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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cockaynes in Paris, by Blanchard Jerrold
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Cockaynes in Paris
+       'Gone abroad'
+
+Author: Blanchard Jerrold
+
+Illustrator: Gustave Dore
+
+Release Date: May 6, 2006 [EBook #18327]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COCKAYNES IN PARIS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Carlo Traverso, Janet Blenkinship, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreaders Europe at
+http://dp.rastko.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: MI LORD ANGLAIS AT MABILLE.
+
+_He is smiling, he is splendid, he is full of graceful enjoyment; on
+the table are a few of the beverages he admires; but above all he adores
+the ease of the French ladies in the dance._]
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+COCKAYNES IN PARIS
+
+OR
+
+"GONE ABROAD."
+
+BY
+
+BLANCHARD JERROLD.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+WITH SKETCHES BY
+
+GUSTAVE DORE,
+
+AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE ENGLISH ABROAD FROM A FRENCH POINT OF
+VIEW.
+
+
+
+
+LONDON: JOHN CAMDEN HOTTEN, 74 & 75, PICCADILLY.
+
+[_All Rights Reserved._]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+The story of the Cockaynes was written some years ago,--in the days when
+Paris was at her best and brightest; and the English quarter was
+crowded; and the Emperor was at St. Cloud; and France appeared destined
+to become the wealthiest and strongest country in the world.
+
+Where the Cockaynes carried their guide-books and opera-glasses, and
+fell into raptures at every footstep, there are dismal ruins now. The
+Vendome Column is a stump, wreathed with a gigantic _immortelle_, and
+capped with the tri-color. The Hall of the Marshals is a black hole.
+Those noble rooms in which the first magistrate of the city of
+Boulevards gave welcome to crowds of English guests, are destroyed. In
+the name of Liberty some of the most precious art-work of modern days
+has been fired. The Communists' defiling fingers have passed over the
+canvas of Ingres. Auber and Dumas have gone from the scene in the
+saddest hour of their country's history. The Anglo-French alliance--that
+surest rock of enduring peace--has been rent asunder, through the
+timorous hesitation of English ministers, and the hardly disguised
+Bourbon sympathies of English society. We are not welcome now in Paris,
+as we were when I followed in the wake of the prying Cockaynes. My old
+concierge is very cold in his greeting, and carries my valise to my
+rooms sulkily. Jerome, my particular waiter at the Grand Cafe, no longer
+deigns to discuss the news of the day with me. Good Monsieur Giraudet,
+who could suggest the happiest little _menus_, when I went to his
+admirable restaurant, and who kept the _Rappel_ for me, now bows
+silently and sends an underling to see what the Englishman requires.
+
+It is a sad, and a woful change; and one of ominous import for our
+children. Most woful to those of my countrymen who, like the reader's
+humble servant, have passed a happy half-score of years in the
+delightful society and the incomparable capital of the French people.
+
+  BLANCHARD JERROLD.
+
+  RUE DE ROME, PARIS,
+  _July_, 1871.
+
+
+ [Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+    CONTENTS.
+
+    CHAP.                                                           PAGE
+
+     I. MRS. ROWE'S                                                   13
+
+    II. HE'S HERE AGAIN!                                              30
+
+   III. MRS. ROWE'S COMPANY                                           39
+
+    IV. THE COCKAYNES IN PARIS                                        45
+
+     V. THE COCKAYNE FAMILY                                           62
+
+    VI. A "GRANDE OCCASION"                                           91
+
+   VII. OUR FOOLISH COUNTRYWOMEN                                     104
+
+  VIII. "OH, YES!" AND "ALL RIGHT!"                                  111
+
+    IX. MISS CARRIE COCKAYNE TO MISS SHARP                           122
+
+     X. "THE PEOPLE OF THE HOUSE"                                    129
+
+    XI. MYSTERIOUS TRAVELLERS                                        140
+
+   XII. MRS. DAKER                                                   154
+
+  XIII. AT BOULOGNE-SUR-MER                                          174
+
+   XIV. THE CASTAWAY                                                 192
+
+    XV. THE FIRST TO BE MARRIED                                      210
+
+  XVI. GATHERING A FEW THREADS                                       231
+
+
+  [Illustration: MAMMA ANGLAISE. (_A French design._)]
+
+
+
+
+  ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+  MY LORD ANGLAIS AT MABILLE                                Frontispiece
+
+  CROSSING THE CHANNEL--A SMOOTH PASSAGE                              13
+
+  CROSSING THE CHANNEL--RATHER SQUALLY                                14
+
+  ROBINSON CRUSOE AND FRIDAY                                          16
+
+  PAPA AND THE DEAR BOYS                                              18
+
+  THE DOWAGER AND TALL FOOTMAN                                        20
+
+  ON THE BOULEVARDS                                                   42
+
+  A GROUP OF MARBLE "INSULAIRES"                                      46
+
+  BEAUTY AND THE B----                                                68
+
+  PALAIS DU LOUVRE.--THE ROAD TO THE BOIS                             72
+
+  MUSEE DU LUXEMBOURG                                                 77
+
+  THE INFLEXIBLE "MEESSES ANGLAISES"                                 105
+
+  ENGLISH VISITORS TO THE CLOSERIE DE LILAS--SHOCKING!!              109
+
+  SMITH BRINGS HIS ALPENSTOCK                                        114
+
+  JONES ON THE PLACE DE LA CONCORDE                                  118
+
+  FRENCH RECOLLECTION OF MEESS TAKING HER BATH                       125
+
+  THE BRAVE MEESS AMONG THE BILLOWS HOLDING ON
+    BY THE TAIL OF HER NEWFOUNDLAND                                  125
+
+  VARIETIES OF THE ENGLISH STOCK.--COMPATRIOTS
+    MEETING IN THE FRENCH EXHIBITION                                 126
+
+  A PIC-NIC AT ENGHIEN                                               147
+
+  EXCURSIONISTS AND EMIGRANTS                                        152
+
+  BOIS DE BOULOGNE                                                   164
+
+  [Illustration: CROSSING THE CHANNEL--A SMOOTH PASSAGE]
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+COCKAYNES IN PARIS.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MRS. ROWE'S.
+
+
+The story I have to tell is disjointed. I throw it out as I picked it
+up. My duties, the nature of which is neither here nor there, have
+borne me to various parts of Europe. I am a man, not with an
+establishment--but with two portmanteaus. I have two hats in Paris and
+two in London always. I have seen everything in both cities, and like
+Paris, on the whole, best. There are many reasons, it seems to me, why
+an Englishman who has the tastes of a duke and the means of a half-pay
+major, should prefer the banks of the Seine to those of the Thames--even
+with the new Embankment. Everybody affects a distinct and deep
+knowledge of Paris in these times; and most people do know how to get
+the dearest dinner Bignon can supply for their money; and to secure the
+apartments which are let by the people of the West whom nature has
+provided with an infinitesimal quantity of conscience. But there are now
+crowds of English men and women who know their Paris well; men who never
+dine in the restaurant of the stranger, and women who are equal to a
+controversy with a French cook. These sons and daughters of Albion who
+have transplanted themselves to French soil, can show good and true
+reasons why they prefer the French to the English life. The wearying
+comparative estimates of household expenses in Westbournia, and
+household expenses in the Faubourg St. Honore! One of the disadvantages
+of living in Paris is the constant contact with the odious atmosphere of
+comparisons.
+
+"Pray, sir--you have been in London lately--what did you pay for veal
+cutlet?"
+
+[Illustration: CROSSING THE CHANNEL--RATHER SQUALLY.]
+
+The new arrivals are the keenest torments. "In London, where I have kept
+house for over twenty years, and have had to endure every conceivable
+development of servants' extortion, no cook ever demanded a supply of
+white aprons yet." You explain for the hundredth time that it is the
+custom in Paris. There are people who believe Kensington is the domestic
+model of the civilized world, and travel only to prove at every stage
+how far the rest of the universe is behind that favoured spot. He who
+desires to see how narrow his countrymen and countrywomen can be abroad,
+and how completely the mass of British travellers lay themselves open to
+the charge of insularity, and an overweening estimate of themselves and
+their native customs, should spend a few weeks in a Paris
+boarding-house, somewhere in the Faubourg St. Honore--if he would have
+the full aroma of British conceit. The most surprising feature of the
+English quarter of the French capital is the eccentricity of the English
+visitors, as it strikes their own countrymen. I cannot find it in me to
+blame Gallican caricaturists. The statuettes which enliven the bronze
+shops; the gaunt figures which are in the chocolate establishments; the
+prints in the windows under the Rivoli colonnade; the monsters with
+fangs, red hair, and Glengarry caps, of Cham, and Dore, and Bertall, and
+the female sticks with ringlets who pass in the terra-cotta show of the
+Palais Royal for our countrywomen, have long ago ceased to warm my
+indignation. All I can say now is, that the artists and modellers have
+not travelled. They have studied the strange British apparitions which
+disfigure the Boulevard des Italiens in the autumn, their knowledge of
+our race is limited to the unfortunate selection of specimens who strut
+about their streets, and--according to their light--they are not guilty
+of outrageous exaggeration. I venture to assert that an Englishman will
+meet more unpleasant samples of his countrymen and countrywomen in an
+August day's walk in Paris, than he will come across during a month in
+London. To begin with, we English treat Paris as though it were a back
+garden, in which a person may lounge in his old clothes, or indulge his
+fancy for the ugly and slovenly. Why, on broiling days, men and women
+should sally forth from their hotel with a travelling-bag and an
+opera-glass slung about their shoulders, passes my comprehension.
+Conceive the condition of mind of that man who imagines that he is an
+impressive presence when he is patrolling the Rue de la Paix with an
+alpenstock in his hand! At home we are a plain, well-dressed,
+well-behaved people, fully up in Art and Letters--that is, among our
+educated classes, to any other nation--in most elegant studies before
+all; but our travellers in France and Switzerland slander us, and the
+"Paris in 10 hours" system has lowered Frenchmen's estimate of the
+national character. The Exhibition of 1867, far from promoting the
+brotherhood of the peoples, and hinting to the soldier that his vocation
+was coming to an end, spread a dislike of Englishmen through Paris. It
+attracted rough men from the North, and ill-bred men from the South,
+whose swagger, and noise, and unceremonious manners in cafes and
+restaurants chafed the polite Frenchman. They could not bring themselves
+to salute the _dame de comptoir_, they were loud at the table d'hote and
+commanding in their airs to the waiter. In brief, the English mass
+jarred upon their neighbours; and Frenchmen went the length of saying
+that the two peoples--like relatives--would remain better friends apart.
+The disadvantage is, beyond doubt, with us; since the _froissement_ was
+produced by the British lack of that suavity which the French
+cultivate--and which may be hollow, but is pleasant, and oils the wheels
+of life.
+
+[Illustration: ROBINSON CRUSOE AND FRIDAY.
+
+_From French designs._]
+
+Mrs. Rowe's was in the Rue--say the Rue Millevoye, so that we may not
+interfere with possible vested interests. Was it respectable? Was it
+genteel? Did good country families frequent it? Were all the comforts of
+an English home to be had? Had Mrs. Grundy cast an approving eye into
+every nook and corner? Of course there were Bibles in the bedrooms; and
+you were not made to pay a franc for every cake of soap. Mrs. Rowe had
+her tea direct from Twinings'. Twinings' tea she had drunk through her
+better time, when Rowe had one of the finest houses in all Shepherd's
+Bush, and come what might, Twinings' tea she would drink while she was
+permitted to drink tea at all. Brown Windsor--no other soap for Mrs.
+Rowe, if you please. People who wanted any of the fanciful soaps of
+Rimmel or Piver must buy them. Brown Windsor was all she kept. Yes, she
+was obliged to have Gruyere--and people did ask occasionally for
+Roquefort; but her opinion was that the person who did not prefer a good
+Cheshire to any other cheese, deserved to go without any. She had been
+twenty-one years in Paris, and seven times only had she missed morning
+service on Sundays. Hereupon, a particular history of each occasion, and
+the superhuman difficulty which had bound Mrs. Rowe hand and foot to the
+Rue Millevoye from eleven till one. She had a faithful note of a
+beautiful sermon preached in the year 1850 by the Rev. John Bobbin, in
+which he compared life to a boarding-house. He was staying with Mrs.
+Howe at the time. He was an earnest worker in the true way; and she
+distinctly saw her _salle-a-manger_ in his eye, when he enlarged on
+the bounteous table spread by Nature, and the little that was needed
+from man to secure all its blessings.
+
+[Illustration: PAPA & THE DEAR BOYS.]
+
+Mrs. Rowe took a maternal interest in me. I had made an economical
+arrangement by which I secured a little room to myself throughout the
+year, under the slates. I had many friends. I constantly arrived,
+bringing new lodgers in my wake. For the house was quiet, well-ordered,
+cheap, and tremendously respectable. I say, Mrs. Rowe took a maternal
+interest in me--that is, she said so. There were ill-natured people who
+had another description for her solicitude; but she had brought herself
+to believe that she had an unselfish regard for your humble servant,
+and that she was necessary to my comfort in the world, and I was pleased
+at the innocent humbug. It afforded me excellent creature comforts; and
+I was indebted to it for a constant welcome when I got to Paris--which
+is something to the traveller. We cling to an old hotel, after we have
+found the service bad, the cooking execrable, and the rooms dirty. It is
+an ancient house, and the people know us, and have a cheery word and a
+home look.
+
+[Illustration: THE DOWAGER AND TALL FOOTMAN.]
+
+Many years were passed in the Rue Millevoye by Mrs. Rowe and her niece,
+without more incident than the packing and unpacking of luggage, and
+genteel disputes over items in the bills conducted with icy politeness
+on both sides, and concluded by Mrs. Rowe invariably with the withering
+observation, that it was the first remark of the kind which had ever
+been made on one of her little notes. People usually came to a
+settlement with complimentary expressions of surprise at the
+extreme--almost reckless--moderation of her charges; and expressed
+themselves as at a loss to understand how she could make it worth her
+while to do so very much for so very little. The people who came and
+went were alike in the mass. The reader is requested to bear in mind
+that Mrs. Rowe had a connexion of her own. She was seldom angry; but
+when an advertising agent made his way to her business parlour, and took
+the liberty of submitting the value of a Western States paper as a
+medium for making her establishment known, she confessed that the
+impertinence was too much for her temper. Mrs. Rowe advertise! Mrs. Rowe
+would just as soon throw herself off the Pont Neuf, or--miss church next
+Sunday.
+
+"They don't come a second time!" Mrs. Rowe would say to me, with a
+fierce compression of the lip, that might lead a nervous person to
+imagine she made away with them in the cellars.
+
+When Mrs. Rowe took you into her confidence--a slow and tedious
+admission--she was pleased, usually, to fortify your stock of knowledge
+with a comprehensive view of her family connexions; intended to set the
+Whytes of Battersea (from whom she derived, before the vulgar Park was
+there) upon an eminence of glory, with a circle of cringing and
+designing Rowes at the base. How she--Whyte on both sides, for her
+father married his first cousin--ever came to marry Joshua Rowe, was
+something her mother never understood to her dying day. She was
+graciously open to consolation in the reflection that nobles and princes
+had made humble matches before her; and particularly in this, that the
+Prince Regent married Mrs. Fitzherbert.
+
+Lucy Rowe was favoured with these observations, heightened by occasional
+hits at her own misfortune in that she was a Rowe, and could not boast
+one thimbleful of Whyte blood in her veins.
+
+It was the almost daily care of Mrs. Rowe to impress the people with
+whom her business brought her in contact, with the gulf that lay between
+her and her niece; although, through the early and inexplicable
+condescension of a Miss Harriet Whyte, of Battersea, they bore the same
+name, Miss Rowe was no blood relation _whatever_.
+
+It was surprising to see how Lucy bore up under the misfortune. She was
+not a Whyte, but she had lived beside one. Youth is so elastic! Lucy,
+albeit she had the Rowe lip and nose, and, worse than all, the Rowe hair
+(a warm auburn, which Mrs. Rowe described in one syllable, with a
+picturesque and popular comparison comprehended in two), was daring
+enough to meet the daylight, without showing the smallest signs of
+giving way to melancholy. When new comers, as a common effort of
+politeness, saw a strong likeness between Mrs. Rowe and her niece, the
+representative of the Whytes of Battersea drew herself to her full
+height, which was a trifle above her niece's shoulders, and
+answered--"Oh dear, no, madam! It would be very strange if there were,
+as there is not the slightest blood relationship between us."
+
+Lucy Rowe was about fifteen when I first saw her. A slender,
+golden-haired, shy and quiet girl, much in bashful and sensitive
+demeanour like her romantic namesake of "the untrodden ways." It is
+quite true that she had no Whyte blood in her veins, and Mrs. Rowe could
+most conscientiously declare that there was not the least resemblance
+between them. The Whyte features were of a type which none would envy
+the possessor, save as the stamp of the illustrious house of Battersea.
+The House of Savoy is not attractive by reason of its faultless profile;
+but there are persons of almost matchless grace who would exchange their
+beauty for its blood. In her very early days, I have no doubt. Lucy Rowe
+would have given her sweet blue eyes, her pouting lips, and pretty head
+(just enough to fold lovingly between the palms of a man's hand), for
+the square jaw and high cheek-bone of the Whytes. She felt very humble
+when she contemplated the grandeur of her aunt's family, and very
+grateful to her aunt who had stooped so far as to give her shelter when
+she was left alone in the world. She kept the accounts, ran errands,
+looked after the house linen, and made herself agreeable to the
+boarders' children; but all this was the very least she could do to
+express her humble thankfulness to the great lady-relative who had
+befriended her, after having been good enough to commit the sacrifice of
+marrying her uncle Joshua.
+
+Lucy sat many hours alone in the business parlour--an apartment not
+decorated with the distinct view of imparting cheerfulness to the human
+temperament. The mantelpiece was covered with files of bills. There were
+rows of numbered keys against the wall. Mrs. Rowe's old desk--_style
+Empire_ she said, when any visitor noticed the handsome ruin--stood in a
+corner by the window, covered with account books, prospectuses and cards
+of the establishment, and heaps of old newspapers. Another corner showed
+heaps of folded linen, parcels left for boarders, umbrellas and sticks,
+which had been forgotten by old customers (Mrs. Rowe called them
+clients), and aunt's walking-boots. One corner was Lucy's, which she
+occupied in conjunction with a little table, at which, from seven in the
+morning until bedtime, she worked with pen or needle (it was provoking
+she could not learn to ply both at one time), when she was not running
+about the house, or nursing a boarder's baby. On the rare evenings when
+her aunt could not find work of any description for her, Lucy was
+requested to take the Bible from the shelf, and read a chapter aloud.
+When her aunt went to sleep during the reading Lucy continued steadily,
+knowing that the scion of the illustrious house of Whyte would wake
+directly her voice ceased.
+
+Occasionally the clergyman would drop in; whereupon Lucy would hear much
+improving discourse between her aunt and the reverend gentleman. Mrs.
+Rowe poured all her griefs into the ear of the Reverend Horace
+Mohun--griefs which she kept from the world. Before Lucy she spoke
+freely--being accustomed to regard the timid girl as a child still,
+whose mind could not gather the threads of her narrative. Lucy sate--not
+listening, but hearing snatches of the mournful circumstances with which
+Mrs. Rowe troubled Mr. Mohun. The reverend gentleman was a patient and
+an attentive listener; and drank his tea and ate his toast (it was only
+at Mrs. Rowe's he said he could ever get a good English round of toast),
+shaking his head, or offering a consoling "dear, dear me!" as the
+droning proceeded. Lucy was at work. If Mrs. Rowe caught her pausing she
+would break her story to say--"If you have finished 42 account, put down
+two candles to 10, and a foot-bath to 14." And Lucy--who seldom paused
+because she had finished her task, as her aunt knew well--bent over the
+table again, and was as content as she was weary. When she went up to
+her bedroom (which the cook had peremptorily refused to occupy) she
+prayed for good Aunt Rowe every night of her dull life, before she lay
+upon her truckle bed to rest for the morrow's cheerful round of hard
+duties. Was it likely that a child put thus into the harness of life,
+would pass the talk of her aunt with Mr. Mohun as the idle wind?
+
+The mysteries which lay in the talk, and perplexed her, were cleared up
+in due time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+HE'S HERE AGAIN!
+
+
+  "He has but stumbled in the path
+   Thou hast in weakness trod."--A. A. PROCTER.
+
+"He's here again, Mum."
+
+He was there at the servant's entrance to the highly respectable
+boarding-house in the Rue Millevoye. It was five in the morning--a
+winter's morning.
+
+Mrs. Rowe hastened from her room, behind the business parlour, in her
+dressing-gown, her teeth chattering, and her eyes flashing the fire of
+hate. The boarders sleeping upstairs would not have known the godly
+landlady, who glided about the house by day, rubbing her hands and
+hoping every soul under her roof was comfortable--or would at once
+complain to her, who lived only to make people comfortable--bills being
+but mere accidental accessories, fortuitously concurrent with the
+arrival of a cab and the descent of luggage.
+
+"At the back door, mum, with his coat tucked over his ears, and such a
+cold in his head. Shall I show him in?"
+
+"My life is a long misery, Jane," Mrs. Rowe said, under her voice.
+
+"La! mum, it's quite safe. I'm sure I shouldn't trouble much about
+it--'specially in this country, as----"
+
+"Silence!" Mrs. Rowe hissed. The thorns in her cross consisted chiefly
+of Jane's awkward attempts at consolation. "The villain is bent on my
+ruin. A bad boy he was; a bad man he is. Show him in; and see that
+Francois doesn't come here. Get some coffee yourself, Jane, and bring
+it. Let the brute in."
+
+"You're hard upon him, mum, indeed you are. I'm sure he'd be a credit
+to----"
+
+"Go, and hold your tongue. You presume, Jane, on the privileges of an
+old servant."
+
+"Indeed I hope not, mum; but----"
+
+"Go!"
+
+Jane went to summon the early visitor; and was heard talking amiably to
+him, as she led him to the bureau. "Now, you must be good, Mr. Charles,
+to-day, and not stay more than a quarter of an hour. Don't talk loud,
+like the last time; promise me. Missus means well--you know she does."
+
+With an impatient "All right" the stranger pushed into the business
+parlour, and sharply closed the door.
+
+Mrs. Rowe stood, her knuckles firmly planted upon the closed desk, her
+face rigidly set, to receive her visitor--keeping the table between him
+and herself. He was advancing to take her hand.
+
+"Stand there," she said, with an authority he had not the courage to
+defy. He stood there--abashed, or hesitating as to the way in which he
+should enter upon his business.
+
+"Well!" Mrs. Rowe said, firmly and impatiently.
+
+Mr. Charles, stung by the manner, turned upon his victim. "Well!" he
+jeered, "yes, and well again, Mrs. Rowe. Is it necessary for me to
+explain myself? Do you think I have come to see _you_!"
+
+"I have no money at present; I wrote you so."
+
+"And I didn't believe you, and have come to fetch what you wouldn't
+send. If you think I'm going into a corner to starve for your personal
+satisfaction, you are very much mistaken. I'm surprised you don't
+understand me better by this time."
+
+"You were a rascal, Charles, before you left school."
+
+"School! Pretty school! D--n it, don't blame me--woman!"
+
+Mrs. Rowe was alarmed by the outburst, lest it should wake some of the
+boarders.
+
+"The Dean and his lady are sleeping overhead. If you don't respect me,
+think----"
+
+"I'm not here to respect, or think about anybody. I'm cast alone into
+the world--tossed into it; left to shift for myself, and to be ashamed
+of myself; and I want a little help through it, and it's for you to give
+it me, and give it me YOU SHALL."
+
+Mr. Charles held out his left hand, and slapped its open palm vehemently
+with his right--pantomime to indicate the exact whereabouts he had
+selected for the reception of Mrs. Rowe's money.
+
+"I told you I had no money. You'll drive me from this house by bringing
+disgrace upon it."
+
+"That's very good," Mr. Charles said, with a cruel laugh. "That's a
+capital joke."
+
+Jane entered with coffee. "That's right," she whispered, encouragingly
+to Mr. Charles; "laugh and be cheerful, Mr. Charles, and make haste with
+your coffee."
