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+Project Gutenberg EBook, Night and Morning by E. B. Lytton, Vol. 3
+#192 in our series by Edward Bulwer Lytton
+
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+Title: Night and Morning, Volume 3
+
+Author: Edward Bulwer Lytton
+
+Release Date: January 2006  [EBook #9752]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 9, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, NIGHT AND MORNING, V3 ***
+
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+[See the latest corrected and updated text and html PG Editions
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+
+                           THE WORKS
+
+                              OF
+
+                     EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
+
+                         (LORD LYTTON)
+
+
+                       NIGHT AND MORNING
+
+                           Book III
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+               "The knight of arts and industry,
+               And his achievements fair."
+     THOMSON'S _Castle of Indolence: Explanatory Verse to Canto II._
+
+In a popular and respectable, but not very fashionable quartier in Paris,
+and in the tolerably broad and effective locale of the Rue ----, there
+might be seen, at the time I now treat of, a curious-looking building,
+that jutted out semicircularly from the neighbouring shops, with plaster
+pilasters and compo ornaments.  The _virtuosi_ of the _quartier_ had
+discovered that the building was constructed in imitation of an ancient
+temple in Rome; this erection, then fresh and new, reached only to the
+_entresol_.  The pilasters were painted light green and gilded in the
+cornices, while, surmounting the architrave, were three little statues--
+one held a torch, another a bow, and a third a bag; they were therefore
+rumoured, I know not with what justice, to be the artistical
+representatives of Hymen, Cupid and Fortune.
+
+On the door was neatly engraved, on a brass plate, the following
+inscription:
+
+                  "MONSIEUR LOVE, ANGLAIS,
+                       A L'ENTRESOL."
+
+And if you had crossed the threshold and mounted the stairs, and gained
+that mysterious story inhabited by Monsieur Love, you would have seen,
+upon another door to the right, another epigraph, informing those
+interested in the inquiry that the bureau, of M. Love was open daily from
+nine in the morning to four in the afternoon.
+
+The office of M. Love--for office it was, and of a nature not
+unfrequently designated in the "_petites affiches_" of Paris--had been
+established about six months; and whether it was the popularity of the
+profession, or the shape of the shop, or the manners of M. Love himself,
+I cannot pretend to say, but certain it is that the Temple of Hymen--as
+M. Love classically termed it--had become exceedingly in vogue in the
+Faubourg St.--.  It was rumoured that no less than nine marriages in the
+immediate neighbourhood had been manufactured at this fortunate office,
+and that they had all turned out happily except one, in which the bride
+being sixty, and the bridegroom twenty-four, there had been rumours of
+domestic dissension; but as the lady had been delivered,--I mean of her
+husband, who had drowned himself in the Seine, about a month after the
+ceremony, things had turned out in the long run better than might have
+been expected, and the widow was so little discouraged; that she had been
+seen to enter the office already--a circumstance that was greatly to the
+credit of Mr. Love.
+
+Perhaps the secret of Mr. Love's success, and of the marked superiority
+of his establishment in rank and popularity over similar ones, consisted
+in the spirit and liberality with which the business was conducted.  He
+seemed resolved to destroy all formality between parties who might desire
+to draw closer to each other, and he hit upon the lucky device of a
+_table d'hote_, very well managed, and held twice a-week, and often
+followed by a _soiree dansante_; so that, if they pleased, the aspirants
+to matrimonial happiness might become acquainted without _gene_.  As he
+himself was a jolly, convivial fellow of much _savoir vivre_, it is
+astonishing how well he made these entertainments answer.  Persons who
+had not seemed to take to each other in the first distant interview grew
+extremely enamoured when the corks of the champagne--an extra of course
+in the _abonnement_--bounced against the wall.  Added to this, Mr. Love
+took great pains to know the tradesmen in his neighbourhood; and, what
+with his jokes, his appearance of easy circumstances, and the fluency
+with which he spoke the language, he became a universal favourite.  Many
+persons who were uncommonly starched in general, and who professed to
+ridicule the bureau, saw nothing improper in dining at the _table
+d'hote_.  To those who wished for secrecy he was said to be wonderfully
+discreet; but there were others who did not affect to conceal their
+discontent at the single state: for the rest, the entertainments were so
+contrived as never to shock the delicacy, while they always forwarded the
+suit.
+
+It was about eight o'clock in the evening, and Mr. Love was still seated
+at dinner, or rather at dessert, with a party of guests.  His apartments,
+though small, were somewhat gaudily painted and furnished, and his
+dining-room was decorated _a la Turque_.  The party consisted-first, of a
+rich _epicier_, a widower, Monsieur Goupille by name, an eminent man in
+the Faubourg; he was in his grand climacteric, but still _belhomme_; wore
+a very well-made _peruque_ of light auburn, with tight pantaloons, which
+contained a pair of very respectable calves; and his white neckcloth and
+his large gill were washed and got up with especial care.  Next to
+Monsieur Goupille sat a very demure and very spare young lady of about
+two-and-thirty, who was said to have saved a fortune--Heaven knows how--
+in the family of a rich English _milord_, where she had officiated as
+governess; she called herself Mademoiselle Adele de Courval, and was very
+particular about the de, and very melancholy about her ancestors.
+Monsieur Goupille generally put his finger through his _peruque_, and
+fell away a little on his left pantaloon when he spoke to Mademoiselle de
+Courval, and Mademoiselle de Courval generally pecked at her bouquet when
+she answered Monsieur Goupille.  On the other side of this young lady sat
+a fine-looking fair man--M. Sovolofski, a Pole, buttoned up to the chin,
+and rather threadbare, though uncommonly neat.  He was flanked by a
+little fat lady, who had been very pretty, and who kept a boarding-house,
+or _pension_, for the English, she herself being English, though long
+established in Paris.  Rumour said she had been gay in her youth, and
+dropped in Paris by a Russian nobleman, with a very pretty settlement,
+she and the settlement having equally expanded by time and season: she was
+called Madame Beavor.  On the other side of the table was a red-headed
+Englishman, who spoke very little French; who had been told that French
+ladies were passionately fond of light hair; and who, having L2000. of
+his own, intended to quadruple that sum by a prudent marriage.  Nobody
+knew what his family was, but his name was Higgins.  His neighbour was an
+exceedingly tall, large-boned Frenchman, with a long nose and a red
+riband, who was much seen at Frascati's, and had served under Napoleon.
+Then came another lady, extremely pretty, very _piquante_, and very gay,
+but past the _premiere jeunesse_, who ogled Mr. Love more than she did
+any of his guests: she was called Rosalie Caumartin, and was at the head
+of a large _bon-bon_ establishment; married, but her husband had gone
+four years ago to the Isle of France, and she was a little doubtful
+whether she might not be justly entitled to the privileges of a widow.
+Next to Mr. Love, in the place of honour, sat no less a person than the
+Vicomte de Vaudemont, a French gentleman, really well-born, but whose
+various excesses, added to his poverty, had not served to sustain that
+respect for his birth which he considered due to it.  He had already been
+twice married; once to an Englishwoman, who had been decoyed by the
+title; by this lady, who died in childbed, he had one son; a fact which
+he sedulously concealed from the world of Paris by keeping the unhappy
+boy--who was now some eighteen or nineteen years old--a perpetual exile
+in England.  Monsieur de Vaudemont did not wish to pass for more than
+thirty, and he considered that to produce a son of eighteen would be to
+make the lad a monster of ingratitude by giving the lie every hour to his
+own father!  In spite of this precaution the Vicomte found great
+difficulty in getting a third wife--especially as he had no actual land
+and visible income; was, not seamed, but ploughed up, with the small-pox;
+small of stature, and was considered more than _un peu bete_.  He was,
+however, a prodigious dandy, and wore a lace frill and embroidered
+waistcoat.  Mr. Love's vis-a-vis was Mr. Birnie, an Englishman, a sort of
+assistant in the establishment, with a hard, dry, parchment face, and a
+remarkable talent for silence.  The host himself was a splendid animal;
+his vast chest seemed to occupy more space at the table than any four of
+his guests, yet he was not corpulent or unwieldy; he was dressed in
+black, wore a velvet stock very high, and four gold studs glittered in
+his shirt-front; he was bald to the crown, which made his forehead appear
+singularly lofty, and what hair he had left was a little greyish and
+curled; his face was shaved smoothly, except a close-clipped mustache;
+and his eyes, though small, were bright and piercing.  Such was the
+party.
+
+"These are the best _bon-bons_ I ever ate," said Mr. Love, glancing at
+Madame Caumartin.  "My fair friends, have compassion on the table of a
+poor bachelor."
+
+"But you ought not to be a bachelor, Monsieur Lofe," replied the fair
+Rosalie, with an arch look; "you who make others marry, should set the
+example."
+
+"All in good time," answered Mr. Love, nodding; "one serves one's
+customers to so much happiness that one has none left for one's self."
+
+Here a loud explosion was heard.  Monsieur Goupille had pulled one of the
+_bon-bon_ crackers with Mademoiselle Adele.
+
+"I've got the motto!--no--Monsieur has it: I'm always unlucky," said the
+gentle Adele.
+
+The epicier solemnly unrolled the little slip of paper; the print was
+very small, and he longed to take out his spectacles, but he thought that
+would make him look old.  However, he spelled through the motto with some
+difficulty:--
+
+               "Comme elle fait soumettre un coeur,
+               En refusant son doux hommage,
+               On peut traiter la coquette en vainqueur;
+               De la beauty modeste on cherit l'esclavage."
+
+     [The coquette, who subjugates a heart, yet refuses its tender
+     homage, one may treat as a conqueror: of modest beauty we cherish
+     the slavery.]
+
+"I present it to Mademoiselle," said he, laying the motto solemnly in
+Adele's plate, upon a little mountain of chestnut-husks.
+
+"It is very pretty," said she, looking down.
+
+"It is very _a propos_," whispered the _epicier_, caressing the _peruque_
+a little too roughly in his emotion.  Mr. Love gave him a kick under the
+table, and put his finger to his own bald head, and then to his nose,
+significantly.  The intelligent _epicier_ smoothed back the irritated
+_peruque_.
+
+"Are you fond of _bon-bons_, Mademoiselle Adele?  I have a very fine
+stock at home," said Monsieur Goupille.  Mademoiselle Adele de Courval
+sighed: "_Helas_! they remind me of happier days, when I was a _petite_
+and my dear grandmamma took me in her lap and told me how she escaped the
+guillotine: she was an _emigree_, and you know her father was a marquis."
+
+The _epicier_ bowed and looked puzzled.  He did not quite see the
+connection between the _bon-bons_ and the guillotine.  "You are _triste_,
+Monsieur," observed Madame Beavor, in rather a piqued tone, to the Pole,
+who had not said a word since the _roti_.
+
+"Madame, an exile is always _triste_: I think of my _pauvre pays_."
+
+"Bah!" cried Mr. Love.  "Think that there is no exile by the side of a
+_belle dame_."
+
+The Pole smiled mournfully.
+
+"Pull it," said Madame Beavor, holding a cracker to the patriot, and
+turning away her face.
+
+"Yes, madame; I wish it were a cannon in defence of _La Pologne_."
+
+With this magniloquent aspiration, the gallant Sovolofski pulled lustily,
+and then rubbed his fingers, with a little grimace, observing that
+crackers were sometimes dangerous, and that the present combustible was
+_d'une force immense_.
+
+                    "Helas!  J'ai cru jusqu'a ce jour
+                    Pouvoir triompher de l'amour,"
+
+     [Alas!  I believed until to-day that I could triumph over love.]
+
+said Madame Beavor, reading the motto.  "What do you say to that?"
+
+"Madame, there is no triumph for _La Pologne_!"  Madame Beavor uttered a
+little peevish exclamation, and glanced in despair at her red-headed
+countryman.  "Are you, too, a great politician, sir?"  said she in
+English.
+
+"No, mem!--I'm all for the ladies."
+
+"What does he say?"  asked Madame Caumartin.
+
+"_Monsieur Higgins est tout pour les dames_."
+
+"To be sure he is," cried Mr. Love; "all the English are, especially with
+that coloured hair; a lady who likes a passionate adorer should always
+marry a man with gold-coloured hair--always.  What do _you_ say,
+Mademoiselle Adele?"
+
+"Oh, I like fair hair," said Mademoiselle, looking bashfully askew at
+Monsieur Goupille's peruque.  "Grandmamma said her papa--the marquis--
+used yellow powder: it must have been very pretty."
+
+"Rather _a la sucre d' orge_," remarked the _epicier_, smiling on the
+right side of his mouth, where his best teeth were.  Mademoiselle de
+Courval looked displeased.  "I fear you are a republican, Monsieur
+Goupille."
+
+"I, Mademoiselle.  No; I'm for the Restoration;" and again the _epicier_
+perplexed himself to discover the association of idea between
+republicanism and _sucre d'orge_.
+
+"Another glass of wine.  Come, another," said Mr. Love, stretching across
+the Vicomte to help Madame Canmartin.
+
+"Sir," said the tall Frenchman with the riband, eying the _epicier_ with
+great disdain, "you say you are for the Restoration--I am for the Empire
+--_Moi_!"
+
+"No politics!" cried Mr. Love.  "Let us adjourn to the salon."
+
+The Vicomte, who had seemed supremely _ennuye_ during this dialogue,
+plucked Mr. Love by the sleeve as he rose, and whispered petulantly,
+"I do not see any one here to suit me, Monsieur Love--none of my rank."
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_"  answered Mr. Love: "_point d' argent point de Suisse_.  I
+could introduce you to a duchess, but then the fee is high.  There's
+Mademoiselle de Courval--she dates from the Carlovingians."
+
+"She is very like a boiled sole," answered the Vicomte, with a wry face.
+"Still-what dower _has_ she?"
+
+"Forty thousand francs, and sickly," replied Mr. Love; "but she likes a
+tall man, and Monsieur Goupille is--"
+
+"Tall men are never well made," interrupted the Vicomte, angrily; and he
+drew himself aside as Mr. Love, gallantly advancing, gave his arm to
+Madame Beavor, because the Pole had, in rising, folded both his own arms
+across his breast.
+
+"Excuse me, ma'am," said Mr. Love to Madame Beavor, as they adjourned to
+the salon, "I don't think you manage that brave man well."
+
+"_Ma foi, comme il est ennuyeux avec sa Pologne_," replied Madame Beavor,
+shrugging her shoulders.
+
+"True; but he is a very fine-shaped man; and it is a comfort to think
+that one will have no rival but his country.  Trust me, and encourage him
+a little more; I think he would suit you to a T."
+
+Here the attendant engaged for the evening announced Monsieur and Madame
+Giraud; whereupon there entered a little--little couple, very fair, very
+plump, and very like each other.  This was Mr. Love's show couple--his
+decoy ducks--his last best example of match-making; they had been married
+two months out of the bureau, and were the admiration of the
+neighbourhood for their conjugal affection.  As they were now united,
+they had ceased to frequent the table d'hote; but Mr. Love often invited
+them after the dessert, _pour encourager les autres_.
+
+"My dear friends," cried Mr. Love, shaking each by the hand, "I am
+ravished to see you.  Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Monsieur and
+Madame Giraud.  the happiest couple in Christendom;--if I had done
+nothing else in my life but bring them together I should not have lived
+in vain!"
+
+The company eyed the objects of this eulogium with great attention.
+
+"Monsieur, my prayer is to deserve my _bonheur_," said Monsieur Giraud.
+
+"_Cher ange_!"  murmured Madame: and the happy pair seated themselves
+next to each other.
+
+Mr. Love, who was all for those innocent pastimes which do away with
+conventional formality and reserve, now proposed a game at "Hunt the
+Slipper," which was welcomed by the whole party, except the Pole and the
+Vicomte; though Mademoiselle Adele looked prudish, and observed to the
+_epicier_, "that Monsieur Lofe was so droll, but she should not have
+liked her _pauvre grandmaman_ to see her."
+
+The Vicomte had stationed himself opposite to Mademoiselle de Courval,
+and kept his eyes fixed on her very tenderly.
+
+"Mademoiselle, I see, does not approve of such _bourgeois_ diversions,"
+said he.
+
+"No, monsieur," said the gentle Adele.  "But I think we must sacrifice
+our own tastes to those of the company."
+
+"It is a very amiable sentiment," said the _epicier_.
+
+"It is one attributed to grandmamma's papa, the Marquis de Courval.  It
+has become quite a hackneyed remark since," said Adele.
+
+"Come, ladies," said the joyous Rosalie;  "I volunteer my slipper."
+
+"_Asseyez-vous donc_," said Madame Beavor to the Pole.  Have you no games
+of this sort in Poland?"
+
+"Madame, _La Pologne_ is no more," said the Pole.  "But with the swords
+of her brave--"
+
+"No swords here, if you please," said Mr. Love, putting his vast hands on
+the Pole's shoulder, and sinking him forcibly down into the circle now
+formed.
+
+The game proceeded with great vigour and much laughter from Rosalie, Mr.
+Love, and Madame Beavor, especially whenever the last thumped the Pole
+with the heel of the slipper.  Monsieur Giraud was always sure that
+Madame Giraud had the slipper about her, which persuasion on his part
+gave rise to many little endearments, which are always so innocent among
+married people.  The Vicomte and the _epicier_ were equally certain the
+slipper was with Mademoiselle Adele, who defended herself with much more
+energy than might have been supposed in one so gentle.  The _epicier_,
+however, grew jealous of the attentions of his noble rival, and told him
+that he _gene'_d mademoiselle; whereupon the Vicomte called him an
+_impertinent_; and the tall Frenchman, with the riband, sprang up and
+said:
+
+"Can I be of any assistance, gentlemen?"
+
+Therewith Mr. Love, the great peacemaker, interposed, and reconciling the
+rivals, proposed to change the game to _Colin Maillard-Anglice_, "Blind
+Man's Buff."  Rosalie clapped her hands, and offered herself to be
+blindfolded.  The tables and chairs were cleared away; and Madame Beaver
+pushed the Pole into Rosalie's arms, who, having felt him about the face
+for some moments, guessed him to be the tall Frenchman.  During this time
+Monsieur and Madame Giraud hid themselves behind the window-curtain.
+
+"Amuse yourself, men ami," said Madame Beaver, to the liberated Pole.
+
+"Ah, madame," sighed Monsieur Sovolofski, "how can I be gay!  All my
+property confiscated by the Emperor of Russia!  Has _La Pologne_ no
+Brutus?"
+
+"I think you are in love," said the host, clapping him on the back.
+
+"Are you quite sure," whispered the Pole to the matchmaker, that Madame
+Beavor has _vingt mille livres de rentes_?"
+
+"Not a _sous_ less."
+
+The Pole mused, and, glancing at Madame Beavor, said, "And yet, madame,
+your charming gaiety consoles me amidst all my suffering;" upon which
+Madame Beavor called him "flatterer," and rapped his knuckles with her
+fan; the latter proceeding the brave Pole did not seem to like, for he
+immediately buried his hands in his trousers' pockets.
+
+The game was now at its meridian.  Rosalie was uncommonly active, and
+flew about here and there, much to the harassment of the Pole, who
+repeatedly wiped his forehead, and observed that it was warm work, and
+put him in mind of the last sad battle for _La Pologne_.  Monsieur
+Goupille, who had lately taken lessons in dancing, and was vain of his
+agility--mounted the chairs and tables, as Rosalie approached--with
+great grace and gravity.  It so happened that, in these saltations, he
+ascended a stool near the curtain behind which Monsieur and Madame Giraud
+were ensconced.  Somewhat agitated by a slight flutter behind the folds,
+which made him fancy, on the sudden panic, that Rosalie was creeping that
+way, the _epicier_ made an abrupt pirouette, and the hook on which the
+curtains were suspended caught his left coat-tail,
+
+            "The fatal vesture left the unguarded side;"
+
+just as he turned to extricate the garment from that dilemma, Rosalie
+sprang upon him, and naturally lifting her hands to that height where she
+fancied the human face divine, took another extremity of Monsieur
+Goupille's graceful frame thus exposed, by surprise.
+
+"I don't know who this is. _Quelle drole de visage_!"  muttered Rosalie.
+
+"_Mais_, madame," faltered Monsieur Goupille, looking greatly
+disconcerted.
+
+The gentle Adele, who did not seem to relish this adventure, came to the
+relief of her wooer, and pinched Rosalie very sharply in the arm.
+
+"That's not fair.  But I will know who this is," cried Rosalie, angrily;
+"you sha'n't escape!"
+
+A sudden and universal burst of laughter roused her suspicions--she drew
+back--and exclaiming, "_Mais quelle mauvaise plaisanterie; c'est trop
+fort_!"  applied her fair hand to the place in dispute, with so hearty a
+good-will, that Monsieur Goupille uttered a dolorous cry, and sprang from
+the chair leaving the coat-tail (the cause of all his woe) suspended upon
+the hook.
+
+It was just at this moment, and in the midst of the excitement caused by
+Monsieur Goupille's misfortune, that the door opened, and the attendant
+reappeared, followed by a young man in a large cloak.
+
+The new-comer paused at the threshold, and gazed around him in evident
+surprise.
+
+"Diable!" said Mr. Love, approaching, and gazing hard at the stranger.
+"Is it possible?--You are come at last?  Welcome!"
+
+"But," said the stranger, apparently still bewildered, "there is some
+mistake; you are not--"
+
+"Yes, I am Mr. Love!--Love all the world over.  How is our friend Gregg?
+--told you to address yourself to Mr. Love,--eh?--Mum!--Ladies and
+gentlemen, an acquisition to our party.  Fine fellow, eh?--Five feet
+eleven without his shoes,--and young enough to hope to be thrice married
+before he dies.  When did you arrive?"
+
+"To-day."
+
+And thus, Philip Morton and Mr. William Gawtrey met once more.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+"Happy the man who, void of care and strife,
+In silken or in leathern purse retains
+A splendid shilling !"--The Splendid Shilling.
+
+"And wherefore should they take or care for thought,
+The unreasoning vulgar willingly obey,
+And leaving toil and poverty behind.
+Run forth by different ways, the blissful boon to find."
+WEST'S _Education_.
+
+"Poor, boy! your story interests me.  The events are romantic, but the
+moral is practical, old, everlasting--life, boy, life.  Poverty by itself
+is no such great curse; that is, if it stops short of starving.  And
+passion by itself is a noble thing, sir; but poverty and passion
+together--poverty and feeling--poverty and pride--the poverty one is not
+born to,--but falls into;--and the man who ousts you out of your
+easy-chair, kicking you with every turn he takes, as he settles himself
+more comfortably--why there's no romance in that--hard every-day life,
+sir!  Well, well:--so after your brother's letter you resigned yourself
+to that fellow Smith."
+
+"No; I gave him my money, not my soul.  I turned from his door, with a
+few shillings that he himself thrust into my hand, and walked on--I cared
+not whither--out of the town, into the fields--till night came; and then,
+just as I suddenly entered on the high-road, many miles away, the moon
+rose; and I saw, by the hedge-side, something that seemed like a corpse;
+it was an old beggar, in the last state of raggedness, disease, and
+famine.  He had laid himself down to die.  I shared with him what I had,
+and helped him to a little inn.  As he crossed the threshold, he turned
+round and blessed me.  Do you know, the moment I heard that blessing a
+stone seemed rolled away from my heart?  I said to myself, 'What then!
+even I can be of use to some one; and I am better off than that old man,
+for I have youth and health.' As these thoughts stirred in me, my limbs,
+before heavy with fatigue, grew light; a strange kind of excitement
+seized me.  I ran on gaily beneath the moonlight that smiled over the
+crisp, broad road.  I felt as if no house, not even a palace, were large
+enough for me that night.  And when, at last, wearied out, I crept into a
+wood, and laid myself down to sleep, I still murmured to myself, 'I have
+youth and health.'  But, in the morning, when I rose, I stretched out my
+arms, and missed my brother!  .  .  .  In two or three days I found
+employment with a farmer; but we quarrelled after a few weeks; for once
+he wished to strike me; and somehow or other I could work, but not serve.
+Winter had begun when we parted.--Oh, such a winter!--Then--then I knew
+what it was to be houseless.  How I lived for some months--if to live it
+can be called--it would pain you to hear, and humble me to tell.  At
+last, I found myself again in London; and one evening, not many days
+since, I resolved at last--for nothing else seemed left, and I had not
+touched food for two days--to come to you."
+
+"And why did that never occur to you before?"!
+
+"Because," said Philip, with a deep blush,--"because I trembled at the
+power over my actions and my future life that I was to give to one, whom
+I was to bless as a benefactor, yet distrust as a guide."
+
+"Well," said Love, or Gawtrey, with a singular mixture of irony and
+compassion in his voice; "and it was hunger, then, that terrified you at
+last even more than I?"
+
+"Perhaps hunger--or perhaps rather the reasoning that comes from hunger.
+I had not, I say, touched food for two days; and I was standing on that
+bridge, from which on one side you see the palace of a head of the
+Church, on the other the towers of the Abbey, within which the men I have
+read of in history lie buried.  It was a cold, frosty evening, and the
+river below looked bright with the lamps and stars.  I leaned, weak and
+sickening, against the wall of the bridge; and in one of the arched
+recesses beside me a cripple held out his hat for pence.  I envied him!--
+he had a livelihood; he was inured to it, perhaps bred to it; he had no
+shame.  By a sudden impulse, I, too, turned abruptly round--held out my
+hand to the first passenger, and started at the shrillness of my own
+voice, as it cried 'Charity.'"
+
+Gawtrey threw another log on the fire, looked complacently round the
+comfortable room, and rubbed his hands.  The young man continued,--
+
+"'You should be ashamed of yourself--I've a great mind to give you to the
+police,' was the answer, in a pert and sharp tone.  I looked up, and saw
+the livery my father's menials had worn.  I had been begging my bread
+from Robert Beaufort's lackey!  I said nothing; the man went on his
+business on tiptoe, that the mud might not splash above the soles of his
+shoes.  Then, thoughts so black that they seemed to blot out every star
+from the sky--thoughts I had often wrestled against, but to which I now
+gave myself up with a sort of mad joy--seized me: and I remembered you.
+I had still preserved the address you gave me; I went straight to the
+house.  Your friend, on naming you, received me kindly, and without
+question placed food before me--pressed on me clothing and money--
+procured me a passport--gave me your address--and now I am beneath your
+roof.  Gawtrey, I know nothing yet of the world but the dark side of it.
+I know not what to deem you--but as you alone have been kind to me, so it
+is to your kindness rather than your aid, that I now cling--your kind
+words and kind looks-yet--" he stopped short, and breathed hard.
+
+"Yet you would know more of me.  Faith, my boy, I cannot tell you more at
+this moment.  I believe, to speak fairly, I don't live exactly within the
+pale of the law.  But I'm not a villain!  I never plundered my friend and
+called it play!--I never murdered my friend and called it honour!--I
+never seduced my friend's wife and called it gallantry!"  As Gawtrey said
+this, he drew the words out, one by one, through his grinded teeth,
+paused and resumed more gaily: "I struggle with Fortune; _voila tout_!
+I am not what you seem to suppose--not exactly a swindler, certainly not
+a robber!  But, as I before told you, I am a charlatan, so is every man
+who strives to be richer or greater than he is.
