Chapter VIII…

Chapter VIII

At last they came within easy reach of London; but Leonard had resolved not to enter the metropolis fatigued and exhausted, as a wanderer needing refuge, but fresh and elate, as a conqueror coming in triumph to take possession of the capital. Therefore they halted early in the evening of the day preceding this imperial entry, about six miles from the metropolis, in the neighbourhood of Ealing (for by that route lay their way). They were not tired on arriving at their inn. The weather was singularly lovely, with that combination of softness and brilliancy which is only known to the rare true summer days of England; all below so green, above so blue,--days of which we have about six in the year, and recall vaguely when we read of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, of Damsel and Knight in Spenser’s golden Summer Song, or of Jacques, dropped under the oak-tree, watching the deer amidst the dells of Ardennes. So, after a little pause at their inn, they strolled forth, not for travel but pleasure, towards the cool of sunset, passing by the grounds that once belonged to the Duke of Kent, and catching a glimpse of the shrubs and lawns of that beautiful domain through the lodge-gates; then they crossed into some fields, and came to a little rivulet called the Brent. Helen had been more sad that day than on any during their journey,--perhaps because, on approaching London, the memory of her father became more vivid; perhaps from her precocious knowledge of life, and her foreboding of what was to befall them, children that they both were. But Leonard was selfish that day; he could not be influenced by his companion’s sorrow; he was so full of his own sense of being, and he already caught from the atmosphere the fever that belongs to anxious capitals.

“Sit here, sister,” said he, imperiously, throwing himself under the shade of a pollard-tree that overhung the winding brook, “sit here and talk.”

He flung off his hat, tossed back his rich curls, and sprinkled his brow from the stream that eddied round the roots of the tree that bulged out, bald and gnarled, from the bank and delved into the waves below. Helen quietly obeyed him, and nestled close to his side.

“And so this London is really very vast,--VERY?” he repeated inquisitively.

“Very,” answered Helen, as, abstractedly, she plucked the cowslips near her, and let them fall into the running waters. “See how the flowers are carried down the stream! They are lost now. London is to us what the river is to the flowers, very vast, very strong;” and she added, after a pause, “very cruel!”

“Cruel! Ah, it has been so to you; but now--now I will take care of you!” he smiled triumphantly; and his smile was beautiful both in its pride and its kindness. It is astonishing how Leonard had altered since he had left his uncle’s. He was both younger and older; for the sense of genius, when it snaps its shackles, makes us both older and wiser as to the world it soars to, younger and blinder as to the world it springs from.

“And it is not a very handsome city, either, you say?”

“Very ugly indeed,” said Helen, with some fervour; “at least all I have seen of it.”

“But there must be parts that are prettier than others? You say there are parks: why should not we lodge near them and look upon the green trees?”

“That would be nice,” said Helen, almost joyously; “but--” and here the head was shaken--“there are no lodgings for us except in courts and alleys.”

“Why?”

“Why?” echoed Helen, with a smile, and she held up the purse.

“Pooh! always that horrid purse; as if, too, we were not going to fill it! Did not I tell you the story of Fortunio? Well, at all events, we will go first to the neighbourhood where you last lived, and learn there all we can; and then the day after to-morrow I will see this Dr. Morgan, and find out the lord.”

The tears started to Helen’s soft eyes. “You want to get rid of me soon, brother.”

“I! Ah, I feel so happy to have you with me it seems to me as if I had pined for you all my life, and you had come at last; for I never had brother nor sister nor any one to love, that was not older than myself, except--”

“Except the young lady you told me of,” said Helen, turning away her face; for children are very jealous.

“Yes, I loved her, love her still. But that was different,” said Leonard. “I could never have talked to her as to you: to you I open my whole heart; you are my little Muse, Helen: I confess to you my wild whims and fancies as frankly as if I were writing poetry.” As he said this, a step was heard, and a shadow fell over the stream. A belated angler appeared on the margin, drawing his line impatiently across the water, as if to worry some dozing fish into a bite before it finally settled itself for the night. Absorbed in his occupation, the angler did not observe the young persons on the sward under the tree, and he halted there, close upon them.

“Curse that perch!” said he, aloud.

“Take care, sir,” cried Leonard; for the man, in stepping back, nearly trod upon Helen.

The angler turned. “What ‘s the matter? Hist! you have frightened my perch. Keep still, can’t you?”

Helen drew herself out of the way, and Leonard remained motionless. He remembered Jackeymo, and felt a sympathy for the angler.

“It is the most extraordinary perch, that!” muttered the stranger, soliloquizing. “It has the devil’s own luck. It must have been born with a silver spoon in its mouth, that damned perch! I shall never catch it,--never! Ha! no, only a weed. I give it up.” With this, he indignantly jerked his rod from the water and began to disjoint it. While leisurely engaged in this occupation, he turned to Leonard.

“Humph! are you intimately acquainted with this stream, sir?”

“No,” answered Leonard. “I never saw it before.”

ANGLER, (solemnly).--“Then, young man, take my advice, and do not give way to its fascinations. Sir, I am a martyr to this stream; it has been the Delilah of my existence.”

LEONARD (interested, the last sentence seemed to him poetical).--“The Delilah! sir, the Delilah!”

ANGLER.--“The Delilah. Young man, listen, and be warned by example. When I was about your age, I first came to this stream to fish. Sir, on that fatal day, about three p.m., I hooked up a fish,--such a big one, it must have weighed a pound and a half. Sir, it was that length;” and the angler put finger to wrist. “And just when I had got it nearly ashore, by the very place where you are sitting, on that shelving bank, young man, the line broke, and the perch twisted himself among those roots, and--cacodaemon that he was--ran off, hook and all. Well, that fish haunted me; never before had I seen such a fish. Minnows I had caught in the Thames and elsewhere, also gudgeons, and occasionally a dace. But a fish like that--a PERCH, all his fins up, like the sails of a man-of-war--a monster perch,--a whale of a perch! No, never till then had I known what leviathans lie hid within the deeps. I could not sleep till I had returned; and again, sir,--I caught that perch. And this time I pulled him fairly out of the water. He escaped; and how did he escape? Sir, he left his eye behind him on the hook. Years, long years, have passed since then; but never shall I forget the agony of that moment.”

LEONARD.--“To the perch, sir?”

ANGLER.--“Perch! agony to him! He enjoyed it. Agony to me! I gazed on that eye, and the eye looked as sly and as wicked as if it were laughing in my face. Well, sir, I had heard that there is no better bait for a perch than a perch’s eye. I adjusted that eye on the hook, and dropped in the line gently. The water was unusually clear; in two minutes I saw that perch return. He approached the hook; he recognized his eye, frisked his tail, made a plunge, and, as I live, carried off the eye, safe and sound; and I saw him digesting it by the side of that water-lily. The mocking fiend! Seven times since that day, in the course of a varied and eventful life, have I caught that perch, and seven times has that perch escaped.”

LEONARD (astonished).--“It can’t be the same perch; perches are very tender fish. A hook inside of it, and an eye hooked out of it--no perch could withstand such havoc in its constitution.”

ANGLER (with an appearance of awe).--“It does seem supernatural. But it is that perch; for hark ye, sir, there is ONLY ONE perch in the whole brook! All the years I have fished here, I have never caught another perch; and this solitary inmate of the watery element I know by sight better than I knew my own lost father. For each time that I have raised it out of the water, its profile has been turned to me, and I have seen with a shudder that it has had only--One Eye! It is a most mysterious and a most diabolical phenomenon, that perch! It has been the ruin of my prospects in life. I was offered a situation in Jamaica: I could not go with that perch left here in triumph. I might afterwards have had an appointinent in India, but I could not put the ocean between myself and that perch: thus have I frittered away my existence in the fatal metropolis of my native land. And once a week from February to December I come hither. Good heavens! if I should catch the perch at last, the occupation of my existence will be gone.”

Leonard gazed curiously at the angler, as the last thus mournfully concluded. The ornate turn of his periods did not suit with his costume. He looked wofully threadbare and shabby,--a genteel sort of shabbiness too,--shabbiness in black. There was humour in the corners of his lip; and his hands, though they did not seem very clean--indeed his occupation was not friendly to such niceties--were those of a man who had not known manual labour. His face was pale and puffed, but the tip of the nose was red. He did not seem as if the watery element was as familiar to himself as to his Delilah, the perch.

“Such is Life!” recommenced the angler, in a moralizing tone, as he slid his rod into its canvas case. “If a man knew what it was to fish all one’s life in a stream that has only one perch, to catch that one perch nine times in all, and nine times to see it fall back into the water, plump,--if a man knew what it was, why, then “--here the angler looked over his shoulder full at Leonard--“why then, young sir, he would know what human life is to vain ambition. Good-evening.”

Away he went treading over the daisies and kingcups. Helen’s eyes followed him wistfully.

“What a strange person!” said Leonard, laughing.

“I think he is a very wise one,” murmured Helen; and she came close up to Leonard, and took his hand in both hers, as if she felt already that he was in need of the Comforter,--the line broken, and the perch lost!

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Chapter IX

At noon the next day, London stole upon them through a gloomy, thick, oppressive atmosphere; for where is it that we can say London bursts on the sight? It stole on them through one of its fairest and most gracious avenues of approach,--by the stately gardens of Kensington, along the side of Hyde Park, and so on towards Cumberland Gate.

Leonard was not the least struck. And yet with a very little money, and a very little taste, it would be easy to render this entrance to London as grand and as imposing as that to Paris from the Champs Elysees. As they came near the Edgware Road, Helen took her new brother by the hand and guided him; for she knew all that neighbourhood, and she was acquainted with a lodging near that occupied by her father (to that lodging itself she could not have gone for the world), where they might be housed cheaply.

But just then the sky, so dull and overcast since morning, seemed one mass of black cloud. There suddenly came on a violent storm of rain. The boy and girl took refuge in a covered mews, in a street running out of the Edgware Road. This shelter soon became crowded; the two young pilgrims crept close to the wall, apart from the rest, Leonard’s arm round Helen’s waist, sheltering her from the rain that the strong wind contending with it beat in through the passage. Presently a young gentleman of better mien and dress than the other refugees entered, not hastily, but rather with a slow and proud step, as if, though he deigned to take shelter, he scorned to run to it. He glanced somewhat haughtily at the assembled group, passed on through the midst of it, came near Leonard, took off his hat, and shook the rain from its brim. His head thus uncovered, left all his features exposed; and the village youth recognized, at the first glance, his old victorious assailant on the green at Hazeldean.

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Chapter IX

Yet Randal Leslie was altered. His dark cheek was as thin as in boyhood, and even yet more wasted by intense study and night vigils; but the expression of his face was at once more refined and manly, and there was a steady concentrated light in his eye, like that of one who has been in the habit of bringing all his thoughts to one point. He looked older than he was. He was dressed simply in black, a colour which became him; and altogether his aspect and figure were, not showy indeed, but distinguished. He looked to the common eye a gentleman; and to the more observant a scholar.

Helter-skelter! pell-mell! the group in the passage now pressed each on each, now scattered on all sides, making way, rushing down the mews, against the walls, as a fiery horse darted under shelter. The rider, a young man with a very handsome face, and dressed with that peculiar care which we commonly call dandyism, cried out, good-humouredly, “Don’t be afraid; the horse sha’n’t hurt any of you. A thousand pardons--so ho! so ho!” He patted the horse, and it stood as still as a statue, filling up the centre of the passage. The groups resettled; Randal approached the rider.

“Frank Hazeldean!”

“Ah, is it indeed Randal Leslie?”

Frank was off his horse in a moment, and the bridle was consigned to the care of a slim ‘prentice-boy holding a bundle.

“My dear fellow, how glad I am to see you. How lucky it was that I should turn in here. Not like me either, for I don’t much care for a ducking. Staying in town, Randal?”

“Yes; at your uncle’s, Mr. Egerton. I have left Oxford.”

“For good?”

“For good.”

“But you have not taken your degree, I think? We Etonians all considered you booked for a double-first. Oh, we have been so proud of your fame,--you carried off all the prizes.”

“Not all; but some, certainly. Mr. Egerton offered me my choice,--to stay for my degree, or to enter at once into the Foreign Office. I preferred the end to the means. For, after all, what good are academical honours but as the entrance to life? To enter now is to save a step in a long way, Frank.”

“Ah, you were always ambitious, and you will make a great figure, I am sure.”

“Perhaps so--if I work for it. Knowledge is power.” Leonard started.

“And you!” resumed Randal, looking with some curious attention at his old schoolfellow. “You never came to Oxford. I did hear you were going into the army.”

“I am in the Guards,” said Frank, trying hard not to look too conceited as he made that acknowledgment. “The governor pished a little, and would rather I had come to live with him in the old Hall, and take to farming. Time enough for that, eh? By Jove, Randal, how pleasant a thing is life in London! Do you go to Almack’s to-night?”

“No; Wednesday is a holiday in the House. There is a great parliamentary dinner at Mr. Egerton’s. He is in the Cabinet now, you know; but you don’t see much of your uncle, I think.”

“Our sets are different,” said the young gentleman, in a tone of voice worthy of Brummel. “All those parliamentary fellows are devilish dull. The rain’s over. I don’t know whether the governor would like me to call at Grosvenor Square; but pray come and see me. Here’s my card to remind you; you must dine at our mess. Such capital fellows! What day will you fix?”

“I will call and let you know. Don’t you find it rather expensive in the Guards? I remember that you thought the governor, as you call him, used to chafe a little when you wrote for more pocket-money; and the only time I ever saw you with tears in your eyes was when Mr. Hazeldean, in sending you L5, reminded you that his estates were not entailed,--were at his own disposal, and they should never go to an extravagant spendthrift. It was not a pleasant threat that, Frank.”

“Oh!” cried the young man, colouring deeply. “It was not the threat that pained me; it was that my father could think so meanly of me as to fancy that--Well, well, but those were schoolboy days. And my father was always more generous than I deserved. We must see a great deal of each other, Randal. How good-natured you were at Eton, making my longs and shorts for me; I shall never forget it. Do call soon.”

Frank swung himself into his saddle, and rewarded the slim youth with half-a-crown,--a largess four times more ample than his father would have deemed sufficient. A jerk of the reins and a touch of the heel, off bounded the fiery horse and the gay young rider. Randal mused, and as the rain had now ceased, the passengers under shelter dispersed and went their way. Only Randal, Leonard, and Helen remained behind. Then, as Randal, still musing, lifted his eyes, they fell full upon Leonard’s face. He started, passed his hand quickly over his brow, looked again, hard and piercingly; and the change in his pale cheek to a shade still paler, a quick compression and nervous gnawing of his lip, showed that he too recognized an old foe. Then his glance ran over Leonard’s dress, which was somewhat dust-stained, but far above the class amongst which the peasant was born. Randal raised his brows in surprise, and with a smile slightly supercilious--the smile stung Leonard--and with a slow step, Randal left the passage, and took his way towards Grosvenor Square. The Entrance of Ambition was clear to him.

Then the little girl once more took Leonard by the hand, and led him through rows of humble, obscure, dreary streets. It seemed almost like an allegory personified, as the sad, silent child led on the penniless and low-born adventurer of genius by the squalid shops and through the winding lanes, which grew meaner and meaner, till both their forms vanished from the view.

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Chapter X

“But do come; change your dress, return and dine with me; you will have just time, Harley. You will meet the most eminent men of our party; surely they are worth your study, philosopher that you affect to be.”

Thus said Audley Egerton to Lord L’Estrange, with whom he had been riding (after the toils of his office). The two gentlemen were in Audley’s library,--Mr. Egerton, as usual, buttoned up, seated in his chair, in the erect posture of a man who scorns “inglorious ease;” Harley, as usual, thrown at length on the sofa., his long hair in careless curls, his neckcloth loose, his habiliments flowing simplex mundit is, indeed, his grace all his own; seemingly negligent, never slovenly; at ease everywhere and with every one, even with Mr. Audley Egerton, who chilled or awed the ease out of most people.

“Nay, my dear Audley, forgive me. But your eminent men are all men of one idea, and that not a diverting one, politics! politics! politics! The storm in the saucer.”

“But what is your life, Harley?--the saucer without the storm?”

“Do you know, that’s very well said, Audley? I did not think you had so much liveliness of repartee. Life! life! it is insipid, it is shallow,--no launching Argosies in the saucer. Audley, I have the oddest fancy--”

“That of course,” said Audley, dryly; “you never had any other. What is the new one?”

HARLEY (with great gravity).--“Do you believe in Mesmerism?”

AUDLEY.--“Certainly not.”

HARLEY.--“If it were in the power of an animal magnetizer to get me out of my own skin into somebody’s else! That’s my fancy! I am so tired of myself,--so tired! I have run through all my ideas,--know every one of them by heart. When some pretentious impostor of an idea perks itself up and says, ‘Look at me,--I ‘m a new acquaintance,’ I just give it a nod, and say ‘Not at all, you have only got a new coat on; you are the same old wretch that has bored me these last twenty years; get away.’ But if one could be in a new skin, if I could be for half-an-hour your tall porter, or one of your eminent matter-of-fact men, I should then really travel into a new world.’ Every man’s brain must be a world in itself, eh? If I could but make a parochial settlement even in yours, Audley,--run over all your thoughts and sensations. Upon my life, I ‘ll go and talk to that French mesmerizer about it.”

[If, at the date in which Lord L’Estrange held this conversation with Mr. Egerton, Alfred de Musset had written his comedies, we should suspect that his lordship had plagiarized from one of them the whimsical idea that he here vents upon Audley. In repeating it, the author at least cannot escape from the charge of obligation to a writer whose humour is sufficiently opulent to justify the loan.]

AUDLEY (who does not seem to like the notion of having his thoughts and sensations rummaged, even by his friend, and even in fancy)--“Pooh, pooh, pooh! Do talk like a man of sense.”

HARLEY.--“Man of sense! Where shall I find a model? I don’t know a man of sense!--never met such a creature. Don’t believe it ever existed. At one time I thought Socrates must have been a man of sense: a delusion; he would stand gazing into the air, and talking to his Genius from sunrise to sunset. Is that like a man of sense? Poor Audley! how puzzled he looks! Well, I’ll try and talk sense to oblige you. And first” (here Harley raised himself on his elbow),--“first, is it true, as I have heard vaguely, that you are paying court to the sister of that infamous Italian traitor?”

“Madame di Negra? No: I am not paying court to her,” answered Audley, with a cold smile. “But she is very handsome; she is very clever; she is useful to me,--I need not say how or why; that belongs to my metier as a politician. But I think, if you will take my advice, or get your friend to take it, I could obtain from her brother, through my influence with her, some liberal concessions to your exile. She is very anxious to know where he is.”

“You have not told her?”

“No; I promised you I would keep that secret.”

“Be sure you do; it is only for some mischief, some snare, that she could desire such information. Concessions! pooh! This is no question of concessions, but of rights.”

“I think you should leave your friend to judge of that.”

“Well, I will write to him. Meanwhile, beware of this woman. I have heard much of her abroad, and she has the character of her brother for duplicity and--”

“Beauty,” interrupted Audley, turning the conversation with practised adroitness. “I am told that the count is one of the handsomest men in Europe, much handsomer than his sister still, though nearly twice her age. Tut, tut, Harley; fear not for me. I am proof against all feminine attractions. This heart is dead.”

“Nay, nay; it is not for you to speak thus,--leave that to me. But even I will not say it. The heart never dies. And you; what have you lost?--a wife; true: an excellent, noble-hearted woman. But was it love that you felt for her? Enviable man, have you ever loved?”

“Perhaps not, Harley,” said Audley, with a sombre aspect and in dejected accents; “very few men ever have loved, at least as you mean by the word. But there are other passions than love that kill the heart, and reduce us to mechanism.”

While Egerton spoke, Harley turned aside, and his breast heaved. There was a short silence; Audley was the first to break it.

“Speaking of my lost wife, I am sorry that you do not approve what I have done for her young kinsman, Randal Leslie.”

HARLEY (recovering himself with an effort).--“Is it true kindness to bid him exchange manly independence for the protection of an official patron?”

AUDLEV.--“I did not bid him. I gave him his choice. At his age, I should have chosen as he has done.”

HARLEY.--“I trust not; I think better of you. But answer me one question frankly, and then I will ask another. Do you mean to make this young man your heir?”

AUDLEY (with a slight embarrassment).--“Heir, pooh! I am young still. I may live as long as he--time enough to think of that.”

HARLEY.--“Then now to my second question. Have you told this youth plainly that he may look to you for influence, but not for wealth?”

AUDLEY (firmly).--“I think I have; but I shall repeat it more emphatically.”

HARLEY.--“Then I am satisfied as to your conduct, but not as to his. For he has too acute an intellect not to know what it is to forfeit independence; and, depend on it, he has made his calculations, and would throw you into the bargain in any balance that he could strike in his favour. You go by your experience in judging men; I by my instincts. Nature warns us as it does the inferior animals,--only we are too conceited, we bipeds, to heed her. My instincts of soldier and gentleman recoil from that old young man. He has the soul of the Jesuit. I see it in his eye, I hear it in the tread of his foot; volto sciolto he has not; i pensieri stretti he has. Hist! I hear now his step in the hall. I should know it from a thousand. That’s his very touch on the handle of the door.”

Randal Leslie entered. Harley--who, despite his disregard for forms, and his dislike to Randal, was too high-bred not to be polite to his junior in age or inferior in rank-rose and bowed. But his bright piercing eyes did not soften as they caught and bore down the deeper and more latent fire in Randal’s. Harley did not resume his seat, but moved to the mantelpiece, and leaned against it.

RANDAL.--“I have fulfilled your commissions, Mr. Egerton. I went first to Maida Hill, and saw Mr. Burley. I gave him the check, but he said it was too much, and he should return half to the banker; he will write the article as you suggested. I then--”

AUDLEY.--“Enough, Randal! we will not fatigue Lord L’Estrange with these little details of a life that displeases him,--the life political.”

HARLEY.--“But these details do not displease me; they reconcile me to my own life. Go on, pray, Mr. Leslie.”

