoted all his persuasion to turning me, after the inhuman methods of his class, to his best profit. Once I stuck tight in one of those clogged “draw-in bends” which had been fatal to my predecessor. I could move no way, and in my struggles, a little crossed stay of iron, fixed in the chimney, so pressed upon my breast as almost to stop my heart. I was in a dreadful condition of terror and suffering, and in the midst he lit some damp straw on the hearth to smoke me down. The fumes took away my senses, and so, perhaps flattening the resistance of my lungs, released me. But I was in a sort of conscious delirium for days afterwards. Sometimes, where he had got the worst of a housewife’s bargaining, he would shout to me, working two-thirds up, “Pike the lew, boy!” which, in sweep’s jargon, meant, Leave the job unfinished, to spite the old slut! And then I would descend at once. Sometimes, where a cluster of flues ran into one shaft, I would come down into the wrong room, causing consternation amongst its inmates. But, through all, the idea of escape was very early a dead passion in me, so utterly in soot and sexlessness was I lost to any sense of self-identity.

So, always homeless, always enslaved, always wandering, I was one day, some nine months after my abduction, come with my master into the neighbourhood of Streatham, which is a little rural suburb of London, reclaimed, with other contiguous hamlets, from the thick woods and gipsy-haunted commons of that part of the country. For some days past we had moved, unhurriedly as was our wont, through an atmosphere charged with a curious nervous excitement. Housewives, avoiding contact with us, as with possibly compromising emissaries of ill-omen, had vanished into their cottages as we came near; tavern cronies, grouped at tap-doors, were to be seen looking citywards, until dark, tramping up the long white roads, drove them within with unreasonable frights of shapeless things approaching. Then, sure enough, the night horizon grew patched with flaring cressets, and we learned that London was in the hands of a No-Popery mob.

Its area of destruction spreading like an unchecked ink-blot, and we moving to meet it, brought us presently involved in the fringe of the disorder. Protestant Dulwich had sent its contingent to help petition Parliament against the legalising of the poor harried Catholics, and had got its warrant, as it chose to consider, for an anti-Romish crusade. And for that, whether right or wrong, I, at least, owe it gratitude.

We were rolling one afternoon along a certain Knight’s Hill or road which skirted a stretch of common, when we came upon a great inn, called The Horns, where was a considerable concourse of people assembled, all in blue cockades, and buzzing like a hive about to swarm. The word most in the mouths of this draff was Pope, which at first we took to mean the Vicar of Rome, but soon understood for the name of a young Jesuit who was lately come as chaplain to a Catholic family of the neighbourhood. Now, such insolent defiance of the penal laws was not to be tolerated, and so the loyal Protestant burghers of Dulwich were going, with no disrespect to the family, to cast down its graven images, and hang up its chaplain for a scarecrow to all propagandists who should venture out of the Holy See into our tight little island. And here they were gathered to organise themselves, the process taking good account of malt liquors; and hence, when they moved off, we, to cut the story short, accompanied them walking, foreseeing some prospect of “swag” in the crusade.

Going in a pretty compact body, with a great deal of howling and hymning, such as that with which all conscripts, either of the cross or guillotine, are accustomed to stimulate one another’s courage and vanity, we crossed a Croksted Lane, and again a sweep of wild heath, that spread towards the dense forests called Northwood, which fill all that shallow valley from Sydenham Wells on the north to Penge Common on the south. And presently coming to the trees, and entering a wide, elegant clearing amidst them, where the woods were banked behind, and the ground dropped towards us in terraces, on the highest we saw the house standing, a great sunny block of brick and stone, but shuttered now, and apparently lifeless.

The mob at first knocked on the door with a diffidence inspired of its varnished and portly exclusiveness; but, provoking no response, presently grew bolder and more clamorous. Still, I believe, its fervour would ultimately have wasted itself on this inflexible barrier, had not my master, with some disgusted expressions of contempt, come to the front and taunted it on to a violence the more vicious because it was shamefaced. Under his stimulus, then, the panels were beginning to crack, when in a moment the bolts flew, and there stood in the opening a little sinister fellow in grey, who asked us, curt and ironic, our business.

All but my master fell back before him, though there were some broken cries touching the Scarlet Woman, which the sweep took up.

The little man wrinkled his little acrid nose. He was nobody, it turned out, but the Scotch steward, holding staunch to his post; but he was cut and coloured like steel.

“D’ye ask here for your doxy?” he said. “Go back, man, and look where you left her in the tavern.”

The sweep, only half understanding, spat out a mouthful of oaths.

“We want that there Pope!” he roared. “Bring us to the black devil, you.”

“After you, sir,” answered the other politely.

My master, looking horribly ugly, repeated his demand.

“Well,” said the steward, “this is fair humours, Newcastle asking for coals!”

The words were hardly out of him, when my master smote him down, and pushed into the house. He gave a little quiver, like unstrung wire, and lay senseless, the red running from his nostrils.

Mon chéri, hast thou ever seen a pack of mongrels snarl aloof, fearful and agitated, about a dog-fight, and in a moment break in with coward teeth upon the conquered? So over the body of the steward trampled this rabble, blooded now at another’s expense, and reckless in its consciousness of self-irresponsibility. They had found a champion to take the onus of this, and all worse that might happen, off their shoulders.

But they were destined to discover no further chestnuts for their catspaw. The Jesuit had fled, it appeared, with the rest of the family; and so they must content themselves with wrecking the private chapel, where the household was wont to practise its treasonable rites.