+
+"I, too, want kindness as much as you do.  My bread and my cup are at your
+service.  I will try and keep you unsullied, even by the clean dirt that
+now and then sticks to me.  On the other hand, youth, my young friend,
+has no right to play the censor; and you must take me as you take the
+world, without being over-scrupulous and dainty.  My present vocation
+pays well; in fact, I am beginning to lay by.  My real name and past life
+are thoroughly unknown, and as yet unsuspected, in this quartier; for
+though I have seen much of Paris, my career hitherto has passed in other
+parts of the city;--and for the rest, own that I am well disguised!  What
+a benevolent air this bald forehead gives me--eh?  True," added Gawtrey,
+somewhat more seriously," if I saw how you could support yourself in a
+broader path of life than that in which I pick out my own way, I might
+say to you, as a gay man of fashion might say to some sober stripling--
+nay, as many a dissolute father says (or ought to say) to his son, 'It is
+no reason you should be a sinner, because I am not a saint.'  In a word,
+if you were well off in a respectable profession, you might have safer
+acquaintances than myself.  But, as it is, upon my word as a plain man,
+I don't see what you can do better."  Gawtrey made this speech with so
+much frankness and ease, that it seemed greatly to relieve the listener,
+and when he wound up with, "What say you?  In fine, my life is that of a
+great schoolboy, getting into scrapes for the fun of it, and fighting his
+way out as he best can!--Will you see how you like it?"  Philip, with a
+confiding and grateful impulse, put his hand into Gawtrey's.  The host
+shook it cordially, and, without saying another word, showed his guest
+into a little cabinet where there was a sofa-bed, and they parted for the
+night.  The new life upon which Philip Morton entered was so odd, so
+grotesque, and so amusing, that at his age it was, perhaps, natural that
+he should not be clear-sighted as to its danger.
+
+William Gawtrey was one of those men who are born to exert a certain
+influence and ascendency wherever they may be thrown; his vast strength,
+his redundant health, had a power of themselves--a moral as well as
+physical power.  He naturally possessed high animal spirits, beneath the
+surface of which, however, at times, there was visible a certain
+undercurrent of malignity and scorn.  He had evidently received a
+superior education, and could command at will the manner of a man not
+unfamiliar with a politer class of society.  From the first hour that
+Philip had seen him on the top of the coach on the R---- road, this man
+had attracted his curiosity and interest; the conversation he had heard
+in the churchyard, the obligations he owed to Gawtrey in his escape from
+the officers of justice, the time afterwards passed in his society till
+they separated at the little inn, the rough and hearty kindliness Gawtrey
+had shown him at that period, and the hospitality extended to him now,--
+all contributed to excite his fancy, and in much, indeed very much,
+entitled this singular person to his gratitude.  Morton, in a word, was
+fascinated; this man was the only friend he had made.  I have not thought
+it necessary to detail to the reader the conversations that had taken
+place between them, during that passage of Morton's life when he was
+before for some days Gawtrey's companion; yet those conversations had
+sunk deep in his mind.  He was struck, and almost awed, by the profound
+gloom which lurked under Gawtrey's broad humour--a gloom, not of
+temperament, but of knowledge.  His views of life, of human justice and
+human virtue, were (as, to be sure, is commonly the case with men who
+have had reason to quarrel with the world) dreary and despairing; and
+Morton's own experience had been so sad, that these opinions were more
+influential than they could ever have been with the happy.  However in
+this, their second reunion, there was a greater gaiety than in their
+first; and under his host's roof Morton insensibly, but rapidly,
+recovered something of the early and natural tone of his impetuous and
+ardent spirits.  Gawtrey himself was generally a boon companion; their
+society, if not select, was merry.  When their evenings were disengaged,
+Gawtrey was fond of haunting cafes and theatres, and Morton was his
+companion; Birnie (Mr. Gawtrey's partner) never accompanied them.
+Refreshed by this change of life, the very person of this young man
+regained its bloom and vigour, as a plant, removed from some choked
+atmosphere and unwholesome soil, where it had struggled for light and
+air, expands on transplanting; the graceful leaves burst from the long-
+drooping boughs, and the elastic crest springs upward to the sun in the
+glory of its young prime.  If there was still a certain fiery sternness
+in his aspect, it had ceased, at least, to be haggard and savage, it even
+suited the character of his dark and expressive features.  He might not
+have lost the something of the tiger in his fierce temper, but in the
+sleek hues and the sinewy symmetry of the frame he began to put forth
+also something of the tiger's beauty.
+
+Mr. Birnie did not sleep in the house, he went home nightly to a lodging
+at some little distance.  We have said but little about this man, for, to
+all appearance, there was little enough to say; he rarely opened his own
+mouth except to Gawtrey, with whom Philip often observed him engaged in
+whispered conferences, to which he was not admitted.  His eye, however,
+was less idle than his lips; it was not a bright eye: on the contrary, it
+was dull, and, to the unobservant, lifeless, of a pale blue, with a dim
+film over it--the eye of a vulture; but it had in it a calm, heavy,
+stealthy watchfulness, which inspired Morton with great distrust and
+aversion.  Mr. Birnie not only spoke French like a native, but all his
+habits, his gestures, his tricks of manner, were, French; not the French
+of good society, but more idiomatic, as it were, and popular.  He was not
+exactly a vulgar person, he was too silent for that, but he was evidently
+of low extraction and coarse breeding; his accomplishments were of a
+mechanical nature; he was an extraordinary arithmetician, he was a very
+skilful chemist, and kept a laboratory at his lodgings--he mended his own
+clothes and linen with incomparable neatness.  Philip suspected him of
+blacking his own shoes, but that was prejudice.  Once he found Morton
+sketching horses' heads--_pour se desennuyer_; and he made some short
+criticisms on the drawings, which showed him well acquainted with the
+art.  Philip, surprised, sought to draw him into conversation; but Birnie
+eluded the attempt, and observed that he had once been an engraver.
+
+Gawtrey himself did not seem to know much of the early life of this
+person, or at least he did not seem to like much to talk of him.  The
+footstep of Mr. Birnie was gliding, noiseless, and catlike; he had no
+sociality in him--enjoyed nothing--drank hard--but was never drunk.
+Somehow or other, he had evidently over Gawtrey an influence little less
+than that which Gawtrey had over Morton, but it was of a different
+nature: Morton had conceived an extraordinary affection for his friend,
+while Gawtrey seemed secretly to dislike Birnie, and to be glad whenever
+he quitted his presence.  It was, in truth, Gawtrey's custom when Birnie
+retired for the night, to rub his hands, bring out the punchbowl, squeeze
+the lemons, and while Philip, stretched on the sofa, listened to him,
+between sleep and waking, to talk on for the hour together, often till
+daybreak, with that bizarre mixture of knavery and feeling, drollery and
+sentiment, which made the dangerous charm of his society.
+
+One evening as they thus sat together, Morton, after listening for some
+time to his companion's comments on men and things, said abruptly,--
+
+"Gawtrey! there is so much in you that puzzles me, so much which I find
+it difficult to reconcile with your present pursuits, that, if I ask no
+indiscreet confidence, I should like greatly to hear some account of your
+early life.  It would please me to compare it with my own; when I am
+your age, I will then look back and see what I owed to your example."
+
+"My early life! well--you shall hear it.  It will put you on your guard,
+I hope, betimes against the two rocks of youth--love and friendship."
+Then, while squeezing the lemon into his favourite beverage, which Morton
+observed he made stronger than usual, Gawtrey thus commenced:
+
+
+                  THE HISTORY OF A GOOD-FOR-NOTHING.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+               "All his success must on himself depend,
+               He had no money, counsel, guide, or friend;
+               With spirit high John learned the world to brave,
+               And in both senses was a ready knave."--CRABBE.
+
+"My grandfather sold walking-sticks and umbrellas in the little passage
+by Exeter 'Change; he was a man of genius and speculation.  As soon as he
+had scraped together a little money, he lent it to some poor devil with a
+hard landlord, at twenty per cent., and made him take half the loan in
+umbrellas or bamboos.  By these means he got his foot into the ladder,
+and climbed upward and upward, till, at the age of forty, he had amassed
+L5,000.  He then looked about for a wife.  An honest trader in the
+Strand, who dealt largely in cotton prints, possessed an only daughter;
+this young lady had a legacy, from a great-aunt, of L3,220., with a small
+street in St. Giles's, where the tenants paid weekly (all thieves or
+rogues-all, so their rents were sure).  Now my grandfather conceived a
+great friendship for the father of this young lady; gave him a hint as to
+a new pattern in spotted cottons; enticed him to take out a patent, and
+lent him L700. for the speculation; applied for the money at the very
+moment cottons were at their worst, and got the daughter instead of the
+money,--by which exchange, you see, he won L2,520., to say nothing of the
+young lady.  My grandfather then entered into partnership with the worthy
+trader, carried on the patent with spirit, and begat two sons.  As he
+grew older, ambition seized him; his sons should be gentlemen--one was
+sent to College, the other put into a marching regiment.  My grandfather
+meant to die worth a plum; but a fever he caught in visiting his tenants
+in St. Giles's prevented him, and he only left L20,000. equally divided
+between the sons.  My father, the College man" (here Gawtrey paused a
+moment, took a large draught of the punch, and resumed with a visible
+effort)--"my father, the College man, was a person of rigid principles--
+bore an excellent character--had a great regard for the world.  He
+married early and respectably.  I am the sole fruit of that union; he
+lived soberly, his temper was harsh and morose, his home gloomy; he was a
+very severe father, and my mother died before I was ten years old.  When
+I was fourteen, a little old Frenchman came to lodge with us; he had been
+persecuted under the old _regime_ for being a philosopher; he filled my
+head with odd crotchets which, more or less, have stuck there ever since.
+At eighteen I was sent to St. John's College, Cambridge.  My father was
+rich enough to have let me go up in the higher rank of a pensioner, but
+he had lately grown avaricious; he thought that I was extravagant; he
+made me a sizar, perhaps to spite me.  Then, for the first time, those
+inequalities in life which the Frenchman had dinned into my ears met me
+practically.  A sizar! another name for a dog!  I had such strength,
+health, and spirits, that I had more life in my little finger than half
+the fellow-commoners--genteel, spindle-shanked striplings, who might have
+passed for a collection of my grandfather's walking-canes--bad in their
+whole bodies.  And I often think," continued Gawtrey, "that health and
+spirits have a great deal to answer for!  When we are young we so far
+resemble savages who are Nature's young people--that we attach prodigious
+value to physical advantages.  My feats of strength and activity--the
+clods I thrashed--and the railings I leaped--and the boat-races I won--
+are they not written in the chronicle of St. John's?  These achievements
+inspired me with an extravagant sense of my own superiority; I could not
+but despise the rich fellows whom I could have blown down with a sneeze.
+Nevertheless, there was an impassable barrier between me and them--a
+sizar was not a proper associate for the favourites of fortune!  But
+there was one young man, a year younger myself, of high birth, and the
+heir to considerable wealth, who did not regard me with the same
+supercilious insolence as the rest; his very rank, perhaps, made him
+indifferent to the little conventional formalities which influence
+persons who cannot play at football with this round world; he was the
+wildest youngster in the university--lamp-breaker--tandem-driver--mob-
+fighter--a very devil in short--clever, but not in the reading line--
+small and slight, but brave as a lion.  Congenial habits made us
+intimate, and I loved him like a brother--better than a brother--as a dog
+loves his master.  In all our rows I covered him with my body.  He had
+but to say to me, 'Leap into the water,' and I would not have stopped to
+pull off my coat.  In short, I loved him as a proud man loves one who
+stands betwixt him and contempt,--as an affectionate man loves one who
+stands between him and solitude.  To cut short a long story: my friend,
+one dark night, committed an outrage against discipline, of the most
+unpardonable character.  There was a sanctimonious, grave old fellow of
+the College, crawling home from a tea-party; my friend and another of his
+set seized, blindfolded, and handcuffed this poor wretch, carried him,
+_vi et armis_, back to the house of an old maid whom he had been courting
+for the last ten years, fastened his pigtail (he wore a long one) to the
+knocker, and so left him.  You may imagine the infernal hubbub which his
+attempts to extricate himself caused in the whole street; the old maid's
+old maidservant, after emptying on his head all the vessels of wrath she
+could lay her hand to, screamed, 'Rape and murder!'  The proctor and his
+bull-dogs came up, released the prisoner, and gave chase to the
+delinquents, who had incautiously remained near to enjoy the sport.  The
+night was dark and they reached the College in safety, but they had been
+tracked to the gates.  For this offence I was expelled."
+
+"Why, you were not concerned in it?"  said Philip.
+
+"No; but I was suspected and accused.  I could have got off by betraying
+the true culprits, but my friend's father was in public life--a stern,
+haughty old statesman; my friend was mortally afraid of him--the only
+person he was afraid of.  If I had too much insisted on my innocence, I
+might have set inquiry on the right track.  In fine, I was happy to prove
+my friendship for him.  He shook me most tenderly by the hand on parting,
+and promised never to forget my generous devotion.  I went home in
+disgrace: I need not tell you what my father said to me: I do not think
+he ever loved me from that hour.  Shortly after this my uncle, George
+Gawtrey, the captain, returned from abroad; he took a great fancy to me,
+and I left my father's house (which had grown insufferable) to live with
+him.  He had been a very handsome man--a gay spendthrift; he had got
+through his fortune, and now lived on his wits--he was a professed
+gambler.  His easy temper, his lively humour, fascinated me; he knew the
+world well; and, like all gamblers, was generous when the dice were
+lucky,--which, to tell you the truth, they generally were, with a man who
+had no scruples.  Though his practices were a little suspected, they had
+never been discovered.  We lived in an elegant apartment, mixed
+familiarly with men of various ranks, and enjoyed life extremely.  I
+brushed off my college rust, and conceived a taste for expense: I knew
+not why it was, but in my new existence every one was kind to me; and I
+had spirits that made me welcome everywhere.  I was a scamp--but a
+frolicsome scamp--and that is always a popular character.  As yet I was
+not dishonest, but saw dishonesty round me, and it seemed a very
+pleasant, jolly mode of making money; and now I again fell into contact
+with the young heir.  My college friend was as wild in London as he had
+been at Cambridge; but the boy-ruffian, though not then twenty years of
+age, had grown into the man-villain."
+
+Here Gawtrey paused, and frowned darkly.
+
+"He had great natural parts, this young man-much wit, readiness, and
+cunning, and he became very intimate with my uncle.  He learned of him
+how to play the dice, and a pack the cards--he paid him L1,000. for the
+knowledge!"
+
+"How! a cheat?  You said he was rich."
+
+"His father was very rich, and he had a liberal allowance, but he was
+very extravagant; and rich men love gain as well as poor men do!  He had
+no excuse but the grand excuse of all vice--SELFISHNESS.  Young as he was
+he became the fashion, and he fattened upon the plunder of his equals,
+who desired the honour of his acquaintance.  Now, I had seen my uncle
+cheat, but I had never imitated his example; when the man of fashion
+cheated, and made a jest of his earnings and my scruples--when I saw him
+courted, flattered, honoured, and his acts unsuspected, because his
+connections embraced half the peerage, the temptation grew strong, but I
+still resisted it.  However, my father always said I was born to be a
+good-for-nothing, and I could not escape my destiny.  And now I suddenly
+fell in love--you don't know what that is yet--so much the better for
+you.  The girl was beautiful, and I thought she loved me--perhaps she
+did--but I was too poor, so her friends said, for marriage.  We courted,
+as the saying is, in the meanwhile.  It was my love for her, my wish to
+deserve her, that made me iron against my friend's example.  I was fool
+enough to speak to him of Mary--to present him to her--this ended in her
+seduction."  (Again Gawtrey paused, and breathed hard.)  "I discovered
+the treachery--I called out the seducer-he sneered, and refused to fight
+the low-born adventurer.  I struck him to the earth--and then we fought.
+I was satisfied by a ball through my side! but he," added Gawtrey,
+rubbing his hands, and with a vindictive chuckle,--"He was a cripple for
+life!  When I recovered I found that my foe, whose sick-chamber was
+crowded with friends and comforters, had taken advantage of my illness to
+ruin my reputation.  He, the swindler, accused me of his own crime: the
+equivocal character of my uncle confirmed the charge.  Him, his own high-
+born pupil was enabled to unmask, and his disgrace was visited on me.  I
+left my bed to find my uncle (all disguise over) an avowed partner in a
+hell, and myself blasted alike in name, love, past, and future.  And
+then, Philip--then I commenced that career which I have trodden since--
+the prince of good-fellows and good-for-nothings, with ten thousand
+aliases, and as many strings to my bow.  Society cast me off when I was
+innocent.  Egad, I have had my revenge on society since!--Ho! ho! ho!"
+
+The laugh of this man had in it a moral infection.  There was a sort of
+glorying in its deep tone; it was not the hollow hysteric of shame and
+despair--it spoke a sanguine joyousness!  William Gawtrey was a man whose
+animal constitution had led him to take animal pleasure in all things: he
+had enjoyed the poisons he had lived on.
+
+"But your father--surely your father--"
+
+"My father," interrupted Gawtrey, "refused me the money (but a small sum)
+that, once struck with the strong impulse of a sincere penitence, I
+begged of him, to enable me to get an honest living in a humble trade.
+His refusal soured the penitence--it gave me an excuse for my career
+and conscience grapples to an excuse as a drowning wretch to a straw.
+And yet this hard father--this cautious, moral, money-loving man, three
+months afterwards, suffered a rogue--almost a stranger--to decoy him into
+a speculation that promised to bring him fifty per cent.  He invested in
+the traffic of usury what had sufficed to save a hundred such as I am
+from perdition, and he lost it all.  It was nearly his whole fortune; but
+he lives and has his luxuries still: be cannot speculate, but he can
+save: he cared not if I starved, for he finds an hourly happiness in
+starving himself."
+
+"And your friend," said Philip, after a pause in which his young
+sympathies went dangerously with the excuses for his benefactor; "what
+has become of him, and the poor girl?"
+
+"My friend became a great man; he succeeded to his father's peerage--a
+very ancient one--and to a splendid income.  He is living still.  Well,
+you shall hear about the poor girl!  We are told of victims of seduction
+dying in a workhouse or on a dunghill, penitent, broken-hearted, and
+uncommonly ragged and sentimental.  It may be a frequent case, but it is
+not the worst.  It is worse, I think, when the fair, penitent, innocent,
+credulous dupe becomes in her turn the deceiver--when she catches vice
+from the breath upon which she has hung--when she ripens, and mellows,
+and rots away into painted, blazing, staring, wholesale harlotry--when,
+in her turn, she ruins warm youth with false smiles and long bills--and
+when worse--worse than all--when she has children, daughters perhaps,
+brought up to the same trade, cooped, plumper, for some hoary lecher,
+without a heart in their bosoms, unless a balance for weighing money may
+be called a heart.  Mary became this; and I wish to Heaven she had rather
+died in an hospital!  Her lover polluted her soul as well as her beauty:
+he found her another lover when he was tired of her.  When she was at the
+age of thirty-six I met her in Paris, with a daughter of sixteen.  I was
+then flush with money, frequenting salons, and playing the part of a fine
+gentleman.  She did not know me at first; and she sought my acquaintance.
+For you must know, my young friend," said Gawtrey, abruptly breaking off
+the thread of his narrative, "that I am not altogether the low dog you
+might suppose in seeing me here.  At Paris--ah! you don't know Paris--
+there is a glorious ferment in society in which the dregs are often
+uppermost!  I came here at the Peace, and here have I resided the greater
+part of each year ever since.  The vast masses of energy and life, broken
+up by the great thaw of the Imperial system, floating along the tide, are
+terrible icebergs for the vessel of the state.  Some think Napoleonism
+over--its effects are only begun.  Society is shattered from one end to
+the other, and I laugh at the little rivets by which they think to keep
+it together.
+
+     [This passage was written at a period when the dynasty of Louis
+     Philippe seemed the most assured, and Napoleonism was indeed
+     considered extinct.]
+
+"But to return.  Paris, I say, is the atmosphere for adventurers--new
+faces and new men are so common here that they excite no impertinent
+inquiry, it is so usual to see fortunes made in a day and spent in a
+month; except in certain circles, there is no walking round a man's
+character to spy out where it wants piercing!  Some lean Greek poet put
+lead in his pockets to prevent being blown away;--put gold in your
+pockets, and at Paris you may defy the sharpest wind in the world,--yea,
+even the breath of that old AEolus--Scandal!  Well, then, I had money--no
+matter how I came by it--and health, and gaiety; and I was well received
+in the coteries that exist in all capitals, but mostly in France, where
+pleasure is the cement that joins many discordant atoms.  Here, I say, I
+met Mary and her daughter, by my old friend--the daughter, still
+innocent, but, sacra! in what an element of vice!  We knew each other's
+secrets, Mary and I, and kept them: she thought me a greater knave than I
+was, and she intrusted to me her intention of selling her child to a rich
+English marquis.  On the other hand, the poor girl confided to me her
+horror of the scenes she witnessed and the snares that surrounded her.
+What do you think preserved her pure from all danger?  Bah! you will
+never guess!  It was partly because, if example corrupts, it as often
+deters, but principally because she loved.  A girl who loves one man
+purely has about her an amulet which defies the advances of the
+profligate.  There was a handsome young Italian, an artist, who
+frequented the house--he was the man.  I had to choose, then, between
+mother and daughter: I chose the last."
+
+Philip seized hold of Gawtrey's hand, grasped it warmly, and the good-
+for-nothing continued--
+
+"Do you know, that I loved that girl as well as I had ever loved the
+mother, though in another way; she was what I fancied the mother to be;
+still more fair, more graceful, more winning, with a heart as full of
+love as her mother's had been of vanity.  I loved that child as if she
+had been my own daughter.  I induced her to leave her mother's house--I
+secreted her--I saw her married to the man she loved--I gave her away,
+and saw no more of her for several months."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I spent them in prison!  The young people could not live upon
+air; I gave them what I had, and in order to do more I did something
+which displeased the police; I narrowly escaped that time; but I am
+popular--very popular, and with plenty of witnesses, not over-scrupulous,
+I got off!  When I was released, I would not go to see them, for my
+clothes were ragged: the police still watched me, and I would not do them
+harm in the world!  Ay, poor wretches! they struggled so hard: he could
+got very little by his art, though, I believe, he was a cleverish fellow
+at it, and the money I had given them could not last for ever.  They
+lived near the Champs Elysees, and at night I used to steal out and look
+at them through the window.  They seemed so happy, and so handsome, and
+so good; but he looked sickly, and I saw that, like all Italians, he
+languished for his own warm climate.  But man is born to act as well as
+to contemplate," pursued Gawtrey, changing his tone into the allegro;
+"and I was soon driven into my old ways, though in a lower line.  I went
+to London, just to give my reputation an airing, and when I returned,
+pretty flush again, the poor Italian was dead, and Fanny was a widow,
+with one boy, and enceinte with a second child.  So then I sought her
+again, for her mother had found her out, and was at her with her devilish
+kindness; but Heaven was merciful, and took her away from both of us: she
+died in giving birth to a girl, and her last words were uttered to me,
+imploring me--the adventurer--the charlatan--the good-for-nothing--to
+keep her child from the clutches of her own mother.  Well, sir, I did
+what I could for both the children; but the boy was consumptive, like his
+father, and sleeps at Pere-la-Chaise.  The girl is here--you shall see
+her some day.  Poor Fanny! if ever the devil will let me, I shall reform
+for her sake.  Meanwhile, for her sake I must get grist for the mill.  My
+story is concluded, for I need not tell you all of my pranks--of all the
+parts I have played in life.  I have never been a murderer, or a burglar,
+or a highway robber, or what the law calls a thief.  I can only say, as I
+said before, I have lived upon my wits, and they have been a tolerable
+capital on the whole.  I have been an actor, a money-lender, a physician,
+a professor of animal magnetism (that was lucrative till it went out of
+fashion, perhaps it will come in again); I have been a lawyer, a house-
+agent, a dealer in curiosities and china; I have kept a hotel; I have set
+up a weekly newspaper; I have seen almost every city in Europe, and made
+acquaintance with some of its gaols; but a man who has plenty of brains
+generally falls on his legs."
+
+"And your father?"  said Philip; and here he spoke to Gawtrey of the
+conversation he had overheard in the churchyard, but on which a scruple
+of natural delicacy had hitherto kept him silent.
+
+"Well, now," said his host, while a slight blush rose to his cheeks,
+"I will tell you, that though to my father's sternness and avarice I
+attribute many of my faults, I yet always had a sort of love for him; and
+when in London I accidentally heard that he was growing blind, and living
+with an artful old jade of a housekeeper, who might send him to rest with
+a dose of magnesia the night after she had coaxed him to make a will in
+her favour.  I sought him out--and--but you say you heard what passed."
+
+"Yes; and I heard him also call you by name, when it was too late, and I
+saw the tears on his cheeks."
+
+"Did you?  Will you swear to that?"  exclaimed Gawtrey, with vehemence:
+then, shading his brow with his band, he fell into a reverie that lasted
+some moments.
+
+"If anything happen to me, Philip," he said, abruptly, "perhaps he may
+yet be a father to poor Fanny; and if he takes to her, she will repay him
+for whatever pain I may, perhaps, have cost him.  Stop! now I think of
+it, I will write down his address for you--never forget it--there!  It is
+time to go to bed."
+
+Gawtrey's tale made a deep impression on Philip.  He was too young, too
+inexperienced, too much borne away by the passion of the narrator, to see
+that Gawtrey had less cause to blame Fate than himself.  True, he had
+been unjustly implicated in the disgrace of an unworthy uncle, but he had
+lived with that uncle, though he knew him to be a common cheat; true, he
+had been betrayed by a friend, but he had before known that friend to be
+a man without principle or honour.  But what wonder that an ardent boy
+saw nothing of this--saw only the good heart that had saved a poor girl
+from vice, and sighed to relieve a harsh and avaricious parent?  Even the
+hints that Gawtrey unawares let fall of practices scarcely covered by the
+jovial phrase of "a great schoolboy's scrapes," either escaped the notice
+of Philip, or were charitably construed by him, in the compassion and the
+ignorance of a young, hasty, and grateful heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+          "And she's a stranger
+          Women--beware women."--MIDDLETON.
+
+          "As we love our youngest children best,
+          So the last fruit of our affection,
+          Wherever we bestow it, is most strong;
+          Since 'tis indeed our latest harvest-home,
+          Last merriment 'fore winter!"
+          WEBSTER, _Devil's Law Case_.
+
+          "I would fain know what kind of thing a man's heart is?
+          I will report it to you; 'tis a thing framed
+          With divers corners!"--ROWLEY.
+
+I have said that Gawtrey's tale made a deep impression on Philip;--that
+impression was increased by subsequent conversations, more frank even
+than their talk had hitherto been.  There was certainly about this man a
+fatal charm which concealed his vices.  It arose, perhaps, from the
+perfect combinations of his physical frame--from a health which made his
+spirits buoyant and hearty under all circumstances--and a blood so fresh,
+so sanguine, that it could not fail to keep the pores of the heart open.
+But he was not the less--for all his kindly impulses and generous
+feelings, and despite the manner in which, naturally anxious to make the
+least unfavourable portrait of himself to Philip, he softened and glossed
+over the practices of his life--a thorough and complete rogue, a
+dangerous, desperate, reckless daredevil.  It was easy to see when
+anything crossed him, by the cloud on his shaggy brow, by the swelling of
+the veins on the forehead, by the dilation of the broad nostril, that he
+was one to cut his way through every obstacle to an end,--choleric,
+impetuous, fierce, determined.  Such, indeed, were the qualities that
+made him respected among his associates, as his more bland and humorous
+ones made him beloved.  He was, in fact, the incarnation of that great
+spirit which the laws of the world raise up against the world, and by
+which the world's injustice on a large scale is awfully chastised; on a
+small scale, merely nibbled at and harassed, as the rat that gnaws the
+hoof of the elephant:--the spirit which, on a vast theatre, rises up,
+gigantic and sublime, in the heroes of war and revolution--in Mirabeaus,
+Marats, Napoleons: on a minor stage, it shows itself in demagogues,
+fanatical philosophers, and mob-writers; and on the forbidden boards,
+before whose reeking lamps outcasts sit, at once audience and actors, it
+never produced a knave more consummate in his part, or carrying it off
+with more buskined dignity, than William Gawtrey.  I call him by his
+aboriginal name; as for his other appellations, Bacchus himself had not
+so many!