Randal had too much tact to need the cautioning glance of Mr. Egerton. He did not continue, but said with a soft voice, “Do you think, Lord L’Estrange, that the contemplation of the mode of life pursued by others can reconcile a man to his own, if he had before thought it needed a reconciler?” Harley looked pleased, for the question was ironical; and if there was a thing in the world be abhorred, it was flattery.

“Recollect your Lucretius, Mr. Leslie, the Suave mare, etc., ‘pleasant from the cliff to see the mariners tossed on the ocean.’ Faith, I think that sight reconciles one to the cliff, though, before, one might have been teased by the splash from the spray, and deafened by the scream of the sea-gulls. But I leave you, Audley. Strange that I have heard no more of my soldier! Remember I have your promise when I come to claim it. Good-by, Mr. Leslie, I hope that Burley’s article will be worth the check.”

Lord L’Estrange mounted his horse, which was still at the door, and rode through the Park. But he was no longer now unknown by sight. Bows and nods saluted him on every side.

“Alas, I am found out, then,” said he to himself. “That terrible Duchess of Knaresborough, too--I must fly my country.” He pushed his horse into a canter, and was soon out of the Park. As he dismounted at his father’s sequestered house, you would have hardly supposed him the same whimsical, fantastic, but deep and subtle humourist that delighted in perplexing the material Audley, for his expressive face was unutterably serious. But the moment he came into the presence of his parents, the countenance was again lighted and cheerful. It brightened the whole room like sunshine.

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Chapter XI

“Mr. Leslie,” said Egerton, when Harley had left the library, “you did not act with your usual discretion in touching upon matters connected with politics in the presence of a third party.”

“I feel that already, sir; my excuse is, that I held Lord L’Estrange to be your most intimate friend.”

“A public man, Mr. Leslie, would ill serve his country if he were not especially reserved towards his private friends--when they do not belong to his party.”

“But pardon me my ignorance. Lord Lansmere is so well known to be one of your supporters, that I fancied his son must share his sentiments, and be in your confidence.”

Egerton’s brows slightly contracted, and gave a stern expression to a countenance always firm and decided. He however answered in a mild tone,

“At the entrance into political life, Mr. Leslie, there is nothing in which a young man of your talents should be more on his guard than thinking for himself; he will nearly always think wrong. And I believe that is one reason why young men of talent disappoint their friends, and remain so long out of office.”

A haughty flush passed over Randal’s brow, and faded away quickly; he bowed in silence.

Egerton resumed, as if in explanation, and even in kindly apology,

“Look at Lord L’Estrange himself. What young man could come into life with brighter auspices? Rank, wealth, high animal spirits (a great advantage those same spirits, Mr. Leslie), courage, self-possession, scholarship as brilliant perhaps as your own; and now see how his life is wasted! Why? He always thought fit to think for himself. He could never be broken into harness, and never will be. The state coach, Mr. Leslie, requires that all the horses should pull together.”

“With submission, sir,” answered Randal, “I should think that there were other reasons why Lord L’Estrange, whatever be his talents--and of these you must be indeed an adequate judge--would never do anything in public life.”

“Ay, and what?” said Egerton, quickly.

“First,” said Randal, shrewdly, “private life has done too much for him. What could public life give to one who needs nothing? Born at the top of the social ladder, why should he put himself voluntarily at the last step, for the sake of climbing up again? And secondly, Lord L’Estrange seems to me a man in whose organization sentiment usurps too large a share for practical existence.”

“You have a keen eye,” said Audley, with some admiration,--“keen for one so young. Poor Harley!”

Mr. Egerton’s last words were said to himself. He resumed quickly,

“There is something on my mind, my young friend. Let us be frank with each other. I placed before you fairly the advantages and disadvantages of the choice I gave you. To take your degree with such honours as no doubt you would have won, to obtain your fellowship, to go to the Bar, with those credentials in favour of your talents,--this was one career. To come at once into public life, to profit by my experience, avail yourself of my interest, to take the chances of rise or fall with a party,--this was another. You chose the last. But in so doing, there was a consideration which might weigh with you, and on which, in stating your reasons for your option, you were silent.”

“What is that, sir?”

“You might have counted on my fortune, should the chances of party fail you: speak, and without shame if so; it would be natural in a young man, who comes from the elder branch of the House whose heiress was my wife.”

“You wound me, Mr. Egerton,” said Randal, turning away.

Mr. Egerton’s cold glance followed Randal’s movements; the face was hid from the glance, and the statesman’s eye rested on the figure, which is often as self-betraying as the countenance itself. Randal baffled Mr. Egerton’s penetration,--the young man’s emotion might be honest pride and pained and generous feeling, or it might be something else. Egerton continued slowly,

“Once for all, then, distinctly and emphatically, I say, never count upon that; count upon all else that I can do for you, and forgive me when I advise harshly or censure coldly; ascribe this to my interest in your career. Moreover, before decision becomes irrevocable, I wish you to know practically all that is disagreeable or even humiliating in the first subordinate steps of him who, without wealth or station, would rise in public life. I will not consider your choice settled till the end of a year at least,--your name will be kept on the college books till then; if on experience you should prefer to return to Oxford, and pursue the slower but surer path to independence and distinction, you can. And now give me your hand, Mr. Leslie, in sign that you forgive my bluntness: it is time to dress.”

Randal, with his face still averted, extended his hand. Mr. Egerton held it a moment, then dropping it, left the room. Randal turned as the door closed; and there was in his dark face a power of sinister passion, that justified all Harley’s warnings. His lips moved, but not audibly; then as if struck by a sudden thought, he followed Egerton into the hall.

“Sir,” said he, “I forgot to say, that on returning from Maida Hill, I took shelter from the rain under a covered passage, and there I met unexpectedly with your nephew, Frank Hazeldean.”

“Ah!” said Egerton, indifferently, “a fine young man; in the Guards. It is a pity that my brother has such antiquated political notions; he should put his son into parliament, and under my guidance; I could push him. Well, and what said Frank?”

“He invited me to call on him. I remember that you once rather cautioned me against too intimate an acquaintance with those who have not got their fortunes to make.”

“Because they are idle, and idleness is contagious. Right,--better not to be too intimate with a young Guardsman.”

“Then you would not have me call on him, sir? We were rather friends at Eton; and if I wholly reject his overtures, might he not think that you--”

“I!” interrupted Egerton. “Ah, true; my brother might think I bore him a grudge; absurd. Call then, and ask the young man here. Yet still, I do not advise intimacy.” Egerton turned into his dressing-room. “Sir,” said his valet, who was in waiting, “Mr. Levy is here,--he says by appointment; and Mr. Grinders is also just come from the country.”

“Tell Mr. Grinders to come in first,” said Egerton, seating himself. “You need not wait; I can dress without you. Tell Mr. Levy I will see him in five minutes.”

Mr. Grinders was steward to Audley Egerton.

Mr. Levy was a handsome man, who wore a camellia in his button-hole; drove, in his cabriolet, a high-stepping horse that had cost L200; was well known to young men of fashion, and considered by their fathers a very dangerous acquaintance.

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Chapter XII

As the company assembled in the drawing-rooms, Mr. Egerton introduced Randal Leslie to his eminent friends in a way that greatly contrasted the distant and admonitory manner which he had exhibited to him in private. The presentation was made with that cordiality and that gracious respect, by which those who are in station command notice for those who have their station yet to win.

“My dear lord, let me introduce to you a kinsman of my late wife’s” (in a whisper),--“the heir to the elder branch of her family. Stanmore, this is Mr. Leslie, of whom I spoke to you. You, who were so distinguished at Oxford, will not like him the worse for the prizes he gained there. Duke, let me present to you Mr. Leslie. The duchess is angry with me for deserting her balls; I shall hope to make my peace, by providing myself with a younger and livelier substitute. Ah, Mr. Howard, here is a young gentleman just fresh from Oxford, who will tell us all about the new sect springing up there. He has not wasted his time on billiards and horses.”

Leslie was received with all that charming courtesy which is the To Kalon of an aristocracy.

After dinner, conversation settled on politics. Randal listened with attention, and in silence, till Egerton drew him gently out; just enough, and no more,--just enough to make his intelligence evident, and without subjecting him to the charge of laying down the law. Egerton knew how to draw out young men,--a difficult art. It was one reason why he was so peculiarly popular with the more rising members of his party.

The party broke up early.

“We are in time for Almack’s,” said Egerton, glancing at the clock, “and I have a voucher for you; come.”

Randal followed his patron into the carriage. By the way Egerton thus addressed him,

“I shall introduce you to the principal leaders of society; know them and study them: I do not advise you to attempt to do more,--that is, to attempt to become the fashion. It is a very expensive ambition: some men it helps, most men it ruins. On the whole, you have better cards in your hands. Dance or not as it pleases you; don’t flirt. If you flirt people will inquire into your fortune,--an inquiry that will do you little good; and flirting entangles a young man into marrying. That would never do. Here we are.”

In two minutes more they were in the great ballroom, and Randal’s eyes were dazzled with the lights, the diamonds, the blaze of beauty. Audley presented him in quick succession to some dozen ladies, and then disappeared amidst the crowd. Randal was not at a loss: he was without shyness; or if he had that disabling infirmity, he concealed it. He answered the languid questions put to him with a certain spirit that kept up talk, and left a favourable impression of his agreeable qualities. But the lady with whom he got on the best was one who had no daughters out, a handsome and witty woman of the world,--Lady Frederick Coniers.

“It is your first ball at Almack’s then, Mr. Leslie?”

“My first.”

“And you have not secured a partner? Shall I find you one? What do you think of that pretty girl in pink?”

“I see her--but I cannot think of her.”

“You are rather, perhaps, like a diplomatist in a new court, and your first object is to know who is who.”

“I confess that on beginning to study the history of my own day I should like to distinguish the portraits that illustrate the memoir.”

“Give me your arm, then, and we will come into the next room. We shall see the different notabilites enter one by one, and observe without being observed. This is the least I can do for a friend of Mr. Egerton’s.”

“Mr. Egerton, then,” said Randal,--as they threaded their way through the space without the rope that protected the dancers,--“Mr. Egerton has had the good fortune to win your esteem even for his friends, however obscure?”

“Why, to say truth, I think no one whom Mr. Egerton calls his friend need long remain obscure, if he has the ambition to be otherwise; for Mr. Egerton holds it a maxim never to forget a friend nor a service.”

“Ah, indeed!” said Randal, surprised.

“And therefore,” continued Lady Frederick, “as he passes through life, friends gather round him. He will rise even higher yet. Gratitude, Mr. Leslie, is a very good policy.”

“Hem,” muttered Mr. Leslie.

They had now gained the room where tea and bread and butter were the homely refreshments to the habitues of what at that day was the most exclusive assembly in London. They ensconced themselves in a corner by a window, and Lady Frederick performed her task of cicerone with lively ease, accompanying each notice of the various persons who passed panoramically before them with sketch and anecdote, sometimes good-natured, generally satirical, always graphic and amusing.

By and by Frank Hazeldean, having on his arm a young lady of haughty air and with high though delicate features, came to the tea-table.

“The last new Guardsman,” said Lady Frederick; “very handsome, and not yet quite spoiled. But he has got into a dangerous set.”

RANDAL.--“The young lady with him is handsome enough to be dangerous.”

LADY FREDERICK (laughing).--“No danger for him there,--as yet at least. Lady Mary (the Duke of Knaresborough’s daughter) is only in her second year. The first year, nothing under an earl; the second, nothing under a baron. It will be full four years before she comes down to a commoner. Mr. Hazeldean’s danger is of another kind. He lives much with men who are not exactly mauvais ton, but certainly not of the best taste. Yet he is very young; he may extricate himself,--leaving half his fortune behind him. What, he nods to you! You know him?”

“Very well; he is nephew to Mr. Egerton.”

“Indeed! I did not know that. Hazeldean is a new name in London. I heard his father was a plain country gentleman, of good fortune, but not that he was related to Mr. Egerton.”

“Half-brother.”

“Will Mr. Egerton pay the young gentleman’s debts? He has no sons himself.”

RANDAL.--“Mr. Egerton’s fortune comes from his wife, from my family,--from a Leslie, not from a Hazeldean.” Lady Frederick turned sharply, looked at Randal’s countenance with more attention than she had yet vouchsafed to it, and tried to talk of the Leslies. Randal was very short there.

An hour afterwards, Randal, who had not danced, was still in the refreshment-room, but Lady Frederick had long quitted him. He was talking with some old Etonians who had recognized him, when there entered a lady of very remarkable appearance, and a murmur passed through the room as she appeared.

She might be three or four and twenty. She was dressed in black velvet, which contrasted with the alabaster whiteness of her throat and the clear paleness of her complexion, while it set off the diamonds with which she was profusely covered. Her hair was of the deepest jet, and worn simply braided. Her eyes, too, were dark and brilliant, her features regular and striking; but their expression, when in repose, was not prepossessing to such as love modesty and softness in the looks of woman. But when she spoke and smiled, there was so much spirit and vivacity in the countenance, so much fascination in the smile, that all which might before have marred the effect of her beauty strangely and suddenly disappeared.

“Who is that very handsome woman?” asked Randal. “An Italian,--a Marchesa something,” said one of the Etonians.

“Di Negra,” suggested another, who had been abroad: “she is a widow; her husband was of the great Genoese family of Negra,--a younger branch of it.”

Several men now gathered thickly around the fair Italian. A few ladies of the highest rank spoke to her, but with a more distant courtesy than ladies of high rank usually show to foreigners of such quality as Madame di Negra. Ladies of rank less elevated seemed rather shy of her,--that might be from jealousy. As Randal gazed at the marchesa with more admiration than any woman, perhaps, had before excited in him, he heard a voice near him say,

“Oh, Madame di Negra is resolved to settle amongst us, and marry an Englishman.”

“If she can find one sufficiently courageous,” returned a female voice.

“Well, she’s trying hard for Egerton, and he has courage enough for anything.”

The female voice replied, with a laugh, “Mr Egerton knows the world too well, and has resisted too many temptations to be--”

“Hush! there he is.”

Egerton came into the room with his usual firm step and erect mien. Randal observed that a quick glance was exchanged between him and the marchesa; but the minister passed her by with a bow.

Still Randal watched, and, ten minutes afterwards, Egerton and the marchesa were seated apart in the very same convenient nook that Randal and Lady Frederick had occupied an hour or so before.

“Is this the reason why Mr. Egerton so insultingly warns me against counting on his fortune?” muttered Randal. “Does he mean to marry again?”

Unjust suspicion!--for, at that moment, these were the words that Audley Egerton was dropping forth from his lips of bronze,

“Nay, dear madam, do not ascribe to my frank admiration more gallantry than it merits. Your conversation charms me, your beauty delights me; your society is as a holiday that I look forward to in the fatigues of my life. But I have done with love, and I shall never marry again.”

“You almost pique me into trying to win, in order to reject you,” said the Italian, with a flash from her bright eyes.

“I defy even you,” answered Audley, with his cold hard smile. “But to return to the point. You have more influence, at least, over this subtle ambassador; and the secret we speak of I rely on you to obtain me. Ah, Madam, let us rest friends. You see I have conquered the unjust prejudices against you; you are received and feted everywhere, as becomes your birth and your attractions. Rely on me ever, as I on you. But I shall excite too much envy if I stay here longer, and am vain enough to think that I may injure you if I provoke the gossip of the ill-natured. As the avowed friend, I can serve you; as the supposed lover, No--” Audley rose as he said this, and, standing by the chair, added carelessly, “--propos, the sum you do me the honour to borrow will be paid to your bankers to-morrow.”

“A thousand thanks! my brother will hasten to repay you.”

Audley bowed. “Your brother, I hope, will repay me in person, not before. When does he come?”

“Oh, he has again postponed his visit to London; he is so much needed in Vienna. But while we are talking of him, allow me to ask if your friend, Lord L’Estrange, is indeed still so bitter against that poor brother of mine?”

“Still the same.”

“It is shameful!” cried the Italian, with warmth; “what has my brother ever done to him that he should actually intrigue against the count in his own court?”

“Intrigue! I think you wrong Lord L’Estrange; he but represented what he believed to be the truth, in defence of a ruined exile.”

“And you will not tell me where that exile is, or if his daughter still lives?”

“My dear marchesa, I have called you friend, therefore I will not aid L’Estrange to injure you or yours. But I call L’Estrange a friend also; and I cannot violate the trust that--” Audley stopped short, and bit his lip. “You understand me,” he resumed, with a more genial smile than usual; and he took his leave.

The Italian’s brows met as her eye followed him; then, as she too rose, that eye encountered Randal’s.

“That young man has the eye of an Italian,” said the marchesa to herself, as she passed by him into the ballroom.

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Chapter XIII

Leonard and Helen settled themselves in two little chambers in a small lane. The neighbourhood was dull enough, the accommodation humble; but their landlady had a smile. That was the reason, perhaps, why Helen chose the lodgings: a smile is not always found on the face of a landlady when the lodger is poor. And out of their windows they caught sight of a green tree, an elm, that grew up fair and tall in a carpenter’s yard at the rear. That tree was like another smile to the place. They saw the birds come and go to its shelter; and they even heard, when a breeze arose, the pleasant murmur of its boughs.

Leonard went the same evening to Captain Digby’s old lodgings, but he could learn there no intelligence of friends or protectors for Helen. The people were rude and surly, and said that the captain still owed them L1 17s. The claim, however, seemed very disputable, and was stoutly denied by Helen. The next morning Leonard set out in search of Dr. Morgan. He thought his best plan was to inquire the address of the doctor at the nearest chemist’s, and the chemist civilly looked into the “Court Guide,” and referred him to a house in Bulstrode Street, Manchester Square. To this street Leonard contrived to find his way, much marvelling at the meanness of London: Screwstown seemed to him the handsomer town of the two.

A shabby man-servant opened the door, and Leonard remarked that the narrow passage was choked with boxes, trunks, and various articles of furniture. He was shown into a small room containing a very large round table, whereon were sundry works on homoeopathy, Parry’s “Cymbrian Plutarch,” Davies’s “Celtic Researches,” and a Sunday news paper. An engraved portrait of the illustrious Hahnemann occupied the place of honour over the chimneypiece. In a few minutes the door to an inner room opened, and Dr. Morgan appeared, and said politely, “Come in, sir.”

The doctor seated himself at a desk, looked hastily at Leonard, and then at a great chronometer lying on the table. “My time’s short, sir,--going abroad: and now that I am going, patients flock to me. Too late. London will repent its apathy. Let it!”

The doctor paused majestically, and not remarking on Leonard’s face the consternation he had anticipated, he repeated peevishly, “I am going abroad, sir, but I will make a synopsis of your case, and leave it to my successor. Hum!

“Hair chestnut; eyes--what colour? Look this way,--blue, dark blue. Hem! Constitution nervous. What are the symptoms?”

“Sir,” began Leonard, “a little girl--”

DR. MORGAN (impatiently).--“Little girl; never mind the history of your sufferings; stick to the symptoms,--stick to the symptoms.”

LEONARD.--“YOU mistake me, Doctor, I have nothing the matter with me. A little girl--”

DR. MORGAN.--“Girl again! I understand! it is she who is ill. Shall I go to her? She must describe her own symptoms,--I can’t judge from your talk. You’ll be telling me she has consumption, or dyspepsia, or some such disease that don’t exist: mere allopathic inventions,--symptoms, sir, symptoms.”

LEONARD (forcing his way).--“You attended her poor father, Captain Digby, when he was taken ill in the coach with you. He is dead, and his child is an orphan.”

DR. MORGAN (fumbling in his medical pocket-book).--“Orphan! nothing for orphans, especially if inconsolable, like aconite and chamomilla.”

[It may be necessary to observe that homoeopathy professes to deal with our moral affections as well as with our physical maladies, and has a globule for every sorrow.]

With some difficulty Leonard succeeded in bringing Helen to the recollection of the homoeopathist, stating how he came in charge of her, and why he sought Dr. Morgan.

The doctor was much moved.

“But, really,” said he, after a pause, “I don’t see how I can help the poor child. I know nothing of her relations. This Lord Les--whatever his name is--I know of no lords in London. I knew lords, and physicked them too, when I was a blundering allopathist. There was the Earl of Lansmere,--has had many a blue pill from me, sinner that I was. His son was wiser; never would take physic. Very clever boy was Lord L’Estrange--”

“Lord L’Estrange! that name begins with Les--”

“Stuff! He’s always abroad,--shows his sense. I’m going abroad too. No development for science in this horrid city,--full of prejudices, sir, and given up to the most barbarous allopathical and phlebotomical propensities. I am going to the land of Hahnemann, sir,--sold my good-will, lease, and furniture, and have bought in on the Rhine. Natural life there, sir,--homeeopathy needs nature: dine at one o’clock, get up at four, tea little known, and science appreciated. But I forget. Cott! what can I do for the orphan?”

“Well, sir,” said Leonard, rising, “Heaven will give me strength to support her.”

The doctor looked at the young man attentively. “And yet,” said he, in a gentler voice, “you, young man, are, by your account, a perfect stranger to her, or were so when you undertook to bring her to London. You have a good heart, always keep it. Very healthy thing, sir, a good heart,--that is, when not carried to excess. But you have friends of your own in town?”

LEONARD.--“Not yet, sir; I hope to make them.”

DOCTOR.--“Pless me, you do? How?--I can’t make any.”

Leonard coloured and hung his head. He longed to say, “Authors find friends in their readers,--I am going to be an author.” But he felt that the reply would savour of presumption, and held his tongue.

The doctor continued to examine him, and with friendly interest. “You say you walked up to London: was that from choice or economy?”

LEONARD.--“Both, sir.”

DOCTOR.--“Sit down again, and let us talk. I can give you a quarter of an hour, and I’ll see if I can help either of you, provided you tell me all the symptoms,--I mean all the particulars.”