+
+The face of Mr. Charles blackened to night. He turned like a tiger upon
+the servant. "Laugh and be cheerful?" he roared; and then he raised a
+hoarse mock laugh, that moved Mrs. Rowe, in her agony of fear, to turn
+the key in the lock of her desk.
+
+Shaking her hands wildly in the air, Jane left the room, and shut the
+door.
+
+"You are an arrant coward, Charles," Mrs. Rowe hissed, leaning across
+the table and shaking her head violently.
+
+Mr. Charles imitated her gesture, answering--"I am what heartless people
+have made me. I have been dragged up under a cloud; made the scape-goat.
+How often in the course of your hypocritical days have you wished me
+dead? You hear I've a cough; but I cannot promise you it's a churchyard
+one. I'm a nuisance; but I suppose I'm not responsible for my existence,
+Mrs. Rowe. _I_ was not consulted."
+
+"Viper!"
+
+"And devil too, when needful: remember that." Mr. Charles moved round
+the table in the direction of the desk.
+
+"Stand where you are. I would rather give you the clothes from my back
+than touch you." Mrs. Rowe, as she stood still turning the lock of the
+bureau, and keeping her angry eyes fixed upon the man, was the picture
+of all the hate she expressed.
+
+She never took her eyes off him, nor did he quail, while she fumbled in
+the drawer in which she kept money. The musical rattle of the gold smote
+upon the ear of Mr. Charles.
+
+"Pretty sound," he said, with a smile of hate in his face; "but there is
+crisp paper sounds sweeter. Mrs. Rowe, I'm not here for a couple of
+yellow-boys. Do you hear that?" He banged the table, and advanced a
+step.
+
+"You can't bleed a stone, miscreant."
+
+"Nay, but you can break it, Mrs. Rowe. I mean business to-day. The rarer
+I make my visits the better for both of us."
+
+"I am quite of that opinion."
+
+"Then make it as long as you like; you know how."
+
+"Is this ever to end? Have you no shame? Charles, you will end with some
+tragedy. A man who can play the part you are playing, must be ready for
+crime!"
+
+Mr. Charles shook his head in impatient rage, and made another step
+towards Mrs. Rowe.
+
+"Move nearer, and I wake the house, come what may." Mrs. Rowe's face
+looked like one cut in grey stone.
+
+"What! and wake the Dean and his lady! What! affright the Reverend
+Horace Mohun who counts Mrs. Rowe among the milk-white sheep of his
+flock! No; Mrs. Rowe is too prudent a woman--Now." As he ended, she drew
+forth a roll of notes. He made a clutch at them--and she started back.
+
+"Charles, it has come to that! Robber! It will be murder some day."
+
+"This day--by----"
+
+Mr. Charles looked the man to make his word good.
+
+Mrs. Rowe was amazed and terrified by the fiend she had conjured up in
+the man. He seized the table, and looked a giant in the mighty
+expression of his iron will.
+
+"Lay that roll upon the table--or I'll shiver it into a thousand
+pieces--and then--and then----Am I to say more?"
+
+Mrs. Rowe fell into a chair. Mr. Charles was at her in an instant, and
+had possession of the notes. The poor woman had swooned.
+
+He rang the bell--Jane appeared.
+
+"Look after her," said Mr. Charles, his eyes flaming, as they fell on
+the unconscious figure of Mrs. Rowe. "But let me out, first."
+
+"You'll kill me with fright, that you will. What have you done to your
+own----"
+
+"Mind your own business. A smell of salts'll put her right enough."
+
+Mr. Charles was gone.
+
+"And what a sweet gentleman he can be, when he likes," said Jane.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+MRS. ROWE'S COMPANY.
+
+
+I must be permitted to tell the rambling stories that ran parallel
+during my experiences of Mrs. Rowe's establishment in my own
+manner--filling up with what I guessed, all I heard from Lucy, or saw
+for myself. Mr. Charles was a visitor at intervals who always arrived
+when the house was quiet; and after whose visits Mrs. Rowe regularly
+took to her room for the day, leaving the accounts and the keys wholly
+to Lucy, and the kitchen to Jane--with strict injunctions to look after
+the Reverend Horace Mohun's tea and his round of toast if he called--and
+let him see the _Times_ before it went up to the general sitting-room.
+On these days Lucy looked pale; and Jane called her "poor child" to me,
+and begged me to say a few words of comfort to her, for she would listen
+to me.
+
+What a fool Jane was!
+
+Visitors came and went. The serious, who inspected Paris as Mr. Redgrave
+inspects a factory, or as the late Mr. Braidwood inspected a fire on the
+morrow; who did the Louvre and called for bread-and-butter and tea on
+the Boulevards at five. The new-rich, who would not have breakfasted
+with the general company to save their vulgar little souls, threw their
+money to the fleecing shopkeepers (who knew their _monde_), and
+misbehaved themselves in all the most expensive ways possible. The jolly
+ignorant, who were loud and unabashed in the sincerity and heartiness of
+their enjoyment, and had more litres of brandy in their bedrooms than
+the rest of the house, as Jane had it, "put together." The frugal, who
+counted the lumps of sugar, found fault with the dinners, lived with the
+fixed and savage determination to eat well up to the rate at which they
+were paying for their board, and stole in, in the evening, with their
+brandy hidden about them. Somehow, although there never was a house in
+which more differences of opinion were held on nearly every question of
+human interest, there was a surprising harmony of ideas as to French
+brandy. A Boulogne excursion boat on its homeward journey hardly
+contains more uncorked bottles of cognac, than were thrust in all kinds
+of secret places in the bedrooms under Mrs. Rowe's roof.
+
+The hypocrisy and scandal which brandy produced in the general room were
+occasionally very fierce, especially when whispers had travelled quietly
+as the flies all over the house that one of the ladies had certainly, on
+one occasion, revoked at cards--for one reason, and one only. Free
+speculations would be cheerfully indulged in at other times on the exact
+quantity the visitor who left yesterday had taken during his stay, and
+the number of months which the charitable might give him to live.
+
+[Illustration: ON THE BOULEVARDS.]
+
+After the general brandy, in degree of interest, stood dress. The
+shopping was prodigious. The carts of the Louvre, the Ville de Paris,
+the Coin de Rue, and other famous houses of nouveautes were for ever
+rattling to Mrs. Rowe's door. With a toss of the head a parcel from the
+_Bon Marche_ was handed to its owner. Mrs. Jones must have come to
+Paris with just one change--and such a change! Mrs. Tottenham had
+nothing fit to wear. Mrs. Court must still be wearing out her
+trousseau--and her youngest was three! Mrs. Rhode had no more taste, my
+dear, than our cook. The men were not far behind--had looked out for
+Captain Tottenham in the Army List; went to Galignani's expressly: not in
+it, by Jove, sir! Court paid four shillings in the pound hardly two years
+ago, and met him swelling it with his wife (deuced pretty creature!)
+yesterday at Bignon's. Is quite up to Marennes oysters: wonder where he
+could have heard of 'em. Rhode is a bore; plenty of money, very
+good-natured; read a good deal--but can't the fellow come to table in
+something better than those eternal plaid trousers? Bad enough in Lord
+Brougham. Eccentricity _with_ the genius, galling enough; but without,
+not to be borne, sir. Last night Jones was simply drunk, and got a wigging,
+no doubt, when he found his room. He looks it all.
+
+We are an amiable people!
+
+Happily, I have forgotten the Joneses and the Tottenhams, and the Courts
+and the Rhodes! The two "sets" who dwell in my memory--who are, I may
+say, somewhat linked with my own life, and of whom I have something to
+tell--were, as a visitor said of the fowls of Boulogne hotels--birds
+apart. They crossed and re-crossed under Mrs. Rowe's roof until they
+hooked together; and I was mixed up with them, until a tragedy and a
+happy event made us part company.
+
+Now, so complicated are our treaties--offensive and defensive--that I
+have to refer to my note-book, where I am likely to meet any one of
+them, to see whether I am on speaking terms with the coming man or
+woman as the case may be.
+
+I shall first introduce the Cockaynes as holding the greater "lengths"
+on my stage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE COCKAYNES IN PARIS.
+
+
+The morning after a bevy of "the blonde daughters of Albion" have
+arrived in Paris, Pater--over the coffee (why is it impossible to get
+such coffee in England?), the delicious bread, and the exquisite
+butter--proceeds to expound his views of the manner in which the time of
+the party should be spent. So was it with the Cockaynes, an intensely
+British party.
+
+"My dears," said Mr. Cockayne, "we must husband our time. To-day I
+propose we go, at eleven o'clock, to see the parade of the Guard in the
+Rue de Rivoli; from there (we shall be close at hand) we can see the
+Louvre; by two o'clock we will lunch in the Palais Royal. I think it's
+at five the band plays in the Tuileries gardens; after the band----"
+
+"But, dear papa, we want to look at the shops!" interposes the gentle
+Sophonisba.
+
+"The what, my dear? Here you are in the capital of the most polished
+nation on the face of the earth, surrounded by beautiful monuments that
+recall--that are, in fact----"
+
+"Well!" firmly observes Sophonisba's determined mamma; "you, Mr.
+Cockayne, go, with your Murray's handbook, see all the antiquities, your
+Raphaels and Rubens, and amuse yourself among the cobwebs of the Hotel
+Cluny; _we_ are not so clever--we poor women; and while you're rubbing
+your nose against the marbles in the Louvre, we'll go and see the
+shops."
+
+"We don't mind the parade and the band, but we might have a peep at just
+a few of the shops near the hotel, before eleven," observes Sophonisba.
+
+Cockayne throws up his eyes, and laments the frivolity of women. He is
+left with one daughter (who is a blue) to admire the proportions of the
+Madeleine, to pass a rapturous hour in the square room of the Louvre,
+and to examine St. Germain l'Auxerrois, while the frivolous part of his
+household goes stoutly away, light-hearted and gay as humming-birds, to
+have their first look at the shops.
+
+[Illustration: A GROUP OF MARBLE "INSULAIRES." _So cold and natural they
+might be mistaken for life_.]
+
+I happen to have seen the shops of many cities. I have peered into the
+quaint, small-windowed shops of Copenhagen; I have passed under the
+pendant tobacco leaves into the primitive cigar-shops of St. Sebastian;
+I have hobbled, in furs, into the shops of Stockholm; I have been
+compelled to take a look at the shops of London, Dublin, Edinburgh,
+Liverpool, and a host of other places; but perfect shopping is to be
+enjoyed in Paris only; and in the days gone by, the Palais Royal was the
+centre of this paradise. Alas! the days of its glory are gone. The lines
+of splendid boulevards, flanked with gorgeous shops and _cafes_; the
+long arcades of the Rue de Rivoli; and, in fine, the leaning of all
+that is fashionable, and lofty, and rich to the west, are the causes
+which have brought the destruction of the Palais Royal. Time was when
+that quaint old square--the Place-Royale in the Marais--was mighty
+fashionable. It now lies in the neglected, industrious, factory-crowded
+east--a kind of Parisian Bloomsbury Square, only infinitely more
+picturesque, with its quaint, low colonnades. You see the fine Parisians
+have travelled steadily westward, sloping slowly, like "the Great
+Orion." They are making their way along the Champs-Elysees to the Avenue
+de l'Imperatrice; and are constructing white stone aristocratic suburbs.
+
+So the foreigners no longer make their way direct to the Palais Royal
+now, on the morrow of their arrival in Paris. If they be at the Louvre,
+they bend westward along the Rue de Rivoli, and by the Rue de la Paix,
+to the brilliant boulevards. If they be in the Grand Hotel, they issue
+at once upon these famous boulevards, and the ladies are in a feminine
+paradise at once. Why, exactly opposite to the Grand Hotel is Rudolphi's
+remarkable shop, packed artistically with his works of art--ay, and of
+the most finished and cunning art--in oxidized silver. His shop is most
+admirably adapted to the articles the effect of which he desires to
+heighten. It is painted black and pointed with delicate gold threads.
+The rich array of jewellery and the rare ecclesiastical ornaments stand
+brightly out from the sombre case, and light the window. The precious
+stones, the lapis lazuli, the malachite, obtain a new brilliance from
+the rich neutral tints and shades of the chased dulled silver in which
+they are held.
+
+Sophonisba, her mamma and sisters, are not at much trouble to decide the
+period to which the bracelet, or the brooch, or the earring belongs.
+"_Cinque cento_, my dear! I know nothing about that. I think it would
+suit my complexion."
+
+"I confess to a more modern taste, Sophonisba. That is just the sort of
+thing your father would like. Now, do look at those--sphinxes, don't
+you call them--for a brooch. I think they're hideous. Did you ever see
+such ears? I own, that diamond dew-drop lying in an enamel rose leaf,
+which I saw, I think, in the Rue de la Paix, is more to my taste."
+
+And so the ladies stroll westward to the famous Giroux (where you can
+buy, an it please you, toys at forty guineas each--babies that cry, and
+call "mamma," and automata to whom the advancement of science and art
+has given all the obnoxious faculties of an unruly child), or east to
+the boulevards, which are known the wide world over, at least by name,
+the Boulevards de la Madeleine, des Capucines, des Italiens, Montmartre.
+These make up the heart and soul of Paris. Within the limits of these
+gorgeous lines of shops and _cafes_ luxury has concentrated all her
+blandishments and wiles. This is the earthly heaven of the Parisians.
+Here all the celebrities air themselves. Here are the Opera stars, the
+lights of literature, the chiefs of art, the dandies of the Jockey Club,
+the prominent spendthrifts and eccentrics of the day. About four
+o'clock in the afternoon all the known Paris figures are lounging upon
+the asphaltum within this charmed space. Within this limit--where the
+Frenchman deploys all his seductive, and vain, and frivolous airs; where
+he wears his best clothes and his best manners; where he loves to be
+seen, and observed, and saluted--the tradesmen of the capital have
+installed establishments the costliness and elaborateness of which it is
+hardly possible to exaggerate. The gilding and the mirrors, the marbles
+and the bronze, the myriad lamps of every fantastic form, the quaint and
+daring designs for shop fronts, the infinite arts employed to
+"set off" goods, and the surprising, never-ceasing varieties of
+art-manufacture--whether in chocolate or the popular Algerian
+onyx--bewilder strangers. Does successful Mr. Brown, who, having doffed
+the apron of trade, considers it due to himself to become--so far as
+money can operate the strange transformation--a _fine fleur_; does he
+desire also to make of plain, homely Mrs. Brown a leader of fashion and
+a model of expensive elegance?--here are all the appliances and means in
+abundance. Within these enchanted lines Madame B. may be made "beautiful
+for ever!" Every appetite, every variety of whim, the cravings of the
+gourmet and the dreams of the sybarite, may be gratified to the utmost.
+A spendthrift might spend a handsome patrimony within these limits, nor,
+at the end of his time, would he call to mind a taste he had not been
+able to gratify.
+
+Sophonisba enters this charmed region of perfect shopping from the west.
+Tahan's bronze shop, at the corner of the Rue de la Paix, marks (or did
+mark) its western boundary. There are costly trifles in that window--as,
+book cutters worth a library of books, and cigar-stands, ash-trays,
+pen-trays, toothpick-holders (our neighbours are great in these), and
+match, and glove, and lace, and jewel-boxes--of wicked price. Ladies are
+not, however, very fond of bronze, as a rule. The great Maison de
+Blanc--or White House--opposite, is more attractive, with its gigantic
+architectural front, and its acres of the most expensive linens,
+cambrics, &c. Ay, but close by Tahan is Boissier. Not to know Boissier
+is to argue yourself unknown in Paris. He is the shining light of the
+confectioner's art. Siraudin, of the Rue de la Paix, has set up a
+dangerous opposition to him, under the patronage of a great duke, whose
+duchess was one day treated like an ordinary mortal in Boissier's
+establishment, but Boissier's clients (nobody has customers in Paris)
+are, in the main, true to him; and his sweets pass the lips still of
+nearly all the elegantes of the "centre of civilization." Peep into his
+shop. Miss Sophonisba is within--_la belle insulaire!_--buying a bag
+of _marrons glaces_, for which Boissier is renowned throughout
+civilization. The shop is a miracle of taste. The white and gold are
+worthy of Marie Antoinette's bedroom at St. Cloud--occupied, by the way,
+by our English queen, when she was the guest of the French Emperor in
+1855. The front of the shop is ornamented with rich and rare caskets. A
+white kitten lies upon a rosy satin cushion; lift the kitten, and you
+shall find that her bed is a _bon-bon_ box!
+
+"How very absurd!" exclaims Sophonisba's mamma, _bon-bon_ boxes not
+being the particular direction which the extravagance of English ladies
+takes.
+
+Close by the succulent establishment of M. Boissier, to whom every
+dentist should lift his hat, is the doorway of Madame Laure. Sophonisba
+sees a man in livery opening the door of what appears to be the entrance
+to some quiet learned institution. She touches her mamma upon the arm,
+and bids her pause. They had reached the threshold of a temple. Madame
+Laure makes for the Empress.
+
+"Ah! to be sure, my child, so she does," Sophonisba's mamma replies. "I
+remember. Very quiet-looking kind of place, isn't it?" It is impossible
+to say what description of "loud" place had dwelt in the mind of
+Sophonisba's mamma as the locale where the Empress Eugenie's milliner
+"_made_" for her Majesty. Perhaps she hoped to see two _cent gardes_
+doing duty at the door of an or-molu paradise.
+
+At every step the ladies find new excitement. By the quiet door of
+Madame Laure is the renowned Neapolitan Ice Establishment, well known to
+most ladies who have been in Paris. Why should there not be a Neapolitan
+ice _cafe_ like this in London? Ices we have, and we have Granger's; but
+here is ice in every variety, from the solid "bombe"--which we strongly
+recommend ladies to bear in mind next time--to the appetizing _Ponch a
+la Romaine_! Again, sitting here on summer evenings, the lounger will
+perceive dapper _bonnes_, or men-servants, going in and out with little
+shapely white paper parcels which they hold daintily by the end. Madame
+has rung for an ice, and this little parcel, which you might blow away,
+contains it. Now, why should not a lady be able to ring for an ice--and
+an exquisitely-flavoured Neapolitan ice--on the shores of "perfidious
+Albion?"
+
+"I wish Papa were here," cries Sophonisba; "we should have ices."
+
+Sophonisba's mamma merely remarks that they are very unwholesome things.
+
+Hard by is Christofle's dazzling window, Christofle being the Elkington
+of France.
+
+"Tut! it quite blinds one!" says the mamma of Sophonisba. Christofle's
+window is startling. It is heaped to the top with a mound of plated
+spoons and forks. They glitter in the light so fiercely that the eye
+cannot bear to rest upon them. Impossible to pass M. Christofle without
+paying a moment's attention to him. And now we pass the asphaltum of the
+boulevard of boulevards--that known as "the Italiens." This is the apple
+of the eye of Paris.
+
+"Now, my dears," says Sophonisba's mamma, "now we can really say that we
+are in Paris." The shops claimed the ladies' attention one by one. They
+passed with disdain the _cafes_ radiant with mirror and gold, where the
+selfish men were drinking absinthe and playing at dominoes. It had
+always been the creed of Sophonisba's mamma that men were selfish
+creatures, and she had come to Paris only to see that she was right.
+They passed on to Potel's.
+
+Potel's window is a sight that is of Paris Parisian. It is more imposing
+than that of Chevet in the Palais Royal. In the first place Potel is on
+"the Italiens." It is a daily store of all the rarest and richest
+articles of food money can command for the discontented palate of man.
+The truffled turkeys are the commonest of the articles. Everybody eats
+truffled turkeys, must be the belief of Potel. If salmon could peer into
+the future, and if they had any ambition, they would desire, after
+death, to be artistically arrayed in fennel in the shop-window of Potel.
+Would not the accommodating bird who builds an edible nest work with
+redoubled ardour, if he could be assured that his house would be some
+day removed to the great window on "the Italiens?"
+
+Happy the ortolans whom destiny puts into Potel's plate of honour! Most
+fortunate of geese, whose liver is fattened by a slow fire to figure
+presently here with the daintiest and noblest of viands! The pig who
+hunts the truffle would have his reward could he know that presently the
+fragrant vegetable would give flavour to his trotter! And is it not a
+good quarter of an hour's amusement every afternoon to watch the
+gourmets feasting their eyes on the day's fare? And the _gamins_ from
+the poor quarters stare in also, and wonder what those black lumps are.
+
+Opposite Potel's is a shop, the like of which we have not, nor, we
+verily believe, has any other city. It is the show-store of the
+far-famed Algerian Onyx Company. The onyx is here in great superb
+blocks, wedded with bronze of exquisite finish, or serving as background
+to enamels of the most elaborate design. Within, the shop is crammed
+with lamps, jardinieres, and monumental marbles, all relieved by
+bronzes, gold, and exotics. The smallest object would frighten a man of
+moderate means, if he inquired its price. There is a flower shop not far
+off, but it isn't a shop, it's a bower. It is close by a dram-shop,
+where the cab-men of the stand opposite refresh the inner man. It
+represents the British public-house. But what a quiet orderly place it
+is! The kettle of punch--a silver one--is suspended over the counter.
+The bottles are trim in rows; there are no vats of liquid; there is no
+brawling; there are no beggars by the door--no drunkards within. It is
+so quiet, albeit on the Boulevard, not one in a hundred of the
+passers-by notice it. The lordly Cafe du Cardinal opposite is not more
+orderly.
+
+Past chocolate shops, where splendidly-attired ladies preside;
+wood-carving shops, printsellers, pastrycooks--where the savarins
+are tricked out, and where _petit fours_ lie in a hundred
+varieties--music-shops, bazaars, immense booksellers' windows; they who
+are bent on a look at the shops reach a corner of the Grand Opera
+Street, where the Emperor's tailor dwells. The attractions here are, as
+a rule, a few gorgeous official costumes, or the laurel-embellished tail
+coat of the academician. Still proceeding eastward, the shops are
+various, and are all remarkable for their decoration and contents. There
+is a shop where cots and flower-stands are the main articles for sale;
+but such cots and such flower-stands! The cots are for Princes and the
+flower-stands for Empresses. I saw the Empress Eugenie quietly issuing
+from this very shop, one winter afternoon.
+
+Sophonisba's mother lingered a long time over the cots, and delighted
+her mother-eye with the models of babies that were lying in them. One,
+she remarked, was the very image of young Harry at home.
+
+And so on to "Barbedienne's," close by the well-known Vachette.
+
+Sophonisba, however, will not wait for our description of the renowned
+Felix's establishment, where are the lightest hands for pastry, it is
+said, in all France. When last we caught sight of the young lady, she
+was _chez_ Felix, demolishing her second _baba!_ May it lie lightly on
+her--!
+
+I humbly beg the pardon of Mademoiselle Sophonisba!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE COCKAYNE FAMILY.
+
+
+The Cockaynes deserve a few words of formal introduction to the reader,
+since he is destined to make their better acquaintance. We have ventured
+hitherto only to take a few discreet and distant glimpses at them, as we
+found them loitering about the Boulevards on the morrow of their
+appearance in Paris. Mr. Cockayne--having been very successful for many
+years in the soap-boiling business, to the great discomfort and vexation
+of the noses of his neighbours, and having amassed fortune enough to
+keep himself and wife and his three blooming daughters among the _creme
+de la creme_ of Clapham, and in the list of the elect of society, known
+as carriage-people--he had given up the soap-boiling to his two sons,
+and had made up his mind to enjoy his money, or rather so much of it as
+Mrs. Cockayne might not require. It is true that every shilling of the
+money had been made by Cockayne, that every penny-piece represented a
+bit of soap which he had manufactured for the better cleansing of his
+generation. But this highly honourable fact, to the credit of poor
+Cockayne, albeit it was unpleasant to the nostrils of Mrs. C. when she
+had skimmed some of the richest of the Clapham _creme_ into her
+drawing-room, did not abate her resolve to put at least three farthings
+of the penny into her pocket, for her uses and those of her simple and
+innocent daughters. Mrs. Cockayne, being an economical woman, spent more
+money on herself, her house, and her children than any lady within a
+mile of Cockayne House. It is certain that she was an excellent mother
+to her three daughters, for she reminded Cockayne every night
+regularly--as regularly, he said, as he took his socks off--that if it
+were not for her, she did not know what would become of the children.