Now, my master, who was eager after spoil, sweating and toiling in the thick of the press, left me unguardedly to my own devices; and suddenly I found myself quite alone in a closet hung with vestments, where there was a fireplace with an open bricked hearth, having no signs of usage, which immediately, from habit, caught my attention. And straight, at last, God, pitiful to His poor little derelict, touched the cross on my breast, and quickened inspiration in that where I had supposed all was dead. I slid into the chimney, and went up, up, like an eel in a well rising for air. The sounds of destruction grew attenuated beneath me; I smelt life and freedom, and swarmed faster in my agony to attain them. The chimney, clean as at its building, let down no token of my passage by it, and in a few moments I emerged from the summit, and, tumbling into the cleft of a long double roof—found myself face to face with a man who was there before me.

IV. I FALL INTO THE HANDS OF A COLLECTOR

At least I call him a man; but O, my Alcide, he was a marionnette! His joints creaked. All the bran in his body seemed to have been shaken down into his calves. His hat supported itself on his ears and the top of his coat collar. His sleeves were sacks. His nose was nothing but a wen, and being no better adapted to the burden of some enormous spectacles he wore, had led his fingers to an incessant trick of adjusting those in their place. He carried under his arm an immense folio, with which, as I appeared, he aimed an agitated blow at me, only to miss and fall forward on his face on the roof.

I instantly dodged past him, and stood panting while he collected himself. His glasses, without which he was helpless, had flown off, and I saw his eyes, which before had seemed to fill the whole field of the great lenses, mere swollen slits, like a pig’s. He groped about in the utmost consternation as he knelt, pawing the tiles for his lost property.

“Who are you? Wait! I’ll be with you,” he ejaculated excitedly, as his bony hands swept the roof.

I backed out of their reach without replying.

At last he found what he sought, and fitting the rims to his nose, rose to his feet and stared at me.

“Hey, what!” he said—“a sweep! Well!”—and blew out a rumbling grunt, which he checked suddenly, as if he had turned a cock on it.

A moment after, he put his hand into his pocket, and fetching out a dirty fragment of biscuit, held it to me persuasively, as one might lure a colt. Seeing, however, that I still held away from him, he threw the biscuit down in a pet, and stood to canvass me in a baleful manner.

“What do you want?” he snapped out suddenly. “How did you find your way here?”

Still with my eyes on him, I answered, in a husky whisper—

“Don’t you know? Up the closet chimney.”

“Ay,” he said, dropping his own voice in tacit response to the warning in mine, “but not to sweep it?”

“No,” I said; “to escape by it.”

His hand went up to his glasses. He glared at me through their restored focus.

Watchful of him, lest, before I could explain, he should silence me provisionally with some stunning blow, I ventured to approach him a little nearer.

“There’s killing,” I whispered, “going on down there—a poor old man in a grey coat.”

He started violently, and pulling his jaw down, uttered a sort of mechanical crow, and let it go again.

“Grey!” he muttered. “It’s the steward, then. He didn’t give me away, did he?”

I shook my head dumbly. He was readjusting his glasses to meet the answer.

“Ay,” he gulped, swallowing with relief, “poor Mackenzie! And to think that for all his loyalty he must burn!”

I whispered, “Why must he?”

“Because,” he said, “he wasn’t of the faith.”

This uncouth creature was getting horrible to me. I suppose he read my repulsion in my face, for his own suddenly grew agitated and menacing.

“Are you thinking of betraying me?” he said.

I retreated before him, working my foolish young arms.

“Keep away!” I cried; “I don’t even know who you are.”

“O!” he said, and stopped, and was at his spectacles again. Then suddenly he held up his hand.

“Hark!” he said.

I listened. Far and faint below, through the hubbub of destruction came wafted at intervals the name of the chaplain—Pope—the cynosure of all this iconoclastic zeal.

“Yes, it’s you they want,” I said.

“And you,” he retorted fiercely, “are pointing the way, you little”—

“It’s a lie!” I cried vehemently. “I came up here to escape from them, like you.”

He looked at me doubtfully.

“You said you didn’t know who I was.”

“No more I did,” I protested, “till you told me.”

“I told you!” he cried. “Humph!” And he glared at me sourly. “Sit down, then,” he said, “and hold your tongue till I speak to you again.”

It was the wise policy, certainly. He squatted himself between me and the chimney, and we dwelt in silence, while the mob wreaked its blind vengeance below. I was in a dreadful fright all the time. Every moment I expected to hear my master’s voice boom up the flue by way of which I had climbed; and, desperate as I was, I devised the naughty expedient to curry favour, if necessary, by claiming the credit of having run this fugitive to bay. It was a base thought, perhaps, though natural under the stress of the occasion. Chiefly, however, I regret it because it was uncalled for, and it is aggravating to burden one’s conscience with unprofitable frailties. The monster I had run from was never, in point of fact, to cross my path again. Probably, thinking I had fled from the house, he went hunting counter, and so put ever a wider interval between us.

It was not, after all, so very long before the racket of despoliation down below died away, and we heard the mob clatter from the house, and go streaming and singing across the common in its retreat. I believe that, either realising how in my master it had evoked a demon to its own legal discomfiture, or perhaps frightened by the bugbear of some reported troop of militia assembling in the neighbourhood, it was suddenly decided to temper Protestantism with prudence, and so dissipating itself with great speed and piety, left the building to a solitude more dense by contrast than before.

It was not, however, until every whisper and echo had long ceased that I durst let myself be persuaded of the reality of my reprieve; and when at last I did, the joy that grew minutely in my heart came near to upsetting my reason.