Then, with that peculiar adroitness which belongs to experience in the medical profession, Dr. Morgan, who was really an acute and able man, proceeded to put his questions, and soon extracted from Leonard the boy’s history and hopes. But when the doctor, in admiration at a simplicity which contrasted so evident an intelligence, finally asked him his name and connections, and Leonard told them, the homoeopathist actually started. “Leonard Fairfield, grandson of my old friend, John Avenel of Lansmere! I must shake you by the hand. Brought up by Mrs. Fairfield!--

“Ah, now I look, strong family likeness,--very strong”

The tears stood in the doctor’s eyes. “Poor Nora!” said he.

“Nora! Did you know my aunt?”

“Your aunt! Ah! ah! yes, yes! Poor Nora! she died almost in these arms,--so young, so beautiful. I remember it as if yesterday.”

The doctor brushed his hand across his eyes, and swallowed a globule; and before the boy knew what he was about, had, in his benevolence, thrust another between Leonard’s quivering lips.

A knock was heard at the door.

“Ha! that ‘s my great patient,” cried the doctor, recovering his self-possession,--“must see him. A chronic case, excellent patient,--tic, sir, tic. Puzzling and interesting. If I could take that tic with me, I should ask nothing more from Heaven. Call again on Monday; I may have something to tell you then as to yourself. The little girl can’t stay with you,--wrong and nonsensical! I will see after her. Leave me your address,--write it here. I think I know a lady who will take charge of her. Good-by. Monday next, ten o’clock.” With this, the doctor thrust out Leonard, and ushered in his grand patient, whom he was very anxious to take with him to the banks of the Rhine.

Leonard had now only to discover the nobleman whose name had been so vaguely uttered by poor Captain Digby. He had again recourse to the “Court Guide;” and finding the address of two or three lords the first syllable of whose titles seemed similar to that repeated to him, and all living pretty near to each other, in the regions of Mayfair, he ascertained his way to that quarter, and, exercising his mother-wit, inquired at the neighbouring shops as to the personal appearance of these noblemen. Out of consideration for his rusticity, he got very civil and clear answers; but none of the lords in question corresponded with the description given by Helen. One was old, another was exceedingly corpulent, a third was bedridden,--none of them was known to keep a great dog. It is needless to say that the name of L’Estrange (no habitant of London) was not in the “Court Guide.” And Dr. Morgan’s assertion that that person was always abroad unluckily dismissed from Leonard’s mind the name the homoeopathist had so casually mentioned. But Helen was not disappointed when her young protector returned late in the day, and told her of his ill-success. Poor child! she was so pleased in her heart not to be separated from her new brother; and Leonard was touched to see how she had contrived, in his absence, to give a certain comfort and cheerful grace to the bare room devoted to himself. She had arranged his few books and papers so neatly, near the window, in sight of the one green elm. She had coaxed the smiling landlady out of one or two extra articles of furniture, especially a walnut-tree bureau, and some odds and ends of ribbon, with which last she had looped up the curtains. Even the old rush-bottom chairs had a strange air of elegance, from the mode in which they were placed. The fairies had given sweet Helen the art that adorns a home, and brings out a smile from the dingiest corner of hut and attic.

Leonard wondered and praised. He kissed his blushing ministrant gratefully, and they sat down in joy to their abstemious meal; when suddenly his face was overclouded,--there shot through him the remembrance of Dr. Morgan’s words, “The little girl can’t stay with you,--wrong and nonsensical. I think I know a lady who will take charge of her.”

“Ah,” cried Leonard, sorrowfully, “how could I forget?” And he told Helen what grieved him. Helen at first exclaimed that she would not go. Leonard, rejoiced, then began to talk as usual of his great prospects; and, hastily finishing his meal, as if there were no time to lose, sat down at once to his papers. Then Helen contemplated him sadly, as he bent over his delightful work. And when, lifting his radiant eyes from his manuscripts, he exclaimed, “No, no, you shall not go. This must succeed,--and we shall live together in some pretty cottage, where we can see more than one tree,”--then Helen sighed, and did not answer this time, “No, I will not go.”

Shortly after she stole from the room, and into her own; and there, kneeling down, she prayed, and her prayer was somewhat this, “Guard me against my own selfish heart; may I never be a burden to him who has shielded me.”

Perhaps as the Creator looks down on this world, whose wondrous beauty beams on us more and more, in proportion as our science would take it from poetry into law,--perhaps He beholds nothing so beautiful as the pure heart of a simple loving child.

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Chapter XIV

Leonard went out the next day with his precious manuscripts. He had read sufficient of modern literature to know the names of the principal London publishers; and to these he took his way with a bold step, though a beating heart.

That day he was out longer than the last; and when he returned, and came into the little room, Helen uttered a cry, for she scarcely recognized him,--there was on his face so deep, so silent, and so concentrated a despondency. He sat down listlessly, and did not kiss her this time, as she stole towards him. He felt so humbled. He was a king deposed.

He take charge of another life! He!

She coaxed him at last into communicating his day’s chronicle. The reader beforehand knows too well what it must be to need detailed repetition. Most of the publishers had absolutely refused to look at his manuscripts; one or two had good-naturedly glanced over and returned them at once with a civil word or two of flat rejection. One publisher alone--himself a man of letters, and who in youth had gone through the same bitter process of disillusion that now awaited the village genius--volunteered some kindly though stern explanation and counsel to the unhappy boy. This gentleman read a portion of Leonard’s principal poem with attention, and even with frank admiration. He could appreciate the rare promise that it manifested. He sympathized with the boy’s history, and even with his hopes; and then he said, in bidding him farewell,

“If I publish this poem for you, speaking as a trader, I shall be a considerable loser. Did I publish all I admire, out of sympathy with the author, I should be a ruined man. But suppose that, impressed as I really am with the evidence of no common poetic gifts in this manuscript, I publish it, not as a trader, but a lover of literature, I shall in reality, I fear, render you a great disservice, and perhaps unfit your whole life for the exertions on which you must rely for independence.”

“How, sir?” cried Leonard. “Not that I would ask you to injure yourself for me,” he added, with proud tears in his eyes.

“How, my young friend? I will explain. There is enough talent in these verses to induce very flattering reviews in some of the literary journals. You will read these, find yourself proclaimed a poet, will cry ‘I am on the road to fame.’ You will come to me, ‘And my poem, how does it sell?’ I shall point to some groaning shelf, and say, ‘Not twenty copies! The journals may praise, but the public will not buy it.’ ‘But you will have got a name,’ you say. Yes, a name as a poet just sufficiently known to make every man in practical business disinclined to give fair trial to your talents in a single department of positive life; none like to employ poets;--a name that will not put a penny in your purse,--worse still, that will operate as a barrier against every escape into the ways whereby men get to fortune. But having once tasted praise, you will continue to sigh for it: you will perhaps never again get a publisher to bring forth a poem, but you will hanker round the purlieus of the Muses, scribble for periodicals, fall at last into a bookseller’s drudge. Profits will be so precarious and uncertain, that to avoid debt may be impossible; then, you who now seem so ingenuous and so proud, will sink deeper still into the literary mendicant, begging, borrowing--”

“Never! never! never!” cried Leonard, veiling his face with his hands.

“Such would have been my career,” continued the publisher; “but I luckily had a rich relative, a trader, whose calling I despised as a boy, who kindly forgave my folly, bound me as an apprentice, and here I am; and now I can afford to write books as well as sell them.

“Young man, you must have respectable relations,--go by their advice and counsel; cling fast to some positive calling. Be anything in this city rather than poet by profession.”

“And how, sir, have there ever been poets? Had they other callings?”

“Read their biography, and then--envy them!”

Leonard was silent a moment; but lifting his head, answered loud and quickly, “I have read their biography. True, their lot was poverty,--perhaps hunger. Sir, I--envy them!”

“Poverty and hunger are small evils,” answered the bookseller, with a grave, kind smile. “There are worse,--debt and degradation, and--despair.”

“No, sir, no, you exaggerate; these last are not the lot of all poets.”

“Right, for most of our greatest poets had some private means of their own. And for others--why, all who have put into a lottery have not drawn blanks. But who could advise another man to set his whole hope of fortune on the chance of a prize in a lottery? And such a lottery!” groaned the publisher, glancing towards sheets and reams of dead authors, lying, like lead, upon his shelves.

Leonard clutched his manuscripts to his heart, and hurried away.

“Yes,” he muttered, as Helen clung to him, and tried to console,--“yes, you were right: London is very vast, very strong, and very cruel;” and his head sank lower and lower yet upon his bosom.

The door was flung widely open, and in, unannounced, walked Dr. Morgan.

The child turned to him, and at the sight of his face she remembered her father; and the tears that for Leonard’s sake she had been trying to suppress found way.

The good doctor soon gained all the confidence of these two young hearts; and after listening to Leonard’s story of his paradise lost in a day, he patted him on the shoulder and said, “Well, you will call on me on Monday, and we will see. Meanwhile, borrow these of me!”--and he tried to slip three sovereigns into the boy’s hand. Leonard was indignant. The bookseller’s warning flashed on him. Mendicancy! Oh, no, he had not yet come to that! He was almost rude and savage in his rejection; and the doctor did not like him the less for it.

“You are an obstinate mule,” said the homoeopathist, reluctantly putting up his sovereigns. “Will you work at something practical and prosy, and let the poetry rest a while?”

“Yes,” said Leonard, doggedly. “I will work.”

“Very well, then. I know an honest bookseller, and he shall give you some employment; and meanwhile, at all events, you will be among books, and that will be some comfort.”

Leonard’s eyes brightened. “A great comfort, sir.” He pressed the hand he had before put aside to his grateful heart.

“But,” resumed the doctor, seriously, “you really feel a strong predisposition to make verses?”

“I did, sir.”

“Very bad symptom indeed, and must be stopped before a relapse! Here, I have cured three prophets and ten poets with this novel specific.”

While thus speaking he had got out his book and a globule. “Agaricus muscarius dissolved in a tumbler of distilled water,--teaspoonful whenever the fit comes on. Sir, it would have cured Milton himself.”

“And now for you, my child,” turning to Helen, “I have found a lady who will be very kind to you. Not a menial situation. She wants some one to read to her and tend on her; she is old and has no children. She wants a companion, and prefers a girl of your age to one older. Will this suit you?”

Leonard walked away.

Helen got close to the doctor’s ear, and whispered, “No, I cannot leave him now,--he is so sad.”

“Cott!” grunted the doctor, “you two must have been reading ‘Paul and Virginia.’ If I could but stay in England, I would try what ignatia would do in this case,--interesting experiment! Listen to me, little girl, and go out of the room, you, sir.”

Leonard, averting his face, obeyed. Helen made an involuntary step after him; the doctor detained and drew her on his knee.

“What’s your Christian name?--I forget.”

“Helen.”

“Helen, listen. In a year or two you will be a young woman, and it would be very wrong then to live alone with that young man. Meanwhile you have no right to cripple all his energies. He must not have you leaning on his right arm,--you would weigh it down. I am going away, and when I am gone there will be no one to help you, if you reject the friend I offer you. Do as I tell you, for a little girl so peculiarly susceptible (a thorough pulsatilla constitution) cannot be obstinate and egotistical.”

“Let me see him cared for and happy, sir,” said she, firmly, “and I will go where you wish.”

“He shall be so; and to-morrow, while he is out, I will come and fetch you. Nothing so painful as leave-taking, shakes the nervous system, and is a mere waste of the animal economy.”

Helen sobbed aloud; then, writhing from the doctor, she exclaimed, “But he may know where I am? We may see each other sometimes? Ah, sir, it was at my father’s grave that we first met, and I think Heaven sent him to me. Do not part us forever.”

“I should have a heart of stone if I did,” cried the doctor, vehemently; “and Miss Starke shall let him come and visit you once a week. I’ll give her something to make her. She is naturally indifferent to others. I will alter her whole constitution, and melt her into sympathy--with rhododendron and arsenic!”

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Chapter XV

Before he went the doctor wrote a line to “Mr. Prickett, Bookseller, Holborn,” and told Leonard to take it the next morning, as addressed. “I will call on Prickett myself tonight and prepare him for your visit. But I hope and trust you will only have to stay there a few days.”

He then turned the conversation, to communicate his plans for Helen. Miss Starke lived at Highgate,--a worthy woman, stiff and prim, as old maids sometimes are; but just the place for a little girl like Helen, and Leonard should certainly be allowed to call and see her.

Leonard listened and made no opposition,--now that his day-dream was dispelled, he had no right to pretend to be Helen’s protector. He could have prayed her to share his wealth and his fame; his penury and his drudgery--no.

It was a very sorrowful evening,--that between the adventurer and the child. They sat up late, till their candle had burned down to the socket; neither did they talk much; but his hand clasped hers all the time, and her head pillowed it self on his shoulder. I fear when they parted it was not for sleep.

And when Leonard went forth the next morning, Helen stood at the street door watching him depart--slowly, slowly. No doubt, in that humble lane there were many sad hearts; but no heart so heavy as that of the still, quiet child, when the form she had watched was to be seen no more, and, still standing on the desolate threshold, she gazed into space, and all was vacant.

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Chapter XVI

Mr. Prickett was a believer in homeeopathy, and declared, to the indignation of all the apothecaries round Holborn, that he had been cured of a chronic rheumatism by Dr. Morgan. The good doctor had, as he promised, seen Mr. Prickett when he left Leonard, and asked him as a favour to find some light occupation for the boy, that would serve as an excuse for a modest weekly salary. “It will not be for long,” said the doctor: “his relations are respectable and well off. I will write to his grandparents, and in a few days I hope to relieve you of the charge. Of course, if you don’t want him, I will repay what he costs meanwhile.”

Mr. Prickett, thus prepared for Leonard, received him very graciously; and, after a few questions, said Leonard was just the person he wanted to assist him in cataloguing his books, and offered him most handsomely L1 a week for the task.

Plunged at once into a world of books vaster than he had ever before won admission to, that old divine dream of knowledge, out of which poetry had sprung, returned to the village student at the very sight of the venerable volumes. The collection of Mr. Prickett was, however, in reality by no means large; but it comprised not only the ordinary standard works, but several curious and rare ones. And Leonard paused in making the catalogue, and took many a hasty snatch of the contents of each tome, as it passed through his hands. The bookseller, who was an enthusiast for old books, was pleased to see a kindred feeling (which his shop-boy had never exhibited) in his new assistant; and he talked about rare editions and scarce copies, and initiated Leonard into many of the mysteries of the bibliographist.

Nothing could be more dark and dingy than the shop. There was a booth outside, containing cheap books and odd volumes, round which there was always an attentive group; within, a gas-lamp burned night and day.

But time passed quickly to Leonard. He missed not the green fields, he forgot his disappointments, he ceased to remember even Helen. O strange passion of knowledge! nothing like thee for strength and devotion!

Mr. Prickett was a bachelor, and asked Leonard to dine with him on a cold shoulder of mutton. During dinner the shop-boy kept the shop, and Mr. Prickett was really pleasant, as well as loquacious. He took a liking to Leonard, and Leonard told him his adventures with the publishers, at which Mr. Prickett rubbed his hands and laughed, as at a capital joke. “Oh, give up poetry, and stick to a shop,” cried he; “and to cure you forever of the mad whim to be author, I’ll just lend you the ‘Life and Works of Chatterton.’ You may take it home with you and read before you go to bed. You’ll come back quite a new man to-morrow.”

Not till night, when the shop was closed, did Leonard return to his lodging. And when he entered the room, he was struck to the soul by the silence, by the void. Helen was gone!

There was a rose-tree in its pot on the table at which he wrote, and by it a scrap of paper, on which was written,

DEAR, dear brother Leonard, God bless you. I will let you know when we can meet again. Take care of this rose, Brother, and don’t forget poor

HELEN.

Over the word “forget” there was a big round blistered spot that nearly effaced the word.

Leonard leaned his face on his hands, and for the first time in his life he felt what solitude really is. He could not stay long in the room. He walked out again, and wandered objectless to and fro the streets. He passed that stiller and humbler neighbourhood, he mixed with the throng that swarmed in the more populous thoroughfares. Hundreds and thousands passed him by, and still--still such solitude.

He came back, lighted his candle, and resolutely drew forth the “Chatterton” which the bookseller had lent him. It was an old edition, in one thick volume. It had evidently belonged to some contemporary of the poet’s,--apparently an inhabitant of Bristol,--some one who had gathered up many anecdotes respecting Chatterton’s habits, and who appeared even to have seen him, nay, been in his company; for the book was interleaved, and the leaves covered with notes and remarks, in a stiff clear hand,--all evincing personal knowledge of the mournful immortal dead. At first, Leonard read with an effort; then the strange and fierce spell of that dread life seized upon him,--seized with pain and gloom and terror,--this boy dying by his own hand, about the age Leonard had attained himself. This wondrous boy, of a genius beyond all comparison the greatest that ever yet was developed and extinguished at the age of eighteen,--self-taught, self-struggling, self-immolated. Nothing in literature like that life and that death!

With intense interest Leonard perused the tale of the brilliant imposture, which had been so harshly and so absurdly construed into the crime of a forgery, and which was (if not wholly innocent) so akin to the literary devices always in other cases viewed with indulgence, and exhibiting, in this, intellectual qualities in themselves so amazing,--such patience, such forethought, such labour, such courage, such ingenuity,--the qualities that, well directed, make men great, not only in books, but action. And, turning from the history of the imposture to the poems themselves, the young reader bent before their beauty, literally awed and breathless. How this strange Bristol boy tamed and mastered his rude and motley materials into a music that comprehended every tune and key, from the simplest to the sublimest! He turned back to the biography; he read on; he saw the proud, daring, mournful spirit alone in the Great City, like himself. He followed its dismal career, he saw it falling with bruised and soiled wings into the mire. He turned again to the later works, wrung forth as tasks for bread,--the satires without moral grandeur, the politics without honest faith. He shuddered and sickened as he read. True, even here his poet mind appreciated (what perhaps only poets can) the divine fire that burned fitfully through that meaner and more sordid fuel,--he still traced in those crude, hasty, bitter offerings to dire Necessity the hand of the young giant who had built up the stately verse of Rowley. But alas! how different from that “mighty line.” How all serenity and joy had fled from these later exercises of art degraded into journey-work! Then rapidly came on the catastrophe,--the closed doors, the poison, the suicide, the manuscripts torn by the hands of despairing wrath, and strewed round the corpse upon the funereal floors. It was terrible! The spectre of the Titan boy (as described in the notes written on the margin), with his haughty brow, his cynic smile, his lustrous eyes, haunted all the night the baffled and solitary child of song.

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Chapter XVII

It will often happen that what ought to turn the human mind from some peculiar tendency produces the opposite effect. One would think that the perusal in the newspaper of some crime and capital punishment would warn away all who had ever meditated the crime, or dreaded the chance of detection. Yet it is well known to us that many a criminal is made by pondering over the fate of some predecessor in guilt. There is a fascination in the Dark and Forbidden, which, strange to say, is only lost in fiction. No man is more inclined to murder his nephews, or stifle his wife, after reading “Richard the Third” or “Othello.” It is the reality that is necessary to constitute the danger of contagion. Now, it was this reality in the fate and life and crowning suicide of Chatterton that forced itself upon Leonard’s thoughts, and sat there like a visible evil thing, gathering evil like cloud around it. There was much in the dead poet’s character, his trials, and his doom, that stood out to Leonard like a bold and colossal shadow of himself and his fate. Alas! the book seller, in one respect, had said truly. Leonard came back to him the next day a new man; and it seemed even to himself as if he had lost a good angel in losing Helen. “Oh, that she had been by my side!” thought he. “Oh, that I could have felt the touch of her confiding hand; that, looking up from the scathed and dreary ruin of this life, that had sublimely lifted itself from the plain, and sought to tower aloft from a deluge, her mild look had spoken to me of innocent, humble, unaspiring childhood! Ah! If indeed I were still necessary to her,--still the sole guardian and protector,--then could I say to myself; ‘Thou must not despair and die! Thou hast her to live and to strive for.’ But no, no! Only this vast and terrible London,--the solitude of the dreary garret, and those lustrous eyes, glaring alike through the throng and through the solitude.”

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Chapter XVIII

On the following Monday Dr. Morgan’s shabby man-servant opened the door to a young man in whom he did not at first remember a former visitor. A few days before, embrowned with healthful travel, serene light in his eye, simple trust on his careless lip, Leonard Fairfield had stood at that threshold. Now again he stood there, pale and haggard, with a cheek already hollowed into those deep anxious lines that speak of working thoughts and sleepless nights; and a settled sullen gloom resting heavily on his whole aspect.

“I call by appointment,” said the boy, testily, as the servant stood irresolute. The man gave way. “Master is just gone out to a patient: please to wait, sir;” and he showed him into the little parlour. In a few moments, two other patients were admitted. These were women, and they began talking very loud. They disturbed Leonard’s unsocial thoughts. He saw that the door into the doctor’s receiving-room was half open, and, ignorant of the etiquette which holds such penetralia as sacred, he walked in to escape from the gossips. He threw himself into the doctor’s own wellworn chair, and muttered to himself, “Why did he tell me to come? What new can he think of for me? And if a favour, should I take it? He has given me the means of bread by work: that is all I have a right to ask from him, from any man,--all I should accept.”

While thus soliloquizing, his eye fell on a letter lying open on the table. He started. He recognized the handwriting,--the same as that of the letter which had inclosed. L50 to his mother,--the letter of his grandparents. He saw his own name: he saw something more,--words that made his heart stand still, and his blood seem like ice in his veins. As he thus stood aghast, a hand was laid on the letter, and a voice, in an angry growl, muttered, “How dare you come into my room, and pe reading my letters? Er-r-r!”

Leonard placed his own hand on the doctor’s firmly, and said, in a fierce tone, “This letter relates to me, belongs to me, crushes me. I have seen enough to know that. I demand to read all,--learn all.”

The doctor looked round, and seeing the door into the waiting-room still open, kicked it to with his foot, and then said, under his breath, “What have you read? Tell me the truth.”