+She was quite sure their father wouldn't trouble his head about them.
+
+Perhaps Mrs. Cockayne was right. Cockayne had slaved in business only
+thirty-five years out of the fifty-two he had passed in this vale of
+tears, and had only lodged her at last in a brougham and pair. He might
+have kept in harness another ten years, and set her up in a carriage and
+four. She was sure he didn't know what to do with himself, now he had
+retired. He was much better tempered when he went off to business by the
+nine o'clock omnibus every morning; and before he had given himself such
+ridiculous airs, and put himself on all kinds of committees he didn't
+understand anything about, and taken to make himself disagreeable to his
+neighbours in the vestry-hall, and moving what he called amendments and
+riders, for the mere pleasure, she verily believed, of opposing
+somebody, as he did everybody in his own house, and of hearing himself
+talk. Does the reader perceive by this time the kind of lady Mrs.
+Cockayne was, and what a comfort she must have been to her husband in
+the autumn of his life?
+
+How he must have listened for what the novelists call "her every
+footstep," and treasured her every syllable! It was mercifully ordained
+that Mr. Cockayne should be a good-tempered, non-resisting man. When
+Mrs. Cockayne was, as her sons pleasantly and respectfully phrased it,
+"down upon the governor," the good man, like the flowers in the poem,
+"dipped and rose, and turned to look at her." He sparkled while she
+stormed. He smiled when the shafts of her sarcasm were thrown
+point-blank at him. He was good-tempered before the storm began, while
+it lasted, and when it was over. Mrs. Cockayne had the ingenuity to
+pretend that Cockayne was the veriest tyrant behind people's backs; he
+who, as a neighbour of his very expressively put the case, dared not
+help himself to the fresh butter without having previously asked the
+permission of his wife. Fate, in order to try the good-nature of
+Timothy Cockayne to the utmost, had given him two daughters closely
+resembling, in patient endurance and self-abnegation, their
+irreproachable mamma. Sophonisba--at whom the reader has already had a
+glimpse, and whom we last saw demolishing her second _baba_ at Felix's,
+was the eldest daughter--and the second was Theodosia. There was a
+third, Carrie; she was the blue, and was gentle and contented with
+everything, like her father.
+
+The reader may now be prepared to learn that it was not Mr. Timothy
+Cockayne, late of Lambeth, who had planned the family's journey to
+Paris. Mrs. Cockayne had projected the expedition. Everybody went to
+Paris now-a-days, and you looked so very stupid if you had to confess in
+a drawing-room that you had never been. She was sure there was not
+another family on Clapham Common, of their station, who had not been.
+Besides, it would exercise the girls' French. If Mr. Cockayne could only
+consent to tear himself away from board-meetings, and devote a little
+time to his own flesh and blood. They would go alone, and not trouble
+him, only what would their neighbours say to see them start off alone,
+as though they'd nobody in the world to care a fig about them. At any
+rate, they didn't want people to know they were neglected. Now Mr.
+Cockayne had never had the most distant idea of leaving the ladies of
+his family to go alone to Paris. But it pleased his wife to put the case
+in this pleasant way, and he never interfered with her pleasures. He
+wanted very much to see Paris again, for he had never been on the banks
+of the Seine since 1840, when he made a flying visit to examine some new
+patent soap-boiling apparatus. He was ordered about by both mother and
+daughters, by boat and railway. He was reproached fifty times for his
+manners in insisting on going the Dieppe route. He was loaded with
+parcels and baskets and rugs, and was soundly rated all the way from the
+railway station to the Grand Hotel, on the Boulevard des Capucines, for
+having permitted the Custom House officers to turn over Mrs. Cockayne's
+boxes, as she said, "in the most impudent manner; but they saw she was
+without protection."
+
+I have always been at a loss to discover why certain classes of English
+travellers, who make their appearance in Paris during the excursion
+season, persist in regarding the capital of France, or, as the Parisian
+has it, "the centre of civilization," as a Margate without the sea. I
+wonder what was floating in the head of Mr. Cockayne, when he bought a
+flat cloth grey cap, and ordered a plaid sporting-suit from his
+tailor's, and in this disguise proceeded to "do" Paris. In London Mr.
+Cockayne was in the habit of dressing like any other respectable elderly
+gentleman. He was going to the capital of a great nation, where people's
+thoughts are not unfrequently given to the cares of the _toilette;_
+where, in short, gentlemen are every bit as severe in their dress as
+they are in Pall Mall, or in a banking-house in Lombard Street. Now Mr.
+Cockayne would as soon have thought of wearing that plaid
+shooting-suit and that grey flat cap down Cheapside or Cornhill, as he
+would have attempted to play at leap-frog in the underwriters' room at
+Lloyd's. He had a notion, however, that he had done the "correct thing"
+for foreign parts, and that he had made himself look as much a traveller
+as Livingstone or Burton. Some strange dreams in the matter of dress had
+possessed the mind of Mrs. Cockayne, and her daughters also. They were
+in varieties of drab coloured dresses and cloaks; and the mother and the
+three daughters, deeming bonnets, we suppose, to be eccentric head-gears
+in Paris, wore dark brown hats all of one pattern, all ornamented with
+voluminous blue veils, and all ready to Dantan's hand. The young ladies
+had, moreover, velvet strings, that hung down from under their hats
+behind, almost to their heels. It was thus arrayed that the party took
+up their quarters at the Grand Hotel, and opened their Continental
+experiences. I have already accompanied Mrs. Cockayne, Sophonisba, and
+Theodosia, on their first stroll along the Boulevards, and peeped into
+a few shops with them. Mr. Cockayne was in the noble courtyard of the
+Hotel, waiting to receive them on their return, with Carrie sitting
+close by him, intently reading a voluminous catalogue of the Louvre, on
+which, according to Mrs. Cockayne, her liege lord had "wasted five
+francs." Mr. Cockayne was all smiles. Mrs. Cockayne and her two elder
+daughters were exhausted, and threw themselves into seats, and vowed
+that Paris was the most tiring place on the face of the earth.
+
+[Illustration: BEAUTY & THE B----. _Normally a severe Excursionist_.]
+
+"My dear," said Mr. Cockayne, addressing his wife, "people find Paris
+fatiguing because they walk about the streets all day, and give
+themselves no rest. If we did the same thing at Clapham----"
+
+"There, that will do, Cockayne," the lady sharply answered. "I'm sure
+I'm a great deal too tired to hear speeches. Order me some iced water.
+You talk about French politeness, Cockayne. I think I never saw people
+stare so much in the whole coarse of my life. And some boys in blue
+pinafores actually laughed in our very faces. I know what _I_ should
+have done to them, had _I_ been their mother. What was it they said,
+Sophy, my dear?"
+
+"I didn't quite catch, mamma; these people talk so fast."
+
+"They seem to me," Mrs. Cockayne continued, "to jumble all their words
+one into another."
+
+"That is because----" Mr. Cockayne was about to explain.
+
+"Now, pray, Mr. Cockayne, do leave your Mutual Improvement Society
+behind, and give us a little relief while we are away. I say the people
+jumble one word into another in the most ridiculous manner, and I
+suppose I have ears, and Sophy has ears, and we are not quite lunatics
+because we have not been staring our eyes out all the morning at things
+we don't understand."
+
+Here Carrie, lifting her eyes from her book, said to her father--
+
+"Papa dear, you remember that first Sculpture Hall, where the colossal
+figures were; that was the Salle des Caryatides, and those gigantic
+figures you admired so much were by Jean Goujon. Just think! It was in
+this hall that Henry IV. celebrated his wedding with Marguerite de
+Valois. Yes, and in this very room Moliere used to act before the
+Court."
+
+"Yes," Mrs. Cockayne interjected, pointing to Carrie's hands, "and in
+that very room, I suppose, Miss Caroline Cockayne appeared with her
+fingers out of her glove."
+
+"And where have you been all day, my dear?" Mr. Cockayne said, in his
+blandest manner, to his wife.
+
+"We poor benighted creatures," responded Mrs. Cockayne, "have been--pray
+don't laugh. Mr. Cockayne--looking at the shops, and very much amused we
+have been, I can assure you, and we are going to look at them to-morrow,
+and the day after, and the day after that."
+
+"With all my heart, my dear," said Mr. Cockayne, who was determined to
+remain in the very best of tempers. "I hope you have been amused, that
+is all."
+
+[Illustration: PALAIS DU LOUVRE.]
+
+[Illustration: THE ROAD TO THE BOIS]
+
+"We have had a delightful day," said Sophonisba.
+
+"I am sure we have been into twenty shops," said Theodosia.
+
+"And I am sure," Mrs. Cockayne continued, "it is quite refreshing, after
+the boorish manners of your London shopkeepers, to be waited upon by
+these polite Frenchmen. They behave like noblemen."
+
+"Mamma has had fifty compliments paid to her in the course of the day, I
+am certain," said Sophonisba.
+
+"I am very glad to hear it," said Sophonisba's papa.
+
+"Glad to hear it, and surprised also, I suppose, Mr. Cockayne! In London
+twenty compliments have to last a lady her lifetime."
+
+"I don't know how it is," Theodosia observed, "but the tradespeople here
+have a way of doing things that is enchanting. We went into an imition
+jeweller's in the Rue Vivienne--and such imitations! I'll defy Mrs.
+Sandhurst--and you know how ill-natured she is--to tell some earrings
+and brooches we saw from real gold and jewels. Well, what do you think
+was the sign of the shop, which was arranged more like a drawing-room
+than a tradesman's place of business; why, it was called L'Ombre du Vrai
+(the Shadow of Truth). Isn't it quite poetical?"
+
+Mr. Cockayne thought he saw his opportunity for an oratorical flourish.
+
+"It has been observed, my dear Theo," said he, dipping the fingers of
+his right hand into the palm of his left, "by more than one acute
+observer, that the mind of the race whose country we are now----"
+
+Here Mrs. Cockayne rapped sharply the marble table before her with the
+end of her parasol, and said--
+
+"Mr. Cockayne, have you ordered any dinner for us?"
+
+Mr. Cockayne meekly gave it up, and replied that he had secured places
+for the party at the _table d'hote_.
+
+Satisfied on this score, the matron proceeded to inform that person whom
+in pleasant irony she called her lord and master, that she had set her
+heart on a brooch of the loveliest design it had ever been her good
+fortune to behold.
+
+"At the _L'Ombre_--what do you call it, my dear?" said the husband,
+blandly.
+
+Mrs. Cockayne went through that stiffening process which ladies of
+dignity call drawing themselves up.
+
+"You really surprise me, Mr. Cockayne. If you mean it as a joke, I would
+have you know that people don't joke with their wives; and I should
+think you ought to know by this time that I am not in the habit of
+wearing imitation jewellery."
+
+"I ought," briefly responded Cockayne; and then he rapidly continued, in
+order to ward off the fire he knew his smart rejoinder would provoke--
+
+"Tell me where it was, my dear. Suppose we go and look at it together. I
+saw myself some exquisite Greek compositions in the Rue de la Paix,
+which both myself and Carrie admired immensely."
+
+"Greek fiddlesticks! I want no Greek, nor any other old-fashioned
+ornaments, Mr. Cockayne. One would think you were married to the oldest
+female inhabitant, by the way you talk; or that I had stepped out of the
+Middle Ages; or that I and Sphinx were twins. But you must be so very
+clever, with your elevation of the working-classes, and those prize
+Robinson Crusoes you gave to the Ragged-school children--which you know
+you got trade price."
+
+"Well, well," poor Cockayne feebly expostulated, "if it's not far, let
+us go and see the brooch."
+
+"There, mamma!" cried both Sophonisba and Theodosia in one breath.
+"Mind, the one with the three diamonds."
+
+[Illustration: MUSEE DU LUXEMBOURG.]
+
+Mrs. Cockayne being of an exceedingly yielding temperament, allowed
+herself to be mollified, and sailed out of the hotel, with the blue
+veil hanging from her hat down her back, observing by the way that she
+should like to box those impudent Frenchmen's ears who were lounging
+about the doorway, and who, she was sure, were looking at her. Mr.
+Cockayne was unfortunate enough to opine that his wife was mistaken, and
+that the Frenchmen in question were not even looking in her direction.
+
+"Of course not, Mr. Cockayne," said the lady; "who would look at me, at
+my time of life?"
+
+"Nonsense! I didn't mean that," said Mr. Cockayne, now a little gruffly,
+for there was a limit even to _his_ patience.
+
+"It is difficult to tell what you mean. I don't think you know yourself,
+half your time."
+
+Thus agreeably beguiling the way, the pair walked to the shop in the Rue
+de la Paix, where the lady had seen a brooch entirely to her mind. It
+was the large enamel rose-leaf, with three charming dew-drops in the
+shape of brilliants.
+
+"They speak English, I hope," said Mr. Cockayne. "We ought to have
+brought Sophonisba with us."
+
+"Sophonisba! much use _her_ French is in this place. She says their
+French and the French she learnt at school are two perfectly different
+things. So you may make up your mind that all those extras for languages
+you paid for the children were so much money thrown away."
+
+"That's a consoling reflection, now the money's gone," quoth Mr.
+Cockayne.
+
+They then entered the shop. A very dignified gentleman, with exquisitely
+arranged beard and moustache, and dressed unexceptionably, made a
+diplomatic bow to Mr. Cockayne and his wife. Cockayne, without ceremony,
+plunged _in medias res_. He wanted to look at the rose-leaf with the
+diamonds on it. The gentleman in black observed that it became English
+ladies' complexion "a ravir."
+
+It occurred to Mr. Cockayne, as it has occurred to many Englishmen in
+Paris, that he might make up for his ignorance of French by speaking in
+a voice of thunder. He seemed to have come to the conclusion that the
+French were a deaf nation, and that they talked a language which he did
+not understand in order that he might bear their deafness in mind. For
+once in her life Mrs. Cockayne held the same opinion as her husband. She
+accordingly, on her side, made what observations she chose to address to
+the dignified jeweller in her loudest voice. The jeweller smiled good
+naturedly, and pattered his broken English in a subdued and deferential
+tone. As Mr. Cockayne found that he did not get on very well, or make
+his meaning as clear as crystal by bawling, and as he found that the
+polite jeweller could jerk out a few broken phrases of English, the
+bright idea struck him that he, Mr. Cockayne, late of Lambeth, would
+make his meaning plainer than a pike-staff by speaking broken English
+also. The jeweller was puzzled, but he was very patient; and as he kept
+passing one bracelet after another over the arm of Mrs. Cockayne, quite
+captivated that lady.
+
+"He seems to think we're going to buy all the shop," growled Cockayne.
+
+"How vulgar you are! Lambeth manners don't do in Paris. Mr. Cockayne."
+
+"But they seem to like Lambeth sovereigns, anyhow," was the aggravating
+rejoinder.
+
+"If you're going to talk like that, I'll leave the shop, and not have
+anything."
+
+This was a threat the lady did not carry out. She bore the enamel
+rose-leaf--the leaf with the three diamonds, as her daughters had
+affectionately reminded her--off in triumph, having promised that
+delightful man, the jeweller, to return and have a look at the bracelets
+another day. She was quite enchanted with the low bow the jeweller gave
+her as he closed his handsome plate-glass door. He might have been a
+duke or a prince, she said.
+
+"Or a footman," Mr. Cockayne added. "I don't call all that bowing and
+scraping business."
+
+When Mr. and Mrs. Cockayne returned to the Grand Hotel, they found their
+daughters Sophonisba and Theodosia in a state of rapture.
+
+"Mamma, mamma!" cried Sophonisba, holding up a copy of _La France,_ an
+evening paper, "you know that splendid shop we passed to-day, under the
+colonnades by the Louvre Hotel, where there was that deep blue _moire_
+you said you should so much like if you could afford it. Well, look
+here, there is a '_Grande Occasion_' there!" and the enraptured girl
+pointed to letters at least two inches high, printed across the sheet of
+the newspaper. "Look! a 'Grande Occasion!'"
+
+"And pray what's that, Sophy?" Mrs. Cockayne asked. "What grand
+occasion, I should like to know."
+
+"Dear me, mamma," Theodosia murmured, "it means an excellent
+opportunity."
+
+"My dear," Mrs. Cockayne retorted severely to her child, "I didn't have
+the advantage of lessons in French, at I don't know how many guineas a
+quarter; nor, I believe, did your father; nor did we have occasion to
+teach ourselves, like Miss Sharp."
+
+"Well, look here, mamma," Miss Sophonisba said, her eyes sparkling and
+her fingers trembling as they ran down line after line of the
+advertisement that covered the whole back sheet of the newspaper. "You
+never saw such bargains. The prices are positively ridiculous. There are
+silks, and laces, and muslins, and grenadines, and alpacas, and shawls,
+and cloaks, and plain _sultanes_, and I don't know what, all at such
+absurdly low prices that I think there must be some mistake about it."
+
+"Tut," Mr. Cockayne said; "one of those 'awful sacrifices' and bankrupt
+stock sales, like those we see in London, and the bills of which are
+thrown into the letter-box day after day."
+
+"You are quite mistaken, papa dear, indeed you are," Theodosia said; "we
+have asked the person in the _Bureau_ down stairs, and she has told us
+that these '_Grandes Occasions_' take place twice regularly every year,
+and that people wait for them to make good bargains for their summer
+things and for their winter things."
+
+The lady in the _Bureau_ was right. The prudent housewives of Paris take
+advantage of these "_Grandes Occasions_" to make their summer and winter
+purchases for the family. In the spring-time, when the great violet
+trade of Paris brightens the corners of the streets, immense
+advertisements appear in all the daily and weekly papers of Paris,
+headed by gigantic letters that the fleetest runner may read, announcing
+extraordinary exhibitions, great exhibitions, and unprecedented spring
+shows. "Poor Jacques" offers 3000 cashmere shawls at twenty-seven francs
+each, 2000 silk dresses at twenty-nine francs, and 1000 at thirty-nine
+francs. "Little Saint Thomas," of the Rue du Bac, has 90,000 French
+linos, 1000 "Jacquettes gentleman," 500 Zouaves, and 1000 dozen
+cravats--all at extraordinary low prices. Poor Jacques draws public
+attention to the "incomparable cheapness" of his immense operations:
+while Little St. Thomas declares that his assortment of goods is of
+"exceptional importance," and that he is selling his goods at a
+cheapness _hors ligne_. For a nation that has twitted the English with
+being a race of shop-keepers, our friends the Parisians who keep shops
+are not wanting in devotion to their own commercial interests. Indeed,
+there is a strong commercial sense in thousands of Parisians who have no
+shutters to take down. Take for instance the poetical M. Alphonse Karr,
+whose name has passed all over Europe as the charming author of A
+Journey round my Garden. Nothing can be more engaging than the manner in
+which M. Karr leads his readers about with him among his flowers and the
+parasites of his garden. He falls into raptures over the petals of the
+rose, and his eye brightens tenderly over the June fly. One would think
+that this garden-traveller was a very ethereal personage, and that milk
+and honey and a few sweet roots would satisfy his simple wants, and that
+he had no more idea of trafficking in a market than a hard man of
+business has in spending hours watching a beetle upon a leaf. But let
+not the reader continue to labour under this grievous mistake.
+
+M. Karr is quite up to the market value of every bud that breaks within
+the charmed circle of his garden at Nice.
+
+He cultivates the poetry for his books, but he does not neglect his
+ledger. In the spring, when, according to Mr. Tennyson, "a fuller
+crimson comes upon the robin's breast," and "young men's fancy lightly
+turns to thoughts of love," M. Alphonse Karr, poet and florist, opens
+his flower-shop.
+
+Carrie had taken up the newspaper which had moved the enthusiasm of her
+elder sisters. Her eyes fell on the following advertisement:--
+
+
+                    "By an arrangement agreed upon,
+                     M. ALPHONSE KARR, of Nice,
+
+     sends direct, gratuitously, and post free, either a box containing
+     Herbes aux Turguoises, or a magnificent bouquet of Parma Violets,
+     to every person who, before the end of March, shall become a
+     subscriber to the monthly review entitled Life in the Country. A
+     specimen number will be sent on receipt of fifteen sous in postage
+     stamps."
+
+This is Alphonse Karr's magnificent spring assortment--his Grand
+Occasion.
+
+"So you see, Mr. Cockayne," said his wife, "this Mr. Karr, whose book
+about the garden--twaddle, _I_ call it--you used to think so very fine
+and poetic, is just a market-gardener and nothing more. He is positively
+an advertising tradesman."
+
+"Nothing more, mamma, I assure you," said Sophonisba. "I remember at
+school that one of the French young ladies, Mademoiselle de la Rosiere,
+told me that when her sister was married, the bride and all the
+bridesmaids had Alphonse Karr's _bouquets_. It seems that the mercenary
+creature advertises to sell ball or wedding _bouquets_, which he manages
+to send to Paris quite fresh in little boxes, for a pound apiece."
+
+"Do you hear that?" said Mrs. Cockayne, addressing her husband. "This is
+your pet, sir, who was so fond of his beetles! Why, the man would sell
+the nightingales out of his trees, if he could catch them, I've no
+doubt."
+
+"The story is a little jarring, I confess," Pater said. "But after all,
+why shouldn't he sell the flowers also, when he sells the pretty things
+he writes about them?"
+
+"Upon my word, you're wonderful. You try to creep out of everything. But
+what is that you were reading, my dear Sophonisba, about the _grande
+occasion_ near the Louvre Hotel? I dare say it's a great deal more
+interesting than Mr. Karr and his violets. I haven't patience with your
+papa's affectation. What was it we saw, my dear, in the Rue Saint
+Honore? The 'Butterfly's Chocolate'?"
+
+"Yes, mamma," Theodosia answered. "_Chocolat du Papillon_. Yes; and you
+know, mamma, there was the linen-draper's with the sign _A la Pensee_. I
+never heard such ridiculous nonsense."
+
+"Yes; and there was another, my dear," said Mrs. Cockayne, "'To the fine
+Englishwoman,' or something of that sort."
+
+"Oh, those two or three shops, mamma," said Sophonisba, "dedicated _A
+la belle Anglaise!_ Just think what people would say, walking along
+Oxford Street, if they were to see over a hosier's shop, written in big,
+flaring letters, 'To the beautiful Frenchwoman!"
+
+Mr. Cockayne laughed. Mrs. Cockayne saw nothing to laugh at. She
+maintained that it was a fair way of putting the case.
+
+Mr. Cockayne said that he was not laughing at his wife, but at some much
+more ridiculous signs which had come under his notice.
+
+"What do you say," he asked, "to a linen-draper's called the 'Siege of
+Corinth?' or the 'Great Conde?' or the 'Good Devil'?"
+
+"What on earth has La Belle Jardiniere got to do with cheap trowsers,
+Mr. Cockayne?" his wife interrupted. "You forget your daughters are in
+the room."
+
+"Well, my dear, the Moses of Paris call their establishment the Belle
+Jardiniere."
+
+"That's not half so absurd, papa dear," Sophonisba observed, "as
+another cheap tailor's I have seen under the sign of the 'Docks de la
+Violette.'"
+
+"I don't know, my dear; I thought when my friend Rhodes came back from
+Paris, and told me he had worn a pair of the Belle Jardinieres----"
+
+"Mr. Cockayne!" screamed his wife.
+
+"Well, unmentionables, my dear--I thought I should have died with
+laughter."
+
+"Sophonisba, my dear, tell us what the paper says about that magnificent
+shop under the Louvre colonnade; your father is forgetting himself."
+
+"Dear mamma," said Sophonisba, "it would take me an hour to read all;"
+but she read the tit-bits.
+
+"My dears," said Mrs. Cockayne to her daughters, "it would be positively
+a sin to miss such an opportunity."
+
+Mr. Cockayne took up the paper which Sophonisba had finished reading,
+and running his eye over it, said, with a wicked curling of his lip--
+
+"My dear Sophy, my dear child, here are a number of things you've not
+read."
+
+Sophonisba tittered, and ejaculated--"Papa dear!"
+
+"We have heard quite enough," Mrs. Cockayne said, sternly; "and we'll go
+to-morrow, directly after breakfast, and spend a nice morning looking
+over the things."
+
+"But there are really two or three items, my dear, Sophy has forgotten.