My excitement hungered for something on which to flesh itself. I rose and went up and down, quickly and softly, in the space left me, seeking the means to some larger action. Then I saw the great folio lying discarded on the roof where the chaplain had dropped it, and all of a sudden felt itching to know what it could contain to tempt this man to burden himself with its care in so anxious a situation.

He sat with his face in his hands—or cuffs, rather. He appeared to be in a sort of uncouth trance. I stole very noiseless by him, and, unobserved as I supposed, had actually lifted the book, when he started awake in a moment.

“Hey!” he cried. “That’s mine!”

“I was going to bring it to you,” I said.

He scuttled towards me on his hands and toes, and snatching the book from me, squatted down, hugging it, and glaring at me in a sort of dumb malevolence.

I had no retort for such rudeness. I stood crimsoning under my black a moment, then, in default of a better answer, began to cry.

He was not the least moved, the ill-conditioned boor, but he was disturbed by the noise.

“Ur-rh!” he bullied. “That’ll do. Do you hear?”

Indignation gave me decision. I turned my back on him.

“Where are you going?” he cried.

I stalked on without a word.

“No, you don’t!” he said, scrambling up; and he followed and caught hold of my jacket.

“Let me go!” I cried, struggling. “My master will be looking for me.”

“O!” he said, quite suddenly agitated. “Come here and I’ll show you a picture.”

I let myself be drawn reluctant.

“Is it of the Scarlet Woman?” I said.

He started, and roared, “The Scarlet—!” then, conscious of his mistake, dropped his voice to a panic whisper.

“There’s no such moth,” said he. “If you mean heraclia dominula, the scarlet tiger, come and I’ll show you one.”

He persuaded me to sit by him on the roof slope, and gingerly opened the book away from me.

“Don’t touch,” he said. “It’s called Fasti Sanctorum Naturæ Cultoribus Proprii.”

“Is that Latin?” I asked.

“Yes,” he growled; but he looked at me rather curiously. “It means The Naturalist’s Calendar of the Saints. How did you know?”

“O, I know,” I said.

He turned some leaves, while scanning me covertly and sourly; and I exclaimed becomingly over their contents. On each was a picture of a saint, hastily illuminated, and of many insects most beautifully coloured after nature. The saints, it is true, were pigmies, and the moths life size; but it was through the former that this uncivilised Churchman justified himself in a secular hobby. He was, as I came to learn presently, a crazy collector of the small game of fields and hedges, and had only drifted into the Church after a particularly fine specimen of the Painted Lady, or some such immoral creature.

I tried to appreciate in order to conciliate him; but I could see that my flattery was not expert, or perhaps fulsome enough for his taste. Presently, on the score that my mere neighbourhood threatened the lustre of his illuminations, he shut the book, and placed it discontentedly by his side.

“Did you do it all by yourself?” I asked.

“Ay,” he grunted.

“And why did you bring it up here, when”—

He smacked his great hand on his knee, interrupting me—

“If you haven’t the intelligence to see—sooner part with my blood to those Vandals! There; let the book alone, and tell me what brought you here.”

“I’ve said already—I was escaping from my master.”

“A master sweep?”

“Yes.”

“Now,” he said, “how did you know this was Latin?”

I hung my head.

“Come,” he threatened, “you’d best tell me.”

I was considering what I should do. I reddened excited under my mask, and rose to my feet again. After all these months of obliteration, a wonderful thought was beginning to dawn in me—the thought of my sex as a possible factor in my redemption. For how long, my dear friend, had I not lost the art to play it for the value of so much as a sugar-plum? And what was there now to prevent me from reassuming that charming confidence in men which so disarms them? Alas! it was a vain recovery here—a waste of art on a material no more responsive to it than a pulpit hassock.

“How did you know?” he repeated angrily.

“Because,” I whispered, blushing, and lingering over the sensation I felt I was about to produce—“because—Father—I am a little daughter of the Church.”

He had been gnawing his knuckles, as he bent his morose brows on me; and at my words stopped suddenly, his great teeth bared, like a dog looking up from a bone.

“I am the child of a great gentleman. I was stolen from my parents,” I said, and clasped my hands to him. “I am not a boy at all, but a girl.”

He leapt up as if I had struck him.

“How dare you!” he shouted; then, choking, in another hoarse reaction to panic, “How dare you try to impose upon me!”

“I’m not!” I cried, in a childish fury of chagrin over his insensibility. “It’s true, every word. My mother was a Sister of les Madelonnettes, and I was stolen from her, and I want to be sent back.”

I did not in truth, save in so far as that way only lay my chance of restoration to my darling father. But the point was inessential.

The priest’s eyes, dilated monstrosities, devoured me through their lenses.

“Les Madelonnettes—the Magdalens!” he muttered, amazed and frowning. His hand, caressing his chin, grated on the stubble of it. “Come,” he said brutally, “I’m an old bird to be caught by chaff. Confess to me, if you’re a Catholic, you wretched little sinner.”

I wanted nothing better. This sacrament of penance must convince and win him. In a moment my young elastic soul had leapt the dark interlude which divided me from my past, and my little feet were tripping once more in fancy down the royal prince’s table. I fell on my knees.

“Say your Confiteor,” he commanded harshly.

I repeated it without a mistake.

“Humph!” said he. “What are you waiting for?”

I told him my whole story. He listened to it, after the first, abstractedly, with one eye caressing his abominable book. At the end he gave me absolution, canvassing me distastefully as he pondered the penance. Presently he spoke.