“Two lines only, and I am called--I am called--” Leonard’s frame shook from head to foot, and the veins on his forehead swelled like cords. He could not complete the sentence. It seemed as if an ocean was rolling up through his brain, and roaring in his ears. The doctor saw at a glance that there was physical danger in his state, and hastily and soothingly answered, “Sit down, sit down; calm yourself; you shall know all,--read all; drink this water;” and he poured into a tumbler of the pure liquid a drop or two from a tiny phial.

Leonard obeyed mechanically, for he was no longer able to stand. He closed his eyes, and for a minute or two life seemed to pass from him; then he recovered, and saw the good doctor’s gaze fixed on him with great compassion. He silently stretched forth his hand towards the letter. “Wait a few moments,” said the physician, judiciously, “and hear me meanwhile. It is very unfortunate you should have seen a letter never meant for your eye, and containing allusions to a secret you were never to have known. But if I tell you more, will you promise me, on your word of honour, that you will hold the confidence sacred from Mrs. Fairfield, the Avenels,--from all? I myself am pledged to conceal a secret, which I can only share with you on the same condition.”

“There is nothing,” announced Leonard, indistinctly, and with a bitter smile on his lip,--“nothing, it seems, that I should be proud to boast of. Yes, I promise; the letter, the letter!”

The doctor placed it in Leonard’s right hand, and quietly slipped to the wrist of the left his forefinger and thumb, as physicians are said to do when a victim is stretched on the rack. “Pulse decreasing,” he muttered; “wonderful thing, aconite!” Meanwhile Leonard read as follows, faults in spelling and all:--

DR. MORGAN

SIR,--I received your favur duly, and am glad to hear that the pore boy is safe and Well. But he has been behaving ill, and ungrateful to my good son Richard, who is a credit to the whole Famuly and has made himself a Gentleman and Was very kind and good to the boy, not knowing who and What he is--God forbid! I don’t want never to see him again--the boy. Pore John was ill and Restless for days afterwards. John is a pore cretur now, and has had paralyticks. And he Talked of nothing but Nora--the boy’s eyes were so like his Mother’s. I cannot, cannot see the Child of Shame. He can’t cum here--for our Lord’s sake, sir, don’t ask it--he can’t, so Respectable as we’ve always been!--and such disgrace! Base born! base born! Keep him where he is, bind him prentis, I’ll pay anything for That. You says, sir, he’s clever, and quick at learning; so did Parson Dale, and wanted him to go to Collidge and make a Figur,--then all would cum out. It would be my death, sir; I could not sleep in my grave, sir. Nora, that we were all so proud of. Sinful creturs that we are! Nora’s good name that we’ve saved, now gone, gone. And Richard, who is so grand, and who was so fond of pore, pore Nora! He would not hold up his Head again. Don’t let him make a Figur in the world; let him be a tradesman, as we were afore him,--any trade he takes to,--and not cross us no more while he lives. Then I shall pray for him, and wish him happy. And have not we had enuff of bringing up children to be above their birth? Nora, that I used to say was like the first lady o’ the land-oh, but we were rightly punished! So now, sir, I leave all to you, and will Pay all you want for the boy. And be sure that the secret’s kept. For we have never heard from the father, and, at leest, no one knows that Nora has a living son but I and my daughter Jane, and Parson Dale and you--and you Two are good Gentlemen--and Jane will keep her word, and I am old, and shall be in my grave Soon, but I hope it won’t be while pore John needs me. What could he do without me? And if that got wind, it would kill me straght, sir. Pore John is a helpless cretur, God bless him. So no more from your servant in all dooty,

M. AVENEL.

Leonard laid down this letter very calmly, and, except by a slight heaving at his breast, and a deathlike whiteness of his lips, the emotions he felt were undetected. And it is a proof how much exquisite goodness there was in his heart that the first words he spoke were, “Thank Heaven!”

The doctor did not expect that thanksgiving, and he was so startled that he exclaimed, “For what?”

“I have nothing to pity or excuse in the woman I knew and honoured as a mother. I am not her son--her-” He stopped short.

“No: but don’t be hard on your true mother,--poor Nora!”

Leonard staggered, and then burst into a sudden paroxysm of tears.

“Oh, my own mother! my dead mother! Thou for whom I felt so mysterious a love,--thou from whom I took this poet soul! pardon me, pardon me! Hard on thee! Would that thou wert living yet, that I might comfort thee! What thou must have suffered!”

These words were sobbed forth in broken gasps from the depth of his heart. Then he caught up the letter again, and his thoughts were changed as his eyes fell upon the writer’s shame and fear, as it were, of his very existence. All his native haughtiness returned to him. His crest rose, his tears dried. “Tell her,” he said, with astern, unfaltering voice, “tell Mrs. Avenel that she is obeyed; that I will never seek her roof, never cross her path, never disgrace her wealthy son. But tell her, also, that I will choose my own way in life,--that I will not take from her a bribe for concealment. Tell her that I am nameless, and will yet make a name.”

A name! Was this but an idle boast, or was it one of those flashes of conviction which are never belied, lighting up our future for one lurid instant, and then fading into darkness?

“I do not doubt it, my prave poy,” said Dr. Morgan, growing exceedingly Welsh in his excitement; “and perhaps you may find a father, who--”

“Father! who is he, what is he? He lives, then! But he has deserted me,--he must have betrayed her! I need him not. The law gives me no father.”

The last words were said with a return of bitter anguish: then, in a calmer tone, he resumed, “But I should know who he is--as another one whose path I may not cross.”

Dr. Morgan looked embarrassed, and paused in deliberation. “Nay,” said he, at length, “as you know so much, it is surely best that you should know all.”

The doctor then proceeded to detail, with some circumlocution, what we will here repeat from his account more succinctly.

Nora Avenel, while yet very young, left her native village, or rather the house of Lady Lansinere, by whom she had been educated and brought up, in order to accept the place of companion to a lady in London. One evening she suddenly presented herself at her father’s house, and at the first sight of her mother’s face she fell down insensible. She was carried to bed. Dr. Morgan (then the chief medical practitioner of the town) was sent for. That night Leonard came into the world, and his mother died. She never recovered her senses, never spoke intelligibly from the time she entered the house. “And never, therefore, named your father,” said Dr. Morgan. “We knew not who he was.”

“And how,” cried Leonard, fiercely,--“how have they dared to slander this dead mother? How knew they that I--was--was--was not the child of wedlock?”

“There was no wedding-ring on Nora’s finger, never any rumour of her marriage; her strange and sudden appearance at her father’s house; her emotions on entrance, so unlike those natural to a wife returning to a parent’s home,--these are all the evidence against her. But Mrs. Avenel deemed them strong, and so did I. You have a right to think we judged too harshly,--perhaps we did.”

“And no inquiries were ever made?” said Leonard, mournfully, and after a long silence,--“no inquiries to learn who was the father of the motherless child?”

“Inquiries! Mrs. Avenel would have died first. Your grandmother’s nature is very rigid. Had she come from princes, from Cadwallader himself,” said the Welshman, “she could not more have shrunk from the thought of dishonour. Even over her dead child, the child she had loved the best, she thought but how to save that child’s name and memory from suspicion. There was luckily no servant in the house, only Mark Fairfield and his wife (Nora’s sister): they had arrived the same day on a visit.

“Mrs. Fairfield was nursing her own infant two or three months old; she took charge of you; Nora was buried and the secret kept. None out of the family knew of it but myself and the curate of the town,--Mr. Dale. The day after your birth, Mrs. Fairfield, to prevent discovery, moved to a village at some distance. There her child died; and when she returned to Hazeldean, where her husband was settled, you passed as the son she had lost. Mark, I know, was as a father to you, for he had loved Nora: they had been children together.”

“And she came to London,--London is strong and cruel,” muttered Leonard. “She was friendless and deceived. I see all,--I desire to know no more. This father--he must in deed have been like those whom I have read of in books. To love, to wrong her,--that I can conceive; but then to leave, to abandon; no visit to her grave, no remorse, no search for his own child. Well, well; Mrs. Avenel was right. Let us think of him no more.”

The man-servant knocked at the door, and then put in his head. “Sir, the ladies are getting very impatient, and say they’ll go.”

“Sir,” said Leonard, with a strange calm return to the things about him, “I ask your pardon for taking up your time so long. I go now. I will never mention to my moth--I mean to Mrs. Fairfield--what I have learned, nor to any one. I will work my way somehow. If Mr. Prickett will keep me, I will stay with him at present; but I repeat, I cannot take Mrs. Avenel’s money and be bound apprentice. Sir, you have been good and patient with me,--Heaven reward you.”

The doctor was too moved to answer. He wrung Leonard’s hand, and in another minute the door closed upon the nameless boy. He stood alone in the streets of London; and the sun flashed on him, red and menacing, like the eye of a foe!

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Chapter XIX

Leonard did not appear at the shop of Mr. Prickett that day. Needless it is to say where he wandered, what he suffered, what thought, what felt. All within was storm. Late at night he returned to his solitary lodging. On his table, neglected since the morning, was Helen’s rose-tree. It looked parched and fading. His heart smote him: he watered the poor plant,--perhaps with his tears.

Meanwhile Dr. Morgan, after some debate with himself whether or not to apprise Mrs. Avenel of Leonard’s discovery and message, resolved to spare her an uneasiness and alarm that might be dangerous to her health, and unnecessary in itself. He replied shortly, that she need not fear Leonard’s coming to her house; that he was disinclined to bind himself an apprentice, but that he was provided for at present; and in a few weeks, when Dr. Morgan heard more of him through the tradesman by whom he was employed, the doctor would write to her from Germany. He then went to Mr. Prickett’s, told the willing bookseller to keep the young man for the present,--to be kind to him, watch over his habits and conduct, and report to the doctor in his new home, on the Rhine, what avocation he thought Leonard would be best suited for, and most inclined to adopt. The charitable Welshman divided with the bookseller the salary given to Leonard, and left a quarter of his moiety in advance. It is true that he knew he should be repaid on applying to Mrs. Avenel; but being a man of independent spirit himself, he so sympathized with Leonard’s present feelings, that he felt as if he should degrade the boy did he maintain him, even secretly, out of Mrs. Avenel’s money,--money intended not to raise, but keep him down in life. At the worst, it was a sum the doctor could afford, and he had brought the boy into the world. Having thus, as he thought, safely provided for his two young charges, Helen and Leonard, the doctor then gave himself up to his final preparations for departure. He left a short note for Leonard with Mr. Prickett, containing some brief advice, some kind cheering; a postscript to the effect that he had not communicated to Mrs. Avenel the information Leonard had acquired, and that it were best to leave her in that ignorance; and six small powders to be dissolved in water, and a teaspoonful every fourth hour,--“Sovereign against rage and sombre thoughts,” wrote the doctor.

By the evening of the next day Dr. Morgan, accompanied by his pet patient with the chronic tic, whom he had talked into exile, was on the steamboat on his way to Ostend.

Leonard resumed his life at Mr. Prickett’s; but the change in him did not escape the bookseller. All his ingenuous simplicity had deserted him. He was very distant and very taciturn; he seemed to have grown much older. I shall not attempt to analyze metaphysically this change. By the help of such words as Leonard may himself occasionally let fall, the reader will dive into the boy’s heart, and see how there the change had worked, and is working still. The happy, dreamy peasant-genius gazing on Glory with inebriate, undazzled eyes is no more. It is a man, suddenly cut off from the old household holy ties,--conscious of great powers, and confronted on all sides by barriers of iron, alone with hard Reality and scornful London; and if he catches a glimpse of the lost Helicon, he sees, where he saw the Muse, a pale melancholy spirit veiling its face in shame,--the ghost of the mournful mother, whose child has no name, not even the humblest, among the family of men.

On the second evening after Dr. Morgan’s departure, as Leonard was just about to leave the shop, a customer stepped in with a book in his hand, which he had snatched from the shop-boy, who was removing the volumes for the night from the booth without.

“Mr. Prickett, Mr. Prickett!” said the customer, “I am ashamed of you. You presume to put upon this work, in two volumes, the sum of eight shillings.”

Mr. Prickett stepped forth from the Cimmerian gloom of some recess, and cried, “What! Mr. Burley, is that you? But for your voice, I should not have known you.”

“Man is like a book, Mr. Prickett; the commonalty only look to his binding. I am better bound, it is very true.” Leonard glanced towards the speaker, who now stood under the gas-lamp, and thought he recognized his face. He looked again. Yes; it was the perch-fisher whom he had met on the banks of the Brent, and who had warned him of the lost fish and the broken line.

MR. BURLEY (continuing).--“But the ‘Art of Thinking’!--you charge eight shillings for the ‘Art of Thinking.’”

MR. PRICKETT.--“Cheap enough, Mr. Burley. A very clean copy.”

MR. BURLEY.--“Usurer! I sold it to you for three shillings. It is more than one hundred and fifty per cent you propose to gain from my ‘Art of Thinking.’”

MR. PRICKETT (stuttering and taken aback).--“You sold it to me! Ah, now I remember. But it was more than three shillings I gave. You forget,--two glasses of brandy-and-water.”

MR. BURLEY.--“Hospitality, sir, is not to be priced. If you sell your hospitality, you are not worthy to possess my ‘Art of Thinking.’ I resume it. There are three shillings, and a shilling more for interest. No; on second thoughts, instead of that shilling, I will return your hospitality: and the first time you come my way you shall have two glasses of brandy-and-water.”

Mr. Prickett did not look pleased, but he made no objection; and Mr. Burley put the book into his pocket, and turned to examine the shelves. He bought an old jest-book, a stray volume of the Comedies of Destouches, paid for them, put them also into his pocket, and was sauntering out, when he perceived Leonard, who was now standing at the doorway.

“Hem! who is that?” he asked, whispering Mr. Prickett. “A young assistant of mine, and very clever.”

Mr. Burley scanned Leonard from top to toe.

“We have met before, sir. But you look as if you had returned to the Brent, and been fishing for my perch.”

“Possibly, sir,” answered Leonard. “But my line is tough, and is not yet broken, though the fish drags it amongst the weeds, and buries itself in the mud.”

He lifted his hat, bowed slightly, and walked on.

“He is clever,” said Mr. Burley to the bookseller: “he understands allegory.”

MR. PRICKETT.--“Poor youth! He came to town with the idea of turning author: you know what that is, Mr. Burley.”

MR. BURLEY (with an air of superb dignity).--“Bibliopole, yes! An author is a being between gods and men, who ought to be lodged in a palace, and entertained at the public charge upon ortolans and Tokay. He should be kept lapped in down, and curtained with silken awnings from the cares of life, have nothing to do but to write books upon tables of cedar, and fish for perch from a gilded galley. And that ‘s what will come to pass when the ages lose their barbarism and know their benefactors. Meanwhile, sir, I invite you to my rooms, and will regale you upon brandy-and-water as long as I can pay for it; and when I cannot--you shall regale me.”

Mr. Prickett muttered, “A very bad bargain indeed,” as Mr. Burley, with his chin in the air, stepped into the street.

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Chapter XX

At first Leonard had always returned home through the crowded thoroughfares,--the contact of numbers had animated his spirits. But the last two days, since the discovery of his birth, he had taken his way down the comparatively unpeopled path of the New Road.

He had just gained that part of this outskirt in which the statuaries and tomb-makers exhibit their gloomy wares, furniture alike for gardens and for graves,--and, pausing, contemplated a column, on which was placed an urn, half covered with a funeral mantle, when his shoulder was lightly tapped, and, turning quickly, he saw Mr. Burley standing behind him.

“Excuse me, sir, but you understand perch-fishing; and since we find ourselves on the same road, I should like to be better acquainted with you. I hear you once wished to be an author. I am one.”

Leonard had never before, to his knowledge, seen an author, and a mournful smile passed his lips as he surveyed the perch-fisher.

Mr. Burley was indeed very differently attired since the first interview by the brooklet. He looked much less like an author,--but more perhaps like a perch-fisher. He had a new white hat, stuck on one side of his head, a new green overcoat, new gray trousers, and new boots. In his hand was a whalebone stick, with a silver handle. Nothing could be more vagrant, devil-me-Garish, and, to use a slang word, tigerish, than his whole air. Yet, vulgar as was his costume, he did not himself seem vulgar, but rather eccentric, lawless,--something out of the pale of convention. His face looked more pale and more puffed than before, the tip of his nose redder; but the spark in his eye was of a livelier light, and there was self-enjoyment in the corners of his sensual, humorous lip.

“You are an author, sir,” repeated Leonard. “Well; and what is your report of the calling? Yonder column props an urn. The column is tall, and the urn is graceful. But it looks out of place by the roadside: what say you?”

MR. BURLEY.--“It would look better in the churchyard.”

LEONARD.--“So I was thinking. And you are an author!”

MR. BURLEY.--“Ah, I said you had a quick sense of allegory. And so you think an author looks better in a churchyard, when you see him but as a muffled urn under the moonshine, than standing beneath the gas-lamp in a white hat, and with a red tip to his nose. Abstractedly, you are right. But, with your leave, the author would rather be where he is. Let us walk on.” The two men felt an interest in each other, and they walked some yards in silence.

“To return to the urn,” said Mr. Burley,--“you think of fame and churchyards. Natural enough, before illusion dies; but I think of the moment, of existence,--and I laugh at fame. Fame, sir--not worth a glass of cold-without! And as for a glass of warm, with sugar--and five shillings in one’s pocket to spend as one pleases--what is there in Westminster Abbey to compare with it?”

“Talk on, sir,--I should like to hear you talk. Let me listen and hold my tongue.” Leonard pulled his hat over his brows, and gave up his moody, questioning, turbulent mind to his new acquaintance.

And John Burley talked on. A dangerous and fascinating talk it was,--the talk of a great intellect fallen; a serpent trailing its length on the ground, and showing bright, shifting, glorious hues, as it grovelled,--a serpent, yet without the serpent’s guile. If John Burley deceived and tempted, he meant it not,--he crawled and glittered alike honestly. No dove could be more simple.

Laughing at fame, he yet dwelt with an eloquent enthusiasm on the joy of composition. “What do I care what men without are to say and think of the words that gush forth on my page?” cried he. “If you think of the public, of urns, and laurels, while you write, you are no genius; you are not fit to be an author. I write because it rejoices me, because it is my nature. Written, I care no more what becomes of it than the lark for the effect that the song has on the peasant it wakes to the plough. The poet, like the lark, sings ‘from his watch-tower in the skies.’ Is this true?”

“Yes, very true!”

“What can rob us of this joy? The bookseller will not buy; the public will not read. Let them sleep at the foot of the ladder of the angels,--we climb it all the same. And then one settles down into such good-tempered Lucianic contempt for men. One wants so little from them, when one knows what one’s self is worth, and what they are. They are just worth the coin one can extract from them, in order to live.

“Our life--that is worth so much to us. And then their joys, so vulgar to them, we can make them golden and kingly. Do you suppose Burns drinking at the alehouse, with his boors around him, was drinking, like them, only beer and whiskey? No, he was drinking nectar; he was imbibing his own ambrosial thoughts,--shaking with the laughter of the gods. The coarse human liquid was just needed to unlock his spirit from the clay,--take it from jerkin and corduroys, and wrap it in the ‘singing robes’ that floated wide in the skies: the beer or the whiskey needed but for that, and then it changed at once into the drink of Hebe. But come, you have not known this life,--you have not seen it. Come, give me this night. I have moneys about me,--I will fling them abroad as liberally as Alexander himself, when he left to his share but hope. Come!”

“Whither?”

“To my throne. On that throne last sat Edmund Kean, mighty mime! I am his successor. We will see whether in truth these wild sons of genius, who are cited but ‘to point a moral and adorn a tale,’ were objects of compassion. Sober-suited tits to lament over a Savage or a Morland, a Porson and a Burns!”

“Or a Chatterton,” said Leonard, gloomily.

“Chatterton was an impostor in all things; he feigned excesses that he never knew. He a bacchanalian, a royster! HE! No. We will talk of him. Come!”

Leonard went.

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Chapter XXI

The Room! And the smoke-reek, and the gas glare of it! The whitewash of the walls, and the prints thereon of the actors in their mime-robes, and stage postures,--actors as far back as their own lost Augustan era, when the stage was a real living influence on the manners and the age! There was Betterton, in wig and gown,--as Cato, moralizing on the soul’s eternity, and halting between Plato and the dagger. There was Woodward as “The Fine Gentleman,” with the inimitable rake-hell in which the heroes of Wycherly and Congreve and Farquhar live again. There was jovial Quin as Falstaff, with round buckler and “fair round belly.” There was Colley Cibber in brocade, taking snuff as with “his Lord,” the thumb and forefinger raised in air, and looking at you for applause. There was Macklin as Shylock, with knife in hand: and Kemble in the solemn weeds of the Dane; and Kean in the place of honour over the chimneypiece.

When we are suddenly taken from practical life, with its real workday men, and presented to the portraits of those sole heroes of a world Fantastic and Phantasmal, in the garments wherein they did “strut and fret their hour upon the stage,” verily there is something in the sight that moves an inner sense within ourselves,--for all of us have an inner sense of some existence, apart from the one that wears away our days: an existence that, afar from St. James’s and St. Giles’s, the Law Courts and Exchange, goes its way in terror or mirth, in smiles or in tears, through a vague magic-land of the poets. There, see those actors--they are the men who lived it--to whom our world was the false one, to whom the Imaginary was the Actual! And did Shakspeare himself, in his life, ever hearken to such applause as thundered round the personators of his airy images? Vague children of the most transient of the arts, fleet shadows on running waters, though thrown down from the steadfast stars, were ye not happier than we who live in the Real? How strange you must feel in the great circuit that ye now take through eternity! No prompt-books, no lamps, no acting Congreve and Shakspeare there! For what parts in the skies have your studies on the earth fitted you? Your ultimate destinies are very puzzling. Hail to your effigies, and pass we on!