+
+One day, a lady, richly dressed, was ushered by Mr. Birnie into the
+bureau of Mr. Love, alias Gawtrey.  Philip was seated by the window,
+reading, for the first time, the _Candide_,--that work, next to
+_Rasselas_, the most hopeless and gloomy of the sports of genius with
+mankind.  The lady seemed rather embarrassed when she perceived Mr. Love
+was not alone.  She drew back, and, drawing her veil still more closely
+round her, said, in French:
+
+"Pardon me, I would wish a private conversation."  Philip rose to
+withdraw, when the lady, observing him with eyes whose lustre shone
+through the veil, said gently: "But perhaps the young gentleman is
+discreet."
+
+"He is not discreet, he is discretion!--my adopted son.  You may confide
+in him--upon my honour you may, madam!"  and Mr. Love placed his hand on
+his heart.
+
+"He is very young," said the lady, in a tone of involuntary compassion,
+as, with a very white hand, she unclasped the buckle of her cloak.
+
+"He can the better understand the curse of celibacy," returned Mr. Love,
+smiling.
+
+The lady lifted part of her veil, and discovered a handsome mouth, and a
+set of small, white teeth; for she, too, smiled, though gravely, as she
+turned to Morton, and said--
+
+"You seem, sir, more fitted to be a votary of the temple than one of its
+officers.  However, Monsieur Love, let there be no mistake between us; I
+do not come here to form a marriage, but to prevent one.  I understand
+that Monsieur the Vicomte de Vaudemont has called into request your
+services.  I am one of the Vicomte's family; we are all anxious that he
+should not contract an engagement of the strange and, pardon me,
+unbecoming character, which must stamp a union formed at a public
+office."
+
+"I assure you, madam," said Mr. Love, with dignity, "that we have
+contributed to the very first--"
+
+"_Mon Dieu_!"  interrupted the lady, with much impatience, "spare me a
+eulogy on your establishment: I have no doubt it is very respectable; and
+for _grisettes_ and _epiciers_ may do extremely well.  But the Vicomte is
+a man of birth and connections.  In a word, what he contemplates is
+preposterous.  I know not what fee Monsieur Love expects; but if he
+contrive to amuse Monsieur de Vaudemont, and to frustrate every
+connection he proposes to form, that fee, whatever it may be, shall be
+doubled.  Do you understand me?"
+
+"Perfectly, madam; yet it is not your offer that will bias me, but the
+desire to oblige so charming a lady."
+
+"It is agreed, then?"  said the lady, carelessly; and as she spoke she
+again glanced at Philip.
+
+"If madame will call again, I will inform her of my plans," said Mr.
+Love.
+
+"Yes, I will call again.  Good morning!"  As she rose and passed Philip,
+she wholly put aside her veil, and looked at him with a gaze entirely
+free from coquetry, but curious, searching, and perhaps admiring--the
+look that an artist may give to a picture that seines of more value than
+the place where he finds it would seem to indicate.  The countenance of
+the lady herself was fair and noble, and Philip felt a strange thrill at
+his heart as, with a slight inclination of her' head, she turned from the
+room.
+
+"Ah!"  said Gawtrey, laughing, "this is not the first time I have been
+paid by relations to break off the marriages I had formed.  Egad! if one
+could open a _bureau_ to make married people single, one would soon be a
+Croesus!  Well, then, this decides me to complete the union between
+Monsieur Goupille and Mademoiselle de Courval.  I had balanced a little
+hitherto between the _epicier_ and the Vicomte.  Now I will conclude
+matters.  Do you know, Phil, I think you have made a conquest?"
+
+"Pooh!" said Philip, colouring.
+
+In effect, that very evening Mr. Love saw both the _epicier_ and Adele,
+and fixed the marriage-day.  As Monsieur Goupille was a person of great
+distinction in the Faubourg, this wedding was one upon which Mr. Love
+congratulated himself greatly; and he cheerfully accepted an invitation
+for himself and his partners to honour the _noces_ with their presence.
+
+A night or two before the day fixed for the marriage of Monsieur Goupille
+and the aristocratic Adele, when Mr. Birnie had retired, Gawtrey made his
+usual preparations for enjoying himself.  But this time the cigar and the
+punch seemed to fail of their effect.  Gawtrey remained moody and silent;
+and Morton was thinking of the bright eyes of the lady who was so much
+interested against the amours of the Vicomte de Vaudemont.
+
+At last, Gawtrey broke silence:
+
+"My young friend," said he, "I told you of my little _protege_; I have
+been buying toys for her this morning; she is a beautiful creature;
+to-morrow is her birthday--she will then be six years old.  But--but--"
+here Gawtrey sighed--"I fear she is not all right here," and he touched
+his forehead.
+
+"I should like much to see her," said Philip, not noticing the latter
+remark.
+
+"And you shall--you shall come with me to-morrow.  Heigho! I should not
+like to die, for her sake!"
+
+"Does her wretched relation attempt to regain her?"
+
+"Her relation!  No; she is no more--she died about two years since!  Poor
+Mary!  I--well, this is folly.  But Fanny is at present in a convent;
+they are all kind to her, but then I pay well; if I were dead, and the
+pay stopped,--again I ask, what would become of her, unless, as I before
+said, my father--"
+
+"But you are making a fortune now?"
+
+"If this lasts--yes; but I live in fear--the police of this cursed city
+are lynx-eyed; however, that is the bright side of the question."
+
+"Why not have the child with you, since you love her so much?  She would
+be a great comfort to you."
+
+"Is this a place for a child--a girl?"  said Gawtrey, stamping his foot
+impatiently.  "I should go mad if I saw that villainous deadman's eye bent
+upon her!"
+
+You speak of Birnie.  How can you endure him?"
+
+"When you are my age you will know why we endure what we dread--why we
+make friends of those who else would be most horrible foes: no, no--
+nothing can deliver me of this man but Death.  And--and--" added Gawtrey,
+turning pale, "I cannot murder a man who eats my bread.  There are
+stronger ties, my lad, than affection, that bind men, like galley-slaves,
+together.  He who can hang you puts the halter round your neck and leads
+you by it like a dog."
+
+A shudder came over the young listener.  And what dark secrets, known
+only to those two, had bound, to a man seemingly his subordinate and
+tool, the strong will and resolute temper of William Gawtrey?
+
+"But, begone, dull care!"  exclaimed Gawtrey, rousing himself.  "And,
+after all, Birnie is a useful fellow, and dare no more turn against me
+than I against him!  Why don't you drink more?
+
+     "Oh! have you e'er heard of the famed Captain Wattle?"
+
+and Gawtrey broke out into a loud Bacchanalian hymn, in which Philip
+could find no mirth, and from which the songster suddenly paused to
+exclaim:--
+
+"Mind you say nothing about Fanny to Birnie; my secrets with him are not
+of that nature.  He could not hurt her, poor lamb! it is true--at least,
+as far as I can foresee.  But one can never feel too sure of one's lamb,
+if one once introduces it to the butcher!"
+
+The next day being Sunday, the bureau was closed, and Philip and Gawtrey
+repaired to the convent.  It was a dismal-looking place as to the
+exterior; but, within, there was a large garden, well kept, and,
+notwithstanding the winter, it seemed fair and refreshing, compared with
+the polluted streets.  The window of the room into which they were shown
+looked upon the green sward, with walls covered with ivy at the farther
+end.  And Philip's own childhood came back to him as he gazed on the
+quiet of the lonely place.
+
+The door opened--an infant voice was heard, a voice of glee-of rapture;
+and a child, light and beautiful as a fairy, bounded to Gawtrey's breast.
+
+Nestling there, she kissed his face, his hands, his clothes, with a
+passion that did not seem to belong to her age, laughing and sobbing
+almost at a breath.
+
+On his part, Gawtrey appeared equally affected: he stroked down her hair
+with his huge hand, calling her all manner of pet names, in a tremulous
+voice that vainly struggled to be gay.
+
+At length he took the toys he had brought with him from his capacious
+pockets, and strewing them on the floor, fairly stretched his vast bulk
+along; while the child tumbled over him, sometimes grasping at the toys,
+and then again returning to his bosom, and laying her head there, looked
+up quietly into his eyes, as if the joy were too much for her.
+
+Morton, unheeded by both, stood by with folded arms.  He thought of his
+lost and ungrateful brother, and muttered to himself:
+
+"Fool! when she is older, she will forsake him!"
+
+Fanny betrayed in her face the Italian origin of her father.  She had
+that exceeding richness of complexion which, though not common even in
+Italy, is only to be found in the daughters of that land, and which
+harmonised well with the purple lustre of her hair, and the full, clear
+iris of the dark eyes.  Never were parted cherries brighter than her dewy
+lips; and the colour of the open neck and the rounded arms was of a
+whiteness still more dazzling, from the darkness of the hair and the
+carnation of the glowing cheek.
+
+Suddenly Fanny started from Gawtrey's arms, and running up to Morton,
+gazed at him wistfully, and said, in French:
+
+"Who are you?  Do you come from the moon?  I think you do."  Then,
+stopping abruptly, she broke into a verse of a nursery-song, which she
+chaunted with a low, listless tone, as if she were not conscious of the
+sense.  As she thus sang, Morton, looking at her, felt a strange and
+painful doubt seize him.  The child's eyes, though soft, were so vacant
+in their gaze.
+
+"And why do I come from the moon?"  said he.
+
+"Because you look sad and cross.  I don't like you--I don't like the
+moon; it gives me a pain here!" and she put her hand to her temples.
+"Have you got anything for Fanny--poor, poor Fanny?" and, dwelling on the
+epithet, she shook her head mournfully.
+
+"You are rich, Fanny, with all those toys."
+
+"Am I?  Everybody calls me poor Fanny--everybody but papa;" and she ran
+again to Gawtrey, and laid her head on his shoulder.
+
+"She calls me papa!" said Gawtrey, kissing her; "you hear it?  Bless
+her!"
+
+"And you never kiss any one but Fanny--you have no other little girl?"
+said the child, earnestly, and with a look less vacant than that which
+had saddened Morton.
+
+"No other--no--nothing under heaven, and perhaps above it, but you!" and
+he clasped her in his arms.  "But," he added, after a pause--"but mind
+me, Fanny, you must like this gentleman.  He will be always good to you:
+and he had a little brother whom he was as fond of as I am of you."
+
+"No, I won't like him--I won't like anybody but you and my sister!"
+
+"Sister!--who is your sister?"
+
+The child's face relapsed into an expression almost of idiotcy.  "I don't
+know--I never saw her.  I hear her sometimes, but I don't understand what
+she says.--Hush! come here!" and she stole to the window on tiptoe.
+Gawtrey followed and looked out.
+
+"Do you hear her, now?" said Fanny.  "What does she say?"
+
+As the girl spoke, some bird among the evergreens uttered a shrill,
+plaintive cry, rather than song--a sound which the thrush occasionally
+makes in the winter, and which seems to express something of fear, and
+pain, and impatience.  "What does she say?--can you tell me?" asked the
+child.
+
+"Pooh! that is a bird; why do you call it your sister?"
+
+"I don't know!--because it is--because it--because--I don't know--is it
+not in pain?--do something for it, papa!"
+
+Gawtrey glanced at Morton, whose face betokened his deep pity, and
+creeping up to him, whispered,--
+
+"Do you think she is really touched here?  No, no,--she will outgrow it--
+I am sure she will!"
+
+Morton sighed.
+
+Fanny by this time had again seated herself in the middle of the floor,
+and arranged her toys, but without seeming to take pleasure in them.
+
+At last Gawtrey was obliged to depart.  The lay sister, who had charge of
+Fanny, was summoned into the parlour; and then the child's manner
+entirely changed; her face grew purple--she sobbed with as much anger as
+grief.  "She would not leave papa--she would not go--that she would not!"
+
+"It is always so," whispered Gawtrey to Morton, in an abashed and
+apologetic voice.  "It is so difficult to get away from her.  Just go and
+talk with her while I steal out."
+
+Morton went to her, as she struggled with the patient good-natured
+sister, and began to soothe and caress her, till she turned on him her
+large humid eyes, and said, mournfully,
+
+"_Tu es mechant, tu_.  Poor Fanny!"
+
+"But this pretty doll--" began the sister.  The child looked at it
+joylessly.
+
+"And papa is going to die!"
+
+"Whenever Monsieur goes," whispered the nun, "she always says that he is
+dead, and cries herself quietly to sleep; when Monsieur returns, she says
+he is come to life again.  Some one, I suppose, once talked to her about
+death; and she thinks when she loses sight of any one, that that is
+death."
+
+"Poor child!"  said Morton, with a trembling voice.
+
+The child looked up, smiled, stroked his cheek with her little hand, and
+said:
+
+"Thank you!--Yes! poor Fanny!  Ah, he is going--see!--let me go too--
+_tu es mechant_."
+
+"But," said Morton, detaining her gently, "do you know that you give him
+pain?--you make him cry by showing pain yourself.  Don't make him so
+sad!"
+
+The child seemed struck, hung down her head for a moment, as if in
+thought, and then, jumping from Morton's lap, ran to Gawtrey, put up her
+pouting lips, and said:
+
+"One kiss more!"
+
+Gawtrey kissed her, and turned away his head.
+
+"Fanny is a good girl!" and Fanny, as she spoke, went back to Morton, and
+put her little fingers into her eyes, as if either to shut out Gawtrey's
+retreat from her sight, or to press back her tears.
+
+"Give me the doll now, sister Marie."
+
+Morton smiled and sighed, placed the child, who struggled no more, in the
+nun's arms, and left the room; but as he closed the door he looked back,
+and saw that Fanny had escaped from the sister, thrown herself on the
+floor, and was crying, but not loud.
+
+"Is she not a little darling?"  said Gawtrey, as they gained the street.
+
+"She is, indeed, a most beautiful child!"
+
+"And you will love her if I leave her penniless," said Gawtrey, abruptly.
+"It was your love for your mother and your brother that made me like you
+from the first.  Ay," continued Gawtrey, in a tone of great earnestness,
+"ay, and whatever may happen to me, I will strive and keep you, my poor
+lad, harmless; and what is better, innocent even of such matters as sit
+light enough on my own well-seasoned conscience.  In turn, if ever you
+have the power, be good to her,--yes, be good to her! and I won't say a
+harsh word to you if ever you like to turn king's evidence against
+myself."
+
+"Gawtrey!" said Morton, reproachfully, and almost fiercely.
+
+"Bah!--such things are!  But tell me honestly, do you think she is very
+strange--very deficient?"
+
+"I have not seen enough of her to judge," answered Morton, evasively.
+
+"She is so changeful," persisted Gawtrey.  "Sometimes you would say that
+she was above her age, she comes out with such thoughtful, clever things;
+then, the next moment, she throws me into despair.  These nuns are very
+skilful in education--at least they are said to be so.  The doctors give
+me hope, too.  You see, her poor mother was very unhappy at the time of
+her birth--delirious, indeed: that may account for it.  I often fancy
+that it is the constant excitement which her state occasions me that
+makes me love her so much.  You see she is one who can never shift for
+herself.  I must get money for her; I have left a little already with the
+superior, and I would not touch it to save myself from famine!  If she
+has money people will be kind enough to her.  And then," continued
+Gawtrey, "you must perceive that she loves nothing in the world but me
+--me, whom nobody else loves!  Well--well, now to the shop again!"
+
+On returning home the _bonne_ informed them that a lady had called, and
+asked both for Monsieur Love and the young gentleman, and seemed much
+chagrined at missing both.  By the description, Morton guessed she was
+the fair _incognita_, and felt disappointed at having lost the interview.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+          "The cursed carle was at his wonted trade,
+          Still tempting heedless men into his snare,
+          In witching wise, as I before have said;
+          But when he saw, in goodly gear array'd,
+          The grave majestic knight approaching nigh,
+          His countenance fell."--THOMSON, _Castle of Indolence_.
+
+The morning rose that was to unite Monsieur Goupille with Mademoiselle
+Adele de Courval.  The ceremony was performed, and bride and bridegroom
+went through that trying ordeal with becoming gravity.  Only the elegant
+Adele seemed more unaffectedly agitated than Mr. Love could well account
+for; she was very nervous in church, and more often turned her eyes to
+the door than to the altar.  Perhaps she wanted to run away; but it was
+either too late or too early for the proceeding.  The rite performed, the
+happy pair and their friends adjourned to the _Cadran Bleu_, that
+_restaurant_ so celebrated in the festivities of the good citizens of
+Paris.  Here Mr. Love had ordered, at the _epicier's_ expense, a most
+tasteful entertainment.
+
+"_Sacre_! but you have not played the economist, Monsieur Lofe," said
+Monsieur Goupille, rather querulously, as he glanced at the long room
+adorned with artificial flowers, and the table _a cingitante couverts_.
+
+"Bah!" replied Mr. Love, "you can retrench afterwards.  Think of the
+fortune she brought you."
+
+"It is a pretty sum, certainly," said Monsieur Goupille, "and the notary
+is perfectly satisfied."
+
+"There is not a marriage in Paris that does me more credit," said Mr.
+Love; and he marched off to receive the compliments and congratulations
+that awaited him among such of the guests as were aware of his good
+offices.  The Vicomte de Vaudemont was of course not present.  He had not
+been near Mr. Love since Adele had accepted the _epicier_.  But Madame
+Beavor, in a white bonnet lined with lilac, was hanging, sentimentally,
+on the arm of the Pole, who looked very grand with his white favour; and
+Mr. Higgins had been introduced, by Mr. Love, to a little dark Creole,
+who wore paste diamonds, and had very languishing eyes; so that Mr.
+Love's heart might well swell with satisfaction at the prospect of the
+various blisses to come, which might owe their origin to his benevolence.
+In fact, that archpriest of the Temple of Hymen was never more great than
+he was that day; never did his establishment seem more solid, his
+reputation more popular, or his fortune more sure.  He was the life of
+the party.
+
+The banquet over, the revellers prepared for a dance.  Monsieur Goupille,
+in tights, still tighter than he usually wore, and of a rich nankeen,
+quite new, with striped silk stockings, opened the ball with the lady of
+a rich _patissier_ in the same Faubourg; Mr. Love took out the bride.
+The evening advanced; and after several other dances of ceremony,
+Monsieur Goupille conceived himself entitled to dedicate one to connubial
+affection.  A country-dance was called, and the _epicier_ claimed the
+fair hand of the gentle Adele.  About this time, two persons not hitherto
+perceived had quietly entered the room, and, standing near the doorway,
+seemed examining the dancers, as if in search for some one.  They bobbed
+their heads up and down, to and fro stopped--now stood on tiptoe.  The
+one was a tall, large-whiskered, fair-haired man; the other, a little,
+thin, neatly-dressed person, who kept his hand on the arm of his
+companion, and whispered to him from time to time.  The whiskered
+gentleman replied in a guttural tone, which proclaimed his origin to be
+German.  The busy dancers did not perceive the strangers.  The bystanders
+did, and a hum of curiosity circled round; who could they be?--who had
+invited them?--they were new faces in the Faubourg--perhaps relations to
+Adele?
+
+In high delight the fair bride was skipping down the middle, while
+Monsieur Goupille, wiping his forehead with care, admired her agility;
+when, to and behold! the whiskered gentleman I have described abruptly
+advanced from his companion, and cried:
+
+"_La voila!--sacre tonnerre!_"
+
+At that voice--at that apparition, the bride halted; so suddenly indeed,
+that she had not time to put down both feet, but remained with one high
+in the air, while the other sustained itself on the light fantastic toe.
+The company naturally imagined this to be an operatic flourish, which
+called for approbation.  Monsieur Love, who was thundering down behind
+her, cried, "Bravo!" and as the well-grown gentleman had to make a sweep
+to avoid disturbing her equilibrium, he came full against the whiskered
+stranger, and sent him off as a bat sends a ball.
+
+"_Mon Dieu_!"  cried Monsieur Goupille.  "_Ma douce amie_--she has
+fainted away!"  And, indeed, Adele had no sooner recovered her, balance,
+than she resigned it once more into the arms of the startled Pole, who
+was happily at hand.
+
+In the meantime, the German stranger, who had saved himself from falling
+by coming with his full force upon the toes of Mr. Higgins, again
+advanced to the spot, and, rudely seizing the fair bride by the arm,
+exclaimed,--
+
+"No sham if you please, madame--speak!  What the devil have you done with
+the money?"
+
+"Really, sir," said Monsieur Goupille, drawing tip his cravat, "this is
+very extraordinary conduct!  What have you got to say to this lady's
+money?--it is _my_ money now, sir!"
+
+"Oho! it is, is it?  We'll soon see that. _Approchez donc, Monsieur
+Favart, faites votre devoir_."
+
+At these words the small companion of the stranger slowly sauntered to
+the spot, while at the sound of his name and the tread of his step, the
+throng gave way to the right and left.  For Monsieur Favart was one of
+the most renowned chiefs of the great Parisian police--a man worthy to
+be the contemporary of the illustrious Vidocq.
+
+"_Calmez vous, messieurs_; do not be alarmed, ladies," said this
+gentleman, in the mildest of all human voices; and certainly no oil
+dropped on the waters ever produced so tranquillising an effect as that
+small, feeble, gentle tenor.  The Pole, in especial, who was holding the
+fair bride with both his arms, shook all over, and seemed about to let
+his burden gradually slide to the floor, when Monsieur Favart, looking at
+him with a benevolent smile, said--
+
+"_Aha, mon brave!  c'est toi.  Restez donc.  Restez, tenant toujours la
+dame_!"
+
+The Pole, thus condemned, in the French idiom, "always to hold the dame,"
+mechanically raised the arms he had previously dejected, and the police
+officer, with an approving nod of the head, said,--
+
+"_Bon,! ne bougez point,--c'est ca_!"
+
+Monsieur Goupille, in equal surprise and indignation to see his better
+half thus consigned, without any care to his own marital feelings, to the
+arms of another, was about to snatch her from the Pole, when Monsieur
+Favart, touching him on the breast with his little finger, said, in the
+suavest manner,--
+
+"_Mon bourgeois_, meddle not with what does not concern you!"
+
+"With what does not concern me!"  repeated Monsieur Goupille, drawing
+himself up to so great a stretch that he seemed pulling off his tights
+the wrong way.  "Explain yourself, if you please!  This lady is my wife!"
+
+"Say that again,--that's all!" cried  the whiskered stranger, in most
+horrible French, and with a furious grimace, as he shook both his fists
+just under the nose of the _epicier_.
+
+"Say it again, sir," said Monsieur Goupille, by no means daunted; "and
+why should not I say it again?  That lady is my wife!"
+
+"You lie!--she is mine!" cried the German; and bending down, he caught
+the fair Adele from the Pole with as little ceremony as if she had never
+had a great-grandfather a marquis, and giving her a shake that might have
+roused the dead, thundered out,--
+
+"Speak!  Madame Bihl!  Are you my wife or not?"
+
+"_Monstre_!"  murmured Adele, opening her eyes.
+
+"There--you hear--she owns me!"  said the German, appealing to the
+company with a triumphant air.
+
+"_C'est vrai_!"  said the  soft voice of the policeman.  And now, pray
+don't let us disturb your amusements any longer.  We have a fiacre at the
+door.  Remove your lady, Monsieur Bihl."
+
+"Monsieur Lofe!--Monsieur Lofe!" cried, or rather screeched the
+_epicier_, darting across the room, and seizing the _chef_ by the tail of
+his coat, just as he was half way through the door, "come back! _Quelle
+mauvaise plaisanterie me faites-vous ici_?  Did you not tell me that lady
+was single?  Am I married or not:  Do I stand on my head or my heels?"
+
+"Hush-hush! _mon bon bourgeois_!"  whispered Mr. Love; "all shall be
+explained to-morrow!"
+
+"Who is this gentleman?"  asked Monsieur Favart, approaching Mr. Love,
+who, seeing himself in for it, suddenly jerked off the _epicier_, thrust
+his hands down into his breeches' pockets, buried his chin in his cravat,
+elevated his eyebrows, screwed in his eyes, and puffed out his cheeks, so
+that the astonished Monsieur Goupille really thought himself bewitched,
+and literally did not recognise the face of the match-maker.
+
+"Who is this gentleman?"  repeated the little officer, standing beside,
+or rather below, Mr. Love, and looking so diminutive by the contras that
+you might have fancied that the Priest of Hymen had only to breathe to
+blow him away.
+
+"Who should he be, monsieur?"  cried, with great pertness, Madame Rosalie
+Caumartin, coming to the relief, with the generosity of her sex.--"This
+is Monsieur Lofe--_Anglais celebre_.  What have you to say against him?"
+
+"He has got five hundred francs of mine!" cried the epicier.
+
+The policeman scanned Mr. Love, with great attention.  "So you are in
+Paris again?--_Hein!--vous jouez toujours votre role_!
+
+"_Ma foi_!" said Mr. Love, boldly; "I don't understand what monsieur
+means; my character is well known--go and inquire it in London--ask the
+Secretary of Foreign Affairs what is said of me--inquire of my
+Ambassador--demand of my--"
+
+"_Votre passeport, monsieur_?"
+
+"It is at home.  A gentleman does not carry his passport in his pocket
+when he goes to a ball!"
+
+"I will call and see it--_au revoir_!  Take my advice and leave Paris; I
+think I have seen you somewhere!"
+
+"Yet I have never had the honour to marry monsieur!"  said Mr. Love, with
+a polite bow.
+
+In return for his joke, the policeman gave Mr. Love one look-it was a
+quiet look, very quiet; but Mr. Love seemed uncommonly affected by it;
+ he did not say another word, but found himself outside the house in a
+twinkling.  Monsieur Favart turned round and saw the Pole making himself
+as small as possible behind the goodly proportions of Madame Beavor.
+
+"What name does that gentleman go by?"
+
+"So--vo--lofski, the heroic Pole," cried Madame Beavor, with sundry
+misgivings at the unexpected cowardice of so great a patriot.
+
+"Hein! take care of yourselves, ladies.  I have nothing against that
+person this time.  But Monsieur Latour has served his apprenticeship at
+the galleys, and is no more a Pole than I am a Jew."
+
+"And this lady's fortune!" cried Monsieur Goupitle, pathetically; "the
+settlements are all made--the notaries all paid.  I am sure there must be
+some mistake."
+
+Monsieur Bihl, who had by this time restored his lost Helen to her
+senses, stalked up to the _epicier_, dragging the lady along with him.
+
+"Sir, there is no mistake!  But, when I have got the money, if you like
+to have the lady you are welcome to her."
+
+"Monstre!" again muttered the fair Adele.
+
+"The long and the short of it," said Monsieur Favart, "is that Monsieur
+Bihl is a _brave garcon_, and has been half over the world as a courier."
+
+"A courier!" exclaimed several voices.
+
+"Madame was nursery-governess to an English _milord_.  They married, and
+quarrelled--no harm in that, _mes amis_; nothing more common.  Monsieur
+Bihl is a very faithful fellow; nursed his last master in an illness that
+ended fatally, because he travelled with his doctor.  Milord left him a
+handsome legacy--he retired from service, and fell ill, perhaps from
+idleness or beer.  Is not that the story, Monsieur Bihl?"
+
+"He was always drunk--the wretch!" sobbed Adele.  "That was to drown my
+domestic sorrows," said the German; "and when I was sick in my bed,
+madame ran off with my money.  Thanks to monsieur, I have found both, and
+I wish you a very good night."
+
+"_Dansez-vous toujours, mes amis_," said the officer, bowing.  And
+following Adele and her spouse, the little man left the room--where he
+had caused, in chests so broad and limbs so doughty, much the same
+consternation as that which some diminutive ferret occasions in a burrow
+of rabbits twice his size.