“I order you,” he said, “twenty Ave Marias, and to return to your master.”

I jumped to my feet.

“My master—the sweep!” I cried.

“Certainly,” he replied stubbornly. “You were obviously the foundling of Providence, which has elected this honest tradesman to be your foster-father.”

“But, my mother?” I choked.

“It is her judgment,” he said, “to remain and mingle her weeping with the ashes of this sacrifice, in the hospital of which her crimes have made her an inmate.”

He had listened with his elbows, as I supposed. I recognised the hopelessness of my task.

“Very well,” I said. “I daresay he has finished with the steward by now. I will go and tell him what you say”—and I made for the chimney.

He was after me in a moment, at a gallop.

“Stop!” he cried. “What do you mean? That your master was one of this rabble?”

“One? The worst of them all,” I answered. “It was he knocked down the poor grey gentleman; and the last I heard of him was crying for you.”

He released me, to throw up his hands.

“The intolerance of these heretics!” he cried. “Stop! Don’t go. I withdraw my pronouncement. You shall name your own penance.”

I breathed quickly, standing before him.

“Father, that is soon done. I will go with you.”

“With me—with me?” he complained, stamping distracted. “Where to?”

“Anywhere from here,” I pleaded. “You can’t stop. The whole country’s up, and a second time, if they come, you’ll be caught.”

Snorting with agitation, he took off his spectacles to wipe them.

“It’s quite impossible,” he said. “I know of only one asylum beyond, and that”—

With a quick little snatch I ravished the glasses from his hand, and, running away with them, hid behind a chimney. For a minute or two he raved round, stumbling, and grabbing at the air, and finally tripped over his book and subsided, quite prostrate, upon the roof.

“Little sweep!” he panted, in a trembling voice. “My daughter—child of Magdalen—where are you?”

I held my breath; and he went on, in broken sentences—

“Come back—give me my glasses—where are you?—I believe all you say—What! will you give me up, and the Calendar unfinished?”

Then, as I still did not answer, “Holy saints! The little devil has hobbled me, and I shall be caught and martyred.”—A longish pause—“In manus tuas, Domine, com— I wonder if in Paradise—the scarce copper—h’m!”

He began to gnaw his knuckles, with a sort of pleased abstraction over the thought. It would never do. I came out of my hiding.

“Will you take me with you?” I repeated.

“O, it’s you?” he cried, with a start. “Where are my glasses?”

“In my hand.”

“Will you return them to me?”

“Will you let me go with you?”

“Scandalous!”

“I will carry the book.”

“Pooh!”

“I will walk behind.”

“Pish!”

“If anything happens to me, then”—

“Fah!” he interposed; and then added, “What could happen to you?”

“Do you suppose I shall stay in these clothes?” I said. “I shall return to be a girl; and what am I to do then, without someone to protect and help me back to my parents?”

“That’s nothing to me,” he said.

“Good-bye,” said I.

He scrambled to his feet with a roar: “Give me back my glasses!”

I stood quite still, making no sound. He thought I had really gone this time, and began taking little strides hither and thither, and throwing his arms about. Suddenly he stopped, sweating with agitation.

“Are you there?” he said.

I did not answer. He hopped from leg to leg, pulling with one hand at the other, as if at a tight glove.

“Child!” he cried, “you’re a good child—a perfect little sweep. You shall come—do you hear?—if we ever get off this roof. We’ll escape by the woods—nobody will see us there together—and I can catch some arguses (lasiommata ægeria) that will be in season.”

V. I AM CARRIED AWAY AS A SPECIMEN

The very rudeness of the creature nominated by Fate to be my warden gave me a feeling of confidence. Here was a shepherd’s dog ugly enough to frighten away the wolf himself, should he cross us in the shape of my master. I thrilled to have secured his promise, which, for all his boorishness, and perhaps because of it, I had faith in. The dark pit was already half bridged in my foolish young imagination, and I dreamed of alighting on the farther side—to what? Not, indeed, to the old melancholy life of the cottage near the Steine. For all my sad experience, I never entertained that prospect for one moment. I was but now in my eleventh year, yet some instinct informed me that the dead—amongst whom, surely, I must be written—should not return if they would avoid the mortification of home truths; that broken threads cannot be made one again, and leave no scar. Perhaps the spirit of vagabondage even had entered a little into my blood. In any case, it was the breezy security of my father’s, not my mother’s, protection to which I hurried in thought, with this reverent cur for escort.

As for him, accounting for his presence on the roof, he growled out to me once after this, in order to still my inquisitive importunity, while I still held the spectacles in pledge, that he had indeed taken the alarm that morning, with the rest of the family to whom he was spiritual director; but that, remembering his book left behind, he had insisted upon quitting the general flight and returning for it—with what awkward results for the steward had appeared, though, as a fact, I believe the poor man recovered later. Now, I was to understand, he had the intention, if he could make good his escape, to seek asylum, while the storm blew over, with a lady, a co-religionist and connection of his patrons, who lived distant a two days’ journey on foot. And so, having grudgingly informed me, he subsided into his unsavoury self, and would speak no more.

I did not much care, once being put in possession of the facts and the chances they afforded me. No one, it was evident, guessed at our retreat; and, for the rest, I was content to bide my time, and the opportunity I foresaw of impressing even this dull animal with a revelation of the pretty romance he had undertaken to squire.