There, too, on the whitewashed walls, were admitted the portraits of ruder rivals in the arena of fame,--yet they, too, had known an applause warmer than his age gave to Shakspeare; the Champions of the Ring,--Cribb and Molyneux and Dutch Sam. Interspersed with these was an old print of Newmarket in the early part of the last century, and sundry engravings from Hogarth. But poets, oh, they were there too! poets who might be supposed to have been sufficiently good fellows to be at home with such companions,--Shakspeare, of course, with his placid forehead; Ben Jonson, with his heavy scowl; Burns and Byron cheek by jowl. But the strangest of all these heterogeneous specimens of graphic art was a full-length print of William Pitt!--William Pitt, the austere and imperious. What the deuce did he do there amongst prize-fighters and actors and poets? It seemed an insult to his grand memory. Nevertheless there he was, very erect, and with a look of ineffable disgust in his upturned nostrils. The portraits on the sordid walls were very like the crambo in the minds of ordinary men,--very like the motley pictures of the FAMOUS hung up in your parlour, O my Public! Actors and prize-fighters, poets and statesmen, all without congruity and fitness, all whom you have been to see or to hear for a moment, and whose names have stared out in your newspapers, O my public!

And the company? Indescribable! Comedians, from small theatres, out of employ; pale, haggard-looking boys, probably the sons of worthy traders, trying their best to break their fathers’ hearts; here and there the marked features of a Jew. Now and then you might see the curious puzzled face of some greenhorn about town, or perhaps a Cantab; and men of grave age, and grayhaired, were there, and amongst them a wondrous proportion of carbuncled faces and bottle-noses. And when John Burley entered, there was a shout that made William Pitt shake in his frame. Such stamping and hallooing, and such hurrahs for “Burley John.” And the gentleman who had filled the great high leathern chair in his absence gave it up to John Burley; and Leonard, with his grave, observant eye, and lip half sad and half scornful, placed himself by the side of his introducer. There was a nameless, expectant stir through the assembly, as there is in the pit of the opera when some great singer advances to the lamps, and begins, “Di tanti palpiti.” Time flies. Look at the Dutch clock over the door. Half-an-hour. John Burley begins to warm. A yet quicker light begins to break from his Eye; his voice has a mellow luscious roll in it.

“He will be grand to-night,” whispered a thin man, who looked like a tailor, seated on the other side of Leonard. Time flies,--an hour. Look again at the Dutch clock. John Burley is grand, he is in his zenith, at his culminating point. What magnificent drollery! what luxuriant humour! How the Rabelais shakes in his easy-chair! Under the rush and the roar of this fun (what word else shall describe it?) the man’s intellect is as clear as gold sand under a river. Such wit and such truth, and, at times, such a flood of quick eloquence! All now are listeners,--silent, save in applause.

And Leonard listened too. Not, as he would some nights ago, in innocent unquestioning delight. No; his mind has passed through great sorrow, great passion, and it comes out unsettled, inquiring, eager, brooding over joy itself as over a problem. And the drink circulates, and faces change; and there are gabbling and babbling; and Burley’s head sinks in his bosom, and he is silent. And up starts a wild, dissolute, bacchanalian glee for seven voices. And the smoke-reek grows denser and thicker, and the gaslight looks dizzy through the haze. And John Burley’s eyes reel.

Look again at the Dutch clock. Two hours have gone. John Burley has broken out again from his silence, his voice thick and husky, and his laugh cracked; and he talks, O ye gods! such rubbish and ribaldry; and the listeners roar aloud, and think it finer than before. And Leonard, who had hitherto been measuring himself in his mind against the giant, and saying inly, “He soars out of my reach,” finds the giant shrink smaller and smaller, and saith to himself, “He is but of man’s common standard after all!”

Look again at the Dutch clock. Three hours have passed. Is John Burley now of man’s common standard? Man himself seems to have vanished from the scene,--his soul stolen from him, his form gone away with the fumes of the smoke, and the nauseous steam from that fiery bowl. And Leonard looked round, and saw but the swine of Circe,--some on the floor, some staggering against the walls, some hugging each other on the tables, some fighting, some bawling, some weeping. The divine spark had fled from the human face; the Beast is everywhere growing more and more out of the thing that had been Man. And John Burley, still unconquered, but clean lost to his senses, fancies himself a preacher, and drawls forth the most lugubrious sermon upon the brevity of life that mortal ever beard, accompanied with unctuous sobs; and now and then in the midst of balderdash gleams out a gorgeous sentence, that Jeremy Taylor might have envied, drivelling away again into a cadence below the rhetoric of a Muggletonian. And the waiters choked up the doorway, listening and laughing, and prepared to call cabs and coaches; and suddenly some one turned off the gaslight, and all was dark as pitch,--howls and laughter, as of the damned, ringing through the Pandemonium. Out from the black atmosphere stepped the boy-poet; and the still stars rushed on his sight, as they looked over the grimy roof-tops.

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Chapter XXII

Well, Leonard, this is the first time thou hast shown that thou hast in thee the iron out of which true manhood is forged and shaped. Thou hast the power to resist. Forth, unebriate, unpolluted, he came from the orgy, as yon star above him came from the cloud.

He had a latch-key to his lodgings. He let himself in and walked noiselessly up the creaking wooden stair. It was dawn. He passed on to his window and threw it open. The green elm-tree from the carpenter’s yard looked as fresh and fair as if rooted in solitude, leagues away from the smoke of Babylon.

“Nature, Nature!” murmured Leonard, “I hear thy voice now. This stills, this strengthens. But the struggle is very dread. Here, despair of life,--there, faith in life. Nature thinks of neither, and lives serenely on.”

By and by a bird slid softly from the heart of the tree, and dropped on the ground below out of sight. But Leonard heard its carol. It awoke its companions; wings began to glance in the air, and the clouds grew red towards the east.

Leonard sighed and left the window. On the table, near Helen’s rose-tree, which he bent over wistfully, lay a letter. He had not observed it before. It was in Helen’s hand. He took it to the light, and read it by the pure, healthful gleams of morn:--

IVY LODGE.

Oh, my dear brother Leonard, will this find you well, and (more happy I dare not say, but) less sad than when we parted? I write kneeling, so that it seems to me as if I wrote and prayed at the same time. You may come and see me to-morrow evening, Leonard. Do come, do,--we shall walk together in this pretty garden; and there is an arbour all covered with jessamine and honeysuckle, from which we can look down on London. I have looked from it so many times,-- so many--trying if I can guess the roofs in our poor little street, and fancying that I do see the dear elm-tree.

Miss Starke is very kind to me; and I think after I have seen you, that I shall be happy here,--that is, if you are happy.

Your own grateful sister,

HELEN.

P. S.--Any one will direct you to our house; it lies to the left near the top of the hill, a little way down a lane that is overhung on one side with chestnut-trees and lilacs. I shall be watching for you at the gate.

Leonard’s brow softened, he looked again like his former self. Up from the dark sea at his heart smiled the meek face of a child, and the waves lay still as at the charm of a spirit.

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Chapter XXIII

“And what is Mr. Burley, and what has he written?” asked Leonard of Mr. Prickett, when he returned to the shop.

Let us reply to that question in our own words, for we know more about Mr. Burley than Mr. Prickett does.

John Burley was the only son of a poor clergyman, in a village near Ealing, who had scraped and saved and pinched, to send his son to an excellent provincial school in a northern county, and thence to college. At the latter, during his first year, young Burley was remarked by the undergraduates for his thick shoes and coarse linen, and remarkable to the authorities for his assiduity and learning. The highest hopes were entertained of him by the tutors and examiners. At the beginning of the second year his high animal spirits, before kept down by study, broke out. Reading had become easy to him. He knocked off his tasks with a facile stroke, as it were. He gave up his leisure hours to Symposia by no means Socratical. He fell into an idle, hard-drinking set. He got into all kinds of scrapes. The authorities were at first kind and forbearing in their admonitions, for they respected his abilities, and still hoped he might become an honour to the University. But at last he went drunk into a formal examination, and sent in papers, after the manner of Aristophanes, containing capital jokes upon the Dons and Big-wigs themselves. The offence was the greater and seemed the more premeditated for being clothed in Greek. John Burley was expelled. He went home to his father’s a miserable man, for, with all his follies, he had a good heart. Removed from ill example, his life for a year was blameless. He got admitted as usher into the school in which he had received instruction as a pupil. This school was in a large town. John Burley became member of a club formed among the tradesmen, and spent three evenings a week there. His astonishing convivial and conversational powers began to declare themselves. He grew the oracle of the club; and, from being the most sober, peaceful assembly in which grave fathers of a family ever smoked a pipe or sipped a glass, it grew under Mr. Burley’s auspices the parent of revels as frolicking and frantic as those out of which the old Greek Goat Song ever tipsily rose. This would not do. There was a great riot in the streets one night, and the next morning the usher was dismissed. Fortunately for John Burley’s conscience, his father had died before this happened,--died believing in the reform of his son. During his ushership Mr. Burley had scraped acquaintance with the editor of the county newspaper, and given him some capital political articles; for Burley was, like Parr and Porson, a notable politician. The editor furnished him with letters to the journalists in London, and John came to the metropolis and got employed on a very respectable newspaper. At college he had known Audley Egerton, though but slightly: that gentleman was then just rising into repute in parliament. Burley sympathized with some question on which Audley had distinguished himself, and wrote a very good article thereon,--an article so good that Egerton inquired into the authorship, found out Burley, and resolved in his own mind to provide for him whenever he himself came into office. But Burley was a man whom it was impossible to provide for. He soon lost his connection with the news paper. First, he was so irregular that he could never be depended upon. Secondly, he had strange, honest, eccentric twists of thinking, that could coalesce with the thoughts of no party in the long run. An article of his, inadvertently admitted, had horrified all the proprietors, staff, and readers of the paper. It was diametrically opposite to the principles the paper advocated, and compared its pet politician to Catiline. Then John Burley shut himself up and wrote books. He wrote two or three books, very clever, but not at all to the popular taste,--abstract and learned, full of whims that were caviare to the multitude, and larded with Greek. Nevertheless they obtained for him a little money, and among literary men some reputation. Now Audley Egerton came into power, and got him, though with great difficulty,--for there were many prejudices against this scampish, harum-scarum son of the Muses,--a place in a public office. He kept it about a month, and then voluntarily resigned it. “My crust of bread and liberty!” quoth John Burley, and he vanished into a garret. From that time to the present he lived--Heaven knows how! Literature is a business, like everything else; John Burley grew more and more incapable of business. “He could not do task-work,” he said; he wrote when the whim seized him, or when the last penny was in his pouch, or when he was actually in the spunging-house or the Fleet,--migrations which occurred to him, on an average, twice a year. He could generally sell what he had actually written, but no one would engage him beforehand. Editors of magazines and other periodicals were very glad to have his articles, on the condition that they were anonymous; and his style was not necessarily detected, for he could vary it with the facility of a practised pen. Audley Egerton continued his best supporter, for there were certain questions on which no one wrote with such force as John Burley,--questions connected with the metaphysics of politics, such as law reform and economical science. And Audley Egerton was the only man John Burley put himself out of the way to serve, and for whom he would give up a drinking bout and do task-work; for John Burley was grateful by nature, and he felt that Egerton had really tried to befriend him. Indeed, it was true, as he had stated to Leonard by the Brent, that even after he had resigned his desk in the London office, he had had the offer of an appointment in Jamaica, and a place in India, from the minister. But probably there were other charms then than those exercised by the one-eyed perch that kept him to the neighbourhood of London. With all his grave faults of character and conduct, John Burley was not without the fine qualities of a large nature. He was most resolutely his own enemy, it is true, but he could hardly be said to be any one else’s. Even when he criticised some more fortunate writer, he was good-humoured in his very satire: he had no bile, no envy. And as for freedom from malignant personalities, he might have been a model to all critics. I must except politics, however, for in these he could be rabid and savage. He had a passion for independence, which, though pushed to excess, was not without grandeur. No lick-platter, no parasite, no toad-eater, no literary beggar, no hunter after patronage and subscriptions; even in his dealings with Audley Egerton, he insisted on naming the price for his labours. He took a price, because, as the papers required by Audley demanded much reading and detail, which was not at all to his taste, he considered himself entitled fairly to something more than the editor of the journal wherein the papers appeared was in the habit of giving. But he assessed this extra price himself, and as he would have done to a bookseller. And when in debt and in prison, though he knew a line to Egerton would have extricated him, he never wrote that line. He would depend alone on his pen,--dipped it hastily in the ink, and scrawled himself free. The most debased point about him was certainly the incorrigible vice of drinking, and with it the usual concomitant of that vice,--the love of low company. To be King of the Bohemians, to dazzle by his wild humour, and sometimes to exalt by his fanciful eloquence, the rude, gross natures that gathered round him,--this was a royalty that repaid him for all sacrifice of solid dignity; a foolscap crown that he would not have changed for an emperor’s diadem. Indeed, to appreciate rightly the talents of John Burley, it was necessary to hear him talk on such occasions. As a writer, after all, he was now only capable of unequal desultory efforts; but as a talker, in his own wild way, he was original and matchless. And the gift of talk is one of the most dangerous gifts a man can possess for his own sake,--the applause is so immediate, and gained with so little labour. Lower and lower and lower had sunk John Burley, not only in the opinion of all who knew his name, but in the habitual exercise of his talents. And this seemed wilfully--from choice. He would write for some unstamped journal of the populace, out of the pale of the law, for pence, when he could have got pounds from journals of high repute. He was very fond of scribbling off penny ballads, and then standing in the street to hear them sung. He actually once made himself the poet of an advertising tailor, and enjoyed it excessively. But that did not last long, for John Burley was a Pittite,--not a Tory, he used to say, but a Pittite. And if you had heard him talk of Pitt, you would never have known what to make of that great statesman. He treated him as the German commentators do Shakspeare, and invested him with all imaginary meanings and objects, that would have turned the grand practical man into a sibyl. Well, he was a Pittite; the tailor a fanatic for Thelwall and Cobbett. Mr. Burley wrote a poem wherein Britannia appeared to the tailor, complimented him highly on the art he exhibited in adorning the persons of her sons; and bestowing upon him a gigantic mantle, said that he, and he alone, might be enabled to fit it to the shoulders of living men. The rest of the poem was occupied in Mr. Snip’s unavailing attempts to adjust this mantle to the eminent politicians of the day, when, just as he had sunk down in despair, Britannia reappeared to him, and consoled him with the information that he had done all mortal man could do, and that she had only desired to convince pigmies that no human art could adjust to THEIR proportions the mantle of William Pitt. Sic itur ad astra,--she went back to the stars, mantle and all! Mr. Snip was exceedingly indignant at this allegorical effusion, and with wrathful shears cut the tie between himself and his poet.

Thus, then, the reader has, we trust, a pretty good idea of John Burley,--a specimen of his genus not very common in any age, and now happily almost extinct, since authors of all degrees share in the general improvement in order, economy, and sober decorum, which has obtained in the national manners. Mr. Prickett, though entering into less historical detail than we have done, conveyed to Leonard a tolerably accurate notion of the man, representing him as a person of great powers and learning, who had thoroughly thrown himself away.

Leonard did not, however, see how much Mr. Burley himself was to be blamed for his waste of life; he could not conceive a man of genius voluntarily seating himself at the lowest step in the social ladder. He rather supposed he had been thrust down there by Necessity.

And when Mr. Prickett, concluding, said, “Well, I should think Burley would cure you of the desire to be an author even more than Chatterton,” the young man answered gloomily, “Perhaps,” and turned to the book-shelves.

With Mr. Prickett’s consent, Leonard was released earlier than usual from his task, and a little before sunset he took his way to Highgate. He was fortunately directed to take the new road by the Regent’s Park, and so on through a very green and smiling country. The walk, the freshness of the air, the songs of the birds, and, above all, when he had got half-way, the solitude of the road, served to rouse him from his stern and sombre meditations. And when he came into the lane overhung with chestnut-trees, and suddenly caught sight of Helen’s watchful and then brightening face, as she stood by the wicket, and under the shadow of cool, murmurous boughs, the blood rushed gayly through his veins, and his heart beat loud and gratefully.

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Chapter XXIV

She drew him into the garden with such true childlike joy. Now behold them seated in the arbour,--a perfect bower of sweets and blossoms; the wilderness of roof-tops and spires stretching below, broad and far; London seen dim and silent, as in a dream.

She took his hat from his brows gently, and looked him in the face with tearful penetrating eyes.

She did not say, “You are changed.” She said, “Why, why did I leave you?” and then turned away.

“Never mind me, Helen. I am man, and rudely born; speak of yourself. This lady is kind to you, then?”

“Does she not let me see you? Oh, very kind,--and look here.”

Helen pointed to fruits and cakes set out on the table. “A feast, brother.”

And she began to press her hospitality with pretty winning ways, more playful than was usual to her, and talking very fast, and with forced, but silvery, laughter.

By degrees she stole him from his gloom and reserve; and though he could not reveal to her the cause of his bitterest sorrow, he owned that he had suffered much. He would not have owned that to another living being. And then, quickly turning from this brief confession, with assurances that the worst was over, he sought to amuse her by speaking of his new acquaintance with the perch-fisher. But when he spoke of this man with a kind of reluctant admiration, mixed with compassionate yet gloomy interest, and drew a grotesque, though subdued, sketch of the wild scene in which he had been spectator, Helen grew alarmed and grave.

“Oh, brother, do not go there again,--do not see more of this bad man.”

“Bad!--no! Hopeless and unhappy, he has stooped to stimulants and oblivion--but you cannot understand these things, my pretty preacher.”

“Yes, I do, Leonard. What is the difference between being good and bad? The good do not yield to temptations, and the bad do.”

The definition was so simple and so wise that Leonard was more struck with it than he might have been by the most elaborate sermon by Parson Dale.

“I have often murmured to myself since I lost you, ‘Helen was my good angel; ‘--say on. For my heart is dark to myself, and while you speak light seems to dawn on it.”

This praise so confused Helen that she was long before she could obey the command annexed to it. But, by little and little, words came to both more frankly. And then he told her the sad tale of Chatterton, and waited, anxious to hear her comments.

“Well,” he said, seeing that she remained silent, “how can I hope, when this mighty genius laboured and despaired? What did he want, save birth and fortune and friends and human justice?”

“Did he pray to God?” asked Helen, drying her tears. Again Leonard was startled. In reading the life of Chatterton he had not much noted the scepticism, assumed or real, of the ill-fated aspirer to earthly immortality. At Helen’s question, that scepticism struck him forcibly. “Why do you ask that, Helen?”

“Because, when we pray often, we grow so very, very patient,” answered the child. “Perhaps, had he been patient a few months more, all would have been won by him, as it will be by you, brother, for you pray, and you will be patient.”

Leonard bowed his head in deep thought, and this time the thought was not gloomy. Then out from that awful life there glowed another passage, which before he had not heeded duly, but regarded rather as one of the darkest mysteries in the fate of Chatterton.

At the very time the despairing poet had locked himself up in his garret, to dismiss his soul from its earthly ordeal, his genius had just found its way into the light of renown. Good and learned and powerful men were preparing to serve and save him. Another year--nay, perchance another month--and he might have stood acknowledged sublime in the foremost ranks of his age.

“Oh, Helen!” cried Leonard, raising his brows, from which the cloud had passed, “why, indeed, did you leave me?”

Helen started in her turn as he repeated this regret, and in her turn grew thoughtful. At length she asked him if he had written for the box which had belonged to her father and been left at the inn.

And Leonard, though a little chafed at what he thought a childish interruption to themes of graver interest, owned, with self-reproach, that he had forgotten to do so. Should he not write now to order the box to be sent to her at Miss Starke’s?

“No; let it be sent to you. Take care of it. I should like to know that something of mine is with you; and perhaps I may not stay here long.”

“Not stay here? That you must, my dear Helen,--at least as long as Miss Starke will keep you, and is kind. By and by” (added Leonard, with something of his former sanguine tone) “I may yet make my way, and we shall have our cottage to ourselves. But--oh, Helen!--I forgot--you wounded me; you left your money with me. I only found it in my drawers the other day. Fie! I have brought it back.”

“It was not mine,--it is yours. We were to share together,--you paid all; and how can I want it here, too?” But Leonard was obstinate; and as Helen mournfully received back all that of fortune her father had bequeathed to her, a tall female figure stood at the entrance of the arbour, and said, in a voice that scattered all sentiment to the winds, “Young man, it is time to go.”

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Chapter XXV

“Already?” said Helen, with faltering accents, as she crept to Miss Starke’s side while Leonard rose and bowed. “I am very grateful to you, madam,” said he, with the grace that comes from all refinement of idea, “for allowing me to see Miss Helen. Do not let me abuse your kindness.”

Miss Starke seemed struck with his look and manner, and made a stiff half courtesy.

A form more rigid than Miss Starke’s it was hard to conceive. She was like the Grim White Woman in the nursery ballads. Yet, apparently, there was a good-nature in allowing the stranger to enter her trim garden, and providing for him and her little charge those fruits and cakes which belied her aspect. “May I go with him to the gate?” whispered Helen, as Leonard had already passed up the path.

“You may, child; but do not loiter. And then come back, and lock up the cakes and cherries, or Patty will get at them.”

Helen ran after Leonard.

“Write to me, brother,--write to me; and do not, do not be friends with this man, who took you to that wicked, wicked place.”

“Oh, Helen, I go from you strong enough to brave worse dangers than that,” said Leonard, almost gayly.

They kissed each other at the little wicket gate, and parted.

Leonard walked home under the summer moonlight, and on entering his chamber looked first at his rose-tree. The leaves of yesterday’s flowers lay strewn around it; but the tree had put forth new buds.

“Nature ever restores,” said the young man. He paused a moment, and added, “Is it that Nature is very patient?” His sleep that night was not broken by the fearful dreams he had lately known. He rose refreshed, and went his way to his day’s work,--not stealing along the less crowded paths, but with a firm step, through the throng of men. Be bold, adventurer,--thou hast more to suffer! Wilt thou sink? I look into thy heart, and I cannot answer.

BOOK SEVENTH.

INITIAL CHAPTER.

MR. CAXTON UPON COURAGE AND PATIENCE.