+
+Morton had outstayed Mr. Love.  But he thought it unnecessary to linger
+long after that gentleman's departure; and, in the general hubbub that
+ensued, he crept out unperceived, and soon arrived at the _bureau_.  He
+found Mr. Love and Mr. Birnie already engaged in packing up their
+effects.
+
+"Why--when did you leave?" said Morton to Mr. Birnie.
+
+"I saw the policeman enter."
+
+"And why the deuce did not you tell us?" said Gawtrey.
+
+"Every man for himself.  Besides, Mr. Love was dancing," replied Mr.
+Birnie, with a dull glance of disdain.  "Philosophy," muttered Gawtrey,
+thrusting his dresscoat into his trunk; then, suddenly changing his
+voice, "Ha! ha! it was a very good joke after all--own I did it well.
+Ecod! if he had not given me that look, I think I should have turned the
+tables on him.  But those d---d fellows learn of the mad doctors how to
+tame us.  Faith, my heart went down to my shoes--yet I'm no coward!"
+
+"But, after all, he evidently did not know you," said Morton; "and what
+has he to say against you?  Your trade is a strange one, but not
+dishonest.  Why give up as if---"
+
+"My young friend," interrupted Gawtrey, "whether the officer comes after
+us or not, our trade is ruined; that infernal Adele, with her fabulous
+_grandmaman_, has done for us.  Goupille will blow the temple about our
+ears.  No help for it--eh, Birnie?"
+
+"None."
+
+"Go to bed, Philip: we'll call thee at daybreak, for we must make clear
+work before our neighbours open their shutters."
+
+Reclined, but half undressed, on his bed in the little cabinet, Morton
+revolved the events of the evening.  The thought that he should see no
+more of that white hand and that lovely mouth, which still haunted his
+recollection as appertaining to the _incognita_, greatly indisposed him
+towards the abrupt flight intended by Gawtrey, while (so much had his
+faith in that person depended upon respect for his confident daring, and
+so thoroughly fearless was Morton's own nature) he felt himself greatly
+shaken in his allegiance to the chief, by recollecting the effect
+produced on his valour by a single glance from the instrument of law.
+He had not yet lived long enough to be aware that men are sometimes the
+Representatives of Things; that what the scytale was to the Spartan hero,
+a sheriff's writ often is to a Waterloo medallist: that a Bow Street
+runner will enter the foulest den where Murder sits with his fellows, and
+pick out his prey with the beck of his forefinger.  That, in short, the
+thing called LAW, once made tangible and present, rarely fails to palsy
+the fierce heart of the thing called CRIME.  For Law is the symbol of all
+mankind reared against One Foe--the Man of Crime.  Not yet aware of this
+truth, nor, indeed, in the least suspecting Gawtrey of worse offences
+than those of a charlatanic and equivocal profession, the young man mused
+over his protector's cowardice in disdain and wonder: till, wearied with
+conjectures, distrust, and shame at his own strange position of
+obligation to one whom he could not respect, he fell asleep.
+
+When he woke, he saw the grey light of dawn that streamed cheerlessly
+through his shutterless window, struggling with the faint ray of a candle
+that Gawtrey, shading with his hand, held over the sleeper.  He started
+up, and, in the confusion of waking and the imperfect light by which he
+beheld the strong features of Gawtrey, half imagined it was a foe who
+stood before him.
+
+"Take care, man," said Gawtrey, as Morton, in this belief, grasped his
+arm.  "You have a precious rough gripe of your own.  Be quiet, will you?
+I have a word to say to you."  Here Gawtrey, placing the candle on a
+chair, returned to the door and closed it.
+
+"Look you," he said in a whisper, "I have nearly run through my circle of
+invention, and my wit, fertile as it is, can present to me little
+encouragement in the future.  The eyes of this Favart once on me, every
+disguise and every double will not long avail.  I dare not return to
+London: I am too well known in Brussels, Berlin, and Vienna--"
+
+"But," interrupted Morton, raising himself on his arm, and fixing his
+dark eyes upon his host,--"but you have told me again and again that you
+have committed no crime; why then be so fearful of discovery?"
+
+"Why," repeated  Gawtrey, with a slight  hesitation which he instantly
+overcame, "why! have not you yourself learned that appearances have the
+effect of crimes?--were you not chased as a thief when I rescued you from
+your foe, the law?--are you not, though a boy in years, under an alias,
+and an exile from your own land?  And how can you put these austere
+questions to me, who am growing grey in the endeavour to extract sunbeams
+from cucumbers--subsistence from poverty?  I repeat that there are
+reasons why I must avoid, for the present, the great capitals.  I must
+sink in life, and take to the provinces.  Birnie is sanguine as ever; but
+he is a terrible sort of comforter!  Enough of that.  Now to yourself:
+our savings are less than you might expect; to be sure, Birnie has been
+treasurer, and I have laid by a little for Fanny, which I will rather
+starve than touch.  There remain, however, 150 napoleons, and our
+effects, sold at a fourth their value, will fetch 150 more.  Here is your
+share.  I have compassion on you.  I told you I would bear you harmless
+and innocent.  Leave us while yet time."
+
+It seemed, then, to Morton that Gawtrey had divined his thoughts of shame
+and escape of the previous night; perhaps Gawtrey had: and such is the
+human heart, that, instead of welcoming the very release he had half
+contemplated, now that it was offered him, Philip shrank from it as a
+base desertion.
+
+"Poor Gawtrey!"  said he, pushing back the canvas bag of gold held out to
+him, "you shall not go over the world, and feel that the orphan you fed
+and fostered left you to starve with your money in his pocket.  When you
+again assure me that you have committed no crime, you again remind me
+that gratitude has no right to be severe upon the shifts and errors of
+its benefactor.  If you do not conform to society, what has society done
+for me?  No! I will not forsake you in a reverse.  Fortune has given you
+a fall.  What, then, courage, and at her again!"
+
+These last words were said so heartily and cheerfully as Morton sprang
+from the bed, that they inspirited Gawtrey, who had really desponded of
+his lot.
+
+"Well," said he, "I cannot reject the only friend left me; and while I
+live--.  But I will make no professions.  Quick, then, our luggage is
+already gone, and I hear Birnie grunting the rogue's march of retreat."
+
+Morton's toilet was soon completed, and the three associates bade adieu
+to the _bureau_.
+
+Birnie, who was taciturn and impenetrable as ever, walked a little before
+as guide.  They arrived, at length, at a _serrurier's_ shop, placed in an
+alley near the Porte St. Denis.  The _serrurier_ himself, a tall,
+begrimed, blackbearded man, was taking the shutters from his shop as they
+approached.  He and Birnie exchanged silent nods; and the former, leaving
+his work, conducted them up a very filthy flight of stairs to an attic,
+where a bed, two stools, one table, and an old walnut-tree bureau formed
+the sole articles of furniture.  Gawtrey looked rather ruefully round the
+black, low, damp walls, and said in a crestfallen tone:
+
+"We were better off at the Temple of Hymen.  But get us a bottle of wine,
+some eggs, and a frying-pan.  By Jove, I am a capital hand at an omelet!"
+
+The _serrurier_ nodded again, grinned, and withdrew.
+
+"Rest here," said Birnie, in his calm, passionless voice, that seemed to
+Morton, however, to assume an unwonted tone of command.  "I will go and
+make the best bargain I can for our furniture, buy fresh clothes, and
+engage our places for Tours."
+
+"For Tours?"  repeated Morton.
+
+"Yes, there are some English there; one can live wherever there are
+English," said Gawtrey.
+
+"Hum!"  grunted Birnie, drily, and, buttoning up his coat, he walked
+slowly away.
+
+About noon he returned with a bundle of clothes, which Gawtrey, who
+always regained his elasticity of spirit wherever there was fair play to
+his talents, examined with great attention, and many exclamations of
+"_Bon!--c'est va_."
+
+"I have done well with the Jew," said Birnie, drawing from his coat
+pocket two heavy bags.  "One hundred and eighty napoleons.  We shall
+commence with a good capital."
+
+"You are right, my friend," said Gawtrey.
+
+The _serrurier_ was then despatched to the best restaurant in the
+neighbourhood, and the three adventurers made a less Socratic dinner than
+might have been expected.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+          "Then out again he flies to wing his marry round."
+                                THOMPSON'S _Castle of Indolence_.
+
+          "Again he gazed, 'It is,' said he, 'the same;
+          There sits he upright in his seat secure,
+          As one whose conscience is correct and pure.'"--CRABBE.
+
+The adventurers arrived at Tours, and established themselves there in a
+lodging, without any incident worth narrating by the way.
+
+At Tours Morton had nothing to do but take his pleasure and enjoy
+himself.  He passed for a young heir; Gawtrey for his tutor--a doctor in
+divinity; Birnie for his valet.  The task of maintenance fell on Gawtrey,
+who hit off his character to a hair; larded his grave jokes with
+university scraps of Latin; looked big and well-fed; wore knee-breeches
+and a shovel hat; and played whist with the skill of a veteran vicar.  By
+his science in that game he made, at first, enough; at least, to defray
+their weekly expenses.  But, by degrees, the good people at Tours, who,
+under pretence of health, were there for economy, grew shy of so
+excellent a player; and though Gawtrey always swore solemnly that he
+played with the most scrupulous honour (an asseveration which Morton, at
+least, implicitly believed), and no proof to the contrary was ever
+detected, yet a first-rate card-player is always a suspicious character,
+unless the losing parties know exactly who he is.  The market fell off,
+and Gawtrey at length thought it prudent to extend their travels.
+
+"Ah!"  said Mr. Gawtrey, "the world nowadays has grown so ostentatious
+that one cannot travel advantageously without a post-chariot and four
+horses."  At length they found themselves at Milan, which at that time
+was one of the El Dorados for gamesters.  Here, however, for want of
+introductions, Mr. Gawtrey found it difficult to get into society.  The
+nobles, proud and rich, played high, but were circumspect in their
+company; the _bourgeoisie_, industrious and energetic, preserved much of
+the old Lombard shrewdness; there were no _tables d'hote_ and public
+reunions.  Gawtrey saw his little capital daily diminishing, with the
+Alps at the rear and Poverty in the van.  At length, always on the _qui
+vive_, he contrived to make acquaintance with a Scotch family of great
+respectability.  He effected this by picking up a snuff-box which the
+Scotchman had dropped in taking out his handkerchief.  This politeness
+paved the way to a conversation in which Gawtrey made himself so
+agreeable, and talked with such zest of the Modern Athens, and the tricks
+practised upon travellers, that he was presented to Mrs. Macgregor; cards
+were interchanged, and, as Mr. Gawtrey lived in tolerable style, the
+Macgregors pronounced him "a vara genteel mon."  Once in the house of a
+respectable person, Gawtrey contrived to turn himself round and round,
+till he burrowed a hole into the English circle then settled in Milan.
+His whist-playing came into requisition, and once more Fortune smiled
+upon Skill.
+
+To this house the pupil one evening accompanied the tutor.  When the
+whist party, consisting of two tables, was formed, the young man found
+himself left out with an old gentleman, who seemed loquacious and good-
+natured, and who put many questions to Morton, which he found it
+difficult to answer.  One of the whist tables was now in a state of
+revolution, viz., a lady had cut out and a gentleman cut in, when the
+door opened, and Lord Lilburne was announced.
+
+Mr. Macgregor, rising, advanced with great respect to this personage.
+
+"I scarcely ventured to hope you would coom, Lord Lilburne, the night is
+so cold."
+
+"You did not allow sufficiently, then, for the dulness of my solitary inn
+and the attractions of your circle.  Aha!  whist, I see."
+
+"You play sometimes?"
+
+"Very seldom, now; I have sown all my wild oats, and even the ace of
+spades can scarcely dig them out again."
+
+"Ha!  ha!  vara gude."
+
+"I will look on;" and Lord Lilburne drew his chair to the table, exactly
+opposite to Mr. Gawtrey.
+
+The old gentleman turned to Philip.
+
+"An extraordinary man, Lord Lilburne; you have heard of him, of course?"
+
+"No, indeed; what of him?"  asked the young man, rousing himself.
+
+"What of him?" said the old gentleman, with a smile; "why the newspapers,
+if you ever read them, will tell you enough of the elegant, the witty
+Lord Lilburne; a man of eminent talent, though indolent.  He was wild in
+his youth, as clever men often are; but, on attaining his title and
+fortune, and marrying into the family of the then premier, he became more
+sedate.  They say he might make a great figure in politics if he would.
+He has a very high reputation--very.  People do say that he is still fond
+of pleasure; but that is a common failing amongst the aristocracy.
+Morality is only found in the middle classes, young gentleman.  It is a
+lucky family, that of Lilburne; his sister, Mrs. Beaufort--"
+
+"Beaufort!" exclaimed Morton, and then muttered to himself, "Ah, true--
+true; I have heard the name of Lilburne before."
+
+"Do you know the Beauforts?  Well, you remember how luckily Robert,
+Lilburne's brother-in-law, came into that fine property just as his
+predecessor was about to marry a--"
+
+Morton scowled at his garrulous acquaintance, and stalked abruptly to the
+card table.
+
+Ever since Lord Lilburne had seated himself opposite to Mr. Gawtrey, that
+gentleman had evinced a perturbation of manner that became obvious to the
+company.  He grew deadly pale, his hands trembled, he moved uneasily in
+his seat, he missed deal, he trumped his partner's best diamond; finally
+he revoked, threw down his money, and said, with a forced smile, "that
+the heat of the room overcame him."  As he rose Lord Lilburne rose also,
+and the eyes of both met.  Those of Lilburne were calm, but penetrating
+and inquisitive in their gaze; those of Gawtrey were like balls of fire.
+He seemed gradually to dilate in his height, his broad chest expanded, he
+breathed hard.
+
+"Ah, Doctor," said Mr. Macgregor, "let me introduce you to Lord
+Lilburne."
+
+The peer bowed haughtily; Mr. Gawtrey did not return the salutation, but
+with a sort of gulp, as if he were swallowing some burst of passion,
+strode to the fire, and then, turning round, again fixed his gaze upon
+the new guest.
+
+Lilburne, however, who had never lost his self-composure at this strange
+rudeness, was now quietly talking with their host.
+
+"Your Doctor seems an eccentric man--a little absent--learned, I suppose.
+Have you been to Como, yet?"
+
+Mr. Gawtrey remained by the fire beating the devil's tattoo upon the
+chimney-piece, and ever and anon turning his glance towards Lilburne, who
+seemed to have forgotten his existence.
+
+Both these guests stayed till the party broke up; Mr. Gawtrey apparently
+wishing to outstay Lord Lilburne; for, when the last went down-stairs,
+Mr. Gawtrey, nodding to his comrade and giving a hurried bow to the host,
+descended also.  As they passed the porter's lodge, they found Lilburne
+on the step of his carriage; he turned his head abruptly, and again met
+Mr. Gawtrey's eye; paused a moment, and whispered over his shoulder:
+
+"So we remember each other, sir?  Let us not meet again; and, on that
+condition, bygones are bygones."
+
+"Scoundrel!"  muttered Gawtrey, clenching his fists; but the peer had
+sprung into his carriage with a lightness scarcely to be expected from
+his lameness, and the wheels whirled within an inch of the soi-disant
+doctor's right pump.
+
+Gawtrey walked on for some moments in great excitement; at length he
+turned to his companion,--
+
+"Do you guess who Lord Lilburne is?  I will tell you my first foe and
+Fanny's grandfather!  Now, note the justice of Fate: here is this man--
+mark well--this man who commenced life by putting his faults on my own
+shoulders!  From that little boss has fungused out a terrible hump.  This
+man who seduced my affianced bride, and then left her whole soul, once
+fair and blooming--I swear it--with its leaves fresh from the dews of
+heaven, one rank leprosy, this man who, rolling in riches, learned to
+cheat and pilfer as a boy learns to dance and play the fiddle, and (to
+damn me, whose happiness he had blasted) accused me to the world of his
+own crime!--here is this man who has not left off one vice, but added to
+those of his youth the bloodless craft of the veteran knave;--here is
+this man, flattered, courted, great, marching through lanes of bowing
+parasites to an illustrious epitaph and a marble tomb, and I, a rogue
+too, if you will, but rogue for my bread, dating from him my errors and
+my ruin!  I--vagabond--outcast--skulking through tricks to avoid crime--
+why the difference?  Because one is born rich and the other poor--because
+he has no excuse for crime, and therefore no one suspects him!"
+
+The wretched man (for at that moment he was wretched) paused breathless
+from his passionate and rapid burst, and before him rose in its marble
+majesty, with the moon full upon its shining spires--the wonder of Gothic
+Italy--the Cathedral Church of Milan.
+
+"Chafe not yourself at the universal fate," said the young man, with a
+bitter smile on his lips and pointing to the cathedral; "I have not lived
+long, but I have learned already enough to know this? he who could raise
+a pile like that, dedicated to Heaven, would be honoured as a saint; he
+who knelt to God by the roadside under a hedge would be sent to the house
+of correction as a vagabond.  The difference between man and man is
+money, and will be, when you, the despised charlatan, and Lilburne, the
+honoured cheat, have not left as much dust behind you as will fill a
+snuff-box.  Comfort yourself, you are in the majority."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+                                "A desert wild
+          Before them stretched bare, comfortless, and vast,
+          With gibbets, bones, and carcasses defiled."
+                          THOMPSON'S _Castle of Indolenece_.
+
+Mr. Gawtrey did not wish to give his foe the triumph of thinking he had
+driven him from Milan; he resolved to stay and brave it out; but when he
+appeared in public, he found the acquaintances he had formed bow
+politely, but cross to the other side of the way.  No more invitations to
+tea and cards showered in upon the jolly parson.  He was puzzled, for
+people, while they shunned him, did not appear uncivil.  He found out at
+last that a report was circulated that he was deranged; though he could
+not trace this rumour to Lord Lilburne, he was at no loss to guess from
+whom it had emanated.  His own eccentricities, especially his recent
+manner at Mr. Macgregor's, gave confirmation to the charge.  Again the
+funds began to sink low in the canvas bags, and at length, in despair,
+Mr. Gawtrey was obliged to quit the field.  They returned to France
+through Switzerland--a country too poor for gamesters; and ever since the
+interview with Lilburne, a great change had come over Gawtrey's gay
+spirit: he grew moody and thoughtful, he took no pains to replenish the
+common stock, he talked much and seriously to his young friend of poor
+Fanny, and owned that he yearned to see her again.  The desire to return
+to Paris haunted him like a fatality; he saw the danger that awaited him
+there, but it only allured him the more, as the candle does the moth
+whose wings it has singed.  Birnie, who, in all their vicissitudes and
+wanderings, their ups and downs, retained the same tacit, immovable
+demeanour, received with a sneer the orders at last to march back upon
+the French capital.  "You would never have left it, if you had taken my
+advice," he said, and quitted the room.
+
+Mr. Gawtrey gazed after him and muttered, "Is the die then cast?"
+
+"What does he mean?" said Morton.
+
+"You will know soon," replied Gawtrey, and he followed Birnie; and from
+that time the whispered conferences with that person, which had seemed
+suspended during their travels, were renewed.
+
+            .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+One morning, three men were seen entering Paris on foot through the Porte
+St. Denis.  It was a fine day in spring, and the old city looked gay with
+its loitering passengers and gaudy shops, and under that clear blue
+exhilarating sky so peculiar to France.
+
+Two of these men walked abreast, the other preceded them a few steps.
+The one who went first--thin, pale, and threadbare--yet seemed to suffer
+the least from fatigue; he walked with a long, swinging, noiseless
+stride, looking to the right and left from the corners of his eyes.  Of
+the two who followed, one was handsome and finely formed, but of swarthy
+complexion, young, yet with a look of care; the other, of sturdy frame,
+leaned on a thick stick, and his eyes were gloomily cast down.
+
+"Philip," said the last, "in coming back to Paris--I feel that I am
+coming back to my grave!"
+
+"Pooh--you were equally despondent in our excursions elsewhere."
+
+"Because I was always thinking of poor Fanny, and because--because--
+Birnie was ever at me with his horrible temptations!"
+
+"Birnie!  I loathe the man!  Will you never get rid of him?"
+
+"I cannot!  Hush! he will hear us.  How unlucky we have been! and now
+without a son in our pockets--here the dunghill--there the gaol!  We are
+in his power at last!"
+
+"His power! what mean you?"
+
+"What ho! Birnie!" cried Gawtrey, unheeding Morton's question.  "Let us
+halt and breakfast: I am tired."
+
+"You forget!--we have no money till we make it," returned Birnie,
+coldly.--"Come to the _serrurier's_ he will trust us."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+          "Gaunt Beggary and Scorn with many bell-hounds more."
+          THOMSON'S _Castle of Indolence_.
+
+          "The other was a fell, despiteful fiend."--Ibid.
+
+          "Your happiness behold! then straight a wand
+          He waved, an anti-magic power that hath
+          Truth from illusive falsehood to command."--Ibid.
+
+          "But what for us, the children of despair,
+          Brought to the brink of hell--what hope remains?
+          RESOLVE, RESOLVE!"--Ibid.
+
+It may be observed that there are certain years in which in a civilised
+country some particular crime comes into vogue.  It flares its season,
+and then burns out.  Thus at one time we have Burking--at another,
+Swingism--now, suicide is in vogue--now, poisoning tradespeople in apple-
+dumplings--now, little boys stab each other with penknives--now, common
+soldiers shoot at their sergeants.  Almost every year there is one crime
+peculiar to it; a sort of annual which overruns the country but does not
+bloom again.  Unquestionably the Press has a great deal to do with these
+epidemics.  Let a newspaper once give an account of some out-of-the-way
+atrocity that has the charm of being novel, and certain depraved minds
+fasten to it like leeches.  They brood over and revolve it--the idea
+grows up, a horrid phantasmalian monomania; and all of a sudden, in a
+hundred different places, the one seed sown by the leaden types springs
+up into foul flowering.
+
+     [An old Spanish writer, treating of the Inquisition, has some very
+     striking remarks on the kind of madness which, whenever some
+     terrible notoriety is given to a particular offence, leads persons
+     of distempered fancy to accuse themselves of it.  He observes that
+     when the cruelties of the Inquisition against the imaginary crime of
+     sorcery were the most barbarous, this singular frenzy led numbers to
+     accuse themselves of sorcery.  The publication and celebrity of the
+     crime begat the desire of the crime.]
+
+But if the first reported aboriginal crime has been attended with
+impunity, how much more does the imitative faculty cling to it.  Ill-
+judged mercy falls, not like dew, but like a great heap of manure, on the
+rank deed.
+
+Now it happened that at the time I write of, or rather a little before,
+there had been detected and tried in Paris a most redoubted coiner.  He
+had carried on the business with a dexterity that won admiration even for
+the offence; and, moreover, he had served previously with some
+distinction at Austerlitz and Marengo.  The consequence was that the
+public went with instead of against him, and his sentence was transmuted
+to three years' imprisonment by the government.  For all governments in
+free countries aspire rather to be popular than just.
+
+No sooner was this case reported in the journals--and even the gravest
+took notice, of it (which is not common with the scholastic journals of
+France)--no sooner did it make a stir and a sensation, and cover the
+criminal with celebrity, than the result became noticeable in a very
+large issue of false money.
+
+Coining in the year I now write of was the fashionable crime.  The police
+were roused into full vigour: it became known to them that there was one
+gang in especial who cultivated this art with singular success.  Their
+coinage was, indeed, so good, so superior to all their rivals, that it
+was often unconsciously preferred by the public to the real mintage.  At
+the same time they carried on their calling with such secrecy that they
+utterly baffled discovery.
+
+An immense reward was offered by the _bureau_ to any one who would betray
+his accomplices, and Monsieur Favart was placed at the head of a
+commission of inquiry.  This person had himself been a _faux monnoyer_,
+and was an adept in the art, and it was he who had discovered the
+redoubted coiner who had brought the crime into such notoriety.  Monsieur
+Favart was a man of the most vigilant acuteness, the most indefatigable
+research, and of a courage which; perhaps, is more common than we
+suppose.  It is a popular error to suppose that courage means courage in
+everything.  Put a hero on board ship at a five-barred gate, and, if he
+is not used to hunting, he will turn pale; put a fox-hunter on one of the
+Swiss chasms, over which the mountaineer springs like a roe, and his
+knees will knock under him.  People are brave in the dangers to which
+they accustom themselves, either in imagination or practice.
+
+Monsieur Favart, then, was a man of the most daring bravery in facing
+rogues and cut-throats.  He awed them with his very eye; yet he had been
+known to have been kicked down-stairs by his wife, and when he was drawn
+into the grand army, he deserted the eve of his first battle.  Such, as
+moralists say, is the inconsistency of man!
+
+But Monsieur Favart was sworn to trace the coiners, and he had never
+failed yet in any enterprise he undertook.  One day he presented himself
+to his chief with a countenance so elated that that penetrating
+functionary said to him at once--
+
+"You have heard of our messieurs!"
+
+"I have: I am to visit them to-night."
+
+"Bravo! How many men will you take?"
+
+"From twelve to twenty to leave without on guard.  But I must enter
+alone.  Such is the condition: an accomplice who fears his own throat too
+much to be openly a betrayer will introduce me to the house--nay, to the
+very room.  By his description it is necessary I should know the exact
+locale in order to cut off retreat; so to-morrow night I shall surround
+the beehive and take the honey."
+
+"They are desperate fellows, these coiners, always; better be cautious."
+
+"You forget I was one of them, and know the masonry."  About the same
+time this conversation was going on at the bureau of the police, in
+another part of the town Morton and Gawtrey were seated alone.  It is
+some weeks since they entered Paris, and spring has mellowed into summer.
+
+The house in which they lodged was in the lordly quartier of the Faubourg
+St. Germain; the neighbouring streets were venerable with the ancient
+edifices of a fallen noblesse; but their tenement was in a narrow, dingy
+lane, and the building itself seemed beggarly and ruinous.  The apartment
+was in an attic on the sixth story, and the window, placed at the back of
+the lane, looked upon another row of houses of a better description, that
+communicated with one of the great streets of the quartier.  The space
+between their abode and their opposite neighbours was so narrow that the
+sun could scarcely pierce between.  In the height of summer might be
+found there a perpetual shade.
+
+The pair were seated by the window.  Gawtrey, well-dressed, smooth-
+shaven, as in his palmy time; Morton, in the same garments with which he
+had entered Paris, weather-stained and ragged.  Looking towards the
+casements of the attic in the opposite house, Gawtrey said, mutteringly,
+"I wonder where Birnie has been, and why he has not returned.  I grow
+suspicious of that man."
+
+"Suspicious of what?"  asked Morton.  "Of his honesty?  Would he rob
+you?"
+
+"Rob me!  Humph--perhaps! but you see I am in Paris, in spite of the
+hints of the police; he may denounce me."
+
+"Why, then, suffer him to lodge away from you?"
+
+"Why?  because, by having separate houses there are two channels of
+escape.  A dark night, and a ladder thrown across from window to window,
+he is with us, or we with him."
+
+"But wherefore such precautions?  You blind--you deceive me; what have
+you done?--what is your employment now?  You are, mute.  Hark you,
+Gawtrey.  I have pinned my fate to you--I am fallen from hope itself!  At
+times it almost makes me mad to look back--and yet you do not trust me.
+Since your return to Paris you are absent whole nights--often days; you
+are moody and thoughtful-yet, whatever your business, it seems to bring
+you ample returns."
+
+"You think that," said Gawtrey, mildly, and with a sort of pity in his
+voice; "yet you refuse to take even the money to change those rags."
+
+"Because I know not how the money was gained.  Ah, Gawtrey, I am not too
+proud for charity, but I am for--" He checked the word uppermost in his
+thoughts, and resumed--
+
+"Yes; your occupations seem lucrative.  It was but yesterday Birnie gave
+me fifty napoleons, for which he said you wished change in silver."