+There are a lot of articles with lace and pen work; and think of it, my
+love, ten thousand ladies' chem----"
+
+Mrs. Cockayne started to her feet, and shrieked--
+
+"Girls, leave the room!"
+
+"What a pity, my dear," the incorrigible Mr. Cockayne continued, in
+spite of the unappeasable anger of Mrs. Cockayne--"what a pity the
+_Magasins de Louvre_ were not established at the time of the celebrated
+emigration of the ten thousand virgins; you see there would have been
+just one apiece."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+A "GRANDE OCCASION."
+
+
+"Well, these Paris tradespeople are the most extraordinary persons in the
+world," cried Sophonisba's mamma, and the absolute ruler of Mr.
+Cockayne. "I confess I can't make them out. They beat me. My dear, they
+are the most independent set I ever came across. They don't seem to care
+whether you buy or you don't; and they ask double what they intend to
+take."
+
+"What is the matter now, my dear?" Mr. Cockayne ventured, in an
+unguarded moment, to ask, putting aside for a moment Mr. Bayle St.
+John's scholarly book on the Louvre.
+
+"At any rate, Mr. Cockayne, we do humbly venture to hope that you will
+be able to spare us an hour this morning to accompany us to the
+_Magasins du Louvre_. We would not ask you, but we have been told the
+crowd is so great that ladies alone would be torn to pieces."
+
+"I forget how many thousands a day, papa dear," Sophonisba mercifully
+interposed, "but a good many, visit these wonderful shops. I confess I
+never saw anything like even the outside of them. The inside must be
+lovely."
+
+"I have no doubt they are, my dear," Mr. Cockayne observed. "They were
+built about ten years ago. The foundations were----"
+
+"There," cried Mrs. Cockayne, rising, "there, your papa is off with his
+lecture. I shall put on my bonnet." And Mrs. Cockayne swept grandly from
+the room.
+
+Mrs. Cockayne re-entered the room with her bonnet on; determination was
+painted on the lady's countenance. Cockayne should not escape this time.
+He should be led off like a lamb to the slaughter. Were not the silks
+marked at ridiculously low prices? Was not the shawl-room a sight more
+than equal to anything to be seen in any other part of Paris? Was not
+the folding department just as much a sight of Paris as that wretched
+collection of lumber in the Hotel Cluny?
+
+Some wives had only to hint to have; but that was not the case with the
+hapless Mrs. Cockayne. She was sure nobody could be more economical than
+she was, both for herself and the children, and that was her reward. She
+had to undergo the most humiliating process of asking point-blank; even
+when twenty or thirty thousand pairs of gloves were to be sold at prices
+that were unheard of! Men were so stupid in their meanness!
+
+"Buy the shop," Mr. Cockayne angrily observed.
+
+Perhaps Mr. Cockayne would be pleased to inform his lawful wife and the
+unfortunate children who were subjected by fate to his cruel
+tyranny--perhaps he would inform them when it would be convenient for
+him to take them home. His insults were more than his wife could bear.
+
+"What's the matter now?" asked the despairing Cockayne, rubbing his hat
+with his coat-sleeve.
+
+"Mamma dear, papa is coming with us," Sophonisba expostulated.
+
+"Well, I suppose he is. It has not quite come to that yet, my dear. I am
+prepared for anything, I believe; but your father will, I trust, not
+make us the laughing-stock of the hotel."
+
+"I am ready," said Cockayne, grimly, between his teeth.
+
+"I am obliged, you see, children, to speak," icily responded the lady he
+had sworn to love and cherish. "Hints are thrown away. I must suffer the
+indignity for your sakes, of saying to your father, I shall want some
+money for the purchases your mother wants to make for you. It is not the
+least use going to this Grande Occasion, or whatever they call it,
+empty-handed."
+
+"Will you allow me time to get change?" And Mr. Cockayne headed the
+procession through the hotel court-yard to the Boulevards.
+
+"Walk with your father," the outraged lady said to Sophonisba. "It's
+positively disgraceful, straggling out in this way. But I might have
+known what it was likely to be before I left home."
+
+Mr. Cockayne, as was his wont, speedily re-assumed his equanimity, and
+chatted pleasantly with Sophonisba as they walked along the Rue de la
+Paix, across the Place Vendome, into the Rue Castiglione. Mrs. Cockayne
+followed with Theodosia; Carrie had begged to be left behind, to write a
+long letter to her intellectual friend, Miss Sharp.
+
+Mr. Cockayne stopped before the door of Mr. John Arthur.
+
+"What on earth can your father want here?" said Mrs. Cockayne, pausing
+at the door, while her husband had an interview with Mr. John Arthur
+within.
+
+Theodosia, peering through the window, answered, "He is getting change,
+mamma dear."
+
+"At last!"
+
+Mr. Cockayne issued radiant from Mr. John Arthur's establishment.
+
+"There," said he to his wife, in his heartiest voice; "there, my dear,
+buy what you and the girls want."
+
+"I will do the best I can with it. Perhaps we can manage our shopping
+without troubling you."
+
+"It's not the least trouble in the world," gaily said Cockayne, putting
+that bright face of his on matters.
+
+"I thought you had some idea of going to the Museum of Artillery this
+afternoon, to see whether or not you approved of the French guns."
+
+Mr. Cockayne laughed at the sarcasm, and again gave Sophonisba his arm,
+and went under the colonnades of the Rue de Rivoli, wondering, by the
+way, why people stared at him in his plaid suit, and at his daughter in
+her brown hat and blue veil. Mrs. Cockayne wondered likewise. The French
+were the rudest people on the face of the earth, and not the politest,
+as they had the impudence to assert.
+
+When the party reached the colonnades of the Grand Hotel du Louvre, they
+found themselves in the midst of a busy scene.
+
+The _Magasins du Louvre_ stretch far under the Hotel, from the Rue de
+Rivoli to the Rue Saint-Honore. Year after year has the stretching
+process continued; but now the great company of linen drapers and
+hosiers have all the space that can be spared them. The endless lines of
+customers' carriages in the Rue Saint-Honore and on the _Place_ opposite
+Prince Napoleon's palace betoken the marvellous trade going on within.
+
+The father of the English family here turned his back upon the great
+shop, and glancing towards the Louvre and the Church of Saint Germain
+l'Auxerrois, exclaimed--"Marvellous scene! A sight not to be equalled in
+the world. Yonder is the old church, the bell of which tolled the----"
+
+"You're making a laughing-stock of yourself," Mrs. Cockayne exclaims,
+taking her husband firmly by the arm. "One would think you were an hotel
+guide, or a walking handbook, or--or a beadle or showman. What do you
+want to know about the massacre of St. Bartholomew now? There'll not be
+a mantle or a pair of gloves left. Come in--do! You can go gesticulating
+about the streets with Carrie to-morrow, if you choose; but do contrive
+to behave like an ordinary mortal to-day."
+
+Mr. Cockayne resigned himself. He plunged into the magnificent shop. He
+was dragged into the crowd that was defiling past the fifteen-sous
+counter, where the goods lay in great tumbled masses on the floor and
+upon the counter. He was surprised to see the shopmen standing upon the
+counter, and, with marvellous rapidity, telling off the yards of the
+cheap fabrics to the ladies and gentlemen who were pressing before them
+in an unbroken line. Beyond were the packers. Beyond again, was the
+office where payment was made, each person having a note or ticket, with
+the article bought, showing the sum due. A grave official marshalled the
+customer to the pay-place. There was wonderful order in the seeming
+confusion. The admirable system of the establishment was equal to the
+emergency. An idea of the continuous flow of the crowd past the silk
+and mixed fabric counters may be got from the fact that many ladies
+waited three and four hours for their turn to be served. One Parisian
+lady told Mrs. Cockayne that, after waiting four hours in the crowd, she
+had gone home to lunch, and had returned to try her fortune a second
+time.
+
+Poor Cockayne! He was absolutely bewildered. His endeavours to steer the
+"three daughters of Albion" who were under his charge, in the right
+direction, were painful to witness. First he threaded corridors, then he
+was in the carpet gallery, and now he was in the splendid, the palatial
+shawl-hall, where elegant ladies were trying on shawls of costly fabric,
+with that grace and quiet for which Parisians are unmatched.
+
+"This is superb! Oh, this is very, very fine!" cried the ladies. "How on
+earth shall we find our way out?"
+
+Now they sailed among immensities of silk and satin waves. Now they were
+encompassed with shawls; and now they were amid colonnades of rolls of
+carpet.
+
+Mrs. Cockayne stayed here and there to make a purchase, by the help of
+Sophonisba's French, which was a source of considerable embarrassment to
+the shopmen. They smiled, but were very polite.
+
+"This is not a shop, it is a palace dedicated to trade," cried Cockayne.
+
+"Stuff and nonsense," was his answer; "take care of the parcels. Yon
+know better, of course, than the people to whom it belongs."
+
+The Cockaynes found themselves borne by the endless stream of customers
+into a vast and lofty gallery. Pater paused.
+
+"This is superb! It would have been impossible to realize----"
+
+"Don't be a fool, Cockayne," said his wife; "this is the lace
+department. We must not go away without buying something."
+
+"Let us try," was saucily answered.
+
+Mrs. Cockayne immediately settled upon some Chantilly, and made her
+lord, as she expressed it in her pretty way, "pay for his impudence."
+
+The silk gallery was as grand and bewildering as the lace department;
+and here again were made some extraordinary bargains.
+
+Obliging officials directed the party to the first staircase on the
+right, or to turn to the left, by the furnishing department. They made a
+mistake, and found themselves in the _salons_ devoted to made linen,
+where Mrs. Cockayne hoped her husband would not make his daughters blush
+with what he considered to be (and he was much mistaken) witty
+observations. He was to be serious and silent amid mountains of feminine
+under linen. He was to ask no questions.
+
+In the Saint Honore gallery--which is the furnishing department--Mr.
+Cockayne was permitted to indulge in a few passing expressions of
+wonder. He was hushed in the splendour of the shawl gallery--where all
+is solid oak and glass and rich gold, and where the wearied traveller
+through the exciting scene of a _Grande Occasion_ at the marvellous
+shops of the Louvre, can get a little rest and quiet.
+
+"A wonderful place!" said Pater, as he emerged in the Rue de Rivoli,
+exhausted.
+
+"And much more sensible than the place opposite," his wife replied,
+pointing to the palace where the art treasures of Imperial France are
+imperially housed.
+
+"_Grande Occasion!_" muttered Mr. Cockayne, when he reached the
+hotel--"a grand opportunity for emptying one's pocket. The cheapness is
+positively ruinous. I wonder whether there are any cheap white elephants
+in Paris?"
+
+"White elephants, Cockayne! White fiddlesticks! I do really think,
+girls, your father is gradually--mind, I say, _gradually--gradually_
+taking leave of his senses."
+
+"La! mamma," unfortunate Carrie interposed, raising her eyes from a
+volume on Paris in the Middle Ages--"la! mamma, you know that in
+India----"
+
+"Hold your tongue, Miss--of course I know--and if I didn't, it is not
+for _you_ to teach me."
+
+Mr. Timothy Cockayne heaved a deep sigh and rang for his bill.
+
+He was to leave for London on the morrow--and his wife and daughters
+were to find lodgings.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+OUR FOOLISH COUNTRYWOMEN.
+
+
+I Introduce at this point--its proper date--Miss Carrie Cockayne's
+letter to Miss Sharp:--
+
+                                             "Grand Hotel, Paris.
+
+"DEAREST EMMY--They are all out shopping, so here's a long
+letter. I haven't patience with the men. I am sure we have had enough
+abuse in our own country, without travelling all the way to Paris for
+it; and yet the first paper I take up in the reading saloon of the
+hotel, contains a paragraph headed _Le Beau Sexe en Angleterre_. The
+paragraph is violent. The writer wants to know what demon possesses the
+Englishwomen at this moment. I might have been sure it was translated
+from an English paper. The creature wants to know whether the furies
+are let loose, and is very clever about Lucretia Borgia, and Mary
+Manning, and Mary Newell! One would think English mothers were all going
+to boil their children. This is just what has happened about everything
+else. In certain English circles slang is talked: therefore women have
+become coarse and vulgar. The Divorce Court has been a busy one of late;
+and scandals have been 'going round' as the American ladies in this
+hotel say; therefore there are to be no more virtuous mothers and
+sisters presently. Upon my word, the audacity of this makes my blood
+boil. Here the ladies paint, my dear, one and all. Why, the children in
+the Tuileries gardens whisk their skirts, and ogle their boy playmates.
+Vanity Fair at its height is here--I am not going to dispute it. Nor
+will I say papa is quite in the wrong when he cries shame on some of the
+costumes one meets on the Boulevards. My dear, short skirts and grey
+hair do _not_ go well together. I cannot even bear to think of
+grand-mamma showing her ankles and Hessian boots! But what vexes and
+enrages me is the injustice of the sudden outcry. Where has the slang
+come from? Pray who brought it into the drawing-room? How is it that
+girls delight in stable-talk, and imitate men in their dress and
+manners? We cannot deny that the domestic virtues have suffered in these
+fast days, nor that wife and husband go different ways too much: but are
+we to bear all the blame? Did _we_ build the clubs, I wonder? Did you or
+I invent racing, and betting, and gambling? Do _you_ like being lonely,
+as you are, my dear? When women go wrong, who leads the way? The pace is
+very fast now, and we _do_ give more time to dress, and that sort of
+thing than our mothers did. I own I'm a heavy hand at pastry, and mamma
+is a light one. I couldn't tell you how many shirts papa has. I should
+be puzzled to make my own dresses. I hate needlework. But are we
+monsters for all this? Papa doesn't grumble _very_ much. He has his
+pleasures, I'm sure. He dined out four times the week we came away. He
+was at the Casino in the Rue St. Honore last night, and came home with
+such an account of it that I am quite posted up in the manners and
+costumes of _ces dames_, yes, and the _lower_ class of them. The mean
+creature who has been writing in the _Saturday Review_ gives us no
+benefit of clergy. We have driven our brothers out into the night; we
+have sent our lovers to Newmarket; we have implored our husbands (that
+is, _we_ who have got husbands,) not to come home to dinner, because we
+have more agreeable company which we have provided for ourselves. Girls
+talk slang, I know--perhaps they taught their brothers! I suppose mamma
+taught papa to describe a woman in the _Bois_ as 'no end of a swell,'
+and when he is in the least put out to swear at her.
+
+[Illustration: THE INFLEXIBLE "MEESSES ANGLAISES."
+
+_They are not impressionable, but they will stoop to "field sports."_]
+
+"Now, my dear, shall I give you _my_ idea of the mischief? Papa thinks I
+go about with my eyes shut; that I observe nothing--except the bonnet
+shops. I say the paint, the chignons, the hoops, and the
+morals--whatever they may be--start from here. My ears absolutely
+tingled the first evening I spent here _en soiree_. Lovers! why the
+married ladies hardly take the trouble to disguise their preferences.
+
+"I was at an embassy reception the other night. Papa said it was like a
+green-room, only not half so amusing. They talked in one corner as
+openly as you might speak of the Prince Imperial, about Mademoiselle
+Schneider's child. There were women of the company whose _liaisons_ are
+as well known as their faces, and yet they were _parfaitement bien
+recues_! Theresa is to be heard--or was to be heard till she went out of
+fashion--in private salons, screaming her vulgar songs among the young
+ladies. When I turn the corner just outside the hotel, what do I see in
+one of the most fashionable print-shops? Why, three great Mabille prints
+of the shockingly indecent description--with ladies and their
+daughters looking at them. Those disagreeable pictures in the Burlington
+Arcade are, my dearest Emmy, moral prints when compared with them. We
+have imported all this. Paris is within ten hours and a half of London,
+so we get French ways, as papa says, 'hot and hot.'"
+
+[Illustration: ENGLISH VISITORS TO THE CLOSERIE DE LILAS.--SHOCKING!]
+
+"Who admires domestic women now? Tell an English _creve_ that Miss Maria
+is clever at a custard, and he will sneer at her. No. She must be witty,
+pert; able to give him as good as he sends, as people say. Young Dumas
+has done a very great deal of this harm; and he has made a fortune by
+it. He has brought the Casino into the drawing-room, given _ces dames_ a
+position in society, and made hundreds of young men ruin themselves for
+the glory of being seen talking to a Cora Pearl. _Now_ what do you think
+he has done. He has actually brought out a complete edition of his
+pieces, with a preface, in which, Papa tells me, he plays the moralist.
+He has unfolded all the vice--crowded the theatres to see a bad woman in
+a consumption--painted the _demi-monde--with a purpose_! All the world
+has laboured under the idea that the purpose was piles of gold. But now,
+the locker being full, and the key turned, and in the young gentleman's
+pocket, he dares to put himself in the robe of a professor, to say it
+was not the money he cared about--it was the lesson. He is a reformer--a
+worshipper of virtue! We shall have the author of _Jack Sheppard_ start
+as a penologist soon. My dear, the cowardice of men when dealing with
+poor women is bad enough; but it is not by half so repulsive as their
+hypocrisy. Ugh!
+
+"Any news of the handsome Mr. Daker? It strikes me, dear Emmy, 'Uncle
+Sharp' didn't send him up from Maidstone with a letter of introduction
+to his niece for nothing.
+
+                           "Your affectionate friend,
+                                         "CARRIE C."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+"OH, YES!" AND "ALL RIGHT!"
+
+
+Lucy was privileged to read the following:--
+
+    _Miss Carrie Cockayne to Miss Emily Sharp._
+
+                                           "Rue Millevoye, Paris.
+
+"MY DEAREST EMMY,--I should certainly not venture to offer any
+remarks on taste to you, my love, under ordinary circumstances. But I am
+provoked. I have passed a severe round of _soirees_ of every
+description. Jaded with the fantastic activities of a fancy-dress
+genteel riot, I have been compelled to respond to the intimation of the
+Vicomtesse de Bois de Rose, that "_on sautera_". I have jumped with the
+rest. I have half killed myself with _sirops, petit-fours_, those
+microscopic caricatures of detestable British preparation--sandwiches
+(pronounced _sonveetch_), _bouillon_, and chocolate, in the small hours;
+ices in tropical heats; _foie-gras_ and champagne about two hours after
+healthy bedtime, and tea like that which provoked old Lady Gargoyle to
+kick over the tea-table in her boudoir--in her eightieth year, too. The
+Gargoyles (I shall have much to tell you about them when we meet) were
+always an energetic race; and I feel the blood tingling in me while my
+eye wanders over the impertinences of the French chroniqueurs, when they
+are pleased to be merry at the expense of _la vieille Angleterre_. I
+hold I am right; am I not?--that when even a chroniqueur--that smallest
+of literary minnows--undertakes to criticize a foreign nation, at least
+the equal of his own, he should start with some knowledge of its
+language, history, manners, and customs. But what do we find? The
+profoundest ignorance of the rudiments of English. The special
+correspondent sent to London by the _Figaro_ to be amusing on our darker
+side, cannot spell the word theatre; but he is trenchant when dealing
+with what he saw at the Adelphi _Theater_. How completely he must have
+understood the dialogue, he who describes Webster as a _comique de
+premier ordre!_ In the same paper the dramatic critic, after explaining
+that at the rehearsals of _L'Abime_, the actors, who continually are
+complaining that they are ordered off on the wrong side, are quieted
+with the information that matters dramatic are managed in this way in
+bizzare England--prints in a line apart, and by way of most humorous
+comment, these words, 'English spoken here.' Conceive, my dear, an
+English humorous writer interlarding his picture of a French incident
+with the occasional interjection of _Parlez-vous Francais?_ Yet the
+comic writers of Paris imagine that they show wit when they pepper their
+comments with disjointed, irrelevant, and misspelt ejaculations in our
+vernacular. We have a friend here (we have made dozens) who has a cat
+she calls To-be--the godfather being 'To-be or not to be! 'All right'
+appears daily as a witticism; 'Oh, yes!' serves for the thousandth time
+as a touch of humour. The reason is obvious. French critics are wholly
+ignorant of our language. Very few of them have crossed the Channel,
+even to obtain a Leicester Square idea of our dear England. But they are
+not diffident on this account. They have never seen samples of the
+Britisher--except on the Boulevards, or whistling in the cafes--where
+our countrymen, I beg leave to say, do not shine; and these to them are
+representations of our English society. Suppose we took our estimate of
+French manners and culture from the small shopkeepers of the Quartier
+St. Antoine! My protest is against those who judge us by our vulgar and
+coarse types. The Manchester bully who lounges into the Cafe Anglais
+with his hat on the back of his head; the woman who wears a hat and a
+long blue veil, and shuffles in in the wake of the _malhonnete_ to whom
+she is married; again, the boor who can speak only such French as 'moa
+besoin' and 'j'avais faim,' represent English men and women just as
+fairly as the rude, hoggish, French egg-and-poultry speculators
+represent the great seigneurs of France.
+
+[Illustration: SMITH BRINGS HIS ALPENSTOCK.]
+
+"I say I have, by this time, more than a tolerable experience, not only
+of French _salons_, but also of those over which foreign residents in
+Paris preside. I have watched the American successes in Paris of this
+season, which is now closing its gilded gates, dismissing the slaves of
+pleasure to the bitter waters of the German springs and gaming-tables. I
+have seen our people put aside for Madame de Lhuile de Petrole and the
+great M. Caligula Shoddy. The beauties of the season have been
+'calculating' and 'going round' in the best _salons_, and they have
+themselves given some of the most successful entertainments we have had.
+Dixie's land has been fairyland. Strange and gorgeous Princesses from
+the East have entered mighty appearances. One has captivated the Prince,
+said to be the handsomest man in Paris. Russian and Polish great ladies
+have done the honours--according to the newspapers--with their
+'habitual charm.' The Misses Bickers have had their beauties sung by a
+chorus of chroniqueurs. Here the shoulders of ladies at a party are as
+open to criticism as the ankles of a stage dancer. The beauties of our
+blonde Misses have made whole bundles of goose-quills tremble. Paris
+society is made up not even chiefly of Parisians; the rich of all
+nations flock to us, and are content to pay a few hundred pounds per
+month for a floor of glass and gilding. The Emperor has made a show
+capital as a speculation. All Europe contributes to the grandeur of the
+fashionable world of Paris. And suddenly what do we hear?
+
+"That we, whose blood is good enough for England; who _can_ speak a few
+foreign languages in addition to our own; who know our neighbours by
+having lived among them; who have travelled enough to learn that good
+breeding is not confined to England or to France, are accused of having
+destroyed the high tone of the Opera audiences in this city. We are good
+enough, as to manners, for Her Majesty's Theatre, but not for the
+Italiens. Tell Mrs. Sandhurst of this: she will be _so_ mad!
+
+"A few nights before La Patti left us, to degrade herself by warbling
+her wood-notes in the ignorant ears of the Opera public whom Mr. Gye is
+about to assemble, and on whom the leadership of Costa is thrown away,
+an unfortunate incident happened at the Italiens. Patti had been
+announced, and Mdlle. Harris appeared instead. Whereupon there was an
+uproar that could not be stilled. La Patti wept; la Harris wept also.
+Finally, the spoilt child appeared, like Niobe, all tears. Who created
+the uproar? The French chroniqueur answers: a cosmopolitan audience--an
+audience from the Grand Hotel. He is good enough not to pick us out, but
+we are included with the rest. The foreign residents have degraded the
+Opera. The audience which greets Patti is a rabble compared with that
+which listened to Sontag. 'The exquisite urbanity which is proverbially
+French,' and which was apparent at the Italiens fifteen or twenty years
+ago, has disappeared since Paris has become the world's railway
+terminus. M. Emile Villars, who is so obliging as to make the
+observation, proceeds to be very clever. Scratch the Russian, and you
+know what you will find. I answer, a gentleman uninfluenced by a stale
+proverb; we have a delightful specimen in this very house. M. Villars is
+great at scratching, since his readers are recommended to grate
+Peruvians and Javanese. Under the three articles, we are told, lies the
+one barbarous material! The ladies of these are charming, seductive,
+irresistible, but they want _ton_, and lack the delicacy of the _monde_.