“What is courage?” said my uncle Roland, rousing himself from a revery into which he had fallen, after the Sixth Book in this history had been read to our family circle.

“What is courage?” he repeated more earnestly. “Is it insensibility to fear? That may be the mere accident of constitution; and if so, there is no more merit in being courageous than in being this table.”

“I am very glad to hear you speak thus,” observed Mr. Caxton, “for I should not like to consider myself a coward; yet I am very sensible to fear in all dangers, bodily and moral.”

“La, Austin, how can you say so?” cried my mother, firing up; “was it not only last week that you faced the great bull that was rushing after Blanche and the children?”

Blanche at that recollection stole to my father’s chair, and, hanging over his shoulder, kissed his forehead.

MR. CAXTON (sublimely unmoved by these flatteries).--“I don’t deny that I faced the bull, but I assert that I was horribly frightened.”

ROLAND.--“The sense of honour which conquers fear is the true courage of chivalry: you could not run away when others were looking on,--no gentleman could.”

MR. CAXTON.--“Fiddledee! It was not on my gentility that I stood, Captain. I should have run fast enough, if it had done any good. I stood upon my understanding. As the bull could run faster than I could, the only chance of escape was to make the brute as frightened as myself.”

BLANCHE.--“Ah, you did not think of that; your only thought was to save me and the children.”

MR. CAXTON.--“Possibly, my dear, very possibly, I might have been afraid for you too; but I was very much afraid for myself. However, luckily I had the umbrella, and I sprang it up and spread it forth in the animal’s stupid eyes, hurling at him simultaneously the biggest lines I could think of in the First Chorus of the ‘Seven against Thebes.’ I began with ELEDEMNAS PEDIOPLOKTUPOS; and when I came to the grand howl of [A line in Greek], the beast stood appalled as at the roar of a lion. I shall never forget his amazed snort at the Greek. Then he kicked up his hind legs, and went bolt through the gap in the hedge. Thus, armed with AEschylus and the umbrella, I remained master of the field; but” (continued Mr. Caxton ingenuously) “I should not like to go through that half-minute again.”

“No man would,” said the captain, kindly. “I should be very sorry to face a bull myself, even with a bigger umbrella than yours, and even though I had AEschylus, and Homer to boot, at my fingers’ ends.”

MR. CAXTON.--“You would not have minded if it had been a Frenchman with a sword in his hand?”

CAPTAIN.--“Of course not. Rather liked it than otherwise,” he added grimly.

MR. CAXTON.--“Yet many a Spanish matador, who does n’t care a button for a bull, would take to his heels at the first lunge en carte from a Frenchman. Therefore, in fact, if courage be a matter of constitution, it is also a matter of custom. We face calmly the dangers we are habituated to, and recoil from those of which we have no familiar experience. I doubt if Marshal Turenue himself would have been quite at his ease on the tight-rope; and a rope-dancer, who seems disposed to scale the heavens with Titanic temerity, might possibly object to charge on a cannon.”

CAPTAIN ROLAND.--“Still, either this is not the courage I mean, or it is another kind of it. I mean by courage that which is the especial force and dignity of the human character, without which there is no reliance on principle, no constancy in virtue,--a something,” continued my uncle, gallantly, and with a half bow towards my mother, “which your sex shares with our own. When the lover, for instance, clasps the hand of his betrothed, and says, ‘Wilt thou be true to me, in spite of absence and time, in spite of hazard and fortune, though my foes malign me, though thy friends may dissuade thee, and our lot in life may be rough and rude?’ and when the betrothed answers, ‘I will be true,’ does not the lover trust to her courage as well as her love?”

“Admirably put, Roland,” said my father. “But a propos of what do you puzzle us with these queries on courage?”

CAPTAIN ROLAND (with a slight blush).--“I was led to the inquiry (though perhaps it may be frivolous to take so much thought of what, no doubt, costs Pisistratus so little) by the last chapters in my nephew’s story. I see this poor boy Leonard, alone with his fallen hopes (though very irrational they were) and his sense of shame. And I read his heart, I dare say, better than Pisistratus does, for I could feel like that boy if I had been in the same position; and conjecturing what he and thousands like him must go through, I asked myself, ‘What can save him and them?’ I answered, as a soldier would answer, ‘Courage.’ Very well. But pray; Austin, what is courage?”

MR. CAXTON (prudently backing out of a reply).--“Papae!’ Brother, since you have just complimented the ladies on that quality, you had better address your question to them.”

Blanche here leaned both hands on my father’s chair, and said, looking down at first bashfully, but afterwards warming with the subject, “Do you not think, sir, that little Helen has already suggested, if not what is courage, what at least is the real essence of all courage that endures and conquers, that ennobles and hallows and redeems? Is it not PATIENCE, Father? And that is why we women have a courage of our own. Patience does not affect to be superior to fear, but at least it never admits despair.”

PISISTRATUS.--“Kiss me, my Blanche, for you have come near to the truth which perplexed the soldier and puzzled the sage.”

MR. CAXTON (tartly).--“If you mean me by the sage, I was not puzzled at all. Heaven knows you do right to inculcate patience,--it is a virtue very much required--in your readers. Nevertheless,” added my father, softening with the enjoyment of his joke,--“nevertheless Blanche and Helen are quite right. Patience is the courage of the conqueror; it is the virtue, par excellence, of Man against Destiny,--of the One against the World, and of the Soul against Matter. Therefore this is the courage of the Gospel; and its importance in a social view--its importance to races and institutions--cannot be too earnestly inculcated. What is it that distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon from all other branches of the human family,--peoples deserts with his children and consigns to them the heritage of rising worlds? What but his faculty to brave, to suffer, to endure,--the patience that resists firmly and innovates slowly? Compare him with the Frenchman. The Frenchman has plenty of valour,--that there is no denying; but as for fortitude, he has not enough to cover the point of a pin. He is ready to rush out of the world if he is bitten by a flea.”

CAPTAIN ROLAND.--“There was a case in the papers the other day, Austin, of a Frenchman who actually did destroy himself because he was so teased by the little creatures you speak of. He left a paper on his table, saying that ‘life was not worth having at the price of such torments.’”

MR. CAXTON (solemnly).--“Sir, their whole political history, since the great meeting of the Tiers Etat, has been the history of men who would rather go to the devil than be bitten by a flea. It is the record of human impatience that seeks to force time, and expects to grow forests from the spawn of a mushroom. Wherefore, running through all extremes of constitutional experiment, when they are nearest to democracy they are next door to a despot; and all they have really done is to destroy whatever constitutes the foundation of every tolerable government. A constitutional monarchy cannot exist without aristocracy, nor a healthful republic endure with corruption of manners. The cry of equality is incompatible with civilization, which, of necessity, contrasts poverty with wealth; and, in short, whether it be an emperor or a mob I that is to rule, Force is the sole hope of order, and the government is but an army.”

[Published more than a year before the date of the French empire under Louis Napoleon.]

“Impress, O Pisistratus! impress the value of patience as regards man and men. You touch there on the kernel of the social system,--the secret that fortifies the individual and disciplines the million. I care not, for my part, if you are tedious so long as you are earnest. Be minute and detailed. Let the real Human Life, in its war with Circumstance, stand out. Never mind if one can read you but slowly,--better chance of being less quickly forgotten. Patience, patience! By the soul of Epictetus, your readers shall set you an example.”

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Chapter II

Leonard had written twice to Mrs. Fairfield, twice to Riccabocca, and once to Mr. Dale; and the poor proud boy could not bear to betray his humiliation. He wrote as with cheerful spirits,--as if perfectly satisfied with his prospects. He said that he was well employed, in the midst of books, and that he had found kind friends. Then he turned from himself to write about those whom he addressed, and the affairs and interests of the quiet world wherein they lived. He did not give his own address, nor that of Mr. Prickett. He dated his letters from a small coffee-house near the bookseller’s, to which he occasionally went for his simple meals. He had a motive in this. He did not desire to be found out. Mr. Dale replied for himself and for Mrs. Fairfield, to the epistles addressed to these two. Riccabocca wrote also.

Nothing could be more kind than the replies of both. They came to Leonard in a very dark period in his life, and they strengthened him in the noiseless battle with despair.

If there be a good in the world that we do without knowing it, without conjecturing the effect it may have upon a human soul; it is when we show kindness to the young in the first barren footpath up the mountain of life.

Leonard’s face resumed its serenity in his intercourse with his employer; but he did not recover his boyish ingenuous frankness. The under-currents flowed again pure from the turbid soil and the splintered fragments uptorn from the deep; but they were still too strong and too rapid to allow transparency to the surface. And now he stood in the sublime world of books, still and earnest as a seer who invokes the dead; and thus, face to face with knowledge, hourly he discovered how little he knew. Mr. Prickett lent him such works as he selected and asked to take home with him. He spent whole nights in reading, and no longer desultorily. He read no more poetry, no more Lives of Poets. He read what poets must read if they desire to be great--Sapere principium et fons,--strict reasonings on the human mind; the relations between motive and conduct, thought and action; the grave and solemn truths of the past world; antiquities, history, philosophy. He was taken out of himself; he was carried along the ocean of the universe. In that ocean, O seeker, study the law of the tides; and seeing Chance nowhere, Thought presiding over all, Fate, that dread phantom, shall vanish from creation, and Providence alone be visible in heaven and on earth!

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Chapter III

There was to be a considerable book-sale at a country house one day’s journey from London. Mr. Prickett meant to have attended it on his own behalf, and that of several gentlemen who had given him commissions for purchase; but on the morning fixed for his departure, he was seized with a severe return of his old foe the rheumatism. He requested Leonard to attend instead of himself. Leonard went, and was absent for the three days during which the sale lasted. He returned late in the evening, and went at once to Mr. Prickett’s house. The shop was closed; he knocked at the private entrance; a strange person opened the door to him, and in reply to his question if Mr. Prickett was at home, said, with a long and funereal face, “Young man, Mr. Prickett senior is gone to his long home, but Mr. Richard Prickett will see you.”

At this moment a very grave-looking man, with lank hair, looked forth from the side-door communicating between the shop and the passage, and then stepped forward. “Come in, sir; you are my late uncle’s assistant, Mr. Fairfield, I suppose?”

“Your late uncle! Heavens, sir, do I understand aright, can Mr. Prickett be dead since I left London?”

“Died, sir, suddenly, last night. It was an affection of the heart. The doctor thinks the rheumatism attacked that organ. He had small time to provide for his departure, and his account-books seem in sad disorder: I am his nephew and executor.”

Leonard had now--followed the nephew into the shop. There still burned the gas-lamp. The place seemed more dingy and cavernous than before. Death always makes its presence felt in the house it visits.

Leonard was greatly affected,--and yet more, perhaps, by the utter want of feeling which the nephew exhibited. In fact the deceased had not been on friendly terms with this person, his nearest relative and heir-at-law, who was also a bookseller.

“You were engaged but by the week, I find, young man, on reference to my late uncle’s papers. He gave you L1 a week,--a monstrous sum! I shall not require your services any further. I shall move these books to my own house. You will be good enough to send me a list of those you bought at the sale, and your account of travelling expenses, etc. What may be due to you shall be sent to your address. Good-evening.”

Leonard went home, shocked and saddened at the sudden death of his kind employer. He did not think much of himself that night; but when he rose the next day, he suddenly felt that the world of London lay before him, without a friend, without a calling, without an occupation for bread.

This time it was no fancied sorrow, no poetic dream disappointed. Before him, gaunt and palpable, stood Famine. Escape!--yes. Back to the village: his mother’s cottage; the exile’s garden; the radishes and the fount. Why could he not escape? Ask why civilization cannot escape its ills, and fly back to the wild and the wigwam.

Leonard could not have returned to the cottage, even if the Famine that faced had already seized him with her skeleton hand. London releases not so readily her fated step-sons.

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Chapter IV

One day three persons were standing before an old bookstall in a passage leading from Oxford Street into Tottenham Court Road. Two were gentlemen; the third, of the class and appearance of those who more habitually halt at old bookstalls.

“Look,” said one of the gentlemen to the other, “I have discovered here what I have searched for in vain the last ten years,--the Horace of 1580, the Horace of the Forty Commentators, a perfect treasury of learning, and marked only fourteen shillings!”

“Hush, Norreys,” said the other, “and observe what is yet more worth your study;” and he pointed to the third bystander, whose face, sharp and attenuated, was bent with an absorbed, and, as it were, with a hungering attention over an old worm-eaten volume.

“What is the book, my lord?” whispered Mr. Norreys. His companion smiled, and replied by another question, “What is the man who reads the book?”

Mr. Norreys moved a few paces, and looked over the student’s shoulder. “Preston’s translation of Boethius’s ‘The Consolations of Philosophy,’” he said, coming back to his friend.

“He looks as if he wanted all the consolations Philosophy can give him, poor boy.”

At this moment a fourth passenger paused at the bookstall, and, recognizing the pale student, placed his hand on his shoulder, and said, “Aha, young sir, we meet again. So poor Prickett is dead. But you are still haunted by associations. Books, books,--magnets to which all iron minds move insensibly. What is this? Boethius! Ah, a book written in prison, but a little time before the advent of the only philosopher who solves to the simplest understanding every mystery of life--”

“And that philosopher?”

“Is death!” said Mr. Burley. “How can you be dull enough to ask? Poor Boethius, rich, nobly born, a consul, his sons consuls, the world one smile to the Last Philosopher of Rome. Then suddenly, against this type of the old world’s departing WISDOM stands frowning the new world’s grim genius, FORCE,--Theodoric the Ostrogoth condemning Boethius the schoolman; and Boethius in his Pavian dungeon holding a dialogue with the shade of Athenian Philosophy. It is the finest picture upon which lingers the glimmering of the Western golden day, before night rushes over time.”

“And,” said Mr. Norreys, abruptly, “Boethius comes back to us with the faint gleam of returning light, translated by Alfred the Great; and, again, as the sun of knowledge bursts forth in all its splendour by Queen Elizabeth. Boethius influences us as we stand in this passage; and that is the best of all the Consolations of Philosophy,--eh, Mr. Burley?”

Mr. Burley turned and bowed.

The two men looked at each other; you could not see a greater contrast,--Mr. Burley, his gay green dress already shabby and soiled, with a rent in the skirts and his face speaking of habitual night-cups; Mr. Norreys, neat and somewhat precise in dress, with firm, lean figure, and quiet, collected, vigorous energy in his eye and aspect.

“If,” replied Mr. Burley, “a poor devil like me may argue with a gentleman who may command his own price with the booksellers, I should say it is no consolation at all, Mr. Norreys. And I should like to see any man of sense accept the condition of Boethius in his prison, with some strangler or headsman waiting behind the door, upon the promised proviso that he should be translated, centuries afterwards, by kings and queens, and help indirectly to influence the minds of Northern barbarians, babbling about him in an alley, jostled by passers-by who never heard the name of Boethius, and who don’t care a fig for philosophy. Your servant, sir, young man, come and talk.”

Burley hooked his arm within Leonard’s, and led the boy passively away.

“That is a clever man,” said Harley L’Estrange. “But I am sorry to see yon young student, with his bright earnest eyes, and his lip that has the quiver of passion and enthusiasm, leaning on the arm of a guide who seems disenchanted of all that gives purpose to learning, and links philosophy with use to the world. Who and what is this clever man whom you call Burley?”

“A man who might have been famous, if he had condescended to be respectable! The boy listening to us both so attentively interested me too,--I should like to have the making of him. But I must buy this Horace.”

The shopman, lurking within his hole like a spider for flies, was now called out. And when Mr. Norreys had bought the Horace, and given an address where to send it, Harley asked the shopman if he knew the young man who had been reading Boethius.

“Only by sight. He has come here every day the last week, and spends hours at the stall. When once he fastens on a book, he reads it through.”

“And never buys?” said Mr. Norreys.

“Sir,” said the shopman, with a good-natured smile, “they who buy seldom read. The poor boy pays me twopence a day to read as long as he pleases. I would not take it, but he is proud.”

“I have known men amass great learning in that way,” said Mr. Norreys. “Yes, I should like to have that boy in my hands. And now, my lord, I am at your service, and we will go to the studio of your artist.”

The two gentlemen walked on towards one of the streets out of Fitzroy Square.

In a few minutes more Harley L’Estrange was in his element, seated carelessly on a deal table smoking his cigar, and discussing art with the gusto of a man who honestly loved, and the taste of a man who thoroughly understood it. The young artist, in his dressing robe, adding slow touch upon touch, paused often to listen the better. And Henry Norrey s, enjoying the brief respite from a life of great labour, was gladly reminded of idle hours under rosy skies; for these three men had formed their friendship in Italy, where the bands of friendship are woven by the hands of the Graces.

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Chapter V

Leonard and Mr. Burley walked on into the suburbs round the north road from London, and Mr. Burley offered to find literary employment for Leonard,--an offer eagerly accepted.

Then they went into a public-house by the wayside. Burley demanded a private room, called for pen, ink, and paper; and placing these implements before Leonard, said, “Write what you please, in prose, five sheets of letter-paper, twenty-two lines to a page,--neither more nor less.”

“I cannot write so.”

“Tut, ‘t is for bread.”

The boy’s face crimsoned.

“I must forget that,” said he.

“There is an arbour in the garden, under a weeping-ash,” returned Burley. “Go there, and fancy yourself in Arcadia.”

Leonard was too pleased to obey. He found out the little arbour at one end of a deserted bowling-green. All was still,--the hedgerow shut out the sight of the inn. The sun lay warm on the grass, and glinted pleasantly through the leaves of the ash. And Leonard there wrote the first essay from his hand as Author by profession. What was it that he wrote? His dreamy impressions of London, an anathema on its streets and its hearts of stone, murmurs against poverty, dark elegies on fate?

Oh, no! little knowest thou true genius, if thou askest such questions, or thinkest that there under the weeping-ash the task-work for bread was remembered; or that the sunbeam glinted but over the practical world, which, vulgar and sordid, lay around. Leonard wrote a fairy tale,--one of the loveliest you can conceive, with a delicate touch of playful humour, in a style all flowered over with happy fancies. He smiled as he wrote the last word,--he was happy. In rather more than an hour Mr. Burley came to him, and found him with that smile on his lips.

Mr. Burley had a glass of brandy-and-water in his hand; it was his third. He too smiled, he too looked happy. He read the paper aloud, and well. He was very complimentary. “You will do!” said he, clapping Leonard on the back. “Perhaps some day you will catch my one-eyed perch.” Then he folded up the manuscript, scribbled off a note, put the whole in one envelope, and they returned to London.

Mr. Burley disappeared within a dingy office near Fleet Street, on which was inscribed, “Office of the ‘Beehive,’” and soon came forth with a golden sovereign in his hand, Leonard’s first-fruits. Leonard thought Peru lay before him. He accompanied Mr. Burley to that gentleman’s lodging in Maida Hill. The walk had been very long; Leonard was not fatigued. He listened with a livelier attention than before to Burley’s talk. And when they reached the apartments of the latter, and Mr. Burley sent to the cookshop, and their joint supper was taken out of the golden sovereign, Leonard felt proud, and for the first time for weeks he laughed the heart’s laugh. The two writers grew more and more intimate and cordial. And there was a vast deal in Burley by which any young man might be made the wiser. There was no apparent evidence of poverty in the apartments,--clean, new, well-furnished; but all things in the most horrible litter,--all speaking of the huge literary sloven.

For several days Leonard almost lived in those rooms. He wrote continuously, save when Burley’s conversation fascinated him into idleness. Nay, it was not idleness,--his knowledge grew larger as he listened; but the cynicism of the talker began slowly to work its way. That cynicism in which there was no faith, no hope, no vivifying breath from Glory, from Religion,--the cynicism of the Epicurean, more degraded in his sty than ever was Diogenes in his tub; and yet presented with such ease and such eloquence, with such art and such mirth, so adorned with illustration and anecdote, so unconscious of debasement!

Strange and dread philosophy, that made it a maxim to squander the gifts of mind on the mere care for matter, and fit the soul to live but as from day to day, with its scornful cry, “A fig for immortality and laurels!” An author for bread! Oh, miserable calling! was there something grand and holy, after all, even in Chatterton’s despair?

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Chapter VI

The villanous “Beehive”! Bread was worked out of it, certainly; but fame, but hope for the future,--certainly not. Milton’s Paradise Lost would have perished without a sound had it appeared in the “Beehive.”

Fine things were there in a fragmentary crude state, composed by Burley himself. At the end of a week they were dead and forgotten,--never read by one man of education and taste; taken simultaneously and indifferently with shallow politics and wretched essays, yet selling, perhaps, twenty or thirty thousand copies,--an immense sale; and nothing got out of them but bread and brandy!

“What more would you have?” cried John Burley. “Did not stern old Sam Johnson say he could never write but from want?”

“He might say it,” answered Leonard; “but he never meant posterity to believe him. And he would have died of want, I suspect, rather than have written ‘Rasselas’ for the ‘Beehive’! Want is a grand thing,” continued the boy, thoughtfully,--“a parent of grand things. Necessity is strong, and should give us its own strength; but Want should shatter asunder, with its very writhings, the walls of our prison-house, and not sit contented with the allowance the jail gives us in exchange for our work.”

“There is no prison-house to a man who calls upon Bacchus; stay, I will translate to you Schiller’s Dithyramb. ‘Then see I Bacchus; then up come Cupid and Phoebus, and all the Celestials are filling my dwelling.’”

Breaking into impromptu careless rhymes, Burley threw off a rude but spirited translation of that divine lyric. “O materialist!” cried the boy, with his bright eyes suffused. “Schiller calls on the gods to take him to their heaven with them; and you would debase the gods to a ginpalace.”

“Ho, ho!” cried Burley, with his giant laugh. “Drink, and you will understand the Dithyramb.”

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Chapter VII

Suddenly one morning, as Leonard sat with Burley, a fashionable cabriolet, with a very handsome horse, stopped at the door. A loud knock, a quick step on the stairs, and Randal Leslie entered. Leonard recognized him, and started. Randal glanced at him in surprise, and then, with a tact that showed he had already learned to profit by London life, after shaking hands with Burley, approached, and said, with some successful attempt at ease, “Unless I am not mistaken, sir, we have met before. If you remember me, I hope all boyish quarrels are forgotten?”