+
+"Did he?  The ras--  Well!  and you got change for them?"
+
+"I know not why, but I refused."
+
+"That was right, Philip.  Do nothing that man tells you."
+
+"Will you, then, trust me?  You are engaged in some horrible traffic! it
+may be blood!  I am no longer a boy--I have a will of my own--I will not
+be silently and blindly entrapped to perdition.  If I march thither, it
+shall be with my own consent.  Trust me, and this day, or we part
+to-morrow."
+
+"Be ruled.  Some secrets it is better not to know."
+
+"It matters not.  I have come to my decision--I ask yours."
+
+Gawtrey paused for some moments in deep thought.  At last he lifted his
+eyes to Philip, and replied:
+
+"Well, then, if it must be.  Sooner or later it must have been so; and I
+want a confidant.  You are bold, and will not shrink.  You desire to know
+my occupation--will you witness it to-night?"
+
+"I am prepared: to-night!"
+
+Here a step was heard on the stairs--a knock at the door--and Birnie
+entered.
+
+He drew aside Gawtrey, and whispered him, as usual, for some moments.
+
+Gawtrey nodded his head, and then said aloud--
+
+"To-morrow we shall talk without reserve before my young friend.
+To-night he joins us."
+
+"To-night!--very well," said Birnie, with his cold sneer.  He must take
+the oath; and you, with your life, will be responsible for his honesty?"
+
+"Ay! it is the rule."
+
+"Good-bye, then, till we meet," said Birnie, and withdrew.
+
+"I wonder," said Gawtrey, musingly, and between his grinded teeth,
+"whether I shall ever have a good fair shot at that fellow?  Ho! ho!"
+and his laugh shook the walls.
+
+Morton looked hard at Gawtrey, as the latter now sank down in his chair,
+and gazed with a vacant stare, that seemed almost to partake of
+imbecility, upon the opposite wall.  The careless, reckless, jovial
+expression, which usually characterised the features of the man, had for
+some weeks given place to a restless, anxious, and at times ferocious
+aspect, like the beast that first finds a sport while the hounds are yet
+afar, and his limbs are yet strong, in the chase which marks him for his
+victim, but grows desperate with rage and fear as the day nears its
+close, and the death-dogs pant hard upon his track.  But at that moment
+the strong features, with their gnarled muscle and iron sinews, seemed to
+have lost every sign both of passion and the will, and to be locked in a
+stolid and dull repose.  At last he looked up at Morton, and said, with a
+smile like that of an old man in his dotage--
+
+"I'm thinking that my life has been one mistake!  I had talents--you
+would not fancy it--but once I was neither a fool nor a villain!  Odd,
+isn't it?  Just reach me the brandy."
+
+But Morton, with a slight shudder, turned and left the room.
+
+He walked on mechanically, and gained, at last, the superb _Quai_ that
+borders the Seine; there, the passengers became more frequent; gay
+equipages rolled along; the white and lofty mansions looked fair and
+stately in the clear blue sky of early summer; beside him flowed the
+sparkling river, animated with the painted baths that floated on its
+surface: earth was merry and heaven serene his heart was dark through
+all: Night within--Morning beautiful without!  At last he paused by that
+bridge, stately with the statues of those whom the caprice of time
+honours with a name; for though Zeus and his gods be overthrown, while
+earth exists will live the worship of Dead Men;--the bridge by which you
+pass from the royal Tuileries, or the luxurious streets beyond the Rue de
+Rivoli, to the Senate of the emancipated People, and the gloomy and
+desolate grandeur of the Faubourg St. Germain, in whose venerable haunts
+the impoverished descendants of the old feudal tyrants, whom the birth of
+the Senate overthrew, yet congregate;--the ghosts of departed powers
+proud of the shadows of great names.  As the English outcast paused
+midway on the bridge, and for the first time lifting his head from his
+bosom, gazed around, there broke at once on his remembrance that terrible
+and fatal evening, when, hopeless, friendless, desperate, he had begged
+for charity of his uncle's hireling, with all the feelings that then (so
+imperfectly and lightly touched on in his brief narrative to Gawtrey) had
+raged and blackened in his breast, urging to the resolution he had
+adopted, casting him on the ominous friendship of the man whose guidance
+he even then had suspected and distrusted.  The spot in either city had a
+certain similitude and correspondence each with each: at the first he had
+consummated his despair of human destinies--he had dared to forget the
+Providence of God--he had arrogated his fate to himself: by the first
+bridge he had taken his resolve; by the last he stood in awe at the
+result--stood no less poor--no less abject--equally in rags and squalor;
+but was his crest as haughty and his eye as fearless, for was his
+conscience as free and his honour as unstained?  Those arches of stone--
+those rivers that rolled between, seemed to him then to take a more
+mystic and typical sense than belongs to the outer world--they were the
+bridges to the Rivers of his Life.  Plunged in thoughts so confused and
+dim that he could scarcely distinguish, through the chaos, the one streak
+of light which, perhaps, heralded the reconstruction or regeneration of
+the elements of his soul;--two passengers halted, also by his side.
+
+"You will be late for the debate," said one of them to the other.  "Why
+do you stop?"
+
+"My friend," said the other, "I never pass this spot without recalling
+the time when I stood here without a son, or, as I thought, a chance of
+one, and impiously meditated self-destruction."
+
+"You!--now so rich--so fortunate in repute and station--is it possible?
+How was it?  A lucky chance?--a sudden legacy?"
+
+"No: Time, Faith, and Energy--the three Friends God has given to the
+Poor!"
+
+The men moved on; but Morton, who had turned his face towards them,
+fancied that the last speaker fixed on him his bright, cheerful eye, with
+a meaning look; and when the man was gone, he repeated those words, and
+hailed them in his heart of hearts as an augury from above.
+
+Quickly, then, and as if by magic, the former confusion of his mind
+seemed to settle into distinct shapes of courage and resolve.  "Yes," he
+muttered; "I will keep this night's appointment--I will learn the secret
+of these men's life.  In my inexperience and destitution, I have suffered
+myself to be led hitherto into a partnership, if not with vice and crime,
+at least with subterfuge and trick.  I awake from my reckless boyhood--my
+unworthy palterings with my better self.  If Gawtrey be as I dread to
+find him--if he be linked in some guilty and hateful traffic; with that
+loathsome accomplice--I will--"  He paused, for his heart whispered,
+"Well, and even so,--the guilty man clothed and fed thee!"  "I will,"
+resumed his thought, in answer to his heart--"I will go on my knees to
+him to fly while there is yet time, to work--beg--starve--perish even--
+rather than lose the right to look man in the face without a blush, and
+kneel to his God without remorse!"
+
+And as he thus ended, he felt suddenly as if he himself were restored to
+the perception and the joy of the Nature and the World around him; the
+NIGHT had vanished from his soul--he inhaled the balm and freshness of
+the air--he comprehended the delight which the liberal June was
+scattering over the earth--he looked above, and his eyes were suffused
+with pleasure, at the smile of the soft blue skies.  The MORNING became,
+as it were, a part of his own being; and he felt that as the world in
+spite of the storms is fair, so in spite of evil God is good.  He walked
+on--he passed the bridge, but his step was no more the same,--he forgot
+his rags.  Why should he be ashamed?  And thus, in the very flush of this
+new and strange elation and elasticity of spirit, he came unawares upon a
+group of young men, lounging before the porch of one of the chief hotels
+in that splendid Rue de Rivoli, wherein Wealth and the English have made
+their homes.  A groom, mounted, was leading another horse up and down the
+road, and the young men were making their comments of approbation upon
+both the horses, especially the one led, which was, indeed, of uncommon
+beauty and great value.  Even Morton, in whom the boyish passion of his
+earlier life yet existed, paused to turn his experienced and admiring eye
+upon the stately shape and pace of the noble animal, and as he did so, a
+name too well remembered came upon his ear.
+
+"Certainly, Arthur Beaufort is the most enviable fellow in Europe."
+
+"Why, yes," said another of the young men; "he has plenty of money--is
+good-looking, devilish good-natured, clever, and spends like a prince."
+
+"Has the best horses!"
+
+"The best luck at roulette!"
+
+"The prettiest girls in love with him!"
+
+"And no one enjoys life more.  Ah! here he is!"
+
+The group parted as a light, graceful figure came out of a jeweller's
+shop that adjoined the hotel, and halted gaily amongst the loungers.
+Morton's first impulse was to hurry from the spot; his second impulse
+arrested his step, and, a little apart, and half-hid beneath one of the
+arches of the colonnade which adorns the street, the Outcast gazed upon.
+the Heir.  There was no comparison in the natural personal advantages of
+the two young men; for Philip Morton, despite all the hardships of his
+rough career, had now grown up and ripened into a rare perfection of form
+and feature.  His broad chest, his erect air, his lithe and symmetrical
+length of limb, united, happily, the attributes of activity and strength;
+and though there was no delicacy of youthful bloom upon his dark cheek,
+and though lines which should have come later marred its smoothness with
+the signs of care and thought, yet an expression of intelligence and
+daring, equally beyond his years, and the evidence of hardy, abstemious,
+vigorous health, served to show to the full advantage the outline of
+features which, noble and regular, though stern and masculine, the artist
+might have borrowed for his ideal of a young Spartan arming for his first
+battle.  Arthur, slight to feebleness, and with the paleness, partly of
+constitution, partly of gay excess, on his fair and clear complexion, had
+features far less symmetrical and impressive than his cousin: but what
+then?  All that are bestowed by elegance of dress, the refinements of
+luxurious habit, the nameless grace that comes from a mind and a manner
+polished, the one by literary culture, the other by social intercourse,
+invested the person of the heir with a fascination that rude Nature alone
+ever fails to give.  And about him there was a gaiety, an airiness of
+spirit, an atmosphere of enjoyment which bespoke one who is in love with
+life.
+
+"Why, this is lucky!  I'm so glad to see you all!" said Arthur Beaufort,
+with that silver-ringing tone and charming smile which are to the happy
+spring of man what its music and its sunshine are to the spring of earth.
+"You must dine with me at Verey's.  I want something to rouse me to-day;
+for I did not get home from the _Salon_* till four this morning."
+
+     *[The most celebrated gaming-house in Paris in the day before
+     gaming-houses were suppressed by the well-directed energy of the
+     government.]
+
+"But you won?"
+
+"Yes, Marsden.  Hang it!  I always win: I who could so well afford to
+lose: I'm quite ashamed of my luck!"
+
+"It is easy to spend what one wins," observed Mr. Marsden, sententiously;
+"and I see you have been at the jeweller's!  A present for Cecile?  Well,
+don't blush, my dear fellow.  What is life without women?"
+
+"And wine?" said a second.  "And play?" said a third.  "And wealth?" said
+a fourth.
+
+"And you enjoy them all!  Happy fellow!" said a fifth.  The Outcast
+pulled his hat over his brows, and walked away.
+
+"This dear Paris," said Beaufort, as his eye carelessly and unconsciously
+followed the dark form retreating through the arches;--"this dear Paris!
+I must make the most of it while I stay!  I have only been here a few
+weeks, and next week I must go."
+
+"Pooh--your health is better: you don't look like the same man."
+
+"You think so really?  Still I don't know: the doctors say that I must
+either go to the German waters--the season is begun--or--"
+
+"Or what?"
+
+"Live less with such pleasant companions, my dear fellow!  But as you
+say, what is life without--"
+
+"Women!"
+
+"Wine!"
+
+"Play!"
+
+"Wealth!"
+
+"Ha! ha.  'Throw physic to the dogs: I'll none of it!'"
+
+And Arthur leaped lightly on his saddle, and as he rode gaily on, humming
+the favourite air of the last opera, the hoofs of his horse splashed the
+mud over a foot-passenger halting at the crossing.  Morton checked the
+fiery exclamation rising to his lips; and gazing after the brilliant form
+that hurried on towards the Champs Elysees, his eye caught the statues on
+the bridge, and a voice, as of a cheering angel, whispered again to his
+heart, "TIME, FAITH, ENERGY!"
+
+The expression of his countenance grew calm at once, and as he continued
+his rambles it was with a mind that, casting off the burdens of the past,
+looked serenely and steadily on the obstacles and hardships of the
+future.  We have seen that a scruple of conscience or of pride, not
+without its nobleness, had made him refuse the importunities of Gawtrey
+for less sordid raiment; the same feeling made it his custom to avoid
+sharing the luxurious and dainty food with which Gawtrey was wont to
+regale himself.  For that strange man, whose wonderful felicity of
+temperament and constitution rendered him, in all circumstances, keenly
+alive to the hearty and animal enjoyments of life, would still emerge, as
+the day declined, from their wretched apartment, and, trusting to his
+disguises, in which indeed he possessed a masterly art, repair to one of
+the better description of restaurants, and feast away his cares for the
+moment.  William Gawtrey would not have cared three straws for the curse
+of Damocles.  The sword over his head would never have spoiled his
+appetite!  He had lately, too, taken to drinking much more deeply than he
+had been used to do--the fine intellect of the man was growing thickened
+and dulled; and this was a spectacle that Morton could not bear to
+contemplate.  Yet so great was Gawtrey's vigour of health, that, after
+draining wine and spirits enough to have despatched a company of fox-
+hunters, and after betraying, sometimes in uproarious glee, sometimes in
+maudlin self-bewailings, that he himself was not quite invulnerable to
+the thyrsus of the god, he would--on any call on his energies, or
+especially before departing on those mysterious expeditions which kept
+him from home half, and sometimes all, the night--plunge his head into
+cold water--drink as much of the lymph as a groom would have shuddered to
+bestow on a horse--close his eyes in a doze for half an hour, and wake,
+cool, sober, and collected, as if he had lived according to the precepts
+of Socrates or Cornaro!
+
+But to return to Morton.  It was his habit to avoid as much as possible
+sharing the good cheer of his companion; and now, as he entered the,
+Champs Elysees, he saw a little family, consisting of a young mechanic,
+his wife, and two children, who, with that love of harmless recreation
+which yet characterises the French, had taken advantage of a holiday in
+the craft, and were enjoying their simple meal under the shadow of the
+trees.  Whether in hunger or in envy, Morton paused and contemplated the
+happy group.  Along the road rolled the equipages and trampled the steeds
+of those to whom all life is a holiday.  There, was Pleasure--under those
+trees was Happiness.  One of the children, a little boy of about six
+years old, observing the attitude and gaze of the pausing wayfarer, ran
+to him, and holding up a fragment of a coarse kind of cake, said to him,
+willingly, "Take it--I have had enough!"  The child reminded Morton of
+his brother--his heart melted within him--he lifted the young Samaritan
+in his arms, and as he kissed him, wept.
+
+The mother observed and rose also.  She laid her hand on his own: "Poor
+boy! why do you weep?--can we relieve you?"
+
+Now that bright gleam of human nature, suddenly darting across the sombre
+recollections and associations of his past life, seemed to Morton as if
+it came from Heaven, in approval and in blessing of this attempt at
+reconciliation to his fate.
+
+"I thank you," said he, placing the child on the ground, and passing his
+hand over his eyes,--"I thank you--yes!  Let me sit down amongst you."
+And he sat down, the child by his side, and partook of their fare, and
+was merry with them,--the proud Philip!--had he not begun to discover the
+"precious jewel" in the "ugly and venomous" Adversity?
+
+The mechanic, though a gay fellow on the whole, was not without some of
+that discontent of his station which is common with his class; he vented
+it, however, not in murmurs, but in jests.  He was satirical on the
+carriages and the horsemen that passed; and, lolling on the grass,
+ridiculed his betters at his ease.
+
+"Hush!" said his wife, suddenly; "here comes Madame de Merville;" and
+rising as she spoke, she made a respectful inclination of her head
+towards an open carriage that was passing very slowly towards the town.
+
+"Madame de Merville!" repeated the husband, rising also, and lifting his
+cap from his head.  "Ah! I have nothing to say against her!"
+
+Morton looked instinctively towards the carriage, and saw a fair
+countenance turned graciously to answer the silent salutations of the
+mechanic and his wife--a countenance that had long haunted his dreams,
+though of late it had faded away beneath harsher thoughts--the
+countenance of the stranger whom he had seen at the bureau of Gawtrey,
+when that worthy personage had borne a more mellifluous name.  He started
+and changed colour: the lady herself now seemed suddenly to recognise
+him; for their eyes met, and she bent forward eagerly.  She pulled the
+check-string--the carriage halted--she beckoned to the mechanic's wife,
+who went up to the roadside.
+
+"I worked once for that lady," said the man with a tone of feeling; "and
+when my wife fell ill last winter she paid the doctors.  Ah, she is an
+angel of charity and kindness!"
+
+Morton scarcely heard this eulogium, for he observed, by something eager
+and inquisitive in the face of Madame de Merville, and by the sudden
+manner in which the mechanic's helpmate turned her head to the spot in
+which he stood, that he was the object of their conversation.  Once more
+he became suddenly aware of his ragged dress, and with a natural shame--a
+fear that charity might be extended to him from her--he muttered an
+abrupt farewell to the operative, and without another glance at the
+carriage, walked away.
+
+Before he had got many paces, the wife however came up to him,
+breathless. "Madame de Merville would speak to you, sir!" she said, with
+more respect than she had hitherto thrown into her manner.  Philip paused
+an instant, and again strode on--
+
+"It must be some mistake," he said, hurriedly: "I have no right to expect
+such an honour."
+
+He struck across the road, gained the opposite side, and had vanished
+from Madame de Merville's eyes, before the woman regained the carriage.
+But still that calm, pale, and somewhat melancholy face, presented itself
+before him; and as he walked again through the town, sweet and gentle
+fancies crowded confusedly on his heart.  On that soft summer day,
+memorable for so many silent but mighty events in that inner life which
+prepares the catastrophes of the outer one; as in the region, of which
+Virgil has sung, the images of men to be born hereafter repose or glide--
+on that soft summer day, he felt he had reached the age when Youth begins
+to clothe in some human shape its first vague ideal of desire and love.
+
+In such thoughts, and still wandering, the day wore away, till he found
+himself in one of the lanes that surround that glittering Microcosm of
+the vices, the frivolities, the hollow show, and the real beggary of the
+gay City--the gardens and the galleries of the Palais Royal.  Surprised
+at the lateness of the hour, it was then on the stroke of seven, he was
+about to return homewards, when the loud voice of Gawtrey sounded behind,
+and that personage, tapping him on the back, said,--
+
+"Hollo, my young friend, well met!  This will be a night of trial to you.
+Empty stomachs produce weak nerves.  Come along! you must dine with me.
+A good dinner and a bottle of old wine--come! nonsense, I say you shall
+come! _Vive la joie_!"
+
+While speaking, he had linked his arm in Morton's, and hurried him on
+several paces in spite of his struggles; but just as the words _Vive la
+joie_ left his lips, he stood still and mute, as if a thunderbolt had
+fallen at his feet; and Morton felt that heavy arm shiver and tremble
+like a leaf. He looked up, and just at the entrance of that part of the
+Palais Royal in which are situated the restaurants of Verey and Vefour,
+he saw two men standing but a few paces before them, and gazing full on
+Gawtrey and himself.
+
+"It is my evil genius," muttered Gawtrey, grinding his teeth.
+
+"And mine!" said Morton.
+
+The younger of the two men thus apostrophised made a step towards Philip,
+when his companion drew him back and whispered,--"What are you about--do
+you know that young man?"
+
+"He is my cousin; Philip Beaufort's natural son!"
+
+"Is he? then discard him for ever.  He is with the most dangerous knave
+in Europe!"
+
+As Lord Lilburne--for it was he--thus whispered his nephew, Gawtrey
+strode up to him; and, glaring full in his face, said in a deep and
+hollow tone,--"There is a hell, my lord,--I go to drink to our meeting!"
+Thus saying, he took off his hat with a ceremonious mockery, and
+disappeared within the adjoining restaurant, kept by Vefour.
+
+"A hell!" said Lilburne, with his frigid smile; "the rogue's head runs
+upon gambling-houses!"
+
+"And I have suffered Philip again to escape me," said Arthur, in
+self-reproach: for while Gawtrey had addressed Lord Lilburne, Morton had
+plunged back amidst the labyrinth of alleys.  "How have I kept my oath?"
+
+"Come! your guests must have arrived by this time.  As for that wretched
+young man, depend upon it that he is corrupted body and soul."
+
+"But he is my own cousin."
+
+
+
+"Pooh! there is no relationship in natural children: besides, he will
+find you out fast enough.  Ragged claimants are not long too proud to
+beg."
+
+"You speak in earnest?" said Arthur, irresolutely.  "Ay! trust my
+experience of the world--Allons!"
+
+And in a _cabinet_ of the very _restaurant_, adjoining that in which the
+solitary Gawtrey gorged his conscience, Lilburne, Arthur, and their gay
+friends, soon forgetful of all but the roses of the moment, bathed their
+airy spirits in the dews of the mirthful wine.  Oh, extremes of life!
+Oh, Night!  Oh, Morning!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+"Meantime a moving scene was open laid,
+That lazar house."--THOMSON'S _Castle of Indolence_.
+
+It was near midnight.  At the mouth of the lane in which Gawtrey resided
+there stood four men.  Not far distant, in the broad street at angles
+with the lane, were heard the wheels of carriages and the sound of music.
+A lady, fair in form, tender of heart, stainless in repute, was receiving
+her friends!
+
+"Monsieur Favart," said one of the men to the smallest of the four; "you
+understand the conditions--20,000 francs and a free pardon?"
+
+"Nothing more reasonable--it is understood.  Still I confess that I
+should like to have my men close at hand.  I am not given to fear; but
+this is a dangerous experiment."
+
+"You knew the danger beforehand and subscribed to it: you must enter
+alone with me, or not at all.  Mark you, the men are sworn to murder him
+who betrays them.  Not for twenty times 20,000 francs would I have them
+know me as the informer.  My life were not worth a day's purchase.  Now,
+if you feel secure in your disguise, all is safe.  You will have seen
+them at their work--you will recognise their persons--you can depose
+against them at the trial--I shall have time to quit France."
+
+"Well, well! as you please."
+
+"Mind, you must wait in the vault with them till they separate.  We have
+so planted your men that whatever street each of the gang takes in going
+home, he can be seized quietly and at once.  The bravest and craftiest of
+all, who, though he has but just joined, is already their captain;--him,
+the man I told you of, who lives in the house, you must take after his
+return, in his bed.  It is the sixth story to the right, remember: here
+is the key to his door.  He is a giant in strength; and will never be
+taken alive if up and armed."
+
+"Ah, I comprehend!--Gilbert" (and Favart turned to one of his companions
+who had not yet spoken) "take three men besides yourself, according to
+the directions I gave you,--the porter will admit you, that's arranged.
+Make no noise.  If I don't return by four o'clock, don't wait for me, but
+proceed at once.  Look well to your primings.  Take him alive, if
+possible--at the worst, dead.  And now--anon ami--lead on!"
+
+The traitor nodded, and walked slowly down the street.  Favart, pausing,
+whispered hastily to the man whom he had called Gilbert,--
+
+"Follow me close--get to the door of the cellar-place eight men within
+hearing of my whistle--recollect the picklocks, the axes.  If you hear
+the whistle, break in; if not, I'm safe, and the first orders to seize
+the captain in his room stand good."
+
+So saying, Favart strode after his guide.  The door of a large, but ill-
+favoured-looking house stood ajar--they entered-passed unmolested through
+a court-yard--descended some stairs; the guide unlocked the door of a
+cellar, and took a dark lantern from under his cloak.  As he drew up the
+slide, the dim light gleamed on barrels and wine-casks, which appeared to
+fill up the space.  Rolling aside one of these, the guide lifted a trap-
+door, and lowered his lantern.  "Enter," said he; and the two men
+disappeared.
+
+               .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+The coiners were at their work.  A man, seated on a stool before a desk,
+was entering accounts in a large book.  That man was William Gawtrey.
+While, with the rapid precision of honest mechanics, the machinery of the
+Dark Trade went on in its several departments.  Apart--alone--at the foot
+of a long table, sat Philip Morton.  The truth had exceeded his darkest
+suspicions.  He had consented to take the oath not to divulge what was to
+be given to his survey; and when, led into that vault, the bandage was
+taken from his eyes, it was some minutes before he could fully comprehend
+the desperate and criminal occupations of the wild forms amidst which
+towered the burly stature of his benefactor.  As the truth slowly grew
+upon him, he shrank from the side of Gawtrey; but, deep compassion for
+his friend's degradation swallowing up the horror of the trade, he flung
+himself on one of the rude seats, and felt that the bond between them was
+indeed broken, and that the next morning he should be again alone in the
+world.  Still, as the obscene jests, the fearful oaths, that from time to
+time rang through the vault, came on his ear, he cast his haughty eye in
+such disdain over the groups, that Gawtrey, observing him, trembled for
+his safety; and nothing but Philip's sense of his own impotence, and the
+brave, not timorous, desire not to perish by such hands, kept silent the
+fiery denunciations of a nature still proud and honest, that quivered on
+his lips.  All present were armed with pistols and cutlasses except
+Morton, who suffered the weapons presented to him to lie unheeded on the
+table.
+
+"_Courage, mes amis_!" said Gawtrey, closing his book,--"_Courage_!"--a
+few months more, and we shall have made enough to retire upon, and enjoy
+ourselves for the rest of the days.  Where is Birnie?"
+
+"Did he not tell you?"  said one of the artisans, looking up.  "He has
+found out the cleverest hand in France, the very fellow who helped
+Bouchard in all his five-franc pieces.  He has promised to bring him
+to-night."
+
+"Ay, I remember," returned Gawtrey, "he told me this morning,--he is a
+famous decoy!"
+
+"I think so, indeed!"  quoth a coiner; "for he caught you, the best head
+to our hands that ever _les industriels_ were blessed with--_sacre
+fichtre_!"
+
+"Flatterer!"  said Gawtrey, coming from the desk to the table, and
+pouring out wine from one of the bottles into a huge flagon--"To your
+healths!"
+
+Here the door slided back, and Birnie glided in.
+
+"Where is  your booty, _mon brave_?"  said  Gawtrey.  "We only coin
+money; you coin men, stamp with your own seal, and send them current to
+the devil!"
+
+The coiners, who liked Birnie's ability (for the ci-devant engraver was
+of admirable skill in their craft), but who hated his joyless manners,
+laughed at this taunt, which Birnie did not seem to heed, except by a
+malignant gleam of his dead eye.
+
+"If you mean the celebrated coiner, Jacques Giraumont, he waits without.
+You know our rules.  I cannot admit him without leave."
+
+"_Bon_! we give it,--eh, messieurs?"  said Gawtrey.  "Ay-ay," cried
+several voices.  "He knows the oath, and will hear the penalty."
+
+"Yes, he knows the oath," replied Birnie, and glided back.
+
+In a moment more he returned with a small man in a mechanic's blouse.
+The new comer wore the republican beard and moustache--of a sandy grey--
+his hair was the same colour; and a black patch over one eye increased
+the ill-favoured appearance of his features.
+
+"_Diable_!  Monsieur Giraumont! but you are more like Vulcan than
+Adonis!" said Gawtrey.
+
+"I don't know anything about Vulcan, but I know how to make five-franc
+pieces," said Monsieur Giraumont, doggedly.
+
+"Are you poor?"
+
+"As a church mouse!  The only thing belonging to a church, since the
+Bourbons came back, that is poor!"
+
+At this sally, the coiners, who had gathered round the table, uttered the
+shout with which, in all circumstances, Frenchmen receive a _bon mot_.
+
+"Humph!" said Gawtrey.  "Who responds with his own life for your
+fidelity?"
+
+"I," said Birnie.
+
+"Administer the oath to him."
+
+Suddenly four men advanced, seized the visitor, and bore him from the
+vault into another one within.  After a few moments they returned.
+
+"He has taken the oath and heard the penalty."