Evening fell, and we were still sitting there. Not a footstep sounded in the house beneath us; not a voice but the birds’ came from the garden. Presently, emboldened by the quiet, I went softly climbing and investigating, finding the trap-door by way of which the chaplain had ascended, and peeping between the gables and over the roof ridges. So far as I could see, nothing human was stirring in all the placid demesne. The sundial on the lawn, the arbour in the corner, the brook embroidering the low trees, like a ribbon run through lace, were things inanimate in a painted picture. But there was something in their voiceless watchfulness that made me long to open the door, as it were, and run into the air. I was not born, like my mother, for cloisteral seclusions.

I was passing my companion once soft-footed, when he startled me by demanding, suddenly and savagely, “What’s your name?”

“Diana, please,” I answered, in a flutter.

“Diana—Please!” he protested crossly. “Fah! Diana Please don’t please”—and he subsided into himself again.

But he had christened me. I had gone lacking nothing but a name of my own hitherto and here was one given me, apt and pat. From that moment I became Diana Please.

The very sense of its possession made me forward.

“Aren’t we safe now?” I said, “or are you going to stop here all night?”

He looked up at me hurriedly, and, scowling, motioned me away from him. Then, without a word, he snatched his book, rose, and striding to the trap-door, began to descend. I followed him closely. The way led by a flight of steps in the walls to a cupboard under the main stairs where they rose from the hall. We emerged from darkness into a wide echoing twilight. For the first time the thought of my master secreted somewhere, watchful and waiting for me, sent my spirits reeling. I slunk against the wall.

“Where was it?” demanded my companion brusquely.

I stared at him. He stamped his foot, so that the noise resounded horribly through the empty house.

“The steward!” he cried. “Where did they leave him?”

“By the door,” I whispered, trembling—“out there.”

It was still ajar. He hurried to it, looked out, went out, returned after a minute or two, and slammed the oak thunderously.

“There are trails of blood down the steps. He has been removed, or has removed himself,” he said, and began immediately to ascend the stairs.

“O, where are you going?” I cried fearfully.

“To bed,” he snapped.

“To bed!”

I clung to his coat-tails. There was a sort of nightmare struggle between us, up as far as the first landing. There he rent himself away, and, leaving me sprawling, banged and locked himself into a room. I crouched on the mat outside, sobbing and imploring. “What am I to do? Where am I to go?”

He answered not a word to my pleading. Presently I heard him snoring, and—would you believe it?—the gross carnival of sound was heavenly music in my ears. In all that vast loneliness it was my only human stay and comfort. O, my Alcide! To think of thy Diane owing her reason to the grunting of a hog.

It was a terrible night. I dared not move—scarcely breathe. But fear and exhaustion at last overcame me, and I slept.

I awoke to sweet, soundless daylight. The look and smell of sunshine restored me in a moment to myself. I had not been disturbed. The house was utterly abandoned. I arose, resolved at once to put into effect the plan I had formed. A little memory of something I had noticed yesterday was urging me. I fled softly upstairs. Signs of the raid met me at every turn: broken crucifixes, torn vestments, scattered Hosts—up and down they lay, trodden into dirty rubbish by the swarming footsteps. There had been, I believe, no secular looting, unless, as was probable, by my master, who would be sure, on that account, to have withdrawn himself remote from consequences. I had nothing to fear from him. I looked for a room where I had seen some children’s clothes scattered, and finding it still undisturbed, quickly selected from among the litter the simplest outfit I could adapt in mind to my figure.

A common watch lay ticking on a table. I examined it—scarce five o’clock—lingered, hesitated, and left it where it was. I had not yet come to thieve, even had it been less bulky for my juvenile fob. Hastily I snatched soap and towels from a washing-stand, and holding the clothes so as not to soil them against my own, stole out. There was not water enough in all the house for my cleansing. My spirit rushed to the little river I had seen gleaming under the trees.

At the back of the hall I found a low window, unlatched it, and dropped into the garden. A light fog was spread abroad, which, dripping from the trees, alarmed me with a thought of unseen things moving near. But presently a bird piped close above my head, with a note of reassurance, and I slipped on and made my way stealthily towards the river until I heard it gurgling; and in a moment later I came upon it.

There, with only the wild things in the grass to scare my modesty, I made my bath. The ecstasy of it, as all that foul husk slipped off, and was carried from me down the stream! The joy to recover my near-forgotten self, the thing of pink and pearl, from its long mourning! The wonder, and the strangeness of that reincarnation to a maturer estate! I was not, like the Sleeping Beauty, to renew my old, but to awake to a newer self—a different from the Diana from whom I had departed nine months before. It seemed incredible; and still when I was washed as white as a lamb, I must sluice, and relather, and sluice again, to convince myself that no stain of my horrible livery remained. Then, at last, I came out, and dried and dressed myself hurriedly; and so, being secure, sat awhile on the bank to let my hair sun. It had never been but roughly clipped since that first cruel shearing, and now was down to my collar, thick and golden. I could see it in the water glass, when I bent over, reflected like a dim glory, and I nodded and laughed to the picture in my delight, and was only sorry presently to bind it about gipsy fashion with the silk handkerchief I had brought down with me for the purpose. But time was moving, and so must I be. I rose, and returned to the house.

I heard a shuffling on the stairs as I re-entered by the window, and in a moment, tripping lightly, came upon Father Pope descending. He had his great book under his arm, and he tiptoed with a sort of scared effort to hush the creaking of his tell-tale shoes. He gave a guilty start on seeing me standing smiling before him, and stumbled and caught himself erect by the banisters, frowning at me.