Leonard bowed, and his heart was still good enough to be softened.

“Where could you two ever have met?” asked Burley. “In a village green, and in single combat,” answered Randal, smiling; and he told the story of the Battle of the Stocks, with a well-bred jest on himself. Burley laughed at the story. “But,” said he, when this laugh was over, “my young friend had better have remained guardian of the village stocks than come to London in search of such fortune as lies at the bottom of an inkhorn.”

“Ah,” said Randal, with the secret contempt which men elaborately cultivated are apt to feel for those who seek to educate themselves,--“ah, you make literature your calling, sir? At what school did you conceive a taste for letters? Not very common at our great public schools.”

“I am at school now for the first time,” answered Leonard, dryly.

“Experience is the best schoolmistress,” said Burley; “and that was the maxim of Goethe, who had book-learning enough, in all conscience.”

Randal slightly shrugged his shoulders, and without wasting another thought on Leonard, peasant-born and self-taught, took his seat, and began to talk to Burley upon a political question, which made then the war-cry between the two great parliamentary parties. It was a subject in which Burley showed much general knowledge; and Randal, seeming to differ from him, drew forth alike his information and his argumentative powers. The conversation lasted more than an hour.

“I can’t quite agree with you,” said Randal, taking his leave; “but you must allow me to call again,--will the same hour tomorrow suit you?”

“Yes,” said Burley.

Away went the young man in his cabriolet. Leonard watched him from the window.

For five days, consecutively, did Randal call and discuss the question in all its bearings; and Burley, after the second day, got interested in the matter, looked up his authorities, refreshed his memory, and even spent an hour or two in the Library of the British Museum.

By the fifth day, Burley had really exhausted all that could well be said on his side of the question.

Leonard, during these colloquies, had sat apart seemingly absorbed in reading, and secretly stung by Randal’s disregard of his presence. For indeed that young man, in his superb self-esteem, and in the absorption of his ambitious projects, scarce felt even curiosity as to Leonard’s rise above his earlier station, and looked on him as a mere journeyman of Burley’s.

But the self-taught are keen and quick observers; and Leonard had remarked that Randal seemed more as one playing a part for some private purpose, than arguing in earnest; and that, when he rose, and said, “Mr. Burley, you have convinced me,” it was not with the modesty of a sincere reasoner, but the triumph of one who has gained his end. But so struck, meanwhile, was our unheeded and silent listener with Burley’s power of generalization and the wide surface over which his information extended, that when Randal left the room the boy looked at the slovenly, purposeless man, and said aloud, “True; knowledge is not power.”

“Certainly not,” said Burley, dryly,--“the weakest thing in the world.”

“Knowledge is power,” muttered Randal Leslie, as, with a smile on his lip, he drove from the door.

Not many days after this last interview there appeared a short pamphlet; anonymous, but one which made a great impression on the town. It was on the subject discussed between Randal and Burley. It was quoted at great length in the newspapers. And Burley started to his feet one morning, and exclaimed, “My own thoughts! my very words! Who the devil is this pamphleteer?”

Leonard took the newspaper from Burley’s hand. The most flattering encomiums preceded the extracts, and the extracts were as stereotypes of Burley’s talk.

“Can you doubt the author?” cried Leonard, in deep disgust and ingenuous scorn. “The young man who came to steal your brains, and turn your knowledge--”

“Into power,” interrupted Burley, with a laugh,--but it was a laugh of pain. “Well, this was very mean; I shall tell him so when he comes.”

“He will come no more,” said Leonard. Nor did Randal come again. But he sent Mr. Burley a copy of the pamphlet with a polite note, saying, with candid but careless acknowledgment, that he “had profited much by Mr. Burley’s hints and remarks.”

And now it was in all the papers that the pamphlet which had made so great a noise was by a very young man, Mr. Audley Egerton’s relation. And high hopes were expressed of the future career of Mr. Randal Leslie.

Burley still attempted to laugh, and still his pain was visible. Leonard most cordially despised and hated Randal Leslie, and his heart moved to Burley with noble but perilous compassion. In his desire to soothe and comfort the man whom he deemed cheated out of fame, he forgot the caution he had hitherto imposed on himself, and yielded more and more to the charm of that wasted intellect. He accompanied Burley now to the haunts to which his friend went to spend his evenings; and more and more--though gradually, and with many a recoil and self-rebuke--there crept over him the cynic’s contempt for glory, and miserable philosophy of debased content.

Randal had risen into grave repute upon the strength of Burley’s knowledge. But, had Burley written the pamphlet, would the same repute have attended him? Certainly not. Randal Leslie brought to that knowledge qualities all his own,--a style simple, strong, and logical; a certain tone of good society, and allusions to men and to parties that showed his connection with a Cabinet minister, and proved that he had profited no less by Egerton’s talk than Burley’s.

Had Burley written the pamphlet, it would have showed more genius, it would have had humour and wit, but have been so full of whims and quips, sins against taste, and defects in earnestness, that it would have failed to create any serious sensation. Here, then, there was something else be sides knowledge, by which knowledge became power. Knowledge must not smell of the brandy-bottle.

Randal Leslie might be mean in his plagiarism, but he turned the useless into use. And so far he was original. But one’s admiration, after all, rests where Leonard’s rested,--with the poor, riotous, lawless, big, fallen man. Burley took himself off to the Brent, and fished again for the one-eyed perch. Leonard accompanied him. His feelings were indeed different from what they had been when he had reclined under the old tree, and talked with Helen of the future. But it was almost pathetic to see how Burley’s nature seemed to alter, as he strayed along the banks of the rivulet, and discoursed of his own boyhood. The man then seemed restored to something of the innocence of the child. He cared, in truth, little for the perch, which continued intractable, but he enjoyed the air and the sky, the rustling grass and the murmuring waters. These excursions to the haunts of youth seemed to rebaptize him, and then his eloquence took a pastoral character, and Izaak Walton himself would have loved to hear him. But as he got back into the smoke of the metropolis, and the gas-lamps made him forget the ruddy sunset and the soft evening star, the gross habits reassumed their sway; and on he went with his swaggering, reckless step to the orgies in which his abused intellect flamed forth, and then sank into the socket quenched and rayless.

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Chapter VIII

Helen was seized with profound and anxious sadness. Leonard had been three or four times to see her, and each time she saw a change in him that excited all her fears. He seemed, it is true, more shrewd, more worldly-wise, more fitted, it might be, for coarse daily life; but, on the other hand, the freshness and glory of his youth were waning slowly. His aspirings drooped earthward. He had not mastered the Practical, and moulded its uses with the strong hand of the Spiritual Architect, of the Ideal Builder; the Practical was overpowering himself. She grew pale when he talked of Burley, and shuddered, poor little Helen? when she found he was daily, and almost nightly, in a companionship which, with her native honest prudence, she saw so unsuited to strengthen him in his struggles, and aid him against temptation. She almost groaned when, pressing him as to his pecuniary means, she found his old terror of debt seemed fading away, and the solid healthful principles he had taken from his village were loosening fast. Under all, it is true, there was what a wiser and older person than Helen would have hailed as the redeeming promise. But that something was grief,--a sublime grief in his own sense of falling, in his own impotence against the Fate he had provoked and coveted. The Sublimity of that grief Helen could not detect; she saw only that it was grief, and she grieved with it, letting it excuse every fault,--making her more anxious to comfort, in order that she might save. Even from the first, when Leonard had exclaimed, “Ah, Helen, why did you ever leave me?” she had revolved the idea of return to him; and when in the boy’s last visit he told her that Burley, persecuted by duns, was about to fly from his present lodgings, and take his abode with Leonard, in the room she had left vacant, all doubt was over. She resolved to sacrifice the safety and shelter of the home assured her. She resolved to come back and share Leonard’s penury and struggles, and save the old room, wherein she had prayed for him, from the tempter’s dangerous presence. Should she burden him? No; she had assisted her father by many little female arts in needle and fancy work. She had improved herself in these during her sojourn with Miss Starke. She could bring her share to the common stock. Possessed with this idea, she determined to realize it before the day on which Leonard had told her Burley was to move his quarters. Accordingly she rose very early one morning; she wrote a pretty and grateful note to Miss Starke, who was fast asleep, left it on the table, and before any one was astir, stole from the house, her little bundle on her arm.

She lingered an instant at the garden-gate, with a remorseful sentiment,--a feeling that she had ill-repaid the cold and prim protection that Miss Starke had shown her. But sisterly love carried all before it. She closed the gate with a sigh, and went on.

She arrived at the lodging-house before Leonard was up, took possession of her old chamber, and presenting herself to Leonard, as he was about to go forth, said (story-teller that she was), “I am sent away, brother, and I have come to you to take care of me. Do not let us part again. But you must be very cheerful and very happy, or I shall think that I am sadly in your way.”

Leonard at first did look cheerful, and even happy; but then he thought of Burley, and then of his own means of supporting Helen, and was embarrassed, and began questioning her as to the possibility of reconciliation with Miss Starke. And Helen said gravely, “Impossible,--do not ask it, and do not go near her.”

Then Leonard thought she had been humbled and insulted, and remembered that she was a gentleman’s child, and felt for her wounded pride, he was so proud himself. Yet still he was embarrassed.

“Shall I keep the purse again, Leonard?” said Helen, coaxingly.

“Alas!” replied Leonard, “the purse is empty.”

“That is very naughty in the purse,” said Helen, “since you put so much into it.”

“Did not you say that you made, at least, a guinea a week?”

“Yes; but Burley takes the money; and then, poor fellow! as I owe all to him, I have not the heart to prevent him spending it as he likes.”

“Please, I wish you could settle the month’s rent,” said the landlady, suddenly showing herself. She said it civilly, but with firmness.

Leonard coloured. “It shall be paid to-day.”

Then he pressed his hat on his head, and putting Helen gently aside, went forth.

“Speak to me in future, kind Mrs. Smedley,” said Helen, with the air of a housewife. “He is always in study, and must not be disturbed.”

The landlady--a good woman, though she liked her rent--smiled benignly. She was fond of Helen, whom she had known of old.

“I am so glad you are come back; and perhaps now the young man will not keep such late hours. I meant to give him warning, but--”

“But he will be a great man one of these days, and you must bear with him now.” And Helen kissed Mrs. Smedley, and sent her away half inclined to cry.

Then Helen busied herself in the rooms. She found her father’s box, which had been duly forwarded. She re-examined its contents, and wept as she touched each humble and pious relic. But her father’s memory itself thus seemed to give this home a sanction which the former had not; and she rose quietly and began mechanically to put things in order, sighing as she saw all so neglected, till she came to the rosetree, and that alone showed heed and care. “Dear Leonard!” she murmured, and the smile resettled on her lips.

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Chapter IX

Nothing, perhaps, could have severed Leonard from Burley but Helen’s return to his care. It was impossible for him, even had there been another room in the house vacant (which there was not), to install this noisy, riotous son of the Muse by Bacchus, talking at random and smelling of spirits, in the same dwelling with an innocent, delicate, timid, female child. And Leonard could not leave her alone all the twenty-four hours. She restored a home to him and imposed its duties. He therefore told Mr. Burley that in future he should write and study in his own room, and hinted, with many a blush, and as delicately as he could, that it seemed to him that whatever he obtained from his pen ought to be halved with Burley, to whose interest he owed the employment, and from whose books or whose knowledge he took what helped to maintain it; but that the other half, if his, he could no longer afford to spend upon feasts or libations. He had another life to provide for.

Burley pooh-poohed the notion of taking half his coadjutor’s earning with much grandeur, but spoke very fretfully of Leonard’s sober appropriation of the other half; and though a good-natured, warm-hearted man, felt extremely indignant at the sudden interposition of poor Helen. However, Leonard was firm; and then Burley grew sullen, and so they parted. But the rent was still to be paid. How? Leonard for the first time thought of the pawnbroker. He had clothes to spare, and Riccabocca’s watch. No; that last he shrank from applying to such base uses.

He went home at noon, and met Helen at the street-door. She too had been out, and her soft cheek was rosy red with unwonted exercise and the sense of joy. She had still preserved the few gold pieces which Leonard had taken back to her on his first visit to Miss Starke’s. She had now gone out and bought wool and implements for work; and meanwhile she had paid the rent.

Leonard did not object to the work, but he blushed deeply when he knew about the rent, and was very angry. He paid back to her that night what she had advanced; and Helen wept silently at his pride, and wept more when she saw the next day a woful hiatus in his wardrobe.

But Leonard now worked at home, and worked resolutely; and Helen sat by his side, working too; so that next day, and the next, slipped peacefully away, and in the evening of the second he asked her to walk out in the fields. She sprang up joyously at the invitation, when bang went the door, and in reeled John Burley,--drunk,--and so drunk!

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Chapter X

And with Burley there reeled in another man,--a friend of his, a man who had been a wealthy trader and once well to do, but who, unluckily, had literary tastes, and was fond of hearing Burley talk. So, since he had known the wit, his business had fallen from him, and he had passed through the Bankrupt Court. A very shabby-looking dog he was, indeed, and his nose was redder than Burley’s.

John made a drunken dash at poor Helen. “So you are the Pentheus in petticoats who defies Bacchus,” cried he; and therewith he roared out a verse from Euripides. Helen ran away, and Leonard interposed.

“For shame, Burley!”

“He’s drunk,” said Mr. Douce, the bankrupt trader, “very drunk; don’t mind him. I say, sir, I hope we don’t intrude. Sit still, Burley, sit still, and talk, do,--that’s a good man. You should hear him--ta--ta--talk, sir.” Leonard meanwhile had got Helen out of the room into her own, and begged her not to be alarmed, and keep the door locked. He then returned to Burley, who had seated himself on the bed, trying wondrous hard to keep himself upright; while Mr. Douce was striving to light a short pipe that he carried in his button-hole--without having filled it--and, naturally failing in that attempt, was now beginning to weep.

Leonard was deeply shocked and revolted for Helen’s sake; but it was hopeless to make Burley listen to reason. And how could the boy turn out of his room the man to whom he was under obligations?

Meanwhile there smote upon Helen’s shrinking ears loud jarring talk and maudlin laughter, and cracked attempts at jovial songs. Then she heard Mrs. Smedley in Leonard’s room, remonstrating; and Burley’s laugh was louder than before, and Mrs. Smedley, who was a meek woman, evidently got frightened, and was heard in precipitate retreat. Long and loud talk recommenced, Burley’s great voice predominant, Mr. Douce chiming in with hiccoughy broken treble. Hour after hour this lasted, for want of the drink that would have brought it to a premature close. And Burley gradually began to talk himself somewhat sober. Then Mr. Douce was heard descending the stairs, and silence followed. At dawn, Leonard knocked at Helen’s door. She opened it at once, for she had not gone to bed.

“Helen,” said he, very sadly, “you cannot continue here. I must find out some proper home for you. This man has served me when all London was friendless, and he tells me that he has nowhere else to go,--that the bailiffs are after him. He has now fallen asleep. I will go and find you some lodging close at hand, for I cannot expel him who has protected me; and yet you cannot be under the same roof with him. My own good angel, I must lose you.”

He did not wait for her answer, but hurried down stairs. The morning looked through the shutterless panes in Leonard’s garret, and the birds began to chirp from the elmtree, when Burley rose and shook himself, and stared round. He could not quite make out where he was. He got hold of the water-jug, which he emptied at three draughts, and felt greatly refreshed. He then began to reconnoitre the chamber,--looked at Leonard’s manuscripts, peeped into the drawers, wondered where the devil Leonard himself had gone to, and finally amused himself by throwing down the fireirons, ringing the bell, and making all the noise he could, in the hopes of attracting the attention of somebody or other, and procuring himself his morning dram.

In the midst of this charivari the door opened softly, but as if with a resolute hand, and the small quiet form of Helen stood before the threshold. Burley turned round, and the two looked at each other for some moments with silent scrutiny.

BURLEY (composing his features into their most friendly expression).--“Come hither, my dear. So you are the little girl whom I saw with Leonard on the banks of the Brent, and you have come back to live with him,--and I have come to live with him too. You shall be our little housekeeper, and I will tell you the story of Prince Pettyman, and a great many others not to be found in ‘Mother Goose.’ Meanwhile, my dear little girl, here’s sixpence,--just run out and change this for its worth in rum.”

HELEN (coming slowly up to Mr. Burley, and still gazing earnestly into his face).--“Ah, sir, Leonard says you have a kind heart, and that you have served him; he cannot ask you to leave the house; and so I, who have never served him, am to go hence and live alone.”

BURLEY (moved).--“You go, my little lady; and why? Can we not all live together?”

HELEN.--“No, sir. I left everything to come to Leonard, for we had met first at my father’s grave; but you rob me of him, and I have no other friend on earth.”

BURLEY (discomposed).--“Explain yourself. Why must you leave him because I come?”

Helen looked at Mr. Burley again, long and wistfully, but made no answer.

BURLEY (with a gulp).--“Is it because he thinks I am not fit company for you?”

Helen bowed her head.

Burley winced, and after a moment’s pause said, “He is right.”

HELEN (obeying the impulse of her heart, springs forward and takes Burley’s hand).--“Ah, sir,” she cried, “before he knew you he was so different; then he was cheerful, then, even when his first disappointment came, I grieved and wept but I felt he would conquer still, for his heart was so good and pure. Oh, sir, don’t think I reproach you; but what is to become of him if--if--No, it is not for myself I speak. I know that if I was here, that if he had me to care for, he would come home early, and work patiently, and--and--that I might save him. But now when I am gone, and you live with him,--you to whom he is grateful, you whom he would follow against his own conscience (you must see that, sir), what is to become of him?”

Helen’s voice died in sobs.

Burley took three or four long strides through the room; he was greatly agitated. “I am a demon,” he murmured. “I never saw it before; but it is true, I should be this boy’s ruin.” Tears stood in his eyes, he paused abruptly, made a clutch at his hat, and turned to the door.

Helen stopped the way, and taking him gently by the arm, said, “Oh, sir, forgive me,--I have pained you;” and looked up at him with a compassionate expression, that indeed made the child’s sweet face as that of an angel.

Burley bent down as if to kiss her, and then drew back, perhaps with a sentiment that his lips were not worthy to touch that innocent brow.

“If I had had a sister,--a child like you, little one,” he muttered, “perhaps I too might have been saved in time. Now--”

“Ah, now you may stay, sir; I don’t fear you any more.”

“No, no; you would fear me again ere night-time, and I might not be always in the right mood to listen to a voice like yours, child. Your Leonard has a noble heart and rare gifts. He should rise yet, and he shall. I will not drag him into the mire. Good-by,--you will see me no more.” He broke from Helen, cleared the stairs with a bound, and was out of the house.

When Leonard returned he was surprised to hear his unwelcome guest was gone,--but Helen did not venture to tell him of her interposition. She knew instinctively how such officiousness would mortify and offend the pride of man; but she never again spoke harshly of poor Burley. Leonard supposed that he should either see or hear of the humourist in the course of the day. Finding he did not, he went in search of him at his old haunts; but no trace. He inquired at the “Beehive” if they knew there of his new address, but no tidings of Burley could be obtained.

As he came home disappointed and anxious, for he felt uneasy as to the disappearance of his wild friend, Mrs. Smedley met him at the door.

“Please, sir, suit yourself with another lodging,” said she. “I can have no such singings and shoutings going on at night in my house. And that poor little girl, too! you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Leonard frowned, and passed by.

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Chapter XI

Meanwhile, on leaving Helen, Burley strode on; and, as if by some better instinct, for he was unconscious of his own steps, he took his way towards the still green haunts of his youth. When he paused at length, he was already before the door of a rural cottage, standing alone in the midst of fields, with a little farmyard at the back; and far through the trees in front was caught a glimpse of the winding Brent.

With this cottage Burley was familiar; it was inhabited by a good old couple who had known him from a boy. There he habitually left his rods and fishing-tackle; there, for intervals in his turbid, riotous life, he had sojourned for two or three days together, fancying the first day that the country was a heaven, and convinced before the third that it was a purgatory.

An old woman, of neat and tidy exterior, came forth to greet him.

“Ah, Master John,” said she, clasping his nerveless hand, “well, the fields be pleasant now; I hope you are come to stay a bit? Do; it will freshen you; you lose all the fine colour you had once, in Lunnon town.”

“I will stay with you, my kind friend,” said Burley, with unusual meekness; “I can have the old room, then?”

“Oh, yes, come and look at it. I never let it now to any one but you,--never have let it since the dear beautiful lady with the angel’s face went away. Poor thing, what could have become of her?”

Thus speaking, while Burley listened not, the old woman drew him within the cottage, and led him up the stairs into a room that might have well become a better house, for it was furnished with taste, and even elegance. A small cabinet pianoforte stood opposite the fireplace, and the window looked upon pleasant meads and tangled hedgerows, and the narrow windings of the blue rivulet. Burley sank down exhausted, and gazed wistfully from the casement.

“You have not breakfasted?” said the hostess, anxiously.

“No.”

“Well, the eggs are fresh laid, and you would like a rasher of bacon, Master John? And if you will have brandy in your tea, I have some that you left long ago in your own bottle.”

Burley shook his head. “No brandy, Mrs. Goodyer; only fresh milk. I will see whether I can yet coax Nature.”

Mrs. Goodyer did not know what was meant by coaxing Nature, but she said, “Pray do, Master John,” and vanished. That day Burley went out with his rod, and he fished hard for the one-eyed perch; but in vain. Then he roved along the stream with his hands in his pockets, whistling. He returned to the cottage at sunset, partook of the fare provided for him, abstained from the brandy, and felt dreadfully low.

He called for pen, ink, and paper, and sought to write, but could not achieve two lines. He summoned Mrs. Goodyer. “Tell your husband to come and sit and talk.”

