Steven Lawrence, Yeoman

Chapter I. In

PAE1S. DURING the first week after his arrival in Paris, Steven Lawrence's life was only passively miserable. The mild, open winter, tbat had been so excellent for hunting in Kent, was detestable to him amidst the closeness and mud and fog of city streets ; but he endured it. Endured being marched up and down the piazzas of the Palais Royal and of the Rue de Rivoli of a morning ; endured theatres of an evening ; endured living in rooms wherein his large figure had scarcely space to turn, and against the ceihng of wUich he knocked his head if he attempted to stand upright ; endured mil linery ; endured Dora ! And, at the end of the week, said to himself: "I have gone VOL. III. B through one eighth of it already. Seven weeks more, and I shall be on tbe farm, almost free again !" After this came brighter weather ; also Grizelda Long, who bad been absent for a few days, and on her return to Paris at once constituted herself a daily visitor of Dora's ; and then Steven's sufferings, from passive, became acute ones.

Grizelda Long at this time was on one of the lowest spokes even in her poor fortune's wheel. Unpaid companion, half lady's-maid, half interpreter, to a capricious, vulgar wo man (the same Indian widow who had once been the mainstay of the Knigbtsbridge household) : with a good deal of time on her hands, for the widow had friends of her own, "to whom, of course, poor Miss Long could not expect to be introduced ;" aud with no money in her pockets. These were the conditions under which Grizelda was living out the present portion of her phantom existence ! " Just beginning my delightful campaign in Paris," the poor soul wrote, with unflagging cheerfulness, to her London friends. But what, to another woman, would have been durance viler than the lot of a seamstress, sewing her fingers to the bone in her own attic, was bearable to Grizelda.

She was floating still ! Still able to run after odds and ends of society; to organize these odds and ends together; to intrigue among them ; occasionally — despite the widow — to show her forlorn wreathed head in third-class salons, and such concert rooms and theatre-boxes as her friends, of their charity, would give her the right to enter. "I know every one," she told Dora, on tbe first occasion of their meeting. " Lady Cowley and tbe Russian ambassadress have unfortunately both got influenza, so, for the moment, I can do nothing for you there. But I know all the ball-giving English, and numbers of excellent French people, and I shall be very glad to introduce you. What carriage have you got ? My dear Mrs. Law rence, do you mean to say your husband has got you no carriage ? I assure you it is a mistake.

It does not clo," said Grizelda, at this moment possessing about fifty-six francs in the world, "to be seen in any of these voitures de remise. Now for — I forget how much a week, but we'll ascertain to-day — you can hire the very brougham the Dyne vors had. Capital horse, English coachman, dark broAvn livery ; no one would know it was hired. Dora answered, that a brougham, even B a brougham hired by the Aveek, would be extravagance entirely beyond her husband's means : then lay awake half the night re gretfully dreaming of it. Next day, the weather happening to be wet again, she spoilt a new dress by walking to their restaurant dinner — those cheap Palais Royal dinners at which Steven was so starved, but which were a remove better than the horrible attempt his Avife made once of cooking something at home !

And then, as a matter of economy, the hiring of a brougham, with an English coachman in brown livery, began, day and night, to be urged upon Dora's husband. This, I say, was the beginning of the poor fellow's active sufferings. He did not want to squander what little money he had of his own (the SquUe bad already lent him a consider able sum to put out upon his farm, and the thought of the debt pressed heavily on him) ; he would have been more loath still for Dora to touch the capital of ber small marriage portion ; and kindly, but with no lack of de termination, he told her that the thing was im possible. Cabs he would hire for her, as many and as often as she wished. She need not drive evenin the common fiacre of the streets. One of the better kind of Americaines she might have, with as clean a driver, for a Frenchman, as could be found, six days a week — nothing as yet would induce him to let Dora amuse herself on Sunday — but a brougham, no !

Grizelda Long and her opinions might be very valuable, indeed, in their pro per place. He was not going to be guided by them. He was not (with extreme reso lution this) going to set up a sham-private brougham, with a sham-private coachman, and ridiculous hired Uvery, to please any one. At tUe end of some Uours, after holding further council with her friend : " If you please, Steven," said Dora, " as you will not spend your money to please me, may I spend my own r I Uave a hundred pounds in my desk lying useless . . . oh, look incredulous