+
+"Death to yourself, your wife, your son, and your grandson, if you betray
+us!"
+
+"I have neither son nor grandson; as for my wife, Monsieur le Capitaine,
+you offer a bribe instead of a threat when you talk of her death."
+
+"Sacre! but you will be an addition to our circle, _mon brave_!"  said
+Gawtrey, laughing; while again the grim circle shouted applause.
+
+"But I suppose you care for your own life."
+
+"Otherwise I should have preferred starving to coming here," answered the
+laconic neophyte.
+
+"I have done with you.  Your health!"
+
+On this the coiners gathered round Monsieur Giraumont, shook him by the
+hand, and commenced many questions with a view to ascertain his skill.
+
+"Show me your coinage first; I see you use both the die and the furnace.
+Hem!  this piece is not bad--you have struck it from an iron die?--right
+--it makes the impression sharper than plaster of Paris.  But you take
+the poorest and the most dangerous part of the trade in taking the home
+market.  I can put you in a way to make ten times as much--and with
+safety.  Look at this!"--and Monsieur Giraumont took a forged Spanish
+dollar from his pocket, so skilfully manufactured that the connoisseurs
+were lost in admiration--"you may pass thousands of these all over
+Europe, except France, and who is ever to detect you?  But it will
+require better machinery than you have here."
+
+Thus conversing, Monsieur Giraumont did not perceive that Mr. Gawtrey had
+been examining him very curiously and minutely.  But Birnie had noted
+their chief's attention, and once attempted to join his new ally, when
+Gawtrey laid his hand on his shoulder, and stopped him.
+
+"Do not speak to your friend till I bid you, or--" lie stopped short, and
+touched his pistols.
+
+Birnie grew a shade more pale, but replied with his usual sneer:
+
+"Suspicious!--well, so much the better!"  and seating himself carelessly
+at the table, lighted his pipe.
+
+"And now, Monsieur Giraumont," said Gawtrey, as he took the head of the
+table, "come to my right hand.  A half-holiday in your honour.  Clear
+these infernal instruments; and more wine, mes amis!"
+
+The party arranged themselves at the table.  Among the desperate there is
+almost invariably a tendency to mirth.  A solitary ruffian, indeed, is
+moody, but a gang of ruffians are jovial.  The coiners talked and laughed
+loud.  Mr. Birnie, from his dogged silence, seemed apart from the rest,
+though in the centre.  For in a noisy circle a silent tongue builds a
+wall round its owner.  But that respectable personage kept his furtive
+watch upon Giraumont and Gawtrey, who appeared talking together, very
+amicably.  The younger novice of that night, equally silent, seated
+towards the bottom of the table, was not less watchful than Birnie.  An
+uneasy, undefinable foreboding had come over him since the entrance of
+Monsieur Giraumont; this had been increased by the manner of Mr. Gawtrey.
+His faculty of observation, which was very acute, had detected something
+false in the chief's blandness to their guest--something dangerous in the
+glittering eye that Gawtrey ever, as he spoke to Giraumont, bent on that
+person's lips as he listened to his reply.  For, whenever William Gawtrey
+suspected a man, he watched not his eyes, but his lips.
+
+Waked from his scornful reverie, a strange spell chained Morton's
+attention to the chief and the guest, and he bent forward, with parted
+mouth and straining ear, to catch their conversation.
+
+"It seems to me a little strange," said Mr. Gawtrey, raising his voice so
+as to be heard by the party, "that a coiner so dexterous as Monsieur
+Giraumont should not be known to any of us except our friend Birnie."
+
+"Not at all," replied Giraumont; "I worked only with Bouchard and two
+others since sent to the galleys.  We were but a small fraternity--
+everything has its commencement."
+
+"_C'est juste: buvez, donc, cher ami_!"
+
+The wine circulated.  Gawtrey began again:
+
+"You have had a bad accident, seemingly, Monsieur Giraumont.  How did you
+lose your eye?"
+
+"In a scuffle with the _gens d' armes_ the night Bouchard was taken and I
+escaped.  Such misfortunes are on the cards."
+
+"C'est juste: buvez, donc, Monsieur Giraumont!"
+
+Again there was a pause, and again Gawtrey's deep voice was heard.
+
+"You wear a wig, I think, Monsieur Giraumont?  To judge by your eyelashes
+your own hair has been a handsomer colour."
+
+"We seek disguise, not beauty, my host; and the police have sharp eyes."
+
+"_C'est juste: buvez, donc-vieux Renard_!  When did we two meet last?"
+
+"Never, that I know of."
+
+"_Ce n'est pas vrai! buvez, donc, MONSIEUR FAVART_!"
+
+At the sound of that name the company started in dismay and confusion,
+and the police officer, forgetting himself for the moment, sprang from
+his seat, and put his right hand into his blouse.
+
+"Ho, there!--treason!"  cried Gawtrey, in a voice of thunder; and he
+caught the unhappy man by the throat.  It was the work of a moment.
+Morton, where he sat, beheld a struggle--he heard a death-cry.  He saw
+the huge form of the master-coiner rising above all the rest, as
+cutlasses gleamed and eyes sparkled round.  He saw the quivering and
+powerless frame of the unhappy guest raised aloft in those mighty arms,
+and presently it was hurled along the table-bottles crashing--the board
+shaking beneath its weight--and lay before the very eyes of Morton, a
+distorted and lifeless mass.  At the same instant Gawtrey sprang upon the
+table, his black frown singling out from the group the ashen, cadaverous
+face of the shrinking traitor.  Birnie had darted from the table--he was
+half-way towards the sliding door--his face, turned over his shoulder,
+met the eyes of the chief.
+
+"Devil!" shouted Gawtrey, in his terrible voice, which the echoes of the
+vault gave back from side to side.  "Did I not give thee up my soul that
+thou mightest not compass my death?  Hark ye! thus die my slavery and all
+our secrets!"  The explosion of his pistol half swallowed up the last
+word, and with a single groan the traitor fell on the floor, pierced
+through the brain--then there was a dead and grim hush as the smoke
+rolled slowly along the roof of the dreary vault.
+
+Morton sank back on his seat, and covered his face with his hands.  The
+last seal on the fate of THE MAN OF CRIME was set; the last wave in the
+terrible and mysterious tide of his destiny had dashed on his soul to the
+shore whence there is no return.  Vain, now and henceforth, the humour,
+the sentiment, the kindly impulse, the social instincts which had
+invested that stalwart shape with dangerous fascination, which had
+implied the hope of ultimate repentance, of redemption even in this
+world.  The HOUR and the CIRCUMSTANCE had seized their prey; and the
+self-defence, which a lawless career rendered a necessity, left the
+eternal die of blood upon his doom!
+
+"Friends, I have saved you," said Gawtrey, slowly gazing on the corpse of
+his second victim, while he turned the pistol to his belt.  "I have not
+quailed before this man's eye" (and he spurned the clay of the officer as
+he spoke with a revengeful scorn) "without treasuring up its aspect in my
+heart of hearts.  I knew him when he entered--knew him through his
+disguise--yet, faith, it was a clever one!  Turn up his face and gaze on
+him now; he will never terrify us again, unless there be truth in ghosts!"
+
+Murmuring and tremulous the coiners scrambled on the table and examined
+the dead man.  From this task Gawtrey interrupted them, for his quick eye
+detected, with the pistols under the policeman's blouse, a whistle of
+metal of curious construction, and he conjectured at once that danger was
+at hand.
+
+"I have saved you, I say, but only for the hour.  This deed cannot sleep.
+See, he had help within call!  The police knew where to look for their
+comrade--we are dispersed.  Each for himself.  Quick, divide the spoils!
+_Sauve qui peat_!"
+
+Then Morton heard where he sat, his hands still clasped before his face,
+a confused hubbub of voices, the jingle of money, the scrambling of feet,
+the creaking of doors.  All was silent!
+
+A strong grasp drew his hands from his eyes.
+
+"Your first scene of life against life," said Gawtrey's voice, which
+seemed fearfully changed to the ear that beard it.  "Bah! what would you
+think of a battle?  Come to our eyrie: the carcasses are gone."
+
+Morton looked fearfully round the vault.  He and Gawtrey were alone.  His
+eyes sought the places where the dead had lain--they were removed--no
+vestige of the deeds, not even a drop of blood.
+
+"Come, take up your cutlass, come!"  repeated the voice of the chief, as
+with his dim lantern--now the sole light of the vault--he stood in the
+shadow of the doorway.
+
+Morton rose, took up the weapon mechanically, and followed that terrible
+guide, mute and unconscious, as a Soul follows a Dream through the House
+of Sleep!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+               "Sleep no more!"--_Macbeth_
+
+After winding through gloomy and labyrinthine passages, which conducted
+to a different range of cellars from those entered by the unfortunate
+Favart, Gawtrey emerged at the foot of a flight of stairs, which, dark,
+narrow, and in many places broken, had been probably appropriated to
+servants of the house in its days of palmier glory.  By these steps the
+pair regained their attic.  Gawtrey placed the lantern on the table and
+seated himself in silence.  Morton, who had recovered his self-possession
+and formed his resolution, gazed on him for some moments, equally
+taciturn.  At length he spoke:
+
+"Gawtrey!"
+
+"I bade you not call me by that name," said the coiner; for we need
+scarcely say that in his new trade he had assumed a new appellation.
+
+"It is the least guilty one by which I have known you," returned Morton,
+firmly.  "It is for the last time I call you by it!  I demanded to see by
+what means one to whom I had entrusted my fate supported himself.  I have
+seen," continued the young man, still firmly, but with a livid cheek and
+lip, "and the tie between us is rent for ever.  Interrupt me not! it is
+not for me to blame you.  I have eaten of your bread and drunk of your
+cup.  Confiding in you too blindly, and believing that you were at least
+free from those dark and terrible crimes for which there is no expiation
+--at least in this life--my conscience seared by distress, my very soul
+made dormant by despair, I surrendered myself to one leading a career
+equivocal, suspicious, dishonourable perhaps, but still not, as I
+believed, of atrocity and bloodshed.  I wake at the brink of the abyss--
+my mother's hand beckons to me from the grave; I think I hear her voice
+while I address you--I recede while it is yet time--we part, and for
+ever!"
+
+Gawtrey, whose stormy passion was still deep upon his soul, had listened
+hitherto in sullen and dogged silence, with a gloomy frown on his knitted
+brow; he now rose with an oath--
+
+"Part! that I may let loose on the world a new traitor!  Part! when you
+have seen me fresh from an act that, once whispered, gives me to the
+guillotine!  Part--never! at least alive!"
+
+"I have said it," said Morton, folding his arms calmly; I say it to your
+face, though I might part from you in secret.  Frown not on me, man of
+blood!  I am fearless as yourself!  In another minute I am gone."
+
+"Ah! is it so?"  said Gawtrey; and glancing round the room, which
+contained two doors, the one concealed by the draperies of a bed,
+communicating with the stairs by which they had entered, the other with
+the landing of the principal and common flight: he turned to the former,
+within his reach, which he locked, and put the key into his pocket, and
+then, throwing across the latter a heavy swing bar, which fell into its
+socket with a harsh noise,--before the threshold he placed his vast bulk,
+and burst into his loud, fierce laugh: "Ho! ho!  Slave and fool, once
+mine, you were mine body and soul for ever!"
+
+"Tempter, I defy you! stand back!"  And, firm and dauntless, Morton laid
+his hand on the giant's vest.
+
+Gawtrey seemed more astonished than enraged.  He looked hard at his
+daring associate, on whose lip the down was yet scarcely dark.
+
+"Boy," said he, "off! do not rouse the devil in me again!  I could crush
+you with a hug."
+
+"My soul supports my body, and I am armed," said Morton, laying hand on
+his cutlass.  "But you dare not harm me, nor I you; bloodstained as you
+are, you gave me shelter and bread; but accuse me not that I will save my
+soul while it is yet time!--Shall my mother have blessed me in vain upon
+her death-bed?"
+
+Gawtrey drew back, and Morton, by a sudden impulse, grasped his hand.
+
+"Oh! hear me-hear me!"  he cried, with great emotion.  "Abandon this
+horrible career; you have been decoyed and betrayed to it by one who can
+deceive or terrify you no more!  Abandon it, and I will never desert you.
+For her sake--for your Fanny's sake--pause, like me, before the gulf
+swallow us.  Let us fly!--far to the New World--to any land where our
+thews and sinews, our stout hands and hearts, can find an honest mart.
+Men, desperate as we are, have yet risen by honest means.  Take her, your
+orphan, with us.  We will work for her, both of us.  Gawtrey! hear me.
+It is not my voice that speaks to you--it is your good angel's!"
+
+Gawtrey fell back against the wall, and his chest heaved.
+
+"Morton," he said, with choked and tremulous accent, "go now; leave me to
+my fate!  I have sinned against you--shamefully sinned.  It seemed to me
+so sweet to have a friend; in your youth and character of mind there was
+so much about which the tough strings of my heart wound themselves, that
+I could not bear to lose you--to suffer you to know me for what I was.
+I blinded--I deceived you as to my past deeds; that was base in me: but I
+swore to my own heart to keep you unexposed to every danger, and free
+from every vice that darkened my own path.  I kept that oath till this
+night, when, seeing that you began to recoil from me, and dreading that
+you should desert me, I thought to bind you to me for ever by implicating
+you in this fellowship of crime.  I am punished, and justly.  Go, I
+repeat--leave me to the fate that strides nearer and nearer to me day by
+day.  You are a boy still--I am no longer young.  Habit is a second
+nature.  Still--still I could repent--I could begin life again.  But
+repose!--to look back--to remember--to be haunted night and day with
+deeds that shall meet me bodily and face to face on the last day--"
+
+"Add not to the spectres!  Come--fly this night--this hour!"
+
+Gawtrey paused, irresolute and wavering, when at that moment he heard
+steps on the stairs below.  He started--as starts the boar caught in his
+lair--and listened, pale and breathless.
+
+"Hush!--they are on us!--they come!" as he whispered, the key from
+without turned in the wards--the door shook.  "Soft! the bar preserves us
+both--this way."  And the coiner crept to the door of the private stairs.
+He unlocked and opened it cautiously.  A man sprang through the aperture:
+
+"Yield!--you are my prisoner!"
+
+"Never!" cried Gawtrey, hurling back the intruder, and clapping to the
+door, though other and stout men were pressing against it with all their
+power.
+
+"Ho! ho!  Who shall open the tiger's cage?"
+
+At both doors now were heard the sound of voices.  "Open in the king's
+name, or expect no mercy!"
+
+"Hist!" said Gawtrey.  "One way yet--the window--the rope."
+
+Morton opened the casement--Gawtrey uncoiled the rope.  The dawn was
+breaking; it was light in the streets, but all seemed quiet without.  The
+doors reeled and shook beneath the pressure of the pursuers.  Gawtrey
+flung the rope across the street to the opposite parapet; after two or
+three efforts, the grappling-hook caught firm hold--the perilous path was
+made.
+
+"On!--quick!--loiter not!"  whispered Gawtrey; "you are active--it seems
+more dangerous than it is--cling with both hands-shut your eyes.  When on
+the other side--you see the window of Birnie's room,--enter it--descend
+the stairs--let yourself out, and you are safe."
+
+"Go first," said Morton, in the same tone: "I will not leave you now: you
+will be longer getting across than I shall.  I will keep guard till you
+are over."
+
+"Hark! hark!--are you mad?  You keep guard! what is your strength to
+mine?  Twenty men shall not move that door, while my weight is against
+it.  Quick, or you destroy us both!  Besides, you will hold the rope for
+me, it may not be strong enough for my bulk in itself.  Stay!--stay one
+moment.  If you escape, and I fall--Fanny--my father, he will take care
+of her,--you remember--thanks!  Forgive me all!  Go; that's right!"
+
+With a firm impulse, Morton threw himself on the dreadful bridge; it
+swung and crackled at his weight.  Shifting his grasp rapidly--holding
+his breath--with set teeth-with closed eyes--he moved on--he gained the
+parapet--he stood safe on the opposite side.  And now, straining his eyes
+across, he saw through the open casement into the chamber he had just
+quitted.  Gawtrey was still standing against the door to the principal
+staircase, for that of the two was the weaker and the more assailed.
+Presently the explosion of a fire-arm was heard; they had shot through
+the panel.  Gawtrey seemed wounded, for he staggered forward, and uttered
+a fierce cry; a moment more, and he gained the window--he seized the
+rope--he hung over the tremendous depth!  Morton knelt by the parapet,
+holding the grappling-hook in its place, with convulsive grasp, and
+fixing his eyes, bloodshot with fear and suspense, on the huge bulk that
+clung for life to that slender cord!
+
+"Le voiles!  Le voiles!"  cried a voice from the opposite side.  Morton
+raised his gaze from Gawtrey; the casement was darkened by the forms of
+his pursuers--they had burst into the room--an officer sprang upon the
+parapet, and Gawtrey, now aware of his danger, opened his eyes, and as he
+moved on, glared upon the foe.  The policeman deliberately raised his
+pistol--Gawtrey arrested himself--from a wound in his side the blood
+trickled slowly and darkly down, drop by drop, upon the stones below;
+even the officers of law shuddered as they eyed him--his hair bristling
+--his cheek white--his lips drawn convulsively from his teeth, and his
+eyes glaring from beneath the frown of agony and menace in which yet
+spoke the indomitable power and fierceness of the man.  His look, so
+fixed--so intense--so stern, awed the policeman; his hand trembled as he
+fired, and the ball struck the parapet an inch below the spot where
+Morton knelt.  An indistinct, wild, gurgling sound-half-laugh, half-yell
+of scorn and glee, broke from Gawtrey's lips.  He swung himself on--near
+--near--nearer--a yard from the parapet.
+
+"You are saved!"  cried Morton; when at the moment a volley burst from
+the fatal casement--the smoke rolled over both the fugitives--a groan, or
+rather howl, of rage, and despair, and agony, appalled even the hardest
+on whose ear it came.  Morton sprang to his feet and looked below.  He
+saw on the rugged stones far down, a dark, formless, motionless mass--the
+strong man of passion and levity--the giant who had played with life and
+soul, as an infant with the baubles that it prizes and breaks--was what
+the Caesar and the leper alike are, when the clay is without God's
+breath--what glory, genius, power, and beauty, would be for ever and for
+ever, if there were no God!
+
+"There is another!" cried the voice of one of the pursuers.  "Fire!"
+
+"Poor Gawtrey!" muttered Philip.  "I will fulfil your last wish;" and
+scarcely conscious of the bullet that whistled by him, he disappeared
+behind the parapet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+                         "Gently moved
+          By the soft wind of whispering silks."--DECKER.
+
+The reader may remember that while Monsieur Favart and Mr. Birnie were
+holding commune in the lane, the sounds of festivity were heard from a
+house in the adjoining street.  To that house we are now summoned.
+
+At Paris, the gaieties of balls, or soirees, are, I believe, very rare in
+that period of the year in which they are most frequent in London.  The
+entertainment now given was in honour of a christening; the lady who gave
+it, a relation of the new-born.
+
+Madame de Merville was a young widow; even before her marriage she had
+been distinguished in literature; she had written poems of more than
+common excellence; and being handsome, of good family, and large fortune,
+her talents made her an object of more interest than they might otherwise
+have done.  Her poetry showed great sensibility and tenderness.  If
+poetry be any index to the heart, you would have thought her one to love
+truly and deeply.  Nevertheless, since she married--as girls in France
+do--not to please herself, but her parents, she made a _mariage de
+convenance_.  Monsieur de Merville was a sober, sensible man, past middle
+age.  Not being fond of poetry, and by no means coveting a professional
+author for his wife, he had during their union, which lasted four years,
+discouraged his wife's liaison with Apollo.  But her mind, active and
+ardent, did not the less prey upon itself.  At the age of four-and-twenty
+she became a widow, with an income large even in England for a single
+woman, and at Paris constituting no ordinary fortune.  Madame de
+Merville, however, though a person of elegant taste, was neither
+ostentatious nor selfish; she had no children, and she lived quietly in
+apartments, handsome, indeed, but not more than adequate to the small
+establishment which--where, as on the Continent, the costly convenience
+of an entire house is not usually incurred--sufficed for her retinue.
+She devoted at least half her income, which was entirely at her own
+disposal, partly to the aid of her own relations, who were not rich, and
+partly to the encouragement of the literature she cultivated.  Although
+she shrank from the ordeal of publication, her poems and sketches of
+romance were read to her own friends, and possessed an eloquence seldom
+accompanied with so much modesty.  Thus, her reputation, though not blown
+about the winds, was high in her own circle, and her position in fashion
+and in fortune made her looked up to by her relations as the head of her
+family; they regarded her as _femme superieure_, and her advice with them
+was equivalent to a command.  Eugenie de Merville was a strange mixture
+of qualities at once feminine and masculine.  On the one hand, she had a
+strong will, independent views, some contempt for the world, and followed
+her own inclinations without servility to the opinion of others; on the
+other hand, she was susceptible, romantic, of a sweet, affectionate, kind
+disposition.  Her visit to M. Love, however indiscreet, was not less in
+accordance with her character than her charity to the mechanic's wife;
+masculine and careless where an eccentric thing was to be done--curiosity
+satisfied, or some object in female diplomacy achieved--womanly,
+delicate, and gentle, the instant her benevolence was appealed to or her
+heart touched.  She had now been three years a widow, and was
+consequently at the age of twenty-seven.  Despite the tenderness of her
+poetry and her character, her reputation was unblemished.  She had never
+been in love.  People who are much occupied do not fall in love easily;
+besides, Madame de Merville was refining, exacting, and wished to find
+heroes where she only met handsome dandies or ugly authors.  Moreover,
+Eugenie was both a vain and a proud person--vain of her celebrity and
+proud of her birth.  She was one whose goodness of heart made her always
+active in promoting the happiness of others.  She was not only generous
+and charitable, but willing to serve people by good offices as well as
+money.  Everybody loved her.  The new-born infant, to whose addition to
+the Christian community the fete of this night was dedicated, was the
+pledge of a union which Madame de Merville had managed to effect between
+two young persons, first cousins to each other, and related to herself.
+There had been scruples of parents to remove--money matters to adjust--
+Eugenie had smoothed all.  The husband and wife, still lovers, looked up
+to her as the author, under Heaven, of their happiness.
+
+The gala of that night had been, therefore, of a nature more than usually
+pleasurable, and the mirth did not sound hollow, but wrung from the
+heart.  Yet, as Eugenie from time to time contemplated the young people,
+whose eyes ever sought each other--so fair, so tender, and so joyous as
+they seemed--a melancholy shadow darkened her brow, and she sighed
+involuntarily.  Once the young wife, Madame d'Anville, approaching her
+timidly, said:
+
+"Ah! my sweet cousin, when shall we see you as happy as ourselves?  There
+is such happiness," she added, innocently, and with a blush, "in being a
+mother!--that little life all one's own--it is something to think of
+every hour!"
+
+"Perhaps," said Eugenie, smiling, and seeking to turn the conversation
+from a subject that touched too nearly upon feelings and thoughts her
+pride did not wish to reveal--"perhaps it is you, then, who have made our
+cousin, poor Monsieur de Vaudemont, so determined to marry?  Pray, be
+more cautious with him.  How difficult I have found it to prevent his
+bringing into our family some one to make us all ridiculous!"
+
+"True," said Madame d'Anville, laughing.  "But then, the Vicomte is so
+poor, and in debt.  He would fall in love, not with the demoiselle, but
+the dower. _A propos_ of that, how cleverly you took advantage of his
+boastful confession to break off his liaisons with that _bureau de
+mariage_."
+
+"Yes; I congratulate myself on that manoeuvre.  Unpleasant as it was to
+go to such a place (for, of course, I could not send for Monsieur Love
+here), it would have been still more unpleasant to have received such a
+Madame de Vaudemont as our cousin would have presented to us.  Only
+think--he was the rival of an _epicier_!  I heard that there was some
+curious _denouement_ to the farce of that establishment; but I could
+never get from Vaudemont the particulars.  He was ashamed of them, I
+fancy."
+
+"What droll professions there are in Paris!"  said Madame d'Anville.  "As
+if people could not marry without going to an office for a spouse as we
+go for a servant!  And so the establishment is broken up?  And you never
+again saw that dark, wild-looking boy who so struck your fancy that you
+have taken him as the original for the Murillo sketch of the youth in
+that charming tale you read to us the other evening?  Ah! cousin, I think
+you were a little taken with him.  The _bureau de mariage_ had its
+allurements for you as well as for our poor cousin!"  The young mother
+said this laughingly and carelessly.
+
+"Pooh!" returned Madame de Merville, laughing also; but a slight blush
+broke over her natural paleness.  "But a propos of the Vicomte.  You know
+how cruelly he has behaved to that poor boy of his by his English wife--
+never seen him since he was an infant--kept him at some school in
+England; and all because his vanity does not like the world to know that
+he has a son of nineteen!  Well, I have induced him to recall this poor
+youth."
+
+"Indeed! and how?"
+
+"Why," said Eugenie, with a smile, "he wanted a loan, poor man, and I
+could therefore impose conditions by way of interest.  But I also managed
+to conciliate him to the proposition, by representing that, if the young
+man were good-looking, he might, himself, with our connections, &c., form
+an advantageous marriage; and that in such a case, if the father treated
+him now justly and kindly, he would naturally partake with the father
+whatever benefits the marriage might confer."
+
+"Ah! you are an excellent diplomatist, Eugenie; and you turn people's
+heads by always acting from your heart.  Hush!  here comes the Vicomte"
+
+"A delightful ball," said Monsieur de Vaudemont, approaching the hostess.
+"Pray, has that young lady yonder, in the pink dress, any fortune?  She
+is pretty--eh?  You observe she is looking at me--I mean at us!"
+
+"My dear cousin, what a compliment you pay to marriage!  You have had two
+wives, and you are ever on the _qui vive_ for a third!"
+
+"What would you have me do?--we cannot resist the overtures of your
+bewitching sex.  Hum--what fortune has she?"
+
+"Not a _sou_; besides, she is engaged."
+
+"Oh! now I look at her, she is not pretty--not at all.  I made a mistake.
+I did not mean her; I meant the young lady in blue."
+
+"Worse and worse--she is married already.  Shall I present you?"
+
+"Ah, Monsieur de Vaudemont," said Madame d'Anville; "have you found out a
+new bureau de mariage?"
+
+The Vicomte pretended not to hear that question.  But, turning to
+Eugenie, took her aside, and said, with an air in which he endeavoured to
+throw a great deal of sorrow, "You know, my dear cousin, that, to oblige
+you, I consented to send for my son, though, as I always said, it is very
+unpleasant for a man like me, in the prime of life, to hawk about a great
+boy of nineteen or twenty.  People soon say, 'Old Vaudemont and younq
+Vaudemont.'  However, a father's feelings are never appealed to in vain."
+(Here the Vicomte put his handkerchief to his eyes, and after a pause,
+continued,)--"I sent for him--I even went to your old _bonne_, Madame
+Dufour, to make a bargain for her lodgings, and this day--guess my grief
+--I received a letter sealed with black.  My son is dead!--a sudden
+fever--it is shocking!"
+
+"Horrible! dead!--your own son, whom you hardly ever saw--never since he
+was an Infant!"
+
+"Yes, that softens the blow very much.  And now you see I must marry.  If
+the boy had been good-looking, and like me, and so forth, why, as you
+observed, he might have made a good match, and allowed me a certain sum,
+or we could have all lived together."
+
+"And your son is dead, and you come to a ball!"
+
+"_Je suis philosophe_," said the Vicomte, shrugging his shoulders.  "And,
+as you say, I never saw him.  It saves me seven hundred francs a-year.