Up came old Jacob Goodyer, and the great wit bade him tell him all the news of the village. Jacob obeyed willingly, and Burley at last fell asleep. The next day it was much the same, only at dinner he had up the brandy-bottle, and finished it; and he did not have up Jacob, but he contrived to write.

The third day it rained incessantly. “Have you no books, Mrs. Goodyer?” asked poor John Burley.

“Oh, yes, some that the dear lady left behind her; and perhaps you would like to look at some papers in her own writing?”

“No, not the papers,--all women scribble, and all scribble the same things. Get me the books.”

The books were brought up,--poetry and essays--John knew them by heart. He looked out on the rain, and at evening the rain had ceased. He rushed to his hat and fled.

“Nature, Nature!” he exclaimed, when he was out in the air and hurrying by the dripping hedgerows, “you are not to be coaxed by me! I have jilted you shamefully, I own it; you are a female, and unforgiving. I don’t complain. You may be very pretty, but you are the stupidest and most tire some companion that ever I met with. Thank Heaven, I am not married to you!”

Thus John Burley made his way into town, and paused at the first public-house. Out of that house he came with a jovial air, and on he strode towards the heart of London. Now he is in Leicester Square, and he gazes on the foreigners who stalk that region, and hums a tune; and now from yonder alley two forms emerge, and dog his careless footsteps; now through the maze of passages towards St. Martin’s he threads his path, and, anticipating an orgy as he nears his favourite haunts, jingles the silver in his pockets; and now the two forms are at his heels.

“Hail to thee, O Freedom!” muttered John Burley, “thy dwelling is in cities, and thy palace is the tavern.”

“In the king’s name,” quoth a gruff voice; and John Burley feels the horrid and familiar tap on the shoulder.

The two bailiffs who dogged have seized their prey. “At whose suit?” asked John Burley, falteringly. “Mr. Cox, the wine-merchant.”

“Cox! A man to whom I gave a check on my bankers not three months ago!”

“But it war n’t cashed.”

“What does that signify?--the intention was the same. A good heart takes the will for the deed. Cox is a monster of ingratitude, and I withdraw my custom.”

“Sarve him right. Would your honour like a jarvey?”

“I would rather spend the money on something else,” said John Burley. “Give me your arm, I am not proud. After all, thank Heaven, I shall not sleep in the country.”

And John Burley made a night of it in the Fleet.

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Chapter XII

Miss Starke was one of those ladies who pass their lives in the direst of all civil strife,--war with their servants. She looked upon the members of that class as the unrelenting and sleepless enemies of the unfortunate householders condemned to employ them. She thought they ate and drank to their villanous utmost, in order to ruin their benefactors; that they lived in one constant conspiracy with one another and the tradesmen, the object of which was to cheat and pilfer. Miss Starke was a miserable woman. As she had no relations or friends who cared enough for her to share her solitary struggle against her domestic foes; and her income, though easy, was an annuity that died with herself, thereby reducing various nephews, nieces, or cousins to the strict bounds of a natural affection,--that did not exist; and as she felt the want of some friendly face amidst this world of distrust and hate,--so she had tried the resource of venal companions. But the venal companions had never stayed long, either they disliked Miss Starke, or Miss Starke disliked them. Therefore the poor woman had resolved upon bringing up some little girl, whose heart, as she said to herself, would be fresh and uncorrupted, and from whom she might expect gratitude. She had been contented, on the whole, with Helen, and had meant to keep that child in her house as long as she (Miss Starke) remained upon the earth,--perhaps some thirty years longer; and then, having carefully secluded her from marriage and other friendship, to leave her nothing but the regret of having lost so kind a benefactress. Conformably with this notion, and in order to secure the affections of the child, Miss Starke had relaxed the frigid austerity natural to her manner and mode of thought, and been kind to Helen in an iron way. She had neither slapped nor pinched her, neither had she starved. She had allowed her to see Leonard, according to the agreement made with Dr. Morgan, and had laid out tenpence on cakes, besides contributing fruit from her garden for the first interview,--a hospitality she did not think it fit to renew on subsequent occasions. In return for this, she conceived she had purchased the right to Helen bodily and spiritually, and nothing could exceed her indignation when she rose one morning and found the child had gone. As it never had occurred to her to ask Leonard’s address, though she suspected Helen had gone to him, she was at a loss what to do, and remained for twenty-four hours in a state of inane depression. But then she began to miss the child so much that her energies woke, and she persuaded herself that she was actuated by the purest benevolence in trying to reclaim this poor creature from the world into which Helen had thus rashly plunged.

Accordingly she put an advertisement into the “Times,” to the following effect, liberally imitated from one by which in former years she had recovered a favourite Blenheim:--

TWO GUINEAS’ REWARD.

STRAYED, from Ivy Cottage, Highgate, a Little Girl,--answers to the name of Helen; with blue eyes and brown hair; white muslin frock, and straw hat with blue ribbons. Whoever will bring the same to Ivy Cottage, shall receive the above Reward.

N. B.--Nothing more will be offered.

Now it so happened that Mrs. Smedley had put an advertisement in the “Times” on her own account, relative to a niece of hers who was coming from the country, and for whom she desired to find a situation. So, contrary to her usual habit, she sent for the newspaper, and close by her own advertisement, she saw Miss Starke’s.

It was impossible that she could mistake the description of Helen; and as this advertisement caught her eye the very day after the whole house had been disturbed and scandalized by Burley’s noisy visit, and on which she had resolved to get rid of a lodger who received such visitors, the good-hearted woman was delighted to think that she could restore Helen to some safe home. While thus thinking, Helen herself entered the kitchen where Mrs. Smedley sat, and the landlady had the imprudence to point out the advertisement, and talk, as she called it, “seriously,” to the little girl.

Helen in vain and with tears entreated her to take no step in reply to the advertisement. Mrs. Smedley felt that it was an affair of duty, and was obdurate, and shortly afterwards put on her bonnet and left the house. Helen conjectured that she was on her way to Miss Starke’s, and her whole soul was bent on flight. Leonard had gone to the office of the “Beehive” with his manuscripts; but she packed up all their joint effects, and just as she had done so, he returned. She communicated the news of the advertisement, and said she should be so miserable if compelled to go back to Miss Starke’s, and implored him so pathetically to save her from such sorrow, that he at once assented to her proposal of flight. Luckily, little was owing to the landlady,--that little was left with the maid-servant; and, profiting by Mrs. Smedley’s absence, they escaped without scene or conflict. Their effects were taken by Leonard to a stand of hackney vehicles, and then left at a coach-office while they went in search of lodgings. It was wise to choose an entirely new and remote district; and before night they were settled in an attic in Lambeth.

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Chapter XIII

As the reader will expect, no trace of Burley could Leonard find: the humourist had ceased to communicate with the “Beehive.” But Leonard grieved for Burley’s sake; and, indeed, he missed the intercourse of the large, wrong mind. But he settled down by degrees to the simple, loving society of his child companion, and in that presence grew more tranquil. The hours in the daytime that he did not pass at work, he spent as before, picking up knowledge at book-stalls; and at dusk he and Helen would stroll out,--sometimes striving to escape from the long suburb into fresh rural air; more often wandering to and fro the bridge that led to glorious Westminster--London’s classic land--and watching the vague lamps reflected on the river. This haunt suited the musing, melancholy boy. He would stand long and with wistful silence by the balustrade, seating Helen thereon, that she too might look along the dark mournful waters, which, dark though they be, still have their charm of mysterious repose.

As the river flowed between the world of roofs, and the roar of human passions on either side, so in those two hearts flowed Thought--and all they knew of London was its shadow.

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Chapter XIV

There appeared in the “Beehive” certain very truculent political papers,--papers very like the tracts in the tinker’s bag. Leonard did not heed them much, but they made far more sensation in the public that read the “Beehive” than Leonard’s papers, full of rare promise though the last were. They greatly increased the sale of the periodical in the manufacturing towns, and began to awake the drowsy vigilance of the Home Office. Suddenly a descent was made upon the “Beehive” and all its papers and plant. The editor saw himself threatened with a criminal prosecution, and the certainty of two years’ imprisonment: he did not like the prospect, and disappeared. One evening, when Leonard, unconscious of these mischances, arrived at the door of the office, he found it closed. An agitated mob was before it, and a voice that was not new to his ear was haranguing the bystanders, with many imprecations against “tyrants.” He looked, and, to his amaze, recognized in the orator Mr. Sprott the Tinker.

The police came in numbers to disperse the crowd, and Mr. Sprott prudently vanished. Leonard learned, then, what had befallen, and again saw himself without employment and the means of bread.

Slowly he walked back. “O knowledge, knowledge!--powerless, indeed!” he murmured.

As he thus spoke, a handbill in large capitals met his eyes on a dead wall, “Wanted, a few smart young men for India.”

A crimp accosted him. “You would make a fine soldier, my man. You have stout limbs of your own.” Leonard moved on.

“It has come back then to this,--brute physical force after all! O Mind, despair! O Peasant, be a machine again!” He entered his attic noiselessly, and gazed upon Helen as she sat at work, straining her eyes by the open window--with tender and deep compassion. She had not heard him enter, nor was she aware of his presence. Patient and still she sat, and the small fingers plied busily. He gazed, and saw that her cheek was pale and hollow, and the hands looked so thin! His heart was deeply touched, and at that moment he had not one memory of the baffled Poet, one thought that proclaimed the Egotist.

He approached her gently, laid his hand on her shoulder, “Helen, put on your shawl and bonnet, and walk out,--I have much to say.”

In a few moments she was ready, and they took their way to their favourite haunt upon the bridge. Pausing in one of the recesses, or nooks, Leonard then began, “Helen, we must part!”

“Part?--Oh, brother!”

“Listen. All work that depends on mind is over for me, nothing remains but the labour of thews and sinews. I cannot go back to my village and say to all, ‘My hopes were self-conceit, and my intellect a delusion!’ I cannot. Neither in this sordid city can I turn menial or porter. I might be born to that drudgery, but my mind has, it may be unhappily, raised me above my birth. What, then, shall I do? I know not yet,--serve as a soldier, or push my way to some wilderness afar, as an emigrant, perhaps. But whatever my choice, I must henceforth be alone; I have a home no more. But there is a home for you, Helen, a very humble one (for you too, so well born), but very safe,--the roof of--of--my peasant mother. She will love you for my sake, and--and--”

Helen clung to him trembling, and sobbed out, “Anything, anything you will. But I can work; I can make money, Leonard. I do, indeed, make money,--you do not know how much, but enough for us both till better times come to you. Do not let us part.”

“And I--a man, and born to labour--to be maintained by the work of an infant! No, Helen, do not so degrade me.”

She drew back as she looked on his flushed brow, bowed her head submissively, and murmured, “Pardon.”

“Ah,” said Helen, after a pause, “if now we could but find my poor father’s friend! I never so much cared for it before.”

“Yes, he would surely provide for you.”

“For me!” repeated Helen, in a tone of soft, deep reproach, and she turned away her head to conceal her tears.

“You are sure you would remember him, if we met him by chance?”

“Oh, yes. He was so different from all we see in this terrible city, and his eyes were like yonder stars, so clear and so bright; yet the light seemed to come from afar off, as the light does in yours, when your thoughts are away from all things round you. And then, too, his dog, whom he called Nero--I could not forget that.”

“But his dog may not be always with him.”

“But the bright clear eyes are! Ah, now you look up to heaven, and yours seem to dream like his.”

Leonard did not answer, for his thoughts were indeed less on earth than struggling to pierce into that remote and mysterious heaven.

Both were silent long; the crowd passed them by unheedingly. Night deepened over the river, but the reflection of the lamp-lights on its waves was more visible than that of the stars. The beams showed the darkness of the strong current; and the craft that lay eastward on the tide, with sail-less spectral masts and black dismal hulks, looked death-like in their stillness.

Leonard looked down, and the thought of Chatterton’s grim suicide came back to his soul; and a pale, scornful face, with luminous haunting eyes, seemed to look up from the stream, and murmur from livid lips, “Struggle no more against the tides on the surface,--all is calm and rest within the deep.”

Starting in terror from the gloom of his revery, the boy began to talk fast to Helen, and tried to soothe her with descriptions of the lowly home which he had offered.

He spoke of the light cares which she would participate with his mother (for by that name he still called the widow), and dwelt, with an eloquence that the contrast round him made sincere and strong, on the happy rural life, the shadowy woodlands, the rippling cornfields, the solemn, lone churchspire soaring from the tranquil landscape.

Flatteringly he painted the flowery terraces of the Italian exile, and the playful fountain that, even as he spoke, was flinging up its spray to the stars, through serene air untroubled by the smoke of cities, and untainted by the sinful sighs of men. He promised her the love and protection of natures akin to the happy scene: the simple, affectionate mother, the gentle pastor, the exile wise and kind, Violante, with dark eyes full of the mystic thoughts that solitude calls from childhood,--Violante should be her companion.

“And, oh!” cried Helen, “if life be thus happy there, return with me, return! return!”

“Alas!” murmured the boy, “if the hammer once strike the spark from the anvil, the spark must fly upward; it cannot fall back to earth until light has left it. Upward still, Helen,--let me go upward still!”

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Chapter XV

The next morning Helen was very ill,--so ill that, shortly after rising, she was forced to creep back to bed. Her frame shivered, her eyes were heavy, her hand burned like fire. Fever had set in. Perhaps she might have caught cold on the bridge, perhaps her emotions had proved too much for her frame. Leonard, in great alarm, called in the nearest apothecary. The apothecary looked grave, and said there was danger. And danger soon declared itself,--Helen became delirious. For several days she lay in this state, be tween life and death. Leonard then felt that all the sorrows of earth are light, compared with the fear of losing what we love. How valueless the envied laurel seemed beside the dying rose!

Thanks, perhaps, more to his heed and tending than to medical skill, she recovered sense at last. Immediate peril was over; but she was very weak and reduced, her ultimate recovery doubtful, convalescence, at best, likely to be very slow.

But when she learned how long she had been thus ill, she looked anxiously at Leonard’s face as he bent over her, and faltered forth, “Give me my work; I am strong enough for that now,--it would amuse me.”

Leonard burst into tears.

Alas! he had no work himself; all their joint money had melted away. The apothecary was not like good Dr. Morgan; the medicines were to be paid for, and the rent. Two days before, Leonard had pawned Riccabocca’s watch; and when the last shilling thus raised was gone, how should he support Helen? Nevertheless he conquered his tears, and assured her that he had employment; and that so earnestly that she believed him, and sank into soft sleep. He listened to her breathing, kissed her forehead, and left the room. He turned into his own neighbouring garret, and leaning his face on his hands, collected all his thoughts.

He must be a beggar at last. He must write to Mr. Dale for money,--Mr. Dale, too, who knew the secret of his birth. He would rather have begged of a stranger; it seemed to add a new dishonour to his mother’s memory for the child to beg of one who was acquainted with her shame. Had he himself been the only one to want and to starve, he would have sunk inch by inch into the grave of famine, before he would have so subdued his pride. But Helen, there on that bed,--Helen needing, for weeks perhaps, all support, and illness making luxuries themselves like necessaries! Beg he must. And when he so resolved, had you but seen the proud, bitter soul he conquered, you would have said, “This, which he thinks is degradation,--this is heroism.” Oh, strange human heart! no epic ever written achieves the Sublime and the Beautiful which are graven, unread by human eye, in thy secret leaves.

Of whom else should he beg? His mother had nothing, Riccabocca was poor, and the stately Violante, who had exclaimed, “Would that I were a man! “--he could not endure the thought that she should pity him and despise. The Avenels! No,--thrice No. He drew towards him hastily ink and paper, and wrote rapid lines that were wrung from him as from the bleeding strings of life.

But the hour for the post had passed, the letter must wait till the next day; and three days at least would elapse before he could receive an answer. He left the letter on the table, and, stifling as for air, went forth. He crossed the bridge, he passed on mechanically, and was borne along by a crowd pressing towards the doors of parliament. A debate that excited popular interest was fixed for that evening, and many bystanders collected in the street to see the members pass to and fro, or hear what speakers had yet risen to take part in the debate, or try to get orders for the gallery.

He halted amidst these loiterers, with no interest, indeed, in common with them, but looking over their heads abstractedly towards the tall Funeral Abbey,--imperial Golgotha of Poets and Chiefs and Kings.

Suddenly his attention was diverted to those around by the sound of a name, displeasingly known to him. “How are you, Randal Leslie? coming to hear the debate?” said a member, who was passing through the street.

“Yes; Mr. Egerton promised to get me under the gallery. He is to speak himself to-night, and I have never heard him. As you are going into the House, will you remind him of his promise to me?”

“I can’t now, for he is speaking already,--and well too. I hurried from the Athenaeum, where I was dining, on purpose to be in time, as I heard that his speech was making a great effect.”

“This is very unlucky,” said Randal. “I had no idea he would speak so early.”

“C----- brought him up by a direct personal attack. But follow me; perhaps I can get you into the House; and a man like you, Leslie, from whom we expect great things some day, I can tell you, should not miss any such opportunity of knowing what this House of ours is on a field-night. Come on!”

The member hurried towards the door; and as Randal followed him, a bystander cried, “That is the young man who wrote the famous pamphlet,--Egerton’s relation.”

“Oh, indeed!” said another. “Clever man, Egerton,--I am waiting for him.”

“So am I.”

“Why, you are not a constituent, as I am.”

“No; but he has been very kind to my nephew, and I must thank him. You are a constituent--he is an honour to your town.”

“So he is: enlightened man!”

“And so generous!”

“Brings forward really good measures,” quoth the politician.

“And clever young men,” said the uncle.

Therewith one or two others joined in the praise of Audley Egerton, and many anecdotes of his liberality were told. Leonard listened at first listlessly, at last with thoughtful attention. He had heard Burley, too, speak highly of this generous statesman, who, without pretending to genius himself, appreciated it in others. He suddenly remembered, too, that Egerton was half-brother to the squire. Vague notions of some appeal to this eminent person, not for charity, but employment to his mind, gleamed across him,--inexperienced boy that he yet was! And while thus meditating, the door of the House opened and out came Audley Egerton himself. A partial cheering, followed by a general murmur, apprised Leonard of the presence of the popular statesman. Egerton was caught hold of by some five or six persons in succession; a shake of the hand, a nod, a brief whispered word or two, sufficed the practised member for graceful escape; and soon, free from the crowd, his tall, erect figure passed on, and turned towards the bridge. He paused at the angle and took out his watch, looking at it by the lamp-light.

“Harley will be here soon,” he muttered,--“he is always punctual; and now that I have spoken, I can give him an hour or so. That is well.”

As he replaced his watch in his pocket and re-buttoned his coat over his firm, broad chest, he lifted his eyes, and saw a young man standing before him.

“Do you want me?” asked the statesman, with the direct brevity of his practical character.

“Mr. Egerton,” said the young man, with a voice that slightly trembled and yet was manly amidst emotion, “you have a great name, and great power; I stand here in these streets of London without a friend, and without employment. I believe that I have it in me to do some nobler work than that of bodily labour, had I but one friend,--one opening for my thoughts. And now I have said this, I scarcely know how, or why, but from despair, and the sudden impulse which that despair took from the praise that follows your success, I have nothing more to add.”

Audley Egerton was silent for a moment, struck by the tone and address of the stranger; but the consummate and wary man of the world, accustomed to all manner of strange applications and all varieties of imposture, quickly recovered from a passing and slight effect.

“Are you a native of?” (naming the town which the statesman represented).

“No, sir.”

“Well, young man, I am very sorry for you; but the good sense you must possess (for I judge of that by the education you have evidently received) must tell you that a public man, whatever be his patronage, has it too fully absorbed by claimants who have a right to demand it, to be able to listen to strangers.”

He paused a moment, and as Leonard stood silent, added with more kindness than most public men so accosted would have shown,

“You say you are friendless,--poor fellow! In early life that happens to many of us, who find friends enough before the close. Be honest, and well-conducted: lean on yourself, not on strangers; work with the body if you can’t with the mind; and, believe me, that advice is all I can give you, unless this trifle”--and the minister held out a crown-piece.

Leonard bowed, shook his head sadly, and walked away. Egerton looked after him with a slight pang.

“Pooh!” said he to himself, “there must be thousands in the same state in these streets of London. I cannot redress the necessities of civilization. Well educated! It is not from ignorance henceforth that society will suffer,--it is from over-educating the hungry thousands who, thus unfitted for manual toil, and with no career for mental, will some day or other stand like that boy in our streets, and puzzle wiser ministers than I am.”

As Egerton thus mused, and passed on to the bridge, a bugle-horn rang merrily from the box of a gay four-in-hand. A drag-coach with superb blood-horses rattled over the causeway, and in the driver Egerton recognized his nephew, Frank Hazeldean.

The young Guardsman was returning with a lively party of men from dining at Greenwich, and the careless laughter of these children of pleasure floated far over the still river; it vexed the ear of the careworn statesman,--sad, perhaps, with all his greatness, lonely amidst all his crowd of friends. It reminded him, perhaps, of his own youth, when such parties and companionships were familiar to him, though through them all he had borne an ambitious, aspiring soul. “Le jeu vaut-il la chandelle?” said he, shrugging his shoulders.

The coach rolled rapidly past Leonard, as he stood leaning against the corner of the bridge, and the mire of the kennel splashed over him from the hoofs of the fiery horses. The laughter smote on his ear more discordantly than on the minister’s, but it begot no envy.

“Life is a dark riddle,” said he, smiting his breast.

And he walked slowly on, gained the recess where he had stood several nights before with Helen, and, dizzy with want of food, and worn out for want of sleep, he sank down into the dark corner; while the river that rolled under the arch of stone muttered dirge-like in his ear,--as under the social key-stone wails and rolls on forever the mystery of Human Discontent. Take comfort, O Thinker by the stream! ‘T is the river that founded and gave pomp to the city; and, without the discontent, where were progress, what were Man? Take comfort, O THINKER! wherever the stream over which thou bendest, or beside which thou sinkest, weary and desolate, frets the arch that supports thee, never dream that, by destroying the bridge, thou canst silence the moan of the wave!

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