I did not speak. I stood dumbly to let him canvass the transformation; but the creature had no nerve of sentiment in all his dull anatomy.

“What do you want?” he said; “who are you?”

I could see he only fenced with the truth to recover himself. I dropped him a pretty little curtsey.

“Diana, please,” I said.

I was in trepidation that he would deny me, as I was convinced he had designed to give me the slip; and, though for policy’s sake I must propitiate him, I hated the creature for his treachery. But, despite his being a Jesuit, he was too crude a wit for the double part.

“Humph!” he growled. “I was wondering what had become of you,”—which, no doubt, was true enough.

He glowered at me dislikingly; then bidding me wait for him, stalked off into the gloom of passages, from which he presently re-emerged with a bagful of bread and biscuit ends which he had collected.

“I have no money,” he said. “You must manage with your share of these or nothing. If you look for better, it must be out of my company.”

“What does for you, will do for me, Father,” I said meekly; but nothing would disarm his churlishness.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” said he. “I could do very well without you, to begin with.”

I dropped my eyes.

“Now, then, bestir yourself,” he bullied. “If you’re to come at all, come before the world’s awake.”

He strode off, and I followed, through shuttered glooms, and along silent corridors to a distant part of the building, emerging from a door in which we found ourselves in a close shrubbery-walk going up towards woods. Very soon the comforting screen of trees was about us, and the peril of watchful enemies surpassed. We pushed on without rest or pause. My spirit and my feet danced together. It was all so free and fragrant, and the rapture of my new emancipation was like a second sight. Fays and sweet things seemed to melt before me round green corners, or overhead among the branches, leaving a scent of the unknown world in their footsteps. I sang low, I laughed to the birds, I seemed incapable of weariness. And, indeed, my late training served me in good stead, for this clerical Caliban had no mercy on my tender limbs. He desired only the least excuse to shake me off, and I would not gratify him with one.

All day he led me south by wood and common, avoiding the living places where men were like to be alert on the new Crusade. We hardly exchanged a word, as he swung on with the gait of a camel; but in the end it was he who succumbed first. The weight of his great folio crushed him—that is the truth. He called a halt in an unfrequented copse, and flung himself exhausted on the grass.

“Go, find yourself a lodging,” he said. “I will sleep here.”

I did not dare cross him. I crept away; but only so far as a low thorn tree, mounting into which I could easily hold him in view. But I need not have feared. The poor wretch was sunk in fatigue, and incapable of further effort. He had an odious night, I am sure, while I, from my late habits, slept as securely as in an arm-chair.

Early next morning we were afoot again. My companion, mouldy-cheeked and limping, greeted me with a scowl.

“What have I not suffered of humiliation as a priest,” he said, “to have thee breathing in the same wood!”

The world must have been an insufficient dormitory to this misogynist.

At noon, having wandered for hours through forest so green, so profound, that its deer-haunted vistas seemed the very byways to the infinite, we came out suddenly, when half faint with toil and hunger, upon the foot of a low hill, on whose summit was a queer octagonal stone tower, crowned with a dome like a pepper-box. My companion sputtered anathema upon seeing it, and stood stock still.

“What is it, Father?” I whispered, creeping up to him.

“We’ve overshot the mark, that’s all,” he growled, conceding a point to civility. “Here’s Shole beyond; and I aimed at no farther than Wellcot-Herring. Well, we must go over as the shortest way,” and he began to mount the slope.

I followed him, emboldened to ask, “What’s this we’re coming to?”

“Rupert’s Folly,” he answered viciously. “Old Lousy’s spy-house.”

“What’s he?” I asked.

He gave a rude laugh.

“He’s an itch on the skin of my lord that he can’t scratch away;” and, with these coarse, enigmatic words, he motioned me to fall behind.

The tower sprouted clean from the grass. Reaching and skirting it, I had occasion barely to notice a figure seated under a low door against its farther angle, before the liveliest prospect below engaged all my attention. The hill went down on this side into a wide valley, in the midst of whose trees and pastures, dominating a tiny village with forge and tavern, stood a great old house of grey stone. On the green before, as we could see, was a merry-making: sports, and dancing, and long tables spread, and a vast broaching of casks. And the villagers in their ribbons were all there, so that my eyes and my heart danced to see them.

But my companion stood looking down with a most venomous expression.

“Fah! A nest of heretics!” he muttered. “What golden calf are they met to worship?”

“The red herring’s spawn, good sir,” said the voice of the creature behind us. I turned and stared at him for the first time. He sat sucking at a long pipe at the open door of the tower—the filthiest little scrub you could imagine. His face was like old crumpled parchment, his crafty eyes floated in rheum, and he scratched a dusty tag of beard down upon his breast as he leered at us.

“What! Lousy John,” said the priest. “Is it our heir of all the Herrings come of age?”

“Ay,” said the old wretch. “Nephew Salted. You know him? Ay, ay. You should be the man Pope, of course, by your rudeness? Go down to your whore of Babylon, sir. She mingles with yonder company.”

“You’d have me into the range of your burning-glass, hey?” said the priest, with a snort between laughter and contempt.

The other smoked on unperturbed.

“All in good time, priest,” he said. “I’m not for anticipatin’ the devil. Is that his scriptures you’re a-carryin’ to propagate?”

My companion uttered a furious exclamation, and, hugging his book, shuffled out of range. Most like a woman, he could not bear to have his spiteful humour returned upon him.

I understood nothing of all this, of course, and was standing bewildered, when the old obscenity beckoned me.

“See,” he said, taking his pipe from his mouth and pointing with the scarlet tongue of it: “a beautiful landscape, ain’t it?”