+We foreigners are too proud of our beauty and our dollars, have an
+unquenchable thirst for pleasure, and we are socially daring. M. Villars
+is funny in the fashion of his class. He says that we English-speaking
+class of foreigners bear aloft a banner with the strange device 'All
+right.' M. Villars proceeds to remark, 'We take from foreigners what we
+should leave to them, their feet upon chairs, and their hats upon
+their heads, as at the Italiens the other night.' He finds that a
+cosmopolitan invasion has made French society less delicate, less
+gallant, less polite.
+
+[Illustration: JONES ON THE PLACE DE LA CONCORDE.]
+
+"We are to blame! Belgravia is not refined enough for the Avenue de
+l'Imperatrice. Clapham, I infer, would not be tolerated at Batignolles.
+I repeat, I have gone through some arduous times here, in the midst of
+the foreign invasion of polite society. I have scratched neither Russ,
+nor German, nor Servian, nor Wallachian. But I must be permitted to
+observe, that I have found their manners quite equal to any that were
+native. Shall I go further, Emmy, and speak all my mind? There is a race
+of the new-rich--of the recently honoured, here, who are French from
+their shoe-rosettes to their chignons. They come direct from the Bourse,
+and from the Pereire fortune-manufactory of the Place Vendome. They
+bring noise and extravagance, but not manners. I have seen many of my
+countrymen in Parisian drawing-rooms, in the midst of Frenchmen,
+Russians, Princes of various lands; and, do you know, I have not seen
+anything _much_ better in the way of bearing, manners, and mental
+culture and natural refinement than the English gentleman. I feel quite
+positive that it is not he who has lowered the manners or morals of
+Napoleon the Third's subjects. I am bold enough to think that a
+probationary tour through some of our London drawing-rooms would do good
+to the saucy young seigneurs I see leaning on the balcony of the Jockey
+Club when we are driving past.
+
+"I will remind M. Villars that his proverb has been parodied, and that
+it has been said, 'Scratch a Frenchman, and you find a dancing-master.'
+But I know this proverb to be foolish; and I am candid and liberal
+enough to say so.
+
+"I hope you are not too lonely, and don't keep too much to your room.
+Now I know by experience what life in a boarding-house means. How must
+you feel, dearest Emmy, alone! Je t'embrasse. How gets on the German?
+
+"We have such a specimen of the gandin here--the Vicomte de Gars. I
+think John Catt had better make haste over.
+
+                               "Yours affectionately,
+
+                                           "CARRIE."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+    _Miss Carrie Cockayne to Miss Sharp._
+
+                                                  "Rue Millevoye.
+
+"My dearest Emmy,--No answer from you? How unkind! But still I continue
+to give you my ideas of the moment from this. What do we want? A writer
+in one of the frivolous sheets which are called newspapers on this side
+of the Channel, has been giving himself great airs; looking out of his
+window, with two or three touches of his pen he dismisses the poor women
+who pass under his balcony, and closes the casement with the conviction
+that woman's rights and wrongs are put away for another generation.
+Foolish women! They are plentiful enough, and they muster in fair
+numbers at the Wauxhall meetings which have been going on here, to the
+infinite amusement of the superior creatures who drink absinthe, smoke
+cigars, and gamble, hours after we silly things have gone to bed. I am
+not writing to deny woman's weakness, nor her vanity, nor the ridiculous
+exhibition she makes of herself when she takes to "orating"--as the
+Yankees say--and lecturing, and dressing herself up in her brother's
+clothes. Do you think, my dear Emmy, there are many women foolish enough
+to applaud Dr. Mary Walker because she dresses like an overgrown
+school-girl, and shows her trousers? What is she like in society?
+Neither man nor woman. But how many have imitated her? How many women in
+England, France, and America have taken to the platform? One would think
+that all womankind was in a state of revolution, and about to make a
+general descent upon the tailors and tobacconists, turning over the
+lords of the creation to the milliners and the baby-linen warehouses.
+This is just the way men argue, and push themselves out of a
+difficulty. This French philosophical pretender, who has been observing
+us from his window (I can't imagine where he lives), describes one or
+two social monstrosities--with false complexions, hair, figure,--and
+morals; brazen in manner, defiant in walk--female intellectual
+all-in-alls. His model drives, hunts, orates, passes resolutions,
+dissects--in short does everything except attend to baby. This she
+leaves to the husband. He takes the pap-bowl, and she shoulders the gun.
+He looks out the linen while she sharpens her razors. The foolish public
+laugh all along the boulevards, and say what a charming creature a woman
+will be when she drives a locomotive, commands a frigate, and storms a
+citadel!
+
+"Every time a meeting is convened at the Wauxhall to consider how the
+amount of female starvation or misery may be reduced, the philosopher
+throws his window open again, and grins while he caricatures, or rather
+distorts and exaggerates to positive untruth. M. Gill gets fresh food.
+The _chroniqueurs_ invent a series of absurdities, which didn't happen
+yesterday, as they allege. I am out of patience when I see all this
+mischievous misrepresentation, because I see that it is doing harm to a
+very just and proper cause. We are arguing for more work for our poor
+sisters who have neither father, husband, brother, nor fortune to depend
+upon; and these French comic scribblers describe us as unsexed brawlers,
+who want top-boots. I want no manly rights for women. I am content with
+the old position, that her head should just reach the height of a man's
+heart; but I do see where she is not well used--where she is left to
+genteel dependence, and a life in the darkest corner of the
+drawing-room, upon the chair with the unsafe leg, over the plate that is
+cracked, in the bedroom where the visitor died of scarlet fever.
+
+[Illustration: FRENCH RECOLLECTION OF MEESS TAKING HER BATH.
+
+_The faithful Bouledogue gazes with admiration at the performance of his
+Mistress._]
+
+[Illustration: THE BRAVE MEESS AMONG THE BILLOWS HOLDING ON BY THE TAIL
+OF HER NEWFOUNDLAND.]
+
+"She is not unsexed wearing her poor heart out against these bars; but
+she would be a free, bright, instructed creature, helping her rich
+sister, or a trusty counsellor when the children are ill. She would be
+unsexed issuing railway tickets or managing a light business; but she is
+truly womanly while she is helpless and a burden to others.
+
+"Foolish women! Yes, very stupid very often, but hardly in hoping that
+the defenceless among us may be permitted to become, by fair womanly
+exertion, independent. I am directed to observe how amusing the _Figaro_
+has been recently at our expense, hoping to obtain the suffrages of the
+really thoughtless of our sex thereby. We are our own worst enemies and
+well do you men know it. The frivolous are an immense host, and these
+have reason to laugh at serious women who want to get a little justice
+and teaching for their dependent sisters--not manly avocations, nor
+masculine amusements. I go to the Wauxhall, my dear Emmy, not to help my
+sex to unsex itself, but, I must repeat, to aid my poor sisters who want
+to work, that, if left without the support of male kindred, they may
+lead honourable, independent lives; to this end they must have certain
+rights, and these, and no more, I advocate.
+
+[Illustration: VARIETIES OF THE ENGLISH STOCK.
+
+_The Parent Flower and two lovely Buds._]
+
+[Illustration: COMPATRIOTS MEETING IN THE FRENCH EXHIBITION.
+
+_Bar-maids in the English Department recognising a fellow-countryman._]
+
+"You see, the old story is told over again. We beg a little
+independence; and we are answered with ancient jests. You are quite as
+unjust, and not so amusing or clever in your injustice in England. They
+have not imitated the medical students in St. James's Hall at this
+Wauxhall. We have seen no such monstrous spectacle as a host of young
+men hooting and yelling at one poor, weak, foolish little woman in black
+pantalettes. Truly, you must be as tired of the comic view of the
+question as you are ashamed of your medical students. I know what the
+highly-educated English ladies think on the subject. They detest the
+orating, blustering, strangely-costumed advocates of woman's rights; but
+don't fall into the common error of believing that they are not earnest
+about many of the points we have been discussing here, in the midst of
+this mocking race. Depend upon it, we are not foolish enough--fond as
+you men are of crying 'foolish women!'--to unsex ourselves.
+
+"The woman who wants to get into Parliament is, to my thinking, a
+monster; and I would sentence her to stocking-mending for life. The
+creature who appears before men in black pantalettes, and other
+imitations of his dress, should be rigorously held clear of decent
+houses, until she had learned how to dress herself modestly and
+becomingly. The Missy who talked about eating her way to the bar, I
+would doom to the perpetual duty of cooking chops for hungry lawyers'
+clerks.
+
+"But you will have had enough of this.
+
+"Not a word? and you promised so many. Somebody has whispered a name to
+me. It is Charles. Is that true? I will never forgive you.
+
+                                               "Ever yours,
+                                                  "CARRIE."
+
+Emmy never answered, poor girl!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+"THE PEOPLE OF THE HOUSE."
+
+
+Lucy Rowe would have been fast friends with Carrie Cockayne during their
+stay in her aunt's house, had Mrs. Cockayne, on the one hand, permitted
+her daughter to become intimate with anything so low as "the people of
+the house," and had Mrs. Rowe, on the other, suffered her niece to
+"forget her place." But they did approach each other, by an irresistible
+affinity, and by the easy companionship of common tastes. While
+Sophonisba engaged ardently in all the doings of the house, and was a
+patient retailer of its scandals; and while Mrs. Cockayne was busy with
+her evening whist, and morning "looks at the shops"--quiet and retiring
+Theodosia managed to become seriously enamoured of the Vicomte de Gars,
+who visited Mrs. Rowe's establishment, as the unexceptionable friend of
+the Reverend Horace Mohun.
+
+The young Vicomte was a Protestant; of ancient family and limited means.
+Where the living scions of the noble stock held their land, and went
+forth over their acres from under the ancestral portcullis, was more
+than even Mrs. Rowe had been able, with all her penetrating power in
+scandal, to ascertain. But the young nobleman was Mr. Mohun's
+friend--and that was enough. There had been reverses in the family.
+Losses fall upon the noblest lines; and supposing the Count de Gars in
+the wine trade--to speak broadly, in the Gironde--this was to his
+honour. The great man struggling with the storms of fate, is a glad
+picture always to noble minds. Some day he would issue from his cellars,
+and don his knightly plume once more, and summon the vulgar intruders to
+begone from the Chateau.
+
+As for Mrs. Cockayne, to deny that she was highly contented at the
+family's intimacy with a Viscount, would be to falsify my little
+fragmentary chain of histories. She wrote to her husband that she met
+the very best society at Mrs. Rowe's, extolled the elegant manners and
+enclosed the photograph of the Vicomte de Gars, and said she really
+began to hope that she had persuaded "his lordship" to pay them a visit
+in London. "Tell Mrs. Sandhurst, my dear Cockayne, that I am sure she
+will like the Vicomte de Gars."
+
+The Vicomte de Gars was a little man, with long wristbands. Miss
+Tayleure described him as all eye-glass and shirt-front. Comic artists
+have often drawn the moon capering on spider-legs; a little filling out
+would make the Vicomte very like the caricature. He was profound--in his
+salutations, learned--in lace, witty--thanks to the _Figaro_. His
+attentions to Miss Theodosia Cockayne, and to Madame her mother, were of
+the most splendid and elaborate description. He left flowers for the
+young lady early in the morning.
+
+It was very provoking that Theodosia had consented to be betrothed to
+John Catt of Peckham.
+
+"Carrie, my dear," Mrs. Cockayne observed, having called her daughter to
+her bedroom for a good lecture, "once for all, I WILL NOT have
+you on such intimate terms with the people of the house. What on earth
+can you be thinking about? I should have thought you would show more
+pride. I am quite sure the Vicomte saw you yesterday when you were
+sitting quite familiarly with Miss Rowe in the bureau. I WILL
+NOT have it."
+
+"Mamma dear, Lucy Rowe is one of the most sensible and, at the same
+time, best informed girls I ever knew; and her sentiments are everything
+that could be desired."
+
+"I will not be answered, Carrie; mind that. I wonder you haven't more
+pride. A chit like that, who keeps the hotel books, and gives out the
+sugar."
+
+"Her father was----"
+
+"Never mind what her father was. What is she? I wonder you don't
+propose to ask her home on a visit."
+
+"She would not disgrace----"
+
+This was too much for Mrs. Cockayne. She stamped her foot, and bore down
+upon Carrie with a torrent of reasons why Miss Rowe should be held at a
+distance.
+
+"You wouldn't find Theodosia behaving in such a manner. She understands
+what's becoming. I dare say she's not so clever as you are----"
+
+"Dear mamma, this is cruel----"
+
+"Don't interrupt me. No, no; I see through most things. This Miss Howe
+is always reading. I saw her just now with some novel, I've no doubt,
+which she shouldn't read----"
+
+"It was Kingsley's----"
+
+"Hold your tongue, child. Yes, reading, and with a pen stuck behind her
+ear."
+
+"She's so very lonely: and Mrs. Howe is so very severe with her."
+
+"I have no doubt it's quite necessary; there, go and dress for the
+table d'hote, and mind what I say."
+
+Poor Lucy wondered what on earth could have happened that Carrie
+Cockayne avoided her: and what those furtive nods of the head and stolen
+smiles at her could mean? On the other hand, how had she offended Mrs.
+Cockayne? Happily, Mrs. Rowe was on Lucy's side; for it had pleased Mrs.
+Cockayne to show her social superiority by extravagant coldness and
+formality whenever she had occasion to address "the landlady." One thing
+Mrs. Cockayne admitted she could NOT understand--viz., Why Jane
+the servant took so much upon herself with her mistress; and what all
+the mystery was about a Mr. Charles, who seemed to be a dark shadow,
+kept somewhere as far as possible in the background of the house.
+
+Mrs. Rowe, on her side, was amply revenged for Mrs. Cockayne's airs of
+superiority, when Mr. Cockayne arrived in the company of Mr. John Catt,
+the betrothed love of Theodosia.
+
+"You must be mad, Mr. Cockayne," was his wife's greeting directly they
+were alone--"raving mad to bring that vulgar fellow John Catt with you.
+Didn't you get my letters?"
+
+"I did, my dear; and they brought me over, and John Catt with me. I, at
+least, intend to act an honourable part."
+
+"Perhaps you will explain yourself, Mr. Cockayne."
+
+"I have travelled from Clapham for that purpose. Who the devil is this
+Viscount de Gars, to begin with?"
+
+Mrs. Cockayne drew herself up to her full height, and looked through her
+husband--or meant to look through him--but just then he was not to be
+cowed even by Mrs. Cockayne.
+
+With provoking coolness and deliberation over the exact relative
+quantities, Mr. Cockayne mixed himself a glass of grog from his brandy
+flask; while he proceeded to inform his wife that Mr. John Catt, who had
+been engaged, with their full consent, to their daughter, had, at his
+instigation, travelled to Paris to understand what all this ridiculous
+twaddle about Viscount de Gars meant.
+
+"You will spoil everything," Mrs. Cockayne gasped, "as usual."
+
+"I don't know, madam, that I am in the habit of spoiling anything; but
+be very certain of this, that I shall not stand by and see my daughter
+make a fool of a young man of undoubted integrity and of excellent
+prospects, for the sake of one of these foreign adventurers who swarm
+wherever foolish Englishwomen wake their appearance. I beg you will say
+nothing, but let me observe for myself, and leave the young people to
+come to an understanding by themselves."
+
+In common with many Englishmen of Timothy Cockayne's and John Catt's
+class, Theodosia's father at once concluded that the poor polite little
+Vicomte de Gars was an adventurer, and that his coronet was pasteboard,
+and his shirt studs stolen. Mr. John Catt distinguished himself on his
+arrival by loud calls for bottled beer, the wearing of his hat in the
+sitting-room, and by the tobacco-fumes which he liberally diffused in
+his wake.
+
+When the little Vicomte made his accustomed appearance in the
+drawing-room, after the table d'hote, he offered the Cockayne ladies his
+profoundest bows, and was most reverential in his attitude to Mr.
+Cockayne, who on his side was red and brusque. As neither Mr. nor Mrs.
+Cockayne could speak a French word, and Mr. John Catt was not in a
+position to help them, and was, moreover, inclined to the most
+unfavourable conclusions on the French nobleman, the presentations were
+on the English side of the most awkward description. The demoiselles
+Cockayne "fell a giggling" to cover their confusion; and the party would
+have made a ridiculous figure before all the boarders, had not the
+Reverend Horace Mohun covered them with his blandness.
+
+Mr. John Catt was not well-mannered, but he was good-hearted and
+stout-hearted. He was one of those rough young gentlemen who pride
+themselves upon "having no nonsense about them." He was downright in all
+things, even in love-making. He took, therefore, a very early
+opportunity of asking his betrothed "what this all meant about Monsieur
+de Gars?" and of observing, "She had only to say the word, and he was
+ready to go."
+
+This was very brutal, and it is not in the least to be wondered at that
+the young lady resented it.
+
+I am, as the reader will have perceived, only touching now and then upon
+the histories of the people who passed through Mrs. Rowe's highly
+respectable establishment while I was in the habit of putting up there.
+This John Catt was told he was very cruel, and that he might go; Mrs.
+Cockayne resolutely refused to give up the delights and advantages of
+the society of the Vicomte de Gars; the foolish girl was--well, just as
+foolish as her mamma; and finally, in a storm that shook the
+boarding-house almost to its respectable foundations, the Cockayne
+party broke up--not before the Vicomte and Miss Theodosia Cockayne had
+had an explanation in the conservatory, and Mrs. Cockayne had invited
+"his lordship" to London.
+
+I shall pick up the threads of all this presently.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+MYSTERIOUS TRAVELLERS.
+
+
+Poor girl! she was timid, frightened. I saw at once that the man with
+whom she was, and who packed her feet up so carefully in the travelling
+rug in her state cabin, was not of her class. She could not have been
+daintier in mien and shape than she appeared. Hands round and white as
+pearls, feet as pretty as ever stole from a man's hand to the stirrup; a
+sweet wee face, that had innocence and heart in it. Country bred, I
+thought: nested in some Kentish village: a childhood amid the hops:
+familiar with buttermilk and home-baked bread.
+
+Who has not been blessed by looking upon such an English face: ruddy on
+the cheek, and white and pink upon the brow and neck: the head poised
+upon the shoulders with a wondrous delicacy? Such girls issue from
+honest Englishmen's homes to gladden honeymoon cottages, and perpetuate
+that which is virtuous and courageous in our Saxon race. She lay muffled
+in shawls, pillowed upon a carpet-bag, softened with his fur coat,
+frightened about the sea, and asking every few minutes whether we were
+near the port.
+
+He fell into conversation with me before we were clear of Folkestone
+harbour. He was a travelled man, accustomed to do his journeying
+socially, and not in the surly, self-contained, and selfish manner of
+our countrymen generally. I confess--and it is a boldness, knowing all I
+do know now--that I was drawn towards Daker at the outset. He had a
+winning manner--just that manner which puts you on a friendly footing
+with a stranger before you have passed an hour in his company. He began,
+as though it was quite natural that we should become acquainted, in the
+tone your neighbour at dinner assumes, although you are unacquainted
+with his name. We were on an exact level: gentlemen, beyond fear or
+reproach. I repeat emphatically, I liked Daker's manner, for it was easy
+and polished, and it had--which you don't often get with much
+polish--warmth. I was attracted by his many attentions to his young
+wife. Who could be near her, and not feel the chivalry in his soul warm
+to such a woman? But Daker's attentions were idiosyncrasies. While he
+was talking to me at the cabin-door, he saw the fur coat slip, and
+readjusted it. He divined when she wanted to move. He fanned her; and
+she sought his eyes incessantly with the deep pure blue of hers, and
+slaked her ever-thirsty love with long, passionate gazing. She took no
+notice of me: he was all her world.
+
+Daker was in an airy humour--a man I thought without guile or care,
+passing away from England to happy connubial times along the enchanting
+shores which the Mediterranean bathes. We fell, as fellow-travellers
+generally do, upon old stories of the ways of the world we had seen. He
+had taken wider ranges than my duties had ever entailed on me.
+
+Autumn was cooling to winter; it was early November when we met.
+
+"I have been," he said, "killing time and birds pleasantly enough in
+Sussex."
+
+Mrs. Daker overheard him, and smiled. Then we shifted carelessly, as far
+as I was concerned, away. He continued--
+
+"And now we're off on the usual tramp. My wife wants a warm winter, and
+so do I, for the matter of that."
+
+"Nice?" I asked.
+
+A very decided "no" was the answer.
+
+"I shall find some little sleepy Italian country-place, where we shall
+lay up like dormice, and just give King Frost the go-by for once. Are
+you bound south?"
+
+"Only to Paris--as prosaic a journey as any cotton-spinner could
+desire."
+
+"Always plenty to be done in Paris," Daker said; "at least I have never
+felt at a loss. But it's a bachelor's paradise."
+
+"And a wife's," I interposed.
+
+"Not a husband's, you think?" Daker asked, turning the end of his
+moustache very tight. "I agree with you."
+
+"I have no experience; but I have an opinion, which I have been at some
+pains to gather--French society spoils our simple English women."
+
+"Most decidedly," said Daker.
+
+"They are too simple and too affectionate for the artificial,
+diplomatic--shall I say heartless?--society of the salons. Their ears
+burn at first at the conversation. They are presented to people who
+would barely be tolerated in the upper circles of South Bank, St. John's
+Wood."
+
+"You are right; I know it well," said Daker, very earnestly, but
+resuming his normal air of liveliness in an instant. "It's a bad
+atmosphere, but decidedly amusing. The _esprit_ of a good salon is
+delicious--nothing short of it. I like to bathe in it: it just suits me,
+though I can't contribute much to it. We Englishmen are not alert enough
+in mind to hold our own against our nimble neighbours. We shall never
+fence, nor dance, nor rally one another as they can. We are men who
+don't know how to be children. It's a great pity!"
+
+"I am not so sure of that," was the opinion I uttered. "We should lose
+something deeper and better. We don't enjoy life--that is, the art of
+living--as they do; but we reach deeper joys."
+
+Daker smiled, and protested playfully--
+
+"We are running into a subject that would carry us far, if we would let
+it. I only know I wish I were a Frenchman with all my heart, and I'm not
+the first Englishman who has said so. Proud of one's country, and all
+that sort of thing: plucky, strong, master race of the world. I know it.
+But I have seen bitter life on that side"--pointing to the faint white
+line of Dover--"and I have enjoyed myself immensely on that"--pointing
+to the growing height of Cape Grisnez.
+
+I thought, as he spoke, that he must be an ungrateful fellow to say one
+word against the country where he had found the sweet little lady whose
+head was then pillowed upon his rough coat. I understood him afterwards.
+He started a fresh conversation, after having made a tender survey of
+the wraps and conveniences of Mrs. Daker, who followed him with the deep
+eyes as he returned to my side with his open cigar-case, to offer me a
+cheroot.
+
+"Do you know anything of Amiens?" he said. "Is it a large place--busy,
+thriving?"
+
+I gave him my impression--a ten-year old one.
+
+"Not a place a man could lose himself in, evidently," he joked; "and
+they've been mowed down rather smartly by the cholera since you were
+there."
+
+I could not quite like the tone of this; and yet what tenderness was in
+the man when he turned to his young wife! "St. Omer, Abbeville,
+Montreuil, and the rest of the places on the line, are dreary holes, I
+happen to know. You have been to Chantilly, of course?"
+
+[Illustration: A PIC-NIC AT ENGHIEN]
+
+I had lost a round sum of money in that delightful place, where our
+ambassador was wont to refresh himself after his diplomatic labours and
+ceremonials.
+
+"I know the place," Daker went on; "I know Chantilly well. It wakes up a
+curious dream of the long ago in my mind."
+
+"And Enghien?"
+
+"_Comme ma poche._" Daker knew his Enghien well--and Enghien was
+profoundly acquainted with Daker. Daker appeared to be a man not yet
+over his thirtieth year. He was fair, full-blooded, with a bright grey
+eye, a lithe shapely build, and distinguished in air and movement
+withal. There were no marks upon his face; his eyes were frank and
+direct; his speech was firm and of a cheery ring; and emotions seemed to
+come and go in him as in an unused nature. Yet his conversation, free
+as it was, and wholly unembarrassed, cast out frequent hints at a
+copious history and an eventful one, in which he had acted a part. I
+concluded he was no common man, and that, until now, the world had not
+treated him over well; albeit he had just received ample compensation
+for the past in the girlish wife who had crept to his side, and who, the
+swiftest runner might have read, loved him with all her soul. We all
+pride ourselves on our skill in reading the characters of our
+fellow-creatures. A man will admit any dulness except that which closes
+the hearts of others to him. I was convinced that I had read the
+character of Daker before we touched the quay at Boulogne: he was a man
+of fine and delicate nature, whom the world had hit; who had been cheery
+under punishment; and who had at length got his rich reward in Mrs.