+Don't say a word to any one--I sha'n't give out that he is dead, poor
+fellow!  Pray be discreet: you see there are some ill-natured people who
+might think it odd I do not shut myself up.  I can wait till Paris is
+quite empty.  It would be a pity to lose any opportunity at present, for
+now, you see, I must marry!" And the philosophe sauntered away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+                    GUIOMAR.
+          "Those devotions I am to pay
+          Are written in my heart, not in this book."
+
+                 Enter RUTILIO.
+          "I am pursued--all the ports are stopped too,
+          Not any hope to escape--behind, before me,
+          On either side, I am beset."
+          BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, _The Custom of the Country_
+
+The party were just gone--it was already the peep of day--the wheels of
+the last carriage had died in the distance.
+
+Madame de Merville had dismissed her woman, and was seated in her own
+room, leaning her head musingly on her hand.
+
+Beside her was the table that held her MSS. and a few books, amidst which
+were scattered vases of flowers.  On a pedestal beneath the window was
+placed a marble bust of Dante.  Through the open door were seen in
+perspective two rooms just deserted by her guests; the lights still
+burned in the chandeliers and girandoles, contending with the daylight
+that came through the half-closed curtains.  The person of the inmate was
+in harmony with the apartment.  It was characterised by a certain grace
+which, for want of a better epithet, writers are prone to call classical
+or antique.  Her complexion, seeming paler than usual by that light, was
+yet soft and delicate--the features well cut, but small and womanly.
+About the face there was that rarest of all charms, the combination of
+intellect with sweetness; the eyes, of a dark blue, were thoughtful,
+perhaps melancholy, in their expression; but the long dark lashes, and
+the shape of the eyes, themselves more long than full, gave to their
+intelligence a softness approaching to languor, increased, perhaps, by
+that slight shadow round and below the orbs which is common with those
+who have tasked too much either the mind or the heart.  The contour of
+the face, without being sharp or angular, had yet lost a little of the
+roundness of earlier youth; and the hand on which she leaned was,
+perhaps, even too white, too delicate, for the beauty which belongs to
+health; but the throat and bust were of exquisite symmetry.
+
+"I am not happy," murmured Eugenie to herself; "yet I scarce know why.
+Is it really, as we women of romance have said till the saying is worn
+threadbare, that the destiny of women is not fame but love.  Strange,
+then, that while I have so often pictured what love should be, I have
+never felt it.  And now,--and now," she continued, half rising, and with
+a natural pang--"now I am no longer in my first youth.  If I loved,
+should I be loved again?  How happy the young pair seemed--they are never
+alone!"
+
+At this moment, at a distance, was heard the report of fire-arms--again!
+Eugenie started, and called to her servant, who, with one of the waiters
+hired for the night, was engaged in removing, and nibbling as he removed,
+the re mains of the feast.  "What is that, at this hour?--open the window
+and look out!"
+
+"I can see nothing, madame."
+
+"Again--that is the third time.  Go into the street and look--some one
+must be in danger."
+
+The servant and the waiter, both curious, and not willing to part
+company, ran down the stairs, and thence into the street.
+
+Meanwhile, Morton, after vainly attempting Birnie's window, which the
+traitor had previously locked and barred against the escape of his
+intended victim, crept rapidly along the roof, screened by the parapet
+not only from the shot but the sight of the foe.  But just as he gained
+the point at which the lane made an angle with the broad street it
+adjoined, he cast his eyes over the parapet, and perceived that one of
+the officers had ventured himself to the fearful bridge; he was pursued--
+detection and capture seemed inevitable.  He paused, and breathed hard.
+He, once the heir to such fortunes, the darling of such affections!--he,
+the hunted accomplice of a gang of miscreants!  That was the thought that
+paralysed--the disgrace, not the danger.  But he was in advance of the
+pursuer--he hastened on--he turned the angle--he heard a shout behind
+from the opposite side--the officer had passed the bridge: "it is but one
+man as yet," thought he, and his nostrils dilated and his hands clenched
+as he glided on, glancing at each casement as he passed.
+
+Now as youth and vigour thus struggled against Law for life, near at hand
+Death was busy with toil and disease.  In a miserable _grabat_, or
+garret, a mechanic, yet young, and stricken by a lingering malady
+contracted by the labour of his occupation, was slowly passing from that
+world which had frowned on his cradle, and relaxed not the gloom of its
+aspect to comfort his bed of Death.  Now this man had married for love,
+and his wife had loved him; and it was the cares of that early marriage
+which had consumed him to the bone.  But extreme want, if long continued,
+eats up love when it has nothing else to eat.  And when people are very
+long dying, the people they fret and trouble begin to think of that too
+often hypocritical prettiness of phrase called "a happy release."  So the
+worn-out and half-famished wife did not care three straws for the dying
+husband, whom a year or two ago she had vowed to love and cherish in
+sickness and in health.  But still she seemed to care, for she moaned,
+and pined, and wept, as the man's breath grew fainter and fainter.
+
+"Ah, Jean!" said she, sobbing, "what will become of me, a poor lone
+widow, with nobody to work for my bread?"  And with that thought she took
+on worse than before.
+
+"I am stifling," said the dying man, rolling round his ghastly eyes.
+"How hot it is!  Open the window; I should like to see the light-daylight
+once again."
+
+"Mon Dieu! what whims he has, poor man!"  muttered the woman, without
+stirring.
+
+The poor wretch put out his skeleton hand and clutched his wife's arm.
+
+"I sha'n't trouble you long, Marie!  Air--air!"
+
+"Jean, you will make yourself worse--besides, I shall catch my death of
+cold.  I have scarce a rag on, but I will just open the door."
+
+"Pardon me," groaned the sufferer; "leave me, then."  Poor fellow!
+perhaps at that moment the thought of unkindness was sharper than the
+sharp cough which brought blood at every paroxysm.  He did not like her
+so near him, but he did not blame her.  Again, I say,--poor fellow!  The
+woman opened the door, went to the other side of the room, and sat down
+on an old box and began darning an old neck-handkerchief.  The silence
+was soon broken by the moans of the fast-dying man, and again he
+muttered, as he tossed to and fro, with baked white lips:
+
+"_Je m'etoufee_!--Air!"
+
+There was no resisting that prayer, it seemed so like the last.  The wife
+laid down the needle, put the handkerchief round her throat, and opened
+the window.
+
+"Do you feel easier now?"
+
+"Bless you, Marie--yes; that's good--good.  It puts me in mind of old
+days, that breath of air, before we came to Paris.  I wish I could work
+for you now, Marie."
+
+"Jean! my poor Jean!"  said the woman, and the words and the voice took
+back her hardening heart to the fresh fields and tender thoughts of the
+past time.  And she walked up to the bed, and he leaned his temples, damp
+with livid dews, upon her breast.
+
+"I have been a sad burden to you, Marie; we should not have married so
+soon; but I thought I was stronger.  Don't cry; we have no little ones,
+thank God.  It will be much better for you when I am gone."
+
+And so, word after word gasped out--he stopped suddenly, and seemed to
+fall asleep.
+
+The wife then attempted gently to lay him once more on his pillow--the
+head fell back heavily--the jaw had dropped--the teeth were set--the eyes
+were open and like the stone--the truth broke on her!
+
+"Jean--Jean!  My God, he is dead! and I was unkind to him at the last!"
+With these words she fell upon the corpse, happily herself insensible.
+
+Just at that moment a human face peered in at the window.  Through that
+aperture, after a moment's pause, a young man leaped lightly into the
+room.  He looked round with a hurried glance, but scarcely noticed the
+forms stretched on the pallet.  It was enough for him that they seemed to
+sleep, and saw him not.  He stole across the room, the door of which
+Marie had left open, and descended the stairs.  He had almost gained the
+courtyard into which the stairs had conducted, when he heard voices below
+by the porter's lodge.
+
+"The police have discovered a gang of coiners!"
+
+"Coiners!"
+
+"Yes, one has been shot dead!  I have seen his body in the kennel;
+another has fled along the roofs--a desperate fellow!  We were to watch
+for him.  Let us go up-stairs and get on the roof and look out."
+
+By the hum of approval that followed this proposition, Morton judged
+rightly that it had been addressed to several persons whom curiosity and
+the explosion of the pistols had drawn from their beds, and who were
+grouped round the porter's lodge.  What was to be done?--to advance was
+impossible: and was there yet time to retreat?--it was at least the only
+course left him; he sprang back up the stairs; he had just gained the
+first flight when he heard steps descending; then, suddenly, it flashed
+across him that he had left open the window above--that, doubtless, by
+that imprudent oversight the officer in pursuit had detected a clue to
+the path he had taken.  What was to be done?--die as Gawtrey had done!--
+death rather than the galleys.  As he thus resolved, he saw to the right
+the open door of an apartment in which lights still glimmered in their
+sockets.  It seemed deserted--he entered boldly and at once, closing the
+door after him.  Wines and viands still left on the table; gilded
+mirrors, reflecting the stern face of the solitary intruder; here and
+there an artificial flower, a knot of riband on the floor, all betokening
+the gaieties and graces of luxurious life--the dance, the revel, the
+feast--all this in one apartment!--above, in the same house, the pallet--
+the corpse--the widow--famine and woe!  Such is a great city! such, above
+all, is Paris! where, under the same roof, are gathered such antagonist
+varieties of the social state!  Nothing strange in this; it is strange
+and sad that so little do people thus neighbours know of each other, that
+the owner of those rooms had a heart soft to every distress, but she did
+not know the distress so close at hand.  The music that had charmed her
+guests had mounted gaily to the vexed ears of agony and hunger.  Morton
+passed the first room--a second--he came to a third, and Eugenie de
+Merville, looking up at that instant, saw before her an apparition that
+might well have alarmed the boldest.  His head was uncovered--his dark
+hair shadowed in wild and disorderly profusion the pale face and
+features, beautiful indeed, but at that moment of the beauty which an
+artist would impart to a young gladiator--stamped with defiance, menace,
+and despair.  The disordered garb--the fierce aspect--the dark eyes, that
+literally shone through the shadows of the room-all conspired to increase
+the terror of so abrupt a presence.
+
+"What are you?--What do you seek here?"  said she, falteringly, placing
+her hand on the bell as she spoke.  Upon that soft hand Morton laid his
+own.
+
+"I seek my life!  I am pursued!  I am at your mercy!  I am innocent!  Can
+you save me?"
+
+As he spoke, the door of the outer room beyond was heard to open, and
+steps and voices were at hand.
+
+"Ah!" he exclaimed, recoiling as he recognised her face.  "And is it to
+you that I have fled?"
+
+Eugenie also recognised the stranger; and there was something in their
+relative positions--the suppliant, the protectress--that excited both her
+imagination and her pity.  A slight colour mantled to her cheeks--her
+look was gentle and compassionate.
+
+"Poor boy! so young!" she said.  "Hush!"
+
+She withdrew her hand from his, retired a few steps, lifted a curtain
+drawn across a recess--and pointing to an alcove that contained one of
+those sofa-beds common in French houses, added in a whisper,--
+
+"Enter--you are saved."
+
+Morton obeyed, and Eugenie replaced the curtain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+                         GUIOMAR.
+          "Speak!  What are you?"
+
+                        RUTILIO.
+          "Gracious woman, hear me.  I am a stranger:
+          And in that I answer all your demands."
+           _Custom of the Country_.
+
+Eugenie replaced the curtain.  And scarcely had she done so ere the steps
+in the outer room entered the chamber where she stood.  Her servant was
+accompanied by two officers of the police.
+
+"Pardon, madame," said one of the latter; "but we are in pursuit of a
+criminal.  We think he must have entered this house through a window
+above while your servant was in the street.  Permit us to search?"
+
+"Without doubt," answered Eugenie, seating herself.  "If he has entered,
+look in the other apartments.  I have not quitted this room."
+
+"You are right.  Accept our apologies."
+
+And the officers turned back to examine every corner where the fugitive
+was not.  For in that, the scouts of Justice resembled their mistress:
+when does man's justice look to the right place?
+
+The servant lingered to repeat the tale he had heard--the sight he had
+seen.  When, at that instant, he saw the curtain of the alcove slightly
+stirred.  He uttered an exclamation-sprung to the bed--his hand touched
+the curtain--Eugenie seized his arm.  She did not speak; but as he turned
+his eyes to her, astonished, he saw that she trembled, and that her cheek
+was as white as marble.
+
+"Madame," he said, hesitating, "there is some one hid in the recess."
+
+"There is!  Be silent!"
+
+A suspicion flashed across the servant's mind.  The pure, the proud, the
+immaculate Eugenie!
+
+"There is!--and in madame's chamber!"  he faltered unconsciously.
+
+Eugenie's quick apprehensions seized the foul thought.  Her eyes flashed
+--her cheek crimsoned.  But her lofty and generous nature conquered even
+the indignant and scornful burst that rushed to her lips.  The truth!--
+could she trust the man?  A doubt--and the charge of the human life
+rendered to her might be betrayed.  Her colour fell--tears gushed to her
+eyes.
+
+"I have been kind to you, Francois.  Not a word."  "Madame confides in
+me--it is enough," said the Frenchman, bowing, with a slight smile on his
+lips; and he drew back respectfully.
+
+One of the police officers re-entered.
+
+"We have done, madame; he is not here.  Aha! that curtain!"
+
+"It is madame's bed," said Francois.  "But I have looked behind."
+
+"I am most sorry to have disarranged you," said the policeman, satisfied
+with the answer; "but we shall have him yet."  And he retired.
+
+The last footsteps died away, the last door of the apartments closed
+behind the officers, and Eugenie and her servant stood alone gazing on
+each other.
+
+"You may retire," said she at last; and taking her purse from the table,
+she placed it in his hands.
+
+The man took it, with a significant look.  "Madame may depend on my
+discretion."
+
+Eugenie was alone again.  Those words rang in her ear,--Eugenie de
+Merville dependent on the discretion of her lackey!  She sunk into her
+chair, and, her excitement succeeded by exhaustion, leaned her face on
+her hands, and burst into tears.  She was aroused by a low voice; she
+looked up, and the young man was kneeling at her feet.
+
+"Go--go!"  she said: "I have done for you all I can."
+
+"You heard--you heard--my own hireling, too!  At the hazard of my own good
+name you are saved.  Go!"
+
+"Of your good name!"--for Eugenie forgot that it was looks, not words,
+that had so wrung her pride--"Your good name," he repeated: and glancing
+round the room--the toilette, the curtain, the recess he had quitted--all
+that bespoke that chastest sanctuary of a chaste woman, which for a
+stranger to enter is, as it were, to profane--her meaning broke on him.
+"Your good name--your hireling!  No, madame,--no!"  And as he spoke, he
+rose to his feet.  "Not for me, that sacrifice!  Your humanity shall not
+cost you so dear.  Ho, there!  I am the man you seek."  And he strode to
+the door.
+
+Eugenie was penetrated with the answer.  She sprung to him--she grasped
+his garments.
+
+"Hush! hush!--for mercy's sake!  What would you do?  Think you I could
+ever be happy again, if the confidence you placed in me were betrayed?
+Be calm--be still.  I knew not what I said.  It will be easy to undeceive
+the man--later--when you are saved.  And you are innocent,--are you not?"
+
+"Oh, madame," said Morton, "from my soul I say it, I am innocent--not of
+poverty--wretchedness--error--shame; I am innocent of crime.  May Heaven
+bless you!"
+
+And as he reverently kissed the hand laid on his arm, there was something
+in his voice so touching, in his manner something so above his fortunes,
+that Eugenie was lost in her feelings of compassion, surprise, and
+something, it might be, of admiration in her wonder.
+
+"And, oh!" he said, passionately, gazing on her with his dark, brilliant
+eyes, liquid with emotion, "you have made my life sweet in saving it.
+You--you--of whom, ever since the first time, almost the sole time, I
+beheld you--I have so often mused and dreamed.  Henceforth, whatever
+befall me, there will be some recollections that will--that--"
+
+He stopped short, for his heart was too full for words; and the silence
+said more to Eugenie than if all the eloquence of Rousseau had glowed
+upon his tongue.
+
+"And who, and what are you?"  she asked, after a pause.
+
+"An exile--an orphan--an outcast!  I have no name!  Farewell!"
+
+"No--stay yet--the danger is not past.  Wait till my servant is gone to
+rest; I hear him yet.  Sit down--sit down.  And whither would you go?"
+
+"I know not."
+
+"Have you no friends?"
+
+"Gone."
+
+"No home?"
+
+"None."
+
+"And the police of Paris so vigilant!"  cried Eugenie, wringing her
+hands.  "What is to be done?  I shall have saved you in vain--you will be
+discovered!  Of what do they charge you?  Not robbery--not--"
+
+And she, too, stopped short, for she did not dare to breathe the black
+word, "Murder!"
+
+"I know not," said Morton, putting his hand to his forehead, "except of
+being friends with the only man who befriended me--and they have killed
+him!"
+
+"Another time you shall tell me all."
+
+"Another time!" he exclaimed, eagerly--"shall I see you again?"
+
+Eugenie blushed beneath the gaze and the voice of joy.  "Yes," she said;
+"yes.  But I must reflect.  Be calm be silent.  Ah!--a happy thought!"
+
+She sat down, wrote a hasty line, sealed, and gave it to Morton.
+
+"Take this note, as addressed, to Madame Dufour; it will provide you with
+a safe lodging.  She is a person I can depend on--an old servant who
+lived with my mother, and to whom I have given a small pension.  She has
+a lodging--it is lately vacant--I promised to procure her a tenant--go--
+say nothing of what has passed.  I will see her, and arrange all.  Wait!
+--hark!--all is still.  I will go first, and see that no one watches you.
+Stop," (and she threw open the window, and looked into the court.)  "The
+porter's door is open--that is fortunate!  Hurry on, and God be with
+you!"
+
+In a few minutes Morton was in the streets.  It was still early--the
+thoroughfares deserted-none of the shops yet open.  The address on the
+note was to a street at some distance, on the other side of the Seine.
+He passed along the same Quai which he had trodden but a few hours since
+--he passed the same splendid bridge on which he had stood despairing, to
+quit it revived--he gained the Rue Faubourg St. Honore.  A young man in a
+cabriolet, on whose fair cheek burned the hectic of late vigils and
+lavish dissipation, was rolling leisurely home from the gaming-house, at
+which he had been more than usually fortunate--his pockets were laden
+with notes and gold.  He bent forwards as Morton passed him.  Philip,
+absorbed in his reverie, perceived him not, and continued his way.  The
+gentleman turned down one of the streets to the left, stopped, and called
+to the servant dozing behind his cabriolet.
+
+"Follow that passenger! quietly--see where he lodges; be sure to find out
+and let me know.  I shall go home with out you."  With that he drove on.
+
+Philip, unconscious of the espionage, arrived at a small house in a quiet
+but respectable street, and rang the bell several times before at last he
+was admitted by Madame Dufour herself, in her nightcap.  The old woman
+looked askant and alarmed at the unexpected apparition.  But the note
+seemed at once to satisfy her.  She conducted him to an apartment on the
+first floor, small, but neatly and even elegantly furnished, consisting
+of a sitting-room and a bedchamber, and said, quietly,--
+
+"Will they suit monsieur?"
+
+To monsieur they seemed a palace.  Morton nodded assent.
+
+"And will monsieur sleep for a short time?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"The bed is well aired.  The rooms have only been vacant three days
+since.  Can I get you anything till your luggage arrives?"
+
+"No."
+
+The woman left him.  He threw off his clothes--flung himself on the bed--
+and did not wake till noon.
+
+When his eyes unclosed--when they rested on that calm chamber, with its
+air of health, and cleanliness, and comfort, it was long before he could
+convince himself that he was yet awake.  He missed the loud, deep voice
+of Gawtrey--the smoke of the dead man's meerschaum--the gloomy garret--
+the distained walls--the stealthy whisper of the loathed Birnie; slowly
+the life led and the life gone within the last twelve hours grew upon his
+struggling memory.  He groaned, and turned uneasily round, when the door
+slightly opened, and he sprung up fiercely,--
+
+"Who is there?"
+
+"It is only I, sir," answered Madame Dufour.  "I have been in three times
+to see if you were stirring.  There is a letter I believe for you, sir;
+though there is no name to it," and she laid the letter on the chair
+beside him.  Did it come from her--the saving angel?  He seized it.  The
+cover was blank; it was sealed with a small device, as of a ring seal.
+He tore it open, and found four billets de banque for 1,000 francs each,
+--a sum equivalent in our money to about L160.
+
+"Who sent this, the--the lady from whom I brought the note?"
+
+"Madame de Merville? certainly not, sir," said Madame Dufour, who, with
+the privilege of age, was now unscrupulously filling the water-jugs and
+settling the toilette-table.  "A young man called about two hours after
+you had gone to bed; and, describing you, inquired if you lodged here,
+and what your name was.  I said you had just arrived, and that I did not
+yet know your name.  So he went away, and came again half an hour
+afterwards with this letter, which he charged me to deliver to you
+safely."
+
+A young man--a gentleman?"
+
+"No, sir; he seemed a smart but common sort of lad."  For the
+unsophisticated Madame Dufour did not discover in the plain black frock
+and drab gaiters of the bearer of that letter the simple livery of an
+English gentleman's groom.
+
+Whom could it come from, if not from Madame de Merville?  Perhaps one of
+Gawtrey's late friends.  A suspicion of Arthur Beaufort crossed him, but
+he indignantly dismissed it.  Men are seldom credulous of what they are
+unwilling to believe.  What kindness had the Beauforts hitherto shown
+him?--Left his mother to perish broken-hearted--stolen from him his
+brother, and steeled, in that brother, the only heart wherein he had a
+right to look for gratitude and love!  No, it must be Madame de Merville.
+He dismissed Madame Dufour for pen and paper--rose--wrote a letter to
+Eugenie--grateful, but proud, and inclosed the notes.  He then summoned
+Madame Dufour, and sent her with his despatch.
+
+"Ah, madame," said the _ci-devant bonne_, when she found herself in
+Eugenie's presence.  "The poor lad! how handsome he is, and how shameful
+in the Vicomte to let him wear such clothes!"
+
+"The Vicomte!"
+
+"Oh, my dear mistress, you must not deny it.  You told me, in your note,
+to ask him no questions, but I guessed at once.  The Vicomte told me
+himself that he should have the young gentleman over in a few days.  You
+need not be ashamed of him.  You will see what a difference clothes will
+make in his appearance; and I have taken it on myself to order a tailor
+to go to him.  The Vicomte--must pay me."
+
+"Not a word to the Vicomte as yet.  We will surprise him," said Eugenie,
+laughing.
+
+Madame de Merville had been all that morning trying to invent some story
+to account for her interest in the lodger, and now how Fortune favoured
+her!
+
+"But is that a letter for me?"
+
+"And I had almost forgot it," said Madame Dufour, as she extended the
+letter.
+
+Whatever there had hitherto been in the circumstances connected with
+Morton, that had roused the interest and excited the romance of Eugenie
+de Merville, her fancy was yet more attracted by the tone of the letter
+she now read.  For though Morton, more accustomed to speak than to write
+French, expressed himself with less precision, and a less euphuistic
+selection of phrase, than the authors and _elegans_ who formed her usual
+correspondents; there was an innate and rough nobleness--a strong and
+profound feeling in every line of his letter, which increased her
+surprise and admiration.
+
+"All that surrounds him--all that belongs to him, is strangeness and
+mystery!"  murmured she; and she sat down to reply.
+
+When Madame Dufour departed with that letter, Eugenie remained silent and
+thoughtful for more than an hour, Morton's letter before her; and sweet,
+in their indistinctness, were the recollections and the images that
+crowded on her mind.
+
+Morton, satisfied by the earnest and solemn assurances of Eugenie that
+she was not the unknown donor of the sum she reinclosed, after puzzling
+himself in vain to form any new conjectures as to the quarter whence it
+came, felt that under his present circumstances it would be an absurd
+Quixotism to refuse to apply what the very Providence to whom he had anew
+consigned himself seemed to have sent to his aid.  And it placed him,
+too, beyond the offer of all pecuniary assistance from one from whom he
+could least have brooked to receive it.  He consented, therefore, to all
+that the loquacious tailor proposed to him.  And it would have been
+difficult to have recognised the wild and frenzied fugitive in the
+stately form, with its young beauty and air of well-born pride, which the
+next day sat by the side of Eugenie.  And that day he told his sad and
+troubled story, and Eugenie wept: and from that day he came daily; and
+two weeks--happy, dreamlike, intoxicating to both--passed by; and as
+their last sun set, he was kneeling at her feet, and breathing to one to
+whom the homage of wit, and genius, and complacent wealth had hitherto
+been vainly proffered, the impetuous, agitated, delicious secrets of the
+First Love.  He spoke, and rose to depart for ever--when the look and
+sigh detained him.
+
+The next day, after a sleepless night, Eugenie de Merville sent for the
+Vicomte de Vaudemont.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+               "A silver river small
+               In sweet accents
+               Its music vents;
+               The warbling virginal
+               To which the merry birds do sing,
+               Timed with stops of gold the silver string."
+               _Sir Richard Fanshawe_.
+
+One evening, several weeks after the events just commemorated, a
+stranger, leading in his hand, a young child, entered the churchyard of
+H----.  The sun had not long set, and the short twilight of deepening
+summer reigned in the tranquil skies; you might still hear from the trees
+above the graves the chirp of some joyous bird;--what cared he, the
+denizen of the skies, for the dead that slept below?--what did he value
+save the greenness and repose of the spot,--to him alike the garden or
+the grave!  As the man and the child passed, the robin, scarcely scared
+by their tread from the long grass beside one of the mounds, looked at
+them with its bright, blithe eye.  It was a famous plot for the robin--
+the old churchyard!  That domestic bird--"the friend of man," as it has
+been called by the poets--found a jolly supper among the worms!
+
+The stranger, on reaching the middle of the sacred ground, paused and
+looked round him wistfully.  He then approached, slowly and hesitatingly,
+an oblong tablet, on which were graven, in letters yet fresh and new,
+these words:--
+
+                                 TO THE
+                 MEMORY OF ONE CALUMNIATED AND WRONGED
+                     THIS BURIAL-STONE IS DEDICATED
+                              BY HER SON.
+
+Such, with the addition of the dates of birth and death, was the tablet
+which Philip Morton had directed to be placed over his mother's bones;
+and around it was set a simple palisade, which defended it from the tread
+of the children, who sometimes, in defiance of the beadle, played over
+the dust of the former race.
+
+"Thy son!"  muttered the stranger, while the child stood quietly by his
+side, pleased by the trees, the grass, the song of the birds, and reeking
+not of grief or death,--"thy son!--but not thy favoured son--thy darling
+--thy youngest born; on what spot of earth do thine eyes look down on
+him?  Surely in heaven thy love has preserved the one whom on earth thou
+didst most cherish, from the sufferings and the trials that have visited
+the less-favoured outcast.  Oh, mother--mother!--it was not his crime--
+not Philip's--that he did not fulfil to the last the trust bequeathed to
+him!  Happier, perhaps, as it is!  And, oh, if thy memory be graven as
+deeply in my brother's heart as my own, how often will it warn and save
+him!  That memory!--it has been to me the angel of my life!  To thee--to
+thee, even in death, I owe it, if, though erring, I am not criminal,--if
+I have lived with the lepers, and am still undefiled!"  His lips then
+were silent--not his heart!
+
+After a few minutes thus consumed he turned to the child, and said,
+gently and in a tremulous voice, "Fanny, you have been taught to pray--
+you will live near this spot,--will you come sometimes here and pray that
+you may grow up good and innocent, and become a blessing to those who
+love you?"
+
+"Will papa ever come to hear me pray?"
+
+That sad and unconscious question went to the heart of Morton.  The child
+could not comprehend death.  He had sought to explain it, but she had
+been accustomed to consider her protector dead when he was absent from
+her, and she still insisted that he must come again to life.  And that
+man of turbulence and crime, who had passed unrepentant, unabsolved, from
+sin to judgment: it was an awful question, "If he should hear her pray?"