“Yes,” I faltered.

“Ah!” said he. “I’ll tell you—just you, mind. I don’t take a-many into my confidence. It’s the beauty of pain, child; a local inflammation in the system.”

I murmured something, and he chuckled.

“They call this tower ‘Rupert’s Folly,’” he said privately; “and I laugh, settin’ up here in my shell. D’ye think they’d laugh too, if they guessed where the smut came from that blasted of their crops?”

“From you?” I whispered.

He bent over, and pointed upwards. For the first time I noticed that the muzzle of a telescope projected from the little dome on the roof. While I was gazing, I suddenly felt my wrist in the clutch of his apish claw.

“Hush!” he said. “It’s there I gathers my star-powder, and discharges it where I will. I’m Briareus, the last of the Uranids, left behind to rack the world to all eternity for its presumption.”

He let me go, squinting and nodding at me. I backed from him in horror. Nothing was plain to me but that here was one of those astrologic demons who delight to bring heaven close that they may measure our remoteness from it, and to cast away poor souls amidst the eternal silences. That he seemed to rave was nothing. Such inhumanity is in itself a madness.

“Ay,” he chuckled, hugging himself in a secret way, “you didn’t expect that, did you? You must be a god to lust in pain. Why, lord, child! the earth would be drab all over but for its galls and breakings. See where I’ve set a withered crop among the green; see where I’ve teased the soil to scarlet—a blazing core of fever. I know the World, the wanton. So long as she can cover her cancer with a ribbon, she’ll smile. By and by I shall set a spark to the west, and burn up the day’s rubbish. Look when the sun drops, and you’ll see it a little point of white, and afterwards a bonfire.”

I backed still farther.

“Lord!” he cried, doubling with laughter, “what headaches I’ve projected into their beer-barrels down there! What poison laid on the lasses’ lips! I shall have some fine incense of sufferin’ risin’ to me to-morrow! What, you’re goin’, are you? Down into the fire, hey? A pretty little faggot to mend its blazin’!” And he kneaded his hands rapturously between his knees.

I saw the priest had disappeared over the crest, and, half crying, pursued him. He turned on me angrily as I came up.

“Now,” said he, adjusting his spectacles to glare through them, “if that old carrion speaks truth, I come to an end with you.” He gripped my shoulder. “Hold your tongue, d’you hear? Not a word of us till we find out how the land lies.”

He dropped his hold, on a sudden thought, to my elbow, and, with a muttered menace, marched me down the hill.

At the bottom, in a little lane, with hedges to screen it from the view beyond, we came unexpectedly upon a lady gathering wild flowers. She started violently upon observing my companion, and dropped her nosegay. He accosted her, with a manner of gruff civility, and here it was somehow that, as they broke into talk of an urgent nature, we got separated.

VI. I AM “PINNED OUT”

The festivities were to celebrate the majority of the Viscount Salted, only son to Hardrough, fourth Earl of Herring, Baron Rowe of Shole and Wellcot-Herring, Warden of the Cinque Ports, and official Verderer of the Forest of Down. The Lady Sophia Rowe, aunt to the young gentleman, had driven over from Wellcot—her estate in tail female, and distant from Shole by road seven miles—to lend her saintly countenance to the gathering, and it was she whom Father Pope, steering his course erroneously for Shole instead of Wellcot-Herring, had fortuitously encountered culling wild flowers in her brother’s lordlier demesne.

The Lady Sophia was, unlike her orthodox kinsman, a convert to the Catholic from the Established Church, and within her limits, and because of them, a zealous fanatic. In her one saw acutely demonstrated the denaturalising power of creed. Gentle as a dove by temperament, there was no crime but self-destruction which she would not have gloried in to justify hers. She would have thought the world well lost to save her own soul, colourless as that dear little article was. Though she was modesty incarnate, her self-importance in this respect was amazing. She schemed through all the virtues for the apotheosis of Lady Sophia, and she called her scheming the vindication of truth, which she held to be a Romish monopoly. She would have made me a nun, as part of it, and taken all the credit with Heaven. I can hardly regret that she was foiled. I love truth as well as any woman, only, being a woman, à contre-cœur, and not a saint, for me it must be coloured, and in the newest shades. To ask me to love it for its own sake is to ask me to be a dowd; and, for all my respect for Lady Sophia, I have never fancied a heaven of dowds.

When we alighted on her, she was by great good chance withdrawn from her company, and communing with Nature for relaxation. Flowers, to her, were sanctified of the altar, so bringing her faith and her inclinations into line. She was terribly agitated over her encounter with Father Pope, whom she knew, and over his peril, which she exaggerated. The shock of intolerance was hardly extended to Shole; but she had heard, by private despatch, of her Dulwich kinsfolk’s flight, and of the chaplain’s eccentric desertion, and all the day had tormented herself with fears of the fate which he had invited to befall him. Now, while they were engaged in earnest discussion, eschewing for the moment all thought of me, I was driven by curiosity to steal down the lane, till, through a gap in the hedge, I was able to observe at close hand the lively scene that was enacting on the green below.

It had certainly looked prettier from the hill. I saw links of red-faced oafs sway roaring across the turf, and whip themselves in mere drunken impulse about any mock-bashful hoyden who stood, feigning unconsciousness, in their path. I saw blowzed, over-fed women, dragging squalling babies, struggle vainly to be included in the amorous capture, and when they failed or were ignored, vindicate their outraged respectability in coarse recriminations. I saw farmers, seated under trees, weep fuddled tears because they could hold no more, and stuffed children, crying for nothing so much as breath. I had been drawn, as was natural to me, by the bait of gaiety and life, and this was my reward. The ground between the booths was strewed with trampled fragments of bread and meat, and sodden with rejected ale. It was a fair, with all the licence of a day gathered into an hour.