+Daker. I repeat this confession, and to my cost; for it is necessary as
+part explanation of what follows.
+
+My conversation with Daker was broken by the call of a sweet
+voice--"Herbert!" We were crossing the bar at the entrance of Boulogne
+harbour. The good ship rolled heavily, and Herbert was wanted! When the
+passengers crowded to the side, pressing and jostling to effect an early
+landing, and the fishwives were scrambling from the paddles to the deck,
+I came upon Daker and his wife once more. She glanced shyly and not very
+good-humouredly at me, and seemed to say, "It was you who diverted the
+attention of my Herbert from me so long."
+
+"Good morning," Daker said, meaning that there was an end of our
+fortuitous intercourse, and that he should be just as chatty and
+familiar with any man who might happen to be in the same carriage with
+him between Boulogne and Paris. I watched him hand his wife into a
+basket phaeton, smooth her dress, arrange her little parcels, satisfy
+her as to her dressing-case, and then seat himself triumphantly at her
+side, and call gaily to the saturnine Boulounais upon the box, "Allez!"
+I confess that a pang of jealousy shot through me. It has been observed
+by La Rochefoucauld that it is astonishing how cheerfully we bear the
+ills of others; he might well have added that, on the other hand, it is
+remarkable how we fret over the happiness of our neighbours. I envied
+Daker when I saw him drive away to the station with the gentle girl at
+his side; I knew that she was nestling against him, and half her illness
+was only an excuse to get nearer to his heart. Why should I envy him?
+Could I have seen through his face into his heart at that moment I
+should have thanked God, who made me of simpler mould--a lonely, but an
+honourable man.
+
+We were on our way to Paris in due time. At Amiens, where we enjoyed the
+usual twenty minutes' rest, Daker offered me a light. I saw him making
+his way to the carriage in which his wife sat, with a basket of pears
+and some _caramels_. The bell rang, and we all hurried to our seats. I
+remarked that, at the point of starting, there was an unusual stir and
+noise on the platform. _Messieurs les voyageurs_ were not complete;
+somebody was missing from one of the carriages. The station-master and
+the guard kept up a brisk and angry conversation, which ended in an
+imperious wave of the hand to the engine-driver.
+
+The guard and the commissioner (who travels in the interest of the
+general vagrant public from London to Paris, making himself generally
+useful by the way) shrugged their shoulders and got to their places, and
+we went forward to Creil. Here the carriages were all searched
+carefully. A lady was inquiring for the gentleman. My French companions
+laughed, and answered in their native light manner; and again we were
+_en route_ for Paris. Past Chantilly and Enghien and St. Denis we flew,
+to where the low line of the fortifications warned us to dust ourselves,
+fold our newspapers, roll up our rugs, and tell one another that which
+was obvious to all--that we were in the centre of civilization once
+more.
+
+It was dark; and I was hungry, and out of humour, and impatient. I had
+fallen in with unsympathetic companions. That half-hour in the
+waiting-room, while the porters are arranging the luggage for
+examination, is trying to most tempers. I am usually free from it; but
+on this occasion I had some luggage belonging to a friend to look after.
+I was waiting sulkily.
+
+Presently the guard, the travelling commissioner, and half-a-dozen more
+in official costume, appeared, surrounding a lady, who was in deep
+distress. Had I seen a gentleman--fair, &c., &c.? I turned and beheld
+Mrs. Daker. She darted at me, and I can never forget the look which
+accompanied the question--
+
+"You were with my husband on the boat. Where is he?"
+
+He was not among the passengers who reached Paris. We telegraphed back
+to Creil, and to Amiens. No English traveller, who had missed his train,
+made answer. We questioned all the passengers in the waiting-room; one
+had seen the _blonde_ Englishman buying pears at Amiens; this was all we
+could hear. I say "we," because Mrs.
+
+[Illustration: EXCURSIONISTS & EMIGRANTS. _Sketches in Paris_]
+
+Daker at once fastened upon me: she implored my advice; she narrated all
+that had passed between her husband and herself while the train was
+waiting at Amiens. He had begged her not to stir--kind fellow that he
+was--he had insisted upon fetching fruit and sweetmeats for her. I
+calmed her fears, for they were exaggerated beyond all reason. He would
+follow in the next train; I knew what Frenchmen were, and they would not
+remark a single traveller, unless he had some strong peculiarity in his
+appearance, and her husband had a travelled air which was cosmopolitan.
+He spoke French like a Frenchman, she told me; and he had proved, on the
+boat, that he was familiar with its idioms. I begged her to get her
+luggage, go to her hotel, and leave me to watch and search. What hotel
+were they to use? She knew nothing about it. Her husband hadn't told
+her, for she was an utter stranger to Paris. I recommended the Windsor
+(I thought it prudent not to say Mrs. Rowe's); and she was a child in my
+hands. She looked even prettier in her distress than when her happy
+eyes were beaming, as I first caught sight of them, upon Herbert Daker.
+The tears trickled down her cheek; the little white hands shook like
+flower bells in the wind. While the luggage was being searched
+(fortunately she had the ticket in her reticule), I stood by and helped
+her.
+
+"But surely, madam, this is not all!" I remarked, when her two boxes had
+been lightly searched. She caught my meaning. Where was her husband's
+portmanteau?
+
+"Mr. Baker's portmanteau was left behind at Boulogne--there was some
+mistake; I don't know what exactly. I----"
+
+At this moment she marked an expression of anxiety in my face. She gave
+a sharp scream, that vibrated through the gloomy hall and startled the
+bystanders. "Was madame ill? Would she have some _eau sucree?_" She had
+fainted! and her head lay upon my arm!
+
+Unhappy little head, why stir again?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+MRS. DAKER.
+
+
+"You must come, my dear fellow. You know, when I promise you a pleasant
+evening I don't disappoint you. You'll meet everybody. You dine with me.
+_Sole Joinville_, at Philippe's--best to be had, I think--and a bird. In
+the cool, the Madrid for our coffee, and so gently back. I'll drop you
+at your door--leave you for an hour to paint the lily, and then fetch
+and take you. You shall not say me nay."
+
+I protested a little, but I was won. I had a couple of days to spend in
+Paris, and, like a man on the wing, had no particular engagements.
+
+We met, my host and I, at the _Napolitain_. He knew everybody, and was
+everybody's favourite. Cosmo Bertram, once guardsman, then fashionable
+saunterer wherever society was gayest, quietly extravagant and
+sentimentally dissipated, had, after much flitting about the sunny
+centres of the Continent, settled down to Paris and a happy place in the
+English society that has agglomerated in the west of Napoleon's capital.
+Fortunately for his "little peace of mind"--as he described a shrewd,
+worldly head--he was put down by the dowagers, after some sharp
+discussions of his antecedents, as "no match." There was the orphan
+daughter of a Baronet who had some hundred and twenty a year, and tastes
+which she hoped one day to satisfy by annexing a creature wearing a hat,
+and a pocket with ten times that sum. She had thought for a moment of
+Cosmo Bertram when she had enjoyed her first half-hour of his amusing
+rattle; but she had been quickly undeceived--Bertram could not have
+added a chicken to her broth, a pair of gloves to her toilette; so she
+shut up the thing she called a heart, for lack of some fitter name, and
+cruised again through the ominous gold rings of her glasses round the
+_salons_, and hoped the growing taste for travel might send her some one
+for annexation at last.
+
+"We're jigging on pretty much as usual," Bertram said at Philippe's.
+"Plenty of scandal and plenty of reason for it. The demand creates the
+supply--is that sound political economy?"
+
+"I am surprised that political economy, together with an intimate
+acquaintance with hydrostatics, are not exacted in these mad examination
+days from a queen's messenger; but I am not bound not to be a fool in
+political economy, so I elect to be one."
+
+"Chablis?"
+
+"Ay; and about ice?"
+
+"My dear Q. M., when you have had a headache, has it ever fallen to your
+lot to be in the company of a pretty woman?"
+
+"Else had I been one of the most neglected of men."
+
+"Well, she has fetched the Eau-de-Cologne, bathed your manly brow, and
+then blown her balmy breath over your temples. That sweet coolness, my
+dear fellow, is my idea of the proper temperature for Chablis."
+
+"It's a great bit of luck to pounce upon you, Bertram, when a man has
+only a few hours to spend in Paris, after a year or two's absence.
+Nearly upon two years have passed since I was here. Yes, November,
+'62--now August, '64."
+
+"In that time, my dear Q. M., reputations have been made and lost by the
+hundred. I have had a score of eternal friendships. You can run through
+the matrimonial gauntlet, from courtship to the Divorce Court, in that
+time. We used to grieve for years: now we weep as we travel; shed tears,
+as we cast grain, by machinery. Two years! Why, I have passed through
+half-a-dozen worlds. My bosom friend of '62 wouldn't remember me if I
+met him to-morrow. I met old Baron Desordres, who has made such a
+brilliant _fiasco_ for everybody except himself, yesterday; I knew him
+in '62 with poor little Bartle, who lent him a couple of thousands.
+Bartle died last month. In '62 Desordres and Bartle were inseparable. I
+said to the Baron yesterday, 'You know poor little Bartle is dead.' The
+Baron, picking his teeth, murmured, turning over the leaves of his
+memory, '_Bartel! Bartel!_ I remember--_un petit gros, vrai?_' and the
+leaves of the Baron's memory were turned back, and Bartle was as much
+forgotten in five minutes as the burnt end of a cigarette. I daresay his
+sisters are gone as governesses for want of the thousands the Baron ate.
+Two years! Two epochs!"
+
+"I suppose so. While the light burns, and the summer is on, the moths
+come out. Tragedy, comedy, and farce elbow each other through the rooms.
+I have seen very much myself, for bird of passage. I took part in a
+strange incident when I passed through last time."
+
+"Tell your story, and drink your Roederer, my dear Q. M."
+
+"Story! I want to get at the story. I travelled with a man and his wife
+from Folkestone to Paris. On the boat he was the most attentive of
+husbands; at the terminus he had disappeared. Poor woman in tears; fell
+into my arms, sir, by Jove!"
+
+"No story!" cried Bertram, winking at the floating air-beads in his
+glass. "No story! my good, simple Q.M. Egad! what would you have? Pray
+go on."
+
+"Go on! I've finished. I was off in the afternoon by the Marseilles
+mail. Of course, I did my utmost to find the husband. She went to the
+Windsor; I thought it would be quiet for her. I went to the police, paid
+to have inquiries kept up in all the hotels; and lastly, put her in
+communication with a good business man--Moffum, you know; and left her,
+a wreck of one of the prettiest creatures I have ever seen."
+
+"What kind of fellow was the husband? You got his name, of course?"
+
+"Daker--Herbert Daker. Man of good family. A most agreeable, taking,
+travelled companion; light and bright as----"
+
+"The light-hearted Janus of Lamb," Bertram interrupted, his words
+dancing lightly as the beads in his glass.
+
+The association of Daker with Wainwright struck me sharply. For how
+genial and accomplished a man was the criminal! a stranger
+conglomeration of graces and sins never dwelt within one human breast. I
+was started on wild speculations.
+
+"I've set you dreaming. You found no clue to a history?"
+
+"None. She had been married three months to Daker. She was a poor girl
+left alone, with a few hundreds, I apprehend. She would not say much. A
+runaway match, I concluded. Not a word about her family. When I left
+Paris, after dinner, he had made no sign. She promised to write to me to
+Constantinople. I gave her my address in town. I told her Arthur's here
+would reach me. But not a word, my dear boy. That woman had the soul of
+truth in voice and look, or I never read Eve's face yet."
+
+"Ha! ha!" Bertram laughed. "I wish I had not got beyond the risk of
+being snared by the un-gloving of a hand. You only pass through, I live
+in Paris."
+
+"Paris or London, a heart may be read, if you will only take the
+trouble. I shall never hear, in all human probability, what has become
+of Mrs. Daker, or her husband; she may be an intrigante, and he a
+card-sharper now; all I know, and will swear, is that she loved that man
+to distraction then, and it was a girl in love."
+
+"And he?"
+
+Bertram's suspicions seemed to be fixed on Daker, whom he had never
+seen; although I had described his eminently prepossessing qualities.
+
+"I can't understand why you should suspect Daker of villany, as I see
+you do, Bertram."
+
+"I tell you he was a most accomplished, prepossessing villain, my dear
+Q.M. Your upper class villains are always prepossessing. Manners are as
+necessary to them as a small hand to a pickpocket."
+
+"Sharp, but unfair--only partly true, like all sweeping generalizations.
+I think, as I hope, that the wife found the husband, and that they are
+nestling in some Italian retreat."
+
+"And never had the grace to write you a word! No, no, you say they had
+manners. That, at any rate, then, is not the solution of the mystery."
+
+Bertram was right here. Then what had become of Mrs. Daker? Daker, if
+alive, was a scoundrel, and one who had contrived to take care of
+himself. But that sweet country face! Here was a heart that might break,
+but would never harden.
+
+"Mystery it must and will remain, I suppose."
+
+"One of many," was Bertram's gay reply. "How they overload these matches
+with sulphur!"
+
+He was lighting his cigar. His phaeton was at the door. A globule of
+Chartreuse; a compliment for the _chef_, a bow to the _dame de
+comptoir_, and we were on our way to the Bois, at a brisk trot, for the
+great world had cleared off to act tragedy and comedy by the ocean
+shore, or the invalid's well, or the gambler's green baize.
+
+Bertram--one of that great and flourishing class of whom Scandal says
+"she doesn't know how they do it, or who pays for it"--albeit a bad
+match, even for Miss Tayleure, was, as I have said, in good English and
+French society, and drove his phaeton. He was saluted on his way along
+the Champs Elysees and by the lake, by many, and by some ladies who were
+still unaccountably lingering in Paris. A superb little Victoria passed.
+Bertram raised his hat.
+
+"An Irish girl," he said, "of superb beauty."
+
+At the Madrid we met a few people we knew; and, driving home, Bertram
+saluted Miss Tayleure, who was crawling round the lake with her twin
+sister, and was provoked to be recognised by a man of fashion in a hack
+vehicle in the month of August.
+
+[Illustration: BOIS DE BOULOGNE.]
+
+"Charming evening they're having," said Bertram: "taking out their
+watches every two minutes to be quite sure they shall get back within
+the hour and a half which they have made up their minds to afford.
+Beastly position!"
+
+"What! living for appearances?"
+
+"Just so; with women especially. Their dodges are extraordinary.
+Tayleure would cheapen a penny loaf, and run down the price of a box of
+lucifer matches. There's a chance for you! She would be an economical
+wife; but then, my dear fellow, she would spend all the savings on
+herself. Her virtue is like Gibraltar!"
+
+"And would be safe as unintrenched tableland, I should think."
+
+"Hang it!" Bertram handsomely interposed, "let us drop poor Tayleure.
+She believes that her hour of happiness has to be rung in yet; and she
+is always craning out of the window to catch the first silver echoes of
+the bells. The old gentlewoman is happy."
+
+"Suppose you tell me something about your Irish beauty," I suggested.
+
+"Quite a different story, my good Q.M. Wait till I get clear of this
+clumsy fellow ahead. So, so, gently. Now, Miss Trefoil; the Trefoil is a
+girl whose success I can understand perfectly. To begin with--the girl
+is educated. In the second place, she is, beyond all dispute, a
+beautiful woman. There is not another pair of violet eyes in all
+Paris--I mean in the season--to be matched with hers. Milk and
+roses--nothing more--for complexion: and _no_ paint; which makes her
+light sisters--accomplished professors of the art of _maquillage_--hate
+her. A foot!" Bertram kissed the tip of his glove, by way of
+description. "A voice that seems to make the air rich about her."
+
+"Gently, Bertram. We must be careful how we approach your queen, I see."
+
+"Not a bit of it. I am telling you just what you would hear in any of
+the clubs. She has a liberal nature, my boy, and loves nobody, that I
+can find, in particular. What bewitches me in talking to her is a sort
+of serious background. I hate a woman all surface as I hate a flat
+house. The Trefoil--queer name, isn't it?--can put a tremor in her voice
+suddenly. The Trefoil has memories--a fact: something which she doesn't
+give to the world, generous as she is. It is the shade to her abounding
+and sparkling passages of light. Only her deep art, I dare say; but
+devilish pleasant and refreshing when you get tired of laughing--gives a
+little repose to facial muscles. The Trefoil has decidedly made a
+sensation. At the races she was as popular as the winner. She must have
+got home with a chariot full of money. Of course, when she bet, she
+won--or she didn't pay. A pot of money is to be made on that system: and
+the women, bless 'em, how kindly they've taken to it!"
+
+This kind of improving discourse employed us to my gate. Bertram dropped
+me to return for "the painted lily" in an hour.
+
+I am no squeamish man, or I should have passed a wretched life. The man
+who is perpetually travelling must bear with him a pliant nature that
+will adapt itself to any society, to various codes of morals, habits of
+thought, rules of conduct, and varieties of temperament. I can make
+myself at home in most places, but least in those regions which the
+progress of civilization, or the progress of something, has established
+in every capital of Europe, and to the description of which the younger
+Dumas has devoted his genius. The atmosphere of the _demi-monde_ never
+delighted me. I see why it charms; I guess why it has become the potent
+rival of good society; the reason why men of genius, scholars,
+statesmen, princes, and all the great of the earth take pleasure in it,
+is not far to seek; silly women at home are to blame in great part. This
+new state of the body social is very much to be regretted; but I am not
+yet of those who think that good, decent society--the converse of
+honourable men with honourable women--is come or coming to an end. I am
+of the old-fashioned, who have always been better pleased and more
+diverted with the society of ladies than with that of the free graces
+who allow smoke and indulge in it, and who have wit but lack wisdom. I
+was not in high glee at the prospect of accompanying Cosmo Bertram to
+his free dancing party.
+
+They are all very much alike. The fifteen sous basket, to use Dumas'
+fine illustration, in Paris, is very like the Vienna, the Berlin, or the
+London basket. The ladies are beautiful, exquisitely dressed, vivacious,
+and, early in the evening, well-mannered. At the outset you might think
+yourself at your embassy; at the close you catch yourself hoping you
+will get away safely. Shrill voices pipe in corners of the room. "_On
+sautera!_" People are jumping with a vengeance. The paint is disturbed
+upon your partner's face. Pretty lips speak ugly words. _Honi soit qui
+mal y pense;_ but then the gentleman is between two and three wines, and
+the lady is rallying him because he has sense enough left to be a
+little modest. A couple sprawl in a waltz. A gentleman roars a toast.
+The hostess prays for less noise. An altercation breaks out in the
+antechamber. Two ladies exchange slaps on the face, and you thank madame
+for a charming evening.
+
+The next morning you are besieged, at your club, for news about
+Aspasia's reception. She did the honours _en souveraine_; but it is
+really a pity she will not be less attentive to the champagne.
+Everything would have gone off splendidly if that little _diablesse_
+Titi had not revived her feud with Fanchette. You are not surprised to
+hear that Aspasia's goods were seized this morning. The duke must have
+had more than enough of it by this time, and has, of course, discovered
+that he has been the laughing-stock of his friends for a long time past.
+Over the absinthe tripping commentary Aspasia sinks from the Chasusee
+d'Antin to the porter's lodge. A little _creve_ taps his teeth with the
+end of his cane, blinks his tired, wicked eyes, like a monkey in the
+sun, through his _pince-nez_, and opines, with a sharp relish, that
+Aspasia is destined to sweep her five stories--well.
+
+Pah! What kind of discourse is all this for born and bred gentlemen to
+hold in these days, when the portals of noble knowledge lie wide open,
+and every man may grace his humanity with some special wisdom of his
+own!
+
+Bertram, a ribbon in his buttonhole, and arrayed to justify his fame as
+one of the best-dressed men in Paris, came in haste for me.
+
+"We are late, my dear Q.M. This is not carnival time, remember. We jump
+early."
+
+The rooms were--but I cannot be at the pains of describing them. The
+reader knows what Sevres and Aubusson, St. Gobain, Barbedienne,
+Fourdinois, Jeanseline, Tahan, and the rest, can do for a first floor
+within a stone's throw of the Boulevard des Italiens. The fashion in all
+its most striking aspects is here. The presents lie thick as autumn
+leaves. The bonne says you might fill a portmanteau with madame's fans.
+Bertram is recognised by a dozen ladies at once. The lady of the house
+receives me with the lowest curtsey. No ambassadress could be more
+_gracieuse_. The toilettes are amazing. It is early, after all Bertram's
+impatience. The state is that of a duchesse for the present. Bertram
+leaves me and is lost in the crowd. The conversation is measured and
+orderly. The dancing begins, and I figure in the quadrille of honour. I
+am giving my partner--a dark-eyed, vivacious lady--an ice, when I am
+tapped upon the shoulder by Cosmo Bertram. Bertram has a lady on his
+arm. He turns to her, saying--
+
+"Permit me to present my friend to you, Madame Trefoil----"
+
+"What! Mrs. Daker!" I cried.
+
+Mrs. Daker's still sweet eyes fell upon me; and she shook my hand; and
+by her commanding calmness smothered my astonishment, so that the
+bystanders should not see it.
+
+Later in the evening she said--passing me in the crowd--"Come and see
+me."
+
+I did not--I could not--next morning, tell Lucy nor Mrs. Rowe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+AT BOULOGNE-SUR-MER.
+
+
+I had an unfortunate friend at Boulogne in the year 1865--then and many
+years before. He lived on the ramparts in the upper town; had put on
+that shabby military air, capped with a naval _couvre-chef_ (to use a
+Paris street word that is expressive, as street words often are), which
+distinguishes the British inhabitant of Boulogne-sur-mer; and was the
+companion of a group of majors and skippers, sprinkled with commercial
+men of erratic book-keeping tendencies. He had lost tone. He took me to
+his club; nothing more than a taproom, reserved to himself and men with
+whom he would not have exchanged a cigar light in London. The jokes were
+bad and flat. A laid-up captain of an old London boat--sad old rascal
+was he!--led the conversation. Who was drunk last night? How did the
+Major get the key into the lock? Who paid for Todger's last go? "My
+word," said I, to my friend, who had liquored himself out of one of the
+snuggest civil berths I know, "how you can spend your time with those
+blackguards, surpasses my comprehension." They amused him, he said. He
+must drink with them, or play whist with another set, whose cards--he
+emphatically added, giving me to understand much thereby--he did not
+like. It was only for a short time, and he would be quit of them. This
+was his day dream. My friend was always on the point of getting rid of
+Boulogne; everything was just settled; and so, buoyed with a hope that
+never staled, death caught him one summer's afternoon, in the Rue
+Siblequin, and it was the bibulous sea captain and the very shady major
+who shambled after him, when he was borne through those pretty _Petits
+Arbres_ to the English section of the cemetery. Wrecks of many happy
+families lie around him in that narrow field of rest; and passing
+through on my state errands, I have thought once or twice, what sermons
+indeed are there not in the headstones of Boulogne cemetery.
+
+I was with my poor friend in the December of 1865. I was on way home to
+pass a cheery Christmas with my own people--a luxury which was not often
+reserved for me--and he had persuaded me to give him a couple of days.
+It would have been hard to refuse Hanger, who had been gazing across
+Channel so many weary months, seeing friends off whither he might not
+follow; and wondering when he should trip down the ladder, and bustle
+with the steward in the cabin, and ask the sailors whether we shall have
+a fine passage. To see men and women and children crowding home to their
+English Christmas from every corner of Europe, and to be left behind to
+eat plum-pudding in a back parlour of an imitation British tavern, with
+an obsolete skipper, and a ruined military man, whose family blushed
+whenever his name was mentioned, was trying. Hanger protested he had no
+sentiment about Christmas, but he nearly wrung my hand off when he took
+leave of me.
+
+It was while we were sauntering along the port, pushing hard against a
+blustering northerly wind, and I was trying to get at the truth about
+Hanger's affairs, advising him at every turn to grasp the bull by the
+horns, adopt strong measures, look his creditors full in the face--the
+common counsel people give their friends, but so seldom apply in their
+own instance--that we were accosted by a man who had just landed from
+the Folkestone boat. He wanted a place--yes, a cheap place--where they
+spoke English and gave English fare. Hanger hastened to refer him to his
+own British tavern, and, turning to me, said, "Must give Cross a good
+turn--a useful fellow in an emergency."
+
+I returned with Hanger to the tavern, much against my will; but he
+insisted I should not give myself airs, but consent to be his guest to
+the extent of some bitter ale. Cross's new client was before a joint of
+cold beef, on the merits of which, combined with pickled onions, pickled
+by the identical hands of Mrs. Cross, Cross could not be prevailed upon
+to be quiet.
+
+"Not a bad bit of beef," said the stranger, helping himself to a
+prodigious slice. "Another pint of beer."
+
+Cross carried off the tankard, and returned, still muttering--"Not bad
+beef, I should think not--nor bad ale neither. Had the beef over from
+the old country."
+
+The stranger brought his fist with tremendous force upon the table, and
+roared--"That's right, landlord; that's it; stick to that."
+
+Cross, thus encouraged, would have treated the company to a copious
+dissertation on the merits of British fare, had not the company chorused
+him down with--"Now Cross is off! Cross on beef! Cross on beer!"
+
+In a furious passion Cross left the room, rowing that he would be even
+with "the captain" before the day was over. Hanger considered himself
+bound to ask the stranger whether he was satisfied with his
+recommendation.
+
+"Couldn't be better, thankee," the stranger answered; "but the landlord
+doesn't seem to know much about the place. New comer, I suppose?"
+
+"Was forty years ago," the old captain said, looking round for a laugh;
+"but he doesn't go out of the street once a month."
+
+"I asked him where Marquise was, and be hanged if he could tell me. I
+want to know particularly."
+
+The major glanced at the captain, and the captain at a third companion.
+Was somebody wanted? Who was hiding at Marquise?
+
+"Thought every fool knew that," the captain said, in the belief that he
+had made a palpable hit.
+
+"Every fool who lives in these parts, leastwise," the stranger retorted.
+"Perhaps you'll direct me?'
+
+"Now, look you here, sir," the captain was proceeding, leisurely
+emphasizing each word with a puff of tobacco smoke.
+
+But the stranger would not be patient. He changed his tone, and
+answered, fiercely--
+
+"I'm in no mind for fun or chaff. I've got d----d serious business on
+hand; and if you can tell me how to get to Marquise, tell me straight
+off, and ha' done with it--and I shall be obliged to you." With this he
+finished his second tankard of ale.
+
+Hanger, feeling some responsibility about the man he had introduced,
+approached him with marked urbanity, and offered his services--
+
+"I know Marquise and Wimille."
+
+"Wimille! that's it!" the stranger cried. "Right you are. That's my
+direction. This is business. Yes, between Marquise and Wimille."
+
+"Precisely," Hanger continued, as we proceeded towards the door.
+
+I heard the major growl between his teeth in our rear--"Hanger's got him
+well in tow."
+
+I should have been glad to show the man his way, and leave him to follow
+it; but Hanger, who could not resist an adventure, drew me aside and
+said--"We may as well drive to Marquise as anywhere else. We shall be
+back easily for the _table d'hote_." The expedition was not to my taste;
+but I yielded. The stranger was glad of our company, for the reason,
+which he bluntly explained, that we might be of some use to him; for the
+place was not exactly at Marquise nor at Wimille. We hired a carriage,
+and were soon clattering along the Calais road, muffled to our noses to
+face the icy wind.
+
+The stranger soon communicated his name, saying, "My name is Reuben
+Sharp, and I don't care who knows it. Ask who Reuben Sharp is at
+Maidstone: they'll tell you."
+
+Reuben Sharp was a respectable farmer--it was not necessary for him to
+tell us that. He was a man something over fifty: sharp eyes, round head,
+ruddy face, short hair flaked with white, which he matted over his
+forehead at intervals with a flaming bandanna; a voice built to call
+across a field or two; limbs equal to any country work or sport. In
+short, an individual as peculiar to England as her chalk cliffs. When he
+found that we knew something--and more than something--of the
+hunting-field, and that I knew his country, including Squire Lufton, to
+say nothing of the Lion at Farningham (one of the sweetest and most
+charming hostelries in all England), he took me to his heart, and told
+me his mission and his grief.
+
+"I don't know how I shall meet him," Reuben Sharp said; "I'm not quite
+certain about myself. The man I'm going to see--this Matthew
+Glendore--has done me and mine a bitter wrong. The villain brought
+dishonour on my family. I knew he was in difficulties when he came into
+our parts, and took two rooms in Mother Gaselee's cottage. But he was a
+gentleman, every inch of it, in appearance. A d--d good shot; rode well;
+and--you know what fools girls are!"
+
+I could only listen: any question might prove a most indiscreet one.
+Hanger was not quite so sensitive. "Fools!" he cried--"they are
+answerable for more mischief in the world than all the men and children,
+and the rest of the animal creation put together."
+
+"And yet no man's worth a woman's little finger, if you know what I
+mean," Reuben Sharp went on, struggling manfully to get clear expression
+for the tumult of painful feeling that was in him. "They don't know what
+the world is; you cannot make 'em understand. The best fall into the
+hands of the worst men. She was the best, and he was the worst: the
+best, that she was. And I sent him to her, where she was living like an
+honest woman, and learning to be a lady, in London."
+
+"And who is this Matthew Glendore, whom you are going to see?"
+
+"The worst of men--the basest; and he's on his death-bed! and I'm to
+forgive him! I!
+
+"Where is she? where is she, Glendore? for I know you through your
+disguise."
+
+We stared at the farmer while he raved, lit his cigar, and then, in the
+torrent of his passion, let it out again. As we dipped to the hollow in
+which Wimille lay, passing carts laden with iron ore, Sharp became more
+excited.
+
+"We cannot be far off now. He's lying at one of the iron-masters'
+houses, half a mile beyond this Wimille. Let's stop: I must have some
+brandy-and-water."
+
+Hanger joyfully fell in with this proposition, vowing that he was
+frozen, and really could not stand the cold without, unless he had
+something warm within, any longer. We alighted at the village cabaret,
+and drew near the sweet-smelling wood fire, from which the buxom
+landlady drove two old men for our convenience. I protested they should
+not be disturbed; but they went off shivering, as they begged us to do
+them the honour of taking up their post in the chimney-corner.
+
+We threw our coats off, and the grog was brought. The woman produced a
+little carafon of brandy.
+
+"Tell her to bring the bottle," Sharp shouted, impatiently. "Does she
+take us to be school girls? Let the water be boiling. Ask her--Does she
+know anything of this Matthew Glendore?"
+
+The farmer mixed himself a stiff glass of brandy-and-water, while he
+watched Hanger questioning the landlady with many bows and smiles.
+
+"Plenty of palavering," Sharp muttered; then shouted--"Does she know the
+scoundrel?"
+
+"One minute, my friend," Hanger mildly observed, meaning to convey to
+Sharp that he was asking a favour of gentlemen, not roaring his order to
+slaves. "Permit me to get the good woman's answers. Yes; she knows
+Monsieur Glendore."
+
+"Mounseer Glendore! She knows no good of him."
+
+"On the contrary," mildly pursued Hanger, sipping his grog, and nicely
+balancing it with sugar to his taste--"on the contrary, my good sir,
+she says he is a brave fellow--what she calls a _brave garcon_."
+
+"Doesn't know him then, Mounseer Glendore! I wonder how many disguises
+he has worn in his life--how many women he has trapped and ruined! Ask
+her how long he has been here?"
+
+The landlady answered--"Two years about the middle of next month."
+
+"And he has never left this since?" Sharp went on, mixing himself by
+this time a second glass of brandy-and-water.
+
+The landlady had never been a day without seeing him. He came to play
+his game of dominoes in the evening frequently. The dominoes exasperated
+the farmer. He would as soon see a man with crochet needles.
+
+"D--n him!" Sharp shouted; "just like him."
+
+I now ventured to interfere. Reuben Sharp was becoming violent with
+passion inflamed by brandy. The landlady was certain poor Monsieur
+Glendore would never rise from his bed again. I said to
+Sharp--"Whatever the wrong may be this man has done you, Mr. Sharp, pray
+remember he is dying. He is passing beyond your judgment."
+
+"Is he? Passing from my grip, is he? No--no--Herbert Daker."
+
+Sharp had sprung from his chair, and was shaking his fist in the air.
+
+"Daker! Herbert Daker!" I seized Reuben Sharp by the shoulder, and shook
+him violently. "What do you know about Herbert Daker?"
+
+Sharp turned upon me a face shattered with rage, and hissed at me. "What
+do I know about him? What do _you_ about him? Are you his friend?"
+
+"I am not: never will, nor can be," was my reply. Sharp wrung my hand
+till it felt bloodless. "Herbert Daker is Matthew Glendore--Mounseer
+Glendore. When did you meet him?"
+
+"On the Boulogne steamer, about three years ago, when he was crossing
+with his wife."
+
+"Then!" Sharp exclaimed, and again he took a draught of
+brandy-and-water.
+
+At this moment Hanger, who had been talking with the landlady, joined
+us, and whispered--"Be calm, gentlemen; this is a time for calmness.
+Glendore is at hand--in a little cottage on Monsieur Guibert's works.
+Madame says if we wish to see him alive, we had better lose no time. The
+clergyman from Boulogne arrived about an hour ago, and is with him now.
+His wife!----"
+
+"His wife!" Sharp was now a pitiable spectacle. He finished his glass,
+and caught Hanger by the collar of his coat--staring into his face to
+get at all the truth. "Glendore's wife!"
+
+Hanger was as cool as man could be. He disengaged himself deliberately
+from the farmer's grip, put the table between them, and went smoothly on
+with the further observation he had to make!
+
+"I repeat, according to the landlady, whose word we have no reason to
+doubt, his wife is with him--and his mother!"
+
+Sharp struck the table and roared that it was impossible. I stood in
+hopeless bewilderment.
+
+"Would it be decent to intrude at such a moment?"
+
+"Decent!" Sharp was frantically endeavouring to button up his coat.
+
+"D--n it, decent! Which is the way? My girl--my poor girl!"
+
+"Show him," I contrived to say to Hanger, and he took the landlady's
+directions, while I passed my arm through Reuben Sharp's. We stumbled
+and blundered along in Hanger's footsteps, round muddy corners, past
+heaps of yellow ore, Sharp muttering and cursing and gesticulating by
+the way. We came suddenly to a halt at the little green door of a
+four-roomed cottage.
+
+"Knock! knock!" Sharp shouted, pressing with his whole weight against
+the door. "Let me see her!--the villain!--Mounseer Glendore!--No, no,
+Herbert Daker!"
+
+The power of observation is at its quickest in moments of intense
+excitement. I remember looking with the utmost calmness at Sharp's face
+and figure, as he stood gasping before the door of Herbert Daker's
+lodging. It was the head of a satyr in anger.
+
+"Daker--Herbert Daker!" Sharp cried.
+
+The door was suddenly thrown open, and an English clergyman, unruffled
+and full of dignity, stood in the entrance. Sharp was a bold, untutored
+man; but he dared not force his way past the priest.
+
+"Quiet, gentlemen--be quiet. Step in--but quiet--quiet."
+
+We were in the chamber of Matthew Glendore in a moment. A lady rose from
+the bedside. Humble, and yet stately, a white face with red and swollen
+eyelids, eyes with command in them. We were uncovered, and in an instant
+wholly subdued.
+
+"My child--my girl!" Reuben Sharp moaned.
+
+The clergyman approached him, and laid his hand upon him.
+
+"Whom do you want?"
+
+"Mrs. Daker--my--"
+
+The pale lady, full of grief, advanced a step, and looking full in the
+face of Reuben Sharp, said, "I, sir, am Mrs. Daker."
+
+I had never seen that lady before.
+
+"You!" Sharp shouted, shaking with rage.
+
+But the minister firmly laid his hand upon him now, saying, "Hush! in
+the chamber of death! His mother is at his bedside; spare her."
+
+At this, a little figure with a ghastly face rose from the farther side
+of the bed.
+
+"Mrs. Rowe!" I cried.
+
+She had not the power left to scream; and her head fell heavily upon the
+pillow of the dying man.
+
+"Enough, enough!" the clergyman said with authority--closing the door of
+the chamber wherein Herbert Daker, the "Mr. Charles" of the Rue
+Millevoye, lay dead!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THE CASTAWAY.
+
+
+Cosmo Bertram was at a very low ebb. No horse. Had moved off to
+Batignolles. Had not been asked to the Embassy for a twelvemonth. When
+he ventured into the Tuileries gardens in the afternoon, it somehow
+happened that the backs of the ladies' chairs were mostly turned towards
+him. He was still dapper in appearance; but a close observer could see a
+difference. Management was perceptible in his dress. He had no watch;
+but the diamond remained on his finger--for the present; and yet society
+had nothing seriously compromising to say against him. It was rumoured
+that he had seen the interior of Clichy twice. So had Sir Ronald, who
+was now the darling of the Faubourg; but then, note the difference. Sir
+Ronald had re-issued with plenty of money--or credit, which to society
+is the same thing; while poor Bertram had stolen down the hill by back
+streets to Batignolles, where he had found a cheap nest, and whence he
+trudged to his old haunts with a foolish notion that people would
+believe his story about a flying visit to England, and accept his
+translation to Batignolles as a sanitary precaution strongly recommended
+by his physician. If society be not yet civilized enough to imitate the
+savages, who kill the old members of the community, it has studied the
+philosophy of the storks in Jutland, who get rid of their ailing, feeble
+brother storks, at the fall of the year. Bertram was a bird to be pecked
+to pieces, and driven away from the prosperous community, being no
+longer prosperous.
+
+First among the sharp peckers was Miss Tayleure, who always had her
+suspicions of Captain Bertram, although she was too good-natured to say
+anything. The seasons had circled three or four times since she had had
+the honour of being introduced to the gentleman, and yet the lady was
+waiting to see what the improved facilities for travel might bring her
+in the matrimonial line. She had, her dearest friends said, almost made
+up her mind to marry into commerce.
+
+"Poor Tayleure!" one of the attaches said, at the Cafe Anglais, over his
+Marennes oysters, after the opera; "doomed to pig-iron, I'm afraid. Must
+do it. Can't carry on much longer. Another skein of false hair this
+season, by Jove."
+
+In a society so charmingly constituted, the blows are dealt with an
+impartial hand; and it is so mercifully arranged, that he who is
+doubling his fist seldom feels the blow that is falling upon his own
+back. It was a belief which consoled the poor Baronet's orphan through
+her dreary time at the boarding-house--that, at least, she was free from
+damaging comment. Her noble head was many inches out of water; the
+conviction gave her superb confidence when she had to pass an opinion
+on her neighbour.
+
+Two old friends of Cosmo Bertram are lounging in the garden of the
+Imperial Club.
+
+"Hasn't old Tayleure got her knife into Bertram! Poor dear boy. It's all
+up with him. Great pity. Was a capital fellow."
+
+"Don't you know the secret? The old girl had designs on Bertram when he
+first turned up; and the Daker affair cast her plot to the winds. Mrs.
+Daker, you remember, was at old Tayleure's place--Rue d'Angouleme!"
+
+"A pretty business that was. But who the deuce was Daker?"
+
+"Bad egg."
+
+The threads of this story lay in a tangle--in Paris, in Boulogne, and in
+Kent! I never laboured hard to unravel them; but time took up the work,
+and I was patient. Also, I was far away from its scenes, and only passed
+through them at intervals--generally at express speed. It so happened,
+however, that I was at hand when the crisis and the close came.
+
+Mrs. Daker was living in a handsome apartment when I called upon her on
+the morrow of the ball. She wept passionately when she saw me. She
+said--"I could have sunk to the earth when I saw you with Bertram--of
+all men in the world." I could get no answers to my questions save that
+she had heard no tidings of her husband, and that she had never had the
+courage to write to her father. Plentiful tears and prayers that I would
+forget her; and never, under any temptation, let her people, should I
+come across them, know her assumed name, or her whereabouts. I pressed
+as far as I could, but she shut her heart upon me, and hurried me away,
+imploring me never to return, nor to speak about her to Cosmo Bertram.
+"He will never talk about me," she added, with something like scorn, and
+something very like disgust.
+
+I left Paris an hour or two after this interview; and when I next met
+Bertram--at Baden, I think, in the following autumn--great as my
+curiosity was, I respected Mrs. Baker's wish. He never touched upon the
+subject; and, since I could not speak, and my suspicions affected him in
+a most painful manner, I did not throw myself in his way, nor give him
+an opportunity of following me up. Besides, he was in a very noisy,
+reckless set, and was, I could perceive before I had talked to him ten
+minutes, on the way to the utter bad. When I remembered our conversation
+about Daker, his light, airy, unconcerned manner, and the consummate
+deceit which effectually conveyed to me the idea that he had never heard
+the name of Daker, I was inclined to turn upon him, and let him know I
+was not altogether in the dark. Again, at the ball, he had carried off
+the introduction to Mrs. Trefoil with masterly coolness, making me a
+second time his dupe. Had we met much we should have quarrelled
+desperately; for I recollected the innocent English face I had first
+seen on the Boulogne boat, and the unhappy woman who had implored me
+not to speak her name to him. The days follow one another and have no
+resemblance, says the proverb. I passed away from Baden, and Bertram
+passed out of my mind. I had not seen him again when I spent those
+eventful few days at Boulogne with Hanger.
+
+Another year had gone, and I had often thought over the death scene of
+Daker, and Sharp's trudges about Paris in search of his niece. I could
+not help him, for I was homeward bound at the time, and shortly
+afterwards was despatched to St. Petersburg. But I gave him letters.
+There was one hope that lingered in the gloom of this miserable story;
+perhaps Mrs. Daker had won the love of some honest man, and, emancipated
+by Daker's deceit and death, might yet spend some happy days. And then
+the figure of Cosmo Bertram would rise before me--and I knew he was not
+the man to atone a fault or sin by a sacrifice.
+
+I was in Paris again at the end of 1866. I heard nothing, save that
+Sharp had returned home, having tried in vain to find the child to whom
+he had been a father since the death of his brother. He had identified
+her as Mrs. Trefoil; he had discovered that shame had come upon her and
+him; and he had made out the nature of the relations between his niece
+and Captain Cosmo Bertram. But Captain Bertram was not in Paris; Mrs.
+Trefoil had disappeared and left no sign. So many exciting stories float
+about Paris in the course of a season, that such an event as the
+appearance of a Kentish farmer in search of Mrs. Daker, afterwards Mrs.
+Trefoil, and the connexion of Captain Bertram with her name, is food for
+a few days only. This is a very quiet humdrum story, when it is compared
+with the dramas of society, provincial and Parisian, which the _Gazette
+des Tribunaux_ is constantly presenting to its readers.
+
+When I reached Paris it was forgotten. Miss Tayleure had moved off to
+Tours--for economy some said; to break new ground, according to others.
+There had been diplomatic changes. The English society had received
+many accessions, and suffered many secessions. I went to my old haunts
+and found new faces. I was met with a burst of passionate tears by Lucy
+Rowe, end honest Jane, the servant. Mrs. Rowe was lying, with all her
+secrets and plots, in Pere Lachaise--to the grief, among others, of the
+Reverend Horace Mohun, who would hardly be comforted by Lucy's handsome
+continuance of the buttered toast and first look at the _Times_. Lucy,
+bright and good Lucy, had become queen and mistress of the
+boarding-house--albeit she had not a thimbleful of the blood of the
+Whytes of Battersea in her veins. But of the Rue Millevoye presently.
+
+I came upon Bertram by accident by the Montmartre cemetery, whither I
+had been with a friend to look at a new-made grave. As I have observed,
+Bertram had reached a very low ebb. He avoided his old thoroughfares. He
+had discovered that all the backs of the Tuileries chairs were towards
+him. Miss Tayleure had had her revenge before she left. He had heard
+that "the fellows were sorry for him," and that they were not anxious to
+see him. The very waiters in his cafe knew that evil had befallen him,
+and were less respectful than of old. No very damaging tales, as I have
+said, were told against him; but it was made evident to him that Paris
+society had had enough of him for the present, and that his comfortable
+plan would be to move off.
+
+Cosmo Bertram had moved off accordingly; and when I met him at
+Montmartre he had not been heard of for many months. I should have
+pushed on, but he would not let me. A man in misfortune disarms your
+resentment. When the friend who has been always bright and manly with
+you, approaches with a humble manner, and his eyes say to you, while he
+speaks, "Now is not the time to be hard," you give in. I parted with my
+fellow-mourner, and joined Bertram, saying coldly--"We have not met,
+Bertram, for many months--it seems years. What has happened?"
+
+The man's manner was completely changed. He talked to me with the cowed
+manner of a conscious inferior. He was abashed; as changed in voice and
+expression as in general effect.
+
+"Ruin--nothing more," he answered me.
+
+"Baden--Homburg, I suppose?"
+
+"No; tomfoolery of every kind. I'm quite broken. That friend of yours
+didn't recognise me, did he?"
+
+"Had never seen you before, I'm quite sure."
+
+I took him into a quiet cafe and ordered breakfast. His face and voice
+recalled to me all the Daker story; and I felt that I was touching
+another link in it. He avoided my eye. He grasped the bottle greedily,
+and took a deep draught. The wine warmed him, and loosed "the jesses of
+his tongue." He had a long tale to tell about himself! He disburdened
+his breast about Clichy; of all the phases of his decline from the
+fashionable man in the Bois to the shabby skulker in the _banlieue_, he
+had something to say. He had been everybody's victim. The world had been
+against him. Friends had proved themselves ungrateful, and foes had
+acted meanly. Nobody could imagine half his sufferings. While he dwelt
+on himself with all the volubility and wearying detail of a wholly
+selfish man, I was eager to catch the least clue to a history that
+interested me much more deeply than his; and in which I had good reason
+to suspect he had not borne an honourable part. The gossips had
+confirmed the fears which Mrs. Daker had created. I had picked up scraps
+here and there which I had put together.
+
+"I am obliged to keep very dark, my dear Q.M.," Bertram said at last,
+still dwelling on the inconvenience to himself. "Hardly dare to move out
+of the quarter. Disgusting bore."
+
+"A debt?" I asked.
+
+"Worse."
+
+"What then, an entanglement; the old story, petticoats?"
+
+"Precisely. To-day I ought to be anywhere but here; the old boy is over,
+or will be, in a few hours."
+
+The whole story was breaking upon me; Bertram saw it, and my manner,
+become icy to him, was closing the sources upon me. I resolved to get
+the mystery cleared up. I resumed my former manner with him, ordered
+some Burgundy, and entreated him to proceed.
+
+"You remember," he said, "your story about the girl you met travelling
+with her husband on the Boulogne boat--Mrs. Daker." His voice fell as he
+pronounced the name. "I deceived you, my dear Q. M., when I affected
+unconcern and ignorance."
+
+"I know it, Bertram," was my answer. "But that is unimportant: go on."
+
+"I met Mrs. Daker at her hotel, very soon after she arrived in Paris.
+She talked about you; and I happened to say that I knew you. We were
+friends at once."
+
+"More than friends."
+
+"I see," Bertram continued, much relieved at finding his revelation
+forestalled in its chief episodes; "I see there is not much to tell
+you. You are pretty well posted up. I cannot see why you should look so
+savage; Mrs. Daker is no relation of yours."
+
+"No!" I shouted, for I could not hold my passion--"had she been----"
+
+"You would have the right to call me to account. As it is," Bertram
+added, rising, "I decline to tell you more, and I shall wish you
+good-day."
+
+After all Bertram was right; I had no claim to urge, no wrong to
+redress. Besides, by my hastiness, I was letting the thread slip through
+my fingers.
+
+"Sit down, Bertram; you are the touchiest man alive. It is no concern of
+mine, but I have seen more than you imagine--I have seen Daker; I have
+been with Sharp."
+
+Bertram grasped my arm.
+
+"Tell me all, then; I must know all. You don't know how I have suffered,
+my dear Q. M. Tell me everything."
+
+"First let me ask you, Bertram, have you been an honourable man to Mrs.
+Daker?"
+
+"Explain yourself."
+
+"Where is she? Her uncle has broken his heart!"
+
+"All I need say is, that she is with me, and that it is I who have
+sacrificed almost my honour in keeping her with me, after----"
+
+I understood the case completely now.
+
+"You found the prey at the right moment, Bertram. Poor forsaken woman!
+You took it; you lost it; it falls into your hands again--broken unto
+death."
+
+"Unto death!" Bertram echoed.
+
+I related to him my adventure in Boulogne; and when I came to Baker's
+end, and his bigamy, Bertram exclaimed--
+
+"The villain! My dear Q. M., I loved--I do love her; she might have been
+my wife. The villain!"
+
+"You say she is with you, Bertram. Where? Can I see her?"
+
+"You cannot, she's very ill So ill, I doubt----"
+
+"And you are here, Bertram?"
+
+"Her uncle--Sharp--is with her by this time. She implored me not to be
+in the way. There would be a row, you know, and I hate rows."
+
+It was Bertram to the last. _He_ hated rows! I suddenly turned upon him
+with an idea that flashed through my mind.
+
+"Bertram, you owe this poor woman some reparation. You love her, you
+say--or have loved her."
+
+"Do love her now."
+
+"She is a free woman; indeed, poor soul, she has always been. Marry
+her--take her away--and get to some quiet place where you will be
+unknown. You will be happy with her, or I have strangely misread her."
+
+"Can't," Bertram dolefully answered. "Not a farthing."
+
+"I'll help you."
+
+Bertram grasped my hand. His difficulty was removed.
+
+I continued rapidly, "Give me your address. I'll see Sharp, and, if they
+permit me, Mrs. Daker. Let us make an effort to end this miserable
+business well. You had better remain behind till I have settled with
+Sharp."
+
+Bertram remained inert, without power of thinking or speaking, in his
+seat. I pushed him, to rouse him. "Bertram, the address--quick."
+
+"Too late, my dear Q. M.--much too late. She's dying--I am sure of it."
+
+The address was 102 in the next street to that in which we had been
+breakfasting. I hurried off, tearing myself, at last, by force from
+Bertram. I ran down the street, round the corner, looking right and left
+at the numbers as I ran. I was within a few doors of the number when I
+came with a great shock against a man, who was walking like myself
+without looking ahead. I growled and was pushing past, when an iron grip
+fell upon my shoulder. It was Reuben Sharp. He was so altered I had
+difficulty in recognising him. At that moment he looked a madman; his
+eyes were wild and savage; his lips were blue; his face was masked by
+convulsive twitches.
+
+"I was running to see you. Come back," I said.
+
+"It's no use--no use. They can ill-treat her no more. My darling Emmy!
+It's all over--all over--and you have been very kind to me."
+
+The poor man clapped his heavy hands upon me like the paws of a lion,
+and wept, as weak women and children weep.
+
+Yea, it was all over.
+
+It was on New Year's Day, 1867, I supported Reuben Sharp, following a
+hearse to the cemetery hard by. Lucy Rowe accompanied us--at my urgent
+request--and her presence served to soften and support old Reuben's
+honest Kentish heart in his desolate agony. As they lowered the coffin a
+haggard face stretched over a tomb behind us. Sharp was blinded with
+tears, and did not see it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+THE FIRST TO BE MARRIED.
+
+
+It will happen so--and here is our moral--the bonnets of Sophonisba and
+Theodosia, bewitching as they were, and archly as these young ladies
+wore them, paling every toilette of the Common, were not put aside for
+bridal veils. Carrie, who was content with silver-grey, it was who
+returned to Paris first, sitting at the side of the writer of the
+following letters, sent, it is presumed, to his bachelor friend:--
+
+
+                               "Paris, 'The Leafy Month of June.'
+
+"MY DEAR MAC,--I will be true to my promise. I will give you
+the best advice my experience may enable me to afford you. Friendship is
+a sacred thing, and I will write as your friend. Only ten days ago
+Caroline murmured those delicious sounds at the altar, which announce a
+heaven upon earth to man. I see you smile, you rogue, as you read this,
+but I repeat it--that announce a heaven upon earth to man.
+
+"Some men take a wife carelessly, as they select a dinner at their club,
+as though they were catering only to satisfy the whim of the hour.
+Others adopt all the homely philosophy of Dr. Primrose, and reflect how
+the wife will wear, and whether she have the qualities that will keep
+the house in order. Others, again, are lured into matrimony by the
+tinkling of the pianoforte, or the elaboration of a bunch of flowers
+upon a Bristol board. Remember Calfsfoot. His wife actually fiddled him
+into the church. Was there ever an uglier woman? Two of her front teeth
+were gone, and she was bald. Fortunately for her, Beauty draws us with a
+single hair, or she had not netted Calfsfoot. Now what a miserable time
+he has of it. She is a vixen. You know what fiddle-strings are made of;
+well, I'm told she supplies her own. But why should I dwell on
+infelicitous unions of this kind? It was obvious to every rational
+creature from the first--and to him most concerned--that Mrs. Calfsfoot
+would fiddle poor C. into a lunatic asylum. And if he be not there yet,
+depend upon it he's on the high road.
+
+"Between Mrs. Calfsfoot and my Caroline (you should have seen her
+hanging upon my shoulder, her auburn ringlets tickling my happy cheek,
+begging me to call her Carrie!)--between Mrs. Calfsfoot and my Carrie,
+then, what a contrast! As I sat last evening in one of the shady nooks
+of the Bois de Boulogne, watching the boats, with their coloured lights,
+floating about the lake, my Carrie's hand trembling like a caught bird
+in mine, I thought, can this sweet, amiable, innocent creature have
+anything in common with that assured, loud-voiced, pretentious Mrs.
+Calfsfoot. Calfsfoot told me that he was very happy during the
+honeymoon. But, then, people's notions of happiness vary, and I cannot
+for the life of me conceive how a man of Calfsfoot's sense--for he has
+sound common sense on most points--could have looked twice at the
+creature he took to his bosom. I have heard of people who like to nurse
+vipers; can friend C. be of this strange band? Now, I am
+happy--supremely happy, I may say, because I honestly believe my Carrie
+to be the most adorable creature on the face of God's earth. A man who
+could not be happy with her would not deserve felicity. You should see
+her at the breakfast-table, in a snow-white dress, with just a purple
+band about her dainty waist, handling the cups and saucers! The first
+time she asked me whether I would take two lumps of sugar (I could have
+taken both of them from her pretty lips, and I'll not say whether I did
+or did not), was one of those delicious moments that happen seldom,
+alas, in the chequered life of man. And then, when she comes tripping
+into the room after breakfast, in her little round hat, and, putting
+her hand upon my shoulder, asks me in the most musical of voices whether
+I have finished with my paper, and am ready for a walk, I feel ashamed
+that I have allowed myself to distract my attention even for ten minutes
+from her charming self, to read stupid leading articles and wretched
+police cases. But men are utterly without sentiment. Reading the _Times_
+in the honeymoon! I wonder how the delightful creatures can give us two
+minutes' thought. Carrie, however, seems to live only for your unworthy
+humble servant. Shall I ever be worthy of her? Shall I ever be worthy of
+the glorious sky overhead, or of the flowers at my feet? My dear Mac, I
+feel the veriest worm as I contemplate this perfect creature, who, with
+that infinite generosity which belongs to goodness and beauty, has sworn
+to love, honour, and obey me. That she loves me I know full well; that
+she obeys my lightest wish, I allow, on my knees. But how shall she
+honour me? To all this you will answer, puffing your filthy pipe the
+while, 'Tut! he has been married only ten short days!"
+
+"My dear Mac, life is not to be measured by the hour-glass. There are
+minutes that are hours, there are hours that are years, there are years
+that are centuries. Again, some men are observant, and some pay no
+better compliment to the light of day than moles. You did me the honour
+of saying one evening, when we were having a late cigar at the Trafalgar
+(we should have been in bed hours before), that you never knew a more
+quick-sighted man, nor a readier reader of the human heart than the
+individual who now addresses you. It would ill become me to say that you
+only did me justice; but permit me to remark, that having closely
+watched myself and compared myself with others, for years, I have come
+to the conclusion that I am blessed with a rapid discernment. Before
+Mrs. Flowerdew (I have written the delightful name on every corner of my
+blotting-paper) honoured me with her hand, I brought this power to bear
+on her incessantly. Under all kinds of vexatious circumstances I have
+been witness of her unassailable good temper. I have seen her wear a new
+bonnet in a shower of rain. These clumsy hands of mine have spilled
+lobster-salad upon her dress. That little wretch of a brother of hers
+has pulled her back hair down. Her sister Sophonisba has abused her.
+Still has she been mild as the dove!
+
+"Then, her common sense is astonishing. She says any woman can manage
+with three bonnets and half-a-dozen good dresses. I wanted to buy her a
+bracelet the other day, price ten guineas. 'No,' she answered; 'here is
+one at only six guineas, quite good enough for me in our station of
+life;' and the dear creature was content with it.
+
+"As for accomplishments, she may vie with any fine lady in the land.
+Last night she played me a piece from Mendelssohn, and her little hands
+danced like lightning about the keys. It was rather long, to be sure;
+but I could not help stealing from behind her and kissing the dear
+fingers when it was over.
+
+"She has written some exquisite verses, much in the style of Byron--a
+poet not easily imitated, you will remember. She has read every line of
+Thackeray; and during one of our morning walks, she proved to me, who am
+not easily moved from my point, that Carlyle has only one idea. Let me
+recommend you to peruse this writer's 'French Revolution' again, and you
+will be satisfied that my Carrie is right.
+
+"I trouble you, my dear fellow, with all these details, that you may not
+run away with the notion that Flowerdew is blindly in love. My faculties
+were never more completely about me than they are at this moment. I am
+at a loss to imagine why a man should throw his head away when he yields
+his heart. I can look dispassionately at my wife, and if she had a
+fault, I am confident that I should be the first to see it. But, _que
+voulez-vous?_ she has not yet given me the opportunity.
+
+"Marriage is a lottery. In a lottery, somebody must draw the prize; if I
+have drawn it, am I to be ashamed of my luck? No; let me manfully
+confess my good fortune, and thank my star.
+
+"I have snatched the time to write you these hurried lines, while the
+worshipped subject of them has been trying on some new--but I forgot; I
+am writing to a bachelor. I have still a few minutes; let me make use of
+them.
+
+"My dear Mac, when I return to foggy London--(I hear you have had
+terrible weather there)--you will see little or nothing of me. My Carrie
+allows me to smoke (she permits me everything), but I should be a mean
+brute if I took advantage of her boundless generosity. I smoke one cigar
+_per diem_, and no more. And as for wine--the honey of the loved one's
+lips is the true grape of the honeymoon. I must tell you that Carrie and
+I have made a solemn compact. Her head was nestled against my waistcoat
+as we made it. We are not going to live for the world, like foolish
+people whom we know. For society my little wife needs me; and I, happy
+man, shall be more than content for ever while the partner of my bosom
+deigns to solace me with her gentle voice. She has friends without
+number who will mourn her loss to society. Her dear friends the
+Barcaroles will be inconsolable; her sister Theodosia will break her
+heart. Life has its trials, however, which must be bravely borne; and
+Carrie's friends must be consoled when they learn that she is happy with
+the man of her choice. In the same way, be comforted, my dear Mac (for I
+know how warmly you regard me), when I tell you that henceforth we shall
+meet only at rare intervals. My life is bound up in that of the
+celestial being who is knitting in the window, not an arm's length from
+me.
+
+"My dear Mac, we have drank our last gin-sling together. Recal me
+affectionately to the memory of Joe Parkes, and young Square, and all
+friends of her Majesty's Pugilistic Department; and may they all
+speedily be as happy as I am. How the wretches will laugh when you tell
+them that Flowerdew has reformed his ways, and has blackened his last
+Milo; but I think, my dear fellow, I have convinced you that I write
+after cool reflection. We have taken a cottage four miles south of my
+office. A sixpenny omnibus will take me back at four o'clock daily, to
+my little haven. My Carrie is fond of a garden; and I shall find her, on
+summer afternoons, waiting at the gate for me, in her garden hat, and
+leaning upon the smartest little rake in the world. You, and Joe, and
+the Pugilistic Department fellows may laugh; but this is the happy life
+I have chalked out for myself. As I have told you, some men marry with
+their eyes shut; but I live only to congratulate myself on my sagacity.
+To think that I, of all men, should have won Caroline Cockayne!
+
+"We shall remain here for another week, when we go to Fontainebleau, and
+thence we return to London. I may write to you from our next stage; but
+if not, expect to hear from me on my return, when, if I can persuade my
+love to brave the presence of a stranger, for friendship's sake, you
+shall have a peep at our felicity.
+
+                                               "Your old friend,
+                                           "HAPPY TOM FLOWERDEW."
+
+Mr. Mac's observations on the foregoing were, no doubt, to this effect:
+"He'll come to his senses by-and-by. I shouldn't like to be compelled to
+buy all the cigars he'll smoke before he turns his toes up."
+
+
+    _Flowerdew, from Fontainebleau._
+
+                                          "Fontainebleau, July 1.
+
+"MY DEAR MAC,--I am tempted to send you a few lines from this
+wonderful place. You have heard of Fontainebleau grapes--you have tasted
+them; but you have not seen Fontainebleau. My dear Mac, when you marry
+(and, as your friend, I say, lose no time about it)--yes, when you
+marry, take the _cara sposa_ to Fontainebleau. Let her see the weeping
+rock, in that wonderful battle between granite and trees, they call the
+forest. Let her feed the fat carp with _galette_ behind the Palace in
+the company of those Normandy nurses (brown and flat as Normandy
+pippins), and their squalling basked-capped charges. Give her some of
+that delicious iced currant-water, which the dragoons who are quartered
+here appear to drink with all the relish the children show for it. Never
+fear that she will look twice at these soldiers, in their sky-blue coats
+and broad red pantaloons, and their hair cut so close that their eyes
+must have watered under the operation. Imagine dragoons drinking
+currant-water; and playing dominoes for shapeless sous, which they
+rattle incessantly in their preposterous trousers! I am meditating a
+book on the French army, in which I shall lay great stress on the above,
+I flatter myself, rather acute bit of observation. Carrie (she grows
+prettier daily) rather inclines to the idea that the moderation of these
+French dragoons is in their favour; and this is the first time I have
+found her judgment at fault. But then it would be unreasonable indeed to
+hope that on military subjects she could have that clear insight which
+she displays with such charming grace, whether we are contemplating the
+Marriage of Cana, in the Louvre, or thinking over the scenes some of
+those orange-trees in the Tuileries gardens have shed leaves upon. For,
+let me tell you, my dear Mac, there are trees there, the flowers of
+which have trembled at the silver laugh of unhappy Antoinette. Sallow
+Robespierre has rubbed against them. They were in their glory on that
+July day when the mob of blouses tasted of the cellars of a King.
+
+"But you can get in Murray all I can tell you of the wonderful place in
+which it has been my fortune to find myself with my little wife. When,
+on the morning after our arrival, I threw my bedroom window open, the
+air was, I thought, the sweetest that had ever refreshed my nostrils.
+The scene would have been perfect, had it not been for swarms of wasps
+that dashed their great bodies, barred, as Carrie said, like grooms'
+waistcoats (wasn't it clever of her?) into the room. If everything were
+not flavoured with garlic (peaches included), I should say without
+hesitation, that our _hote_ is THE _cordon bleu_ of the
+country. Omelettes, my dear Mac, as light as syllabub; wild strawberries
+frosted with the finest white sugar I ever put to my lips; coffee that
+would make a Turk dance with delight; only, in each and all of these
+dainties, there is just a pinch of garlic. But love makes light of these
+little drawbacks. Carrie has made a wry face once or twice, it is true,
+but only in the best of humours, and when the garlic was very strong
+indeed.
+
+"We had a rainy day yesterday: but we enjoyed it. We sat all the morning
+at our window, gossiping and flirting, and watching the peasants
+sauntering home from market, apparently unconscious that they were being
+drenched. I had bought Carrie a huge sugar stick (_sucre de pomme_, I
+think they call it), and she looked bewitchingly as she nibbled it, and
+then coaxingly held it to my lips. You remember my old antipathy to
+sweets; well, strange to say, I thought I had never tasted anything more
+delicious than this sugar stick; but remember, it came direct from
+Carrie's lips. Then we speculated on what our friends were doing at that
+very moment, peeped into Clapham, and we made bad guesses enough, I have
+no doubt. It ended by our agreeing that none of you were half so happy
+as we were.
+
+"In the evening the weather cleared a little, and we went out for a
+stroll. A stroll through the streets of Fontainebleau is not one of the
+pleasantest exploits in the world. I thought every moment that my wife
+(delightful word, that thrills me to the finger tips as I write it)
+would sprain an ankle, for the paving is simply a heap of round stones
+thrown out of a cart; but she stepped so nimbly and lightly, that no
+harm came to her. I wish, my dear Mac, you could hear her conversation.
+From morning till night she prattles away, hopping, skipping, and
+jumping from one subject to another, and saying something sensible or
+droll on each. You must know that Carrie has an immense fund of humour.
+Her imitations of people make me almost die with laughter. You remember
+Mrs. Calfsfoot's habit of twitching her nose and twirling her thumbs
+when she is beginning an anecdote about somebody one never saw, and
+never cared to see. Well, Carrie stopped in the middle of our rambles in
+the forest, and imitated her squeaky voice and absurd gestures to the
+life. The anecdote, concocted impromptu, was a wonderfully sustained bit
+of pure invention. On my honour, when she had finished her little
+performance, I could not help giving her a kiss for it.
+
+"You will smile, my dear Mac, at this: remembering the horror we
+mutually expressed one night at Ardbye's chambers, of female mimics. But
+there is a difference, which we do not appear to have recognised on that
+occasion, between good-natured and ill-natured mimicry. Now nothing can
+be more harmless fun than my Carrie's imitations. She never has the bad
+taste to mimic a deformity, or to burlesque a misfortune. She certainly
+said of Mrs. Blomonge (who is known to be the stoutest person in the
+parish of St. Bride's) that her head floated on her shoulders like a
+waterlily on a pond; but then the joke was irresistible, and there was
+not a touch of malice in the way the thing was said. How much there is
+in manner!
+
+"Carrie is beginning to yearn for the repose of Arcady Cottage. She
+wants to see herself mistress of a house. She longs to have to order
+dinner, inspect the dusting of the drawing-room, pour out tea from our
+own tea-pot, and work antimacassars for our chairs. I can see already
+that she will make the most perfect little housewife in the world.
+
+"There are dolts and dullards who declare that women who are witty and
+accomplished, generally make bad housewives. They are said to lie on
+sofas all day through, reading hooks they cannot understand; playing all
+kinds of tortuous music; and painting moss roses upon velvet. I am not
+an old married man (twenty days old only), but I am ready to wager, from
+what I have already seen of my Carrie, that there is not the slightest
+ground for those charges against clever women; on the contrary, it seems
+to me that your clever woman will see the duty, as well as the pleasure,
+of ordering her husband's house in a becoming manner. Why should
+empty-headed girls, who haven't a word to say for themselves, nor an
+accomplishment to their back--why should they be the superlative
+concocters of custards, and menders of shirts and stockings? Do you mean
+to tell me that a woman must be a fool to have a light hand at pastry? I
+believe these libels on clever women have been propagated by designing
+mothers who had stupid daughters on their hands. Whenever you see a
+heavy-eyed, lumpish girl, who hides herself in corners, and reddens to
+the very roots of the hair when you say a civil thing to her, you are
+sure to be told that she is the very best house-keeper in the world, and
+will make a better wife than her pretty sister. In future I shall treat
+all such excuses for ugliness and dulness as they deserve. For I say it
+boldly beforehand, ere Carrie has tried her first undercrust, she will
+be a pattern housewife--although she reads John Stuart Mill.
+
+"'Tom, darling!' sounds from the next room, and the music goes to my
+soul. Good-bye. The next from Aready Cottage. Thine,
+
+                                                  "TOM FLOWERDEW.
+
+"P.S.--We met yesterday a most charming travelling companion; and
+although, as I think I hinted in my last, I and Carrie intend to suffice
+for each other, he had so vast a fund of happy anecdote, we could not
+find it in our hearts to snub him. Besides, he began by lending me the
+day's _Galignani_."
+
+"That travelling companion," remarked shrewd Mr. Mac, "marks the
+beginning of the end of the honeymoon. I shall keep him dark when I dine
+with Papa Cockayne on Sunday."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+GATHERING A FEW THREADS.
+
+
+Is there a more melancholy place than the street in which you have
+lived; than the house, now curtainless and weather-stained, you knew
+prim, and full of happy human creatures; than the "banquet-hall
+deserted:" than the empty chair; than the bed where Death found the
+friend you loved?
+
+The Rue Millevoye is all this to me. I avoid it. If any cabman wants to
+make a short cut that way I stop him. Mrs. Rowe rests at last, in the
+same churchyard with the Whytes of Battersea: her faults forgiven; that
+dark story which troubled all her afterlife and made her son the terror
+of every hour, ended and forgotten.
+
+If hers was a sad life, even cheered by the consolations of Mr. Mohun
+given over refreshing rounds of buttered toast; what was the gloom upon
+the head of Emily Sharp, whom the child of shame (was it in revenge)
+brought to shame? I never tread the deck of a Boulogne steamer without
+thinking of her sweet, loving face; I never wait for my luggage in the
+chilly morning at the Chemin de Fer du Nord terminus, without seeing her
+agony as the deserted one.
+
+The Cockayne girls are prospering in all the comfort of maternal dignity
+in the genteel suburbs; and yet were they a patch upon forlorn Emmy
+Sharp? Miss Sophonisba, with her grand airs, in her critical letters
+from Paris--what kind of a heart had she? Miss Theodosia was a flirt of
+the vulgarest type who would have thrown up John Catt as she would throw
+away a two-button glove for a three-button pair, had not the Vicomte de
+Gars given her father to understand that he must have a very substantial
+_dot_ with her. Mademoiselle Cockayne without money was not a thing to
+be desired, according to "his lordship."
+
+John Catt was a rough diamond, as the reader has perceived, given to
+copious draughts of beer, black pipes, short sticks, prodigious
+shirt-collars, and music-halls. But he was a brave, honest, chivalrous
+lad in his coarse way. He loved Miss Theodosia Cockayne, and was
+seriously stricken when he left Paris, although he had tried to throw
+off the affair with a careless word or two. He hid his grief behind his
+bluntness; but she had no tears to hide. It was only when the Vicomte,
+after a visit to Clapham (paid much against Mr. Cockayne's will) had
+come to business in the plumpest manner, that the young lady had been
+brought to her senses by the father's observation that he was not
+prepared to buy a foreign viscount into the family on his own terms,
+and that "his lordship" would not take the young lady on her own merits,
+aroused Miss Theodosia's pride;--and with it the chances of John Catt
+revived. He took her renewed warmth for repentance after a folly. He
+said to himself, "She loved me all the time; and even the Vicomte was
+not, in the long run, proof against her affection for me." Miss
+Theodosia, having lost the new love, was fortunate enough to get on with
+the old again, and she is, I hear, reasonably happy--certainly happier
+than she deserves to be, as Mrs. John Catt.
+
+I am told she is very severe upon Emma Sharp, and wonders how her sister
+Carrie can have the creature's portrait hung up in her morning room. But
+there are a few things she no longer wonders at. Carrie speaks to Lucy
+Rowe; kisses Lucy Rowe; puts her arm round Lucy Rowe's neck; and tumbles
+her baby upon Lucy Rowe's knees; and Mrs. John Catt wonders no longer.
+Not, I suspect, because she is fonder of Lucy now than she was in the
+Rue Millevoye, but because--well, _I_ married her, as the reader, who is
+not a goose, has suspected long ago.
+
+And a little Lucy writes for me, in big round hand, her mother guiding
+the pen--
+
+
+  THE END.
+
+
+  LONDON:
+  SAVILL, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET,
+  COVENT GARDEN.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Cockaynes in Paris, by Blanchard Jerrold
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