+
+"Yes!" said he, after a pause,--"yes, Fanny, there is a Father who will
+hear you pray; and pray to Him to be merciful to those who have been kind
+to you.  Fanny, you and I may never meet again!"
+
+"Are you going to die too? _Mechant_, every one dies to Fanny!"  and,
+clinging to him endearingly, she put up her lips to kiss him.  He took
+her in his arms: and, as a tear fell upon her rosy cheek, she said,
+"Don't cry, brother, for I love you."
+
+"Do you, dear Fanny?  Then, for my sake, when you come to this place, if
+any one will give you a few flowers, scatter them on that stone.  And now
+we will go to one whom you must love also, and to whom, as I have told
+you, _he_ sends you; he who--Come!"
+
+As he thus spoke, and placed Fanny again on the ground, he was startled
+to see: precisely on the spot where he had seen before the like
+apparition--on the same spot where the father had cursed the son, the
+motionless form of an old man.  Morton recognised, as if by an instinct
+rather than by an effort of the memory, the person to whom he was bound.
+
+He walked slowly towards him; but Fanny abruptly left his side, lured by
+a moth that flitted duskily over the graves.
+
+"Your name, sir, I think, is Simon Gawtrey?" said Morton.  "I have came
+to England in quest of you."
+
+"Of me?" said the old man, half rising, and his eyes, now completely
+blind, rolled vacantly over Morton's person--"Of me?--for what?--Who are
+you?--I don't know your voice!"
+
+"I come to you from your son!"
+
+"My son!" exclaimed the old man, with great vehemence,--"the reprobate!--
+the dishonoured!--the infamous!--the accursed--"
+
+"Hush! you revile the dead!"
+
+"Dead!"  muttered the wretched father, tottering back to the seat he had
+quitted,--"dead!" and the sound of his voice was so full of anguish, that
+the dog at his feet, which Morton had not hitherto perceived, echoed it
+with a dismal cry, that recalled to Philip the awful day in which he had
+seen the son quit the father for the last time on earth.
+
+The sound brought Fanny to the spot; and, with a laugh of delight, which
+made to it a strange contrast, she threw herself on the grass beside the
+dog and sought to entice it to play.  So there, in that place of death,
+were knit together the four links in the Great Chain;--lusty and blooming
+life--desolate and doting age--infancy, yet scarce conscious of a soul--
+and the dumb brute, that has no warrant of a Hereafter!
+
+"Dead!--dead!"  repeated the old man, covering his sightless balls with
+his withered hands.  "Poor William!"
+
+"He remembered you to the last.  He bade me seek you out--he bade me
+replace the guilty son with a thing pure and innocent, as he had been had
+he died in his cradle--a child to comfort your old age!  Kneel, Fanny, I
+have found you a father who will cherish you--(oh! you will, sir, will
+you not?)--as he whom you may see no more!"
+
+There was something in Morton's voice so solemn, that it awed and touched
+both the old man and the infant; and Fanny, creeping to the protector
+thus assigned to her, and putting her little hands confidingly on his
+knees, said--
+
+"Fanny will love you if papa wished it.  Kiss Fanny."
+
+"Is it his child--his?"  said the blind man, sobbing.  "Come to my heart;
+here--here!  O God, forgive me!"  Morton did not think it right at that
+moment to undeceive him with regard to the poor child's true connexion
+with the deceased: and he waited in silence till Simon, after a burst of
+passionate grief and tenderness, rose, and still clasping the child to
+his breast, said--
+
+"Sir, forgive me!--I am a very weak old man--I have many thanks to give--
+I have much, too, to learn.  My poor son! he did not die in want,--did
+he?"
+
+The particulars of Gawtrey's fate, with his real name and the various
+aliases he had assumed, had appeared in the French journals, had been
+partially copied into the English; and Morton had expected to have been
+saved the painful narrative of that fearful death; but the utter
+seclusion of the old man, his infirmity, and his estranged habits, had
+shut him out from the intelligence that it now devolved on Philip to
+communicate.  Morton hesitated a little before he answered:
+
+"It is late now; you are not yet prepared to receive this poor infant at
+your home, nor to hear the details I have to state.  I arrived in England
+but to-day.  I shall lodge in the neighbourhood, for it is dear to me.
+If I may feel sure, then, that you will receive and treasure this sacred
+and last deposit bequeathed to you by your unhappy son, I will bring my
+charge to you to-morrow, and we will then, more calmly than we can now,
+talk over the past."
+
+"You do not answer my question," said Simon, passionately; "answer that,
+and I will wait for the rest.  They call me a miser!  Did I send out my
+only child to starve?  Answer that!"
+
+"Be comforted.  He did not die in want; and he has even left some little
+fortune for Fanny, which I was to place in your hands."
+
+"And he thought to bribe the old miser to be human!  Well--well--well--I
+will go home."
+
+"Lean on me!"
+
+The dog leapt playfully on his master as the latter rose, and Fanny slid
+from Simon's arms to caress and talk to the animal in her own way.  As
+they slowly passed through the churchyard Simon muttered incoherently to
+himself for several paces, and Morton would not disturb, since he could
+not comfort, him.
+
+At last he said abruptly, "Did my son repent?"
+
+"I hoped," answered Morton, evasively, "that, had his life been spared,
+he would have amended!"
+
+"Tush, sir!--I am past seventy; we repent!--we never amend!"  And Simon
+again sunk into his own dim and disconnected reveries.
+
+At length they arrived at the blind man's house.  The door was opened to
+them by an old woman of disagreeable and sinister aspect, dressed out
+much too gaily for the station of a servant, though such was her reputed
+capacity; but the miser's affliction saved her from the chance of his
+comment on her extravagance.  As she stood in the doorway with a candle
+in her hand, she scanned curiously, and with no welcoming eye, her
+master's companions.
+
+"Mrs. Boxer, my son is dead!"  said Simon, in a hollow voice.
+
+"And a good thing it is, then, sir!"
+
+"For shame, woman!"  said Morton, indignantly.  "Hey-dey! sir! whom have
+we got here?"
+
+"One," said Simon, sternly, "whom you will treat with respect.  He brings
+me a blessing to lighten my loss.  One harsh word to this child, and you
+quit my house!"
+
+The woman looked perfectly thunderstruck; but, recovering herself, she
+said, whiningly--
+
+"I! a harsh word to anything my dear, kind master cares for.  And, Lord,
+what a sweet pretty creature it is!  Come here, my dear!"
+
+But Fanny shrunk back, and would not let go Philip's hand.
+
+"To-morrow, then," said Morton; and he was turning away, when a sudden
+thought seemed to cross the old man,--
+
+"Stay, sir--stay!  I--I--did my son say I was rich?  I am very, very
+poor--nothing in the house, or I should have been robbed long ago!"
+
+"Your son told me to bring money, not to ask for it!"
+
+"Ask for it!  No; but," added the old man, and a gleam of cunning
+intelligence shot over his face,--"but he had got into a bad set.  Ask!--
+No!--Put up the door-chain, Mrs. Boxer!"
+
+It was with doubt and misgivings that Morton, the next day, consigned the
+child, who had already nestled herself into the warmest core of his
+heart, to the care of Simon.  Nothing short of that superstitious
+respect, which all men owe to the wishes of the dead, would have made him
+select for her that asylum; for Fate had now, in brightening his own
+prospects, given him an alternative in the benevolence of Madame de
+Merville.  But Gawtrey had been so earnest on the subject, that he felt
+as if he had no right to hesitate.  And was it not a sort of atonement to
+any faults the son might have committed against the parent, to place by
+the old man's hearth so sweet a charge?
+
+The strange and peculiar mind and character of Fanny made him, however,
+yet more anxious than otherwise he might have been.  She certainly
+deserved not the harsh name of imbecile or idiot, but she was different
+from all other children; she felt more acutely than most of her age, but
+she could not be taught to reason.  There was something either oblique or
+deficient in her intellect, which justified the most melancholy
+apprehensions; yet often, when some disordered, incoherent, inexplicable
+train of ideas most saddened the listener, it would be followed by
+fancies so exquisite in their strangeness, or feelings so endearing in
+their tenderness, that suddenly she seemed as much above, as before she
+seemed below, the ordinary measure of infant comprehension.  She was like
+a creature to which Nature, in some cruel but bright caprice, has given
+all that belongs to poetry, but denied all that belongs to the common
+understanding necessary to mankind; or, as a fairy changeling, not,
+indeed, according to the vulgar superstition, malignant and deformed, but
+lovelier than the children of men, and haunted by dim and struggling
+associations of a gentler and fairer being, yet wholly incapable to learn
+the dry and hard elements which make up the knowledge of actual life.
+
+Morton, as well as he could, sought to explain to Simon the peculiarities
+in Fanny's mental constitution.  He urged on him the necessity of
+providing for her careful instruction, and Simon promised to send her to
+the best school the neighbourhood could afford; but, as the old man
+spoke, he dwelt so much on the supposed fact that Fanny was William's
+daughter, and with his remorse, or affection, there ran so interwoven a
+thread of selfishness and avarice, that Morton thought it would be
+dangerous to his interest in the child to undeceive his error.  He,
+therefore,--perhaps excusably enough--remained silent on that subject.
+
+Gawtrey had placed with the superior of the convent, together with an
+order to give up the child to any one who should demand her in his true
+name, which he confided to the superior, a sum of nearly L300., which he
+solemnly swore had been honestly obtained, and which, in all his shifts
+and adversities, he had never allowed himself to touch.  This sum, with
+the trifling deduction made for arrears due to the convent, Morton now
+placed in Simon's hands.  The old man clutched the money, which was for
+the most in French gold, with a convulsive gripe: and then, as if ashamed
+of the impulse, said--
+
+"But you, sir--will any sum--that is, any reasonable sum--be of use to
+you?"
+
+"No! and if it were, it is neither yours nor mine--it is hers.  Save it
+for her, and add to it what you can."
+
+While this conversation took place, Fanny had been consigned to the care
+of Mrs. Boxer, and Philip now rose to see and bid her farewell before he
+departed.
+
+"I may come again to visit you, Mr. Gawtrey; and I pray Heaven to find
+that you and Fanny have been a mutual blessing to each other.  Oh,
+remember how your son loved her!"
+
+"He had a good heart, in spite of all his sins.  Poor William!"  said
+Simon.
+
+Philip Morton heard, and his lip curled with a sad and a just disdain.
+
+If when, at the age of nineteen, William Gawtrey had quitted his father's
+roof, the father had then remembered that the son's heart was good,--the
+son had been alive still, an honest and a happy man.  Do ye not laugh, O
+ye all-listening Fiends! when men praise those dead whose virtues they
+discovered not when alive?  It takes much marble to build the sepulchre--
+how little of lath and plaster would have repaired the garret!
+
+On turning into a small room adjoining the parlour in which Gawtrey sat,
+Morton found Fanny standing gloomily by a dull, soot-grimed window, which
+looked out on the dead walls of a small yard.  Mrs. Boxer, seated by a
+table, was employed in trimming a cap, and putting questions to Fanny in
+that falsetto voice of endearment in which people not used to children
+are apt to address them.
+
+"And so, my dear, they've never taught you to read or write?  You've been
+sadly neglected, poor thing!"
+
+"We must do our best to supply the deficiency," said Morton, as he
+entered.
+
+"Bless me, sir, is that you?"  and the gouvernante bustled up and dropped
+a low courtesy; for Morton, dressed then in the garb of a gentleman, was
+of a mien and person calculated to strike the gaze of the vulgar.
+
+"Ah, brother!"  cried Fanny, for by that name he had taught her to call
+him; and she flew to his side.  "Come away--it's ugly there--it makes me
+cold."
+
+"My child, I told you you must stay; but I shall hope to see you again
+some day.  Will you not be kind to this poor creature, ma'am?  Forgive
+me, if I offended you last night, and favour me by accepting this, to
+show that we are friends."  As he spoke, he slid his purse into the
+woman's hand.  "I shall feel ever grateful for whatever you can do for
+Fanny."
+
+"Fanny wants nothing from any one else; Fanny wants her brother."
+
+"Sweet child!  I fear she don't take to me.  Will you like me, Miss
+Fanny?"
+
+"No! get along!"
+
+"Fie, Fanny--you remember you did not take to me at first.  But she is so
+affectionate, ma'am; she never forgets a kindness."
+
+"I will do all I can to please her, sir.  And so she is really master's
+grandchild?"  The woman fixed her eyes, as she spoke, so intently on
+Morton, that he felt embarrassed, and busied himself, without answering,
+in caressing and soothing Fanny, who now seemed to awake to the
+affliction about to visit her; for though she did not weep--she very
+rarely wept--her slight frame trembled--her eyes closed--her cheeks, even
+her lips, were white--and her delicate hands were clasped tightly round
+the neck of the one about to abandon her to strange breasts.
+
+Morton was greatly moved.  "One kiss, Fanny! and do not forget me when we
+meet again."
+
+The child pressed her lips to his cheek, but the lips were cold.  He put
+her down gently; she stood mute and passive.
+
+"Remember that he wished me to leave you here," whispered Morton, using
+an argument that never failed.  "We must obey him; and so-God bless you,
+Fanny!"
+
+He rose and retreated to the door; the child unclosed her eyes, and gazed
+at him with a strained, painful, imploring gaze; her lips moved, but she
+did not speak.  Morton could not bear that silent woe.  He sought to
+smile on her consolingly; but the smile would not come.  He closed the
+door, and hurried from the house.
+
+From that day Fanny settled into a kind of dreary, inanimate stupor,
+which resembled that of the somnambulist whom the magnetiser forgets to
+waken.  Hitherto, with all the eccentricities or deficiencies of her
+mind, had mingled a wild and airy gaiety.  That was vanished.  She spoke
+little--she never played--no toys could lure her--even the poor dog
+failed to win her notice.  If she was told to do anything she stared
+vacantly and stirred not.  She evinced, however, a kind of dumb regard to
+the old blind man; she would creep to his knees and sit there for hours,
+seldom answering when he addressed her, but uneasy, anxious, and
+restless, if he left her.
+
+"Will you die too?"  she asked once; the old man understood her not, and
+she did not try to explain.  Early one morning, some days after Morton
+was gone, they missed her: she was not in the house, nor the dull yard
+where she was sometimes dismissed and told to play--told in vain.  In
+great alarm the old man accused Mrs. Boxer of having spirited her away,
+and threatened and stormed so loudly that the woman, against her will,
+went forth to the search.  At last she found the child in the churchyard,
+standing wistfully beside a tomb.
+
+"What do you here, you little plague?"  said Mrs. Boxer, rudely seizing
+her by the arm.
+
+"This is the way they will both come back some day!  I dreamt so!"
+
+"If ever I catch you here again!"  said the housekeeper, and, wiping her
+brow with one hand, she struck the child with the other.  Fanny had never
+been struck before.  She recoiled in terror and amazement, and, for the
+first time since her arrival, burst into tears.
+
+"Come--come, no crying! and if you tell master I'll beat you within an
+inch of your life!"  So saying, she caught Fanny in her arms, and,
+walking about, scolding and menacing, till she had frightened back the
+child's tears, she returned triumphantly to the house, and bursting into
+the parlour, exclaimed, "Here's the little darling, sir!"
+
+When old Simon learned where the child had been found he was glad; for it
+was his constant habit, whenever the evening was fine, to glide out to
+that churchyard--his dog his guide--and sit on his one favourite spot
+opposite the setting sun.  This, not so much for the sanctity of the
+place, or the meditations it might inspire, as because it was the
+nearest, the safest, and the loneliest spot in the neighbourhood of his
+home, where the blind man could inhale the air and bask in the light of
+heaven.  Hitherto, thinking it sad for the child, he had never taken her
+with him; indeed, at the hour of his monotonous excursion she had
+generally been banished to bed.  Now she was permitted to accompany him;
+and the old man and the infant would sit there side by side, as Age and
+Infancy rested side by side in the graves below.  The first symptom of
+childlike interest and curiosity that Fanny betrayed was awakened by the
+affliction of her protector.  One evening, as they thus sat, she made him
+explain what the desolation of blindness is.  She seemed to comprehend
+him, though he did not seek to adapt his complaints to her understanding.
+
+"Fanny knows," said she, touchingly; "for she, too, is blind here;" and
+she pressed her hands to her temples.  Notwithstanding her silence and
+strange ways, and although he could not see the exquisite loveliness
+which Nature, as in remorseful pity, had lavished on her outward form,
+Simon soon learned to love her better than he had ever loved yet: for
+they most cold to the child are often dotards to the grandchild.  For her
+even his avarice slept.  Dainties, never before known at his sparing
+board, were ordered to tempt her appetite, toy-shops ransacked to amuse
+her indolence.  He was long, however, before he could prevail on himself
+to fulfil his promise to Morton, and rob himself of her presence.  At
+length, however, wearied with Mrs. Boxer's lamentations at her ignorance,
+and alarmed himself at some evidences of helplessness, which made him
+dread to think what her future might be when left alone in life, he
+placed her at a day-school in the suburb.  Here Fanny, for a considerable
+time, justified the harshest assertions of her stupidity.  She could not
+even keep her eyes two minutes together on the page from which she was to
+learn the mysteries of reading; months passed before she mastered the
+alphabet, and, a month after, she had again forgot it, and the labour was
+renewed.  The only thing in which she showed ability, if so it might be
+called, was in the use of the needle.  The sisters of the convent had
+already taught her many pretty devices in this art; and when she found
+that at the school they were admired--that she was praised instead of
+blamed--her vanity was pleased, and she learned so readily all that they
+could teach in this not unprofitable accomplishment, that Mrs. Boxer
+slyly and secretly turned her tasks to account and made a weekly
+perquisite of the poor pupil's industry.  Another faculty she possessed,
+in common with persons usually deficient, and with the lower species--
+viz., a most accurate and faithful recollection of places.  At first Mrs.
+Boxer had been duly sent, morning, noon, and evening, to take her to, or
+bring her from, the school; but this was so great a grievance to Simon's
+solitary superintendent, and Fanny coaxed the old man so endearingly to
+allow her to go and return alone, that the attendance, unwelcome to both,
+was waived.  Fanny exulted in this liberty; and she never, in going or in
+returning, missed passing through the burial-ground, and gazing wistfully
+at the tomb from which she yet believed Morton would one day reappear.
+With his memory she cherished also that of her earlier and more guilty
+protector; but they were separate feelings, which she distinguished in
+her own way.
+
+"Papa had given her up.  She knew that he would not have sent her away,
+far--far over the great water, if he had meant to see Fanny again; but
+her brother was forced to leave her--he would come to life one day, and
+then they should live together!"
+
+One day, towards the end of autumn, as her schoolmistress, a good woman
+on the whole, but who had not yet had the wit to discover by what chords
+to tune the instrument, over which so wearily she drew her unskilful
+hand--one day, we say, the schoolmistress happened to be dressed for a
+christening party to which she was invited in the suburb; and,
+accordingly, after the morning lessons, the pupils were to be dismissed
+to a holiday.  As Fanny now came last, with the hopeless spelling-book,
+she stopped suddenly short, and her eyes rested with avidity upon a large
+bouquet of exotic flowers, with which the good lady had enlivened the
+centre of the parted kerchief, whose yellow gauze modestly veiled that
+tender section of female beauty which poets have likened to hills of
+snow--a chilling simile!  It was then autumn; and field, and even garden
+flowers were growing rare.
+
+"Will you give me one of those flowers?"  said Fanny, dropping her book.
+
+"One of these flowers, child!  why?"
+
+Fanny did not answer; but one of the elder and cleverer girls said--
+
+"Oh! she comes from France, you know, ma'am, and the Roman Catholics put
+flowers, and ribands, and things, over the graves; you recollect, ma'am,
+we were reading yesterday about Pere-la-Chaise?"
+
+"Well! what then?"
+
+"And Miss Fanny will do any kind of work for us if we will give her
+flowers."
+
+"My brother told me where to put them;--but these pretty flowers, I never
+had any like them; they may bring him back again!  I'll be so good if
+you'll give me one, only one!"
+
+"Will you learn your lesson if I do, Fanny?"
+
+"Oh! yes!  Wait a moment!"
+
+And Fanny stole back to her desk, put the hateful book resolutely before
+her, pressed both hands tightly on her temples,--Eureka! the chord was
+touched; and Fanny marched in triumph through half a column of hostile
+double syllables!
+
+From that day the schoolmistress knew how to stimulate her, and Fanny
+learned to read: her path to knowledge thus literally strewn with
+flowers!  Catherine, thy children were far off, and thy grave looked gay!
+
+It naturally happened that those short and simple rhymes, often sacred,
+which are repeated in schools as helps to memory, made a part of her
+studies; and no sooner had the sound of verse struck upon her fancy than
+it seemed to confuse and agitate anew all her senses.  It was like the
+music of some breeze, to which dance and tremble all the young leaves of
+a wild plant.  Even when at the convent she had been fond of repeating
+the infant rhymes with which they had sought to lull or to amuse her,
+but now the taste was more strongly developed.  She confounded, however,
+in meaningless and motley disorder, the various snatches of song that
+came to her ear, weaving them together in some form which she understood,
+but which was jargon to all others; and often, as she went alone through
+the green lanes or the bustling streets, the passenger would turn in pity
+and fear to hear her half chant--half murmur--ditties that seemed to suit
+only a wandering and unsettled imagination.  And as Mrs. Boxer, in her
+visits to the various shops in the suburb, took care to bemoan her hard
+fate in attending to a creature so evidently moon-stricken, it was no
+wonder that the manner and habits of the child, coupled with that strange
+predilection to haunt the burial-ground, which is not uncommon with
+persons of weak and disordered intellect; confirmed the character thus
+given to her.
+
+So, as she tripped gaily and lightly along the thoroughfares, the
+children would draw aside from her path, and whisper with superstitious
+fear mingled with contempt, "It's the idiot girl!"--Idiot--how much more
+of heaven's light was there in that cloud than in the rushlights that,
+flickering in sordid chambers, shed on dull things the dull ray--esteeming
+themselves as stars!
+
+Months-years passed--Fanny was thirteen, when there dawned a new era to
+her existence.  Mrs. Boxer had never got over her first grudge to Fanny.
+Her treatment of the poor girl was always harsh, and sometimes cruel.
+But Fanny did not complain, and as Mrs. Boxer's manner to her before
+Simon was invariably cringing and caressing, the old man never guessed
+the hardships his supposed grandchild underwent.  There had been scandal
+some years back in the suburb about the relative connexion of the master
+and the housekeeper; and the flaunting dress of the latter, something
+bold in her regard, and certain whispers that her youth had not been
+vowed to Vesta, confirmed the suspicion.  The only reason why we do not
+feel sure that the rumour was false is this,--Simon Gawtrey had been so
+hard on the early follies of his son!  Certainly, at all events, the
+woman had exercised great influence over the miser before the arrival of
+Fanny, and she had done much to steel his selfishness against the ill-
+fated William.  And, as certainly, she had fully calculated on succeeding
+to the savings, whatever they might be, of the miser, whenever Providence
+should be pleased to terminate his days.  She knew that Simon had, many
+years back, made his will in her favour; she knew that he had not altered
+that will: she believed, therefore, that in spite of all his love for
+Fanny, he loved his gold so much more, that be could not accustom himself
+to the thought of bequeathing it to hands too helpless to guard the
+treasure.  This had in some measure reconciled the housekeeper to the
+intruder; whom, nevertheless, she hated as a dog hates another dog, not
+only for taking his bone, but for looking at it.
+
+But suddenly Simon fell ill.  His age made it probable he would die.  He
+took to his bed--his breathing grew fainter and fainter--he seemed dead.
+Fanny, all unconscious, sat by his bedside as usual, holding her breath
+not to waken him.  Mrs. Boxer flew to the bureau--she unlocked it--she
+could not find the will; but she found three bags of bright gold guineas:
+the sight charmed her.  She tumbled them forth on the distained green
+cloth of the bureau--she began to count them; and at that moment, the old
+man, as if there were a secret magnetism between himself and the guineas,
+woke from his trance.  His blindness saved him the pain that might have
+been fatal, of seeing the unhallowed profanation; but he heard the chink
+of the metal.  The very sound restored his strength.  But the infirm are
+always cunning--he breathed not a suspicion.  "Mrs. Boxer," said he,
+faintly, "I think I could take some broth."  Mrs. Boxer rose in great
+dismay, gently re-closed the bureau, and ran down-stairs for the broth.
+Simon took the occasion to question Fanny; and no sooner had he learnt
+the operation of the heir-expectant, than he bade the girl first lock the
+bureau and bring him the key, and next run to a lawyer (whose address he
+gave her), and fetch him instantly.
+
+With a malignant smile the old man took the broth from his handmaid,--
+"Poor Boxer, you are a disinterested creature," said he, feebly; "I
+think you will grieve when I go."
+
+Mrs. Boxer sobbed, and before she had recovered, the lawyer entered.
+That day a new will was made; and the lawyer politely informed Mrs. Boxer
+that her services would be dispensed with the next morning, when he
+should bring a nurse to the house.  Mrs. Boxer heard, and took her
+resolution.  As soon as Simon again fell asleep, she crept into the room-
+led away Fanny--locked her up in her own chamber--returned--searched for
+the key of the bureau, which she found at last under Simon's pillow--
+possessed herself of all she could lay her hands on--and the next morning
+she had disappeared forever!  Simon's loss was greater than might have
+been supposed; for, except a trifling sum in the savings bank, he, like
+many other misers, kept all he had, in notes or specie, under his own
+lock and key.  His whole fortune, indeed, was far less than was supposed:
+for money does not make money unless it is put out to interest,--and the
+miser cheated himself.  Such portion as was in bank-notes Mrs. Boxer
+probably had the prudence to destroy; for those numbers which Simon could
+remember were never traced; the gold, who could swear to?  Except the
+pittance in the savings bank, and whatever might be the paltry worth of
+the house he rented, the father who had enriched the menial to exile the
+son was a beggar in his dotage.  This news, however, was carefully
+concealed from him by the advice of the doctor, whom, on his own
+responsibility, the lawyer introduced, till he had recovered sufficiently
+to bear the shock without danger; and the delay naturally favoured Mrs.
+Boxer's escape.
+
+Simon remained for some moments perfectly stunned and speechless when the
+news was broken to him.  Fanny, in alarm at his increasing paleness,
+sprang to his breast.  He pushed her away,--"Go--go--go, child," he
+said; "I can't feed you now.  Leave me to starve."
+
+"To starve!"  said Fanny, wonderingly; and she stole away, and sat
+herself down as if in deep thought.  She then crept up to the lawyer as
+he was about to leave the room, after exhausting his stock of commonplace
+consolation; and putting her hand in his, whispered, "I want to talk to
+you--this way:"--She led him through the passage into the open air.
+"Tell me," she said, "when poor people try not to starve, don't they
+work?"
+
+"My dear, yes."
+
+"For rich people buy poor people's work?"
+
+"Certainly, my dear; to be sure."
+
+"Very well.  Mrs. Boxer used to sell my work.  Fanny will feed grandpapa!
+Go and tell him never to say 'starve' again."
+
+The good-natured lawyer was moved.  "Can you work, indeed, my poor girl?
+Well, put on your bonnet, and come and talk to my wife."
+
+And that was the new era in Fanny's existence!  Her schooling was
+stopped.  But now life schooled her.  Necessity ripened her intellect.
+And many a hard eye moistened,--as, seeing her glide with her little
+basket of fancy work along the streets, still murmuring her happy and
+bird-like snatches of unconnected song--men and children alike said with
+respect, in which there was now no contempt, "It's the idiot girl who
+supports her blind grandfather!"  They called her idiot still!
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, NIGHT AND MORNING, V3 ***
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