I don’t know how long I had been standing, absorbed in contemplation of this Gehenna, and of the stately mansion across the green, on whose terraces a gay company, gathered to see the beasts feed, was clearly distinguishable, when a sound of hoofs coming up the lane behind me brought me to myself; and almost immediately three horsemen, with very flushed faces, rode into view, and, perceiving me, halted. One was a fox-featured gentleman, in fulvous cloth; one, good-humoured and quiet, wore a grey coat; and the third was resplendent all over, and as drunk as Chloe. He, at the first sight of me, tumbled rather than dismounted from his horse, and, forsaking the reins, which the grey gentleman caught, came staggering upon me.

“Hey, my vitals!” he lisped, “whom the devil have we here?”

He was quite young, and like a pretty toy, with a spangled coat in the Maccaroni Club style, a great bow at his neck, and ribbons to his knees. But he frightened me with the stare in his glazed eyes; and as he advanced, I backed into the hedge.

“I was only looking,” I fluttered. “I didn’t mean any harm. Please let me go.”

“Harm!” he exclaimed, with a tipsy crow. “O, but you’re trespassing, missy, and must give an hic-count of yourself. Come ’long, now, before my lord.”

I saw the eldest of the three regarding us from his saddle with a sort of mordant humour, and the sudden recognition of his state made my heart leap. Red, and lank-jawed, and vicious, he sat watching us as a fox might watch his cub negotiating the helpless struggles of a lamb. He always had a fine appetite for such occasions, and could sin very sweetly by proxy, could Hardrough.

“Wounds, my lord!” cried the boy, “is this a larsh surprise for me you’ve ’ranged? Besh preshent of all the day. Come cock-horse, child, and we’ll kiss a-riding.”

He put an arm about me. For all my distress, the musky contact of him, so precious after my long degradation, seemed half to drug me from resistance. I struggled feebly to push him away.

“Get on with your gallophic,” said he, addressing his companions knowingly. “I’ll follerer by-m-by.”

“Come, Salted,” cried the grey gentleman suddenly, in a laughing, half-vexed way. “Remember what’s due to your guests, child, now and to be. Come along and ride yourself sober, as you engaged.”

“Shober, nunky! shober, you cake!” sputtered the fool. “Shober ’nough yourself to wa’t me go on and break my neck—hey, my lord?”

He leered tipsily to the earl his father, who grinned, and blinked his red eyes.

“Let him be, George,” said the nobleman. “Damme, the boy’s not fit to ride a broomstick. You’re precious anxious for the gipsy, brother. I’d as lief you was concerned for your nephew.”

“And so I am,” says the other hotly. “’Tis foul so to take advantage of a stranger and a child. Call your cub off, sir,” says he, “if I’m not to take a whip to him.”

He gathered his reins in, and twitched his heels. He was bronzed and comely, a man of thirty or so, younger by ten years than the earl. He, the latter, had turned quite white. A frost seemed to have pinched his cheeks. In another moment, I believe, he would have drawn his riding-switch across the handsome face, but in that moment I was aware of a lady hurrying up, and I broke from my captor, and fled to meet her.

“Help me!” I cried. “Don’t let him hurt me!”

She received me very kindly. She was a tall and colourless figure, gentle in mien but with a bad complexion—the lady, in short, in whose company I had left Father Pope.

“Hardwick! George!” she whispered, in an outraged voice.

The earl pushed up to her, with a snigger.

“There, Sophy,” said he. “What are you doin’ here? But I’m glad you’ve come. Is this here your protégée? Well, take the little baggage away, that was near bringing us to words about her.”

“Words!” she said. “This child!”

“O,” he exclaimed, “that’s all one! Come, boy!”

She detained him some minutes, murmuring to him as he bent down. At the end he rose, grinning at me.

“What!” says he—“the sly old crow! Be sure the little sweep wasn’t fathered by a black cassock before you adopt her.”

She started back, flushing scarlet.

“Hardrough!” she said; “I ask you to go on.”

“Well, I will,” said he, with a little breathless laugh, “and carry your secret, sister, safe in my keepin’.”

He half wheeled, and in an ironic voice summoned the young viscount. The boy got to his horse as sulky as sin. In another minute the three gentlemen were ridden out of sight.

The moment they had disappeared the lady turned to me.

“Why didn’t you keep by your friend?” she asked, rather sharply. “From what he tells me, you are in need of one.”

I hung my head and broke into sobs. She was softened immediately.

“There,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be harsh; but discretion was so necessary. Will you come with me—I am the Lady Sophia Rowe—and we can discuss your case in safety at home? But every instant means peril, and we must hasten.”

I suffered her to hurry me up the lane. Her gait took no grace from urgency, being awkward as with most over-tall women, and the worse to view because she was reckless how she raised her skirts. In a little we came round a curve that swept beyond the limits of the green; and here, under some trees, we found her coach, which had been ordered round earlier, with the priest and his great folio ensconced glowering in it. In a moment we were in, and rolling along quiet country roads. The noise of the fairing died behind us. The world of new peace and beatitude lay before. For seven miles we sped soberly on, deeper and deeper into the pleasant hush, that was broken only by the incessant confidential murmuring of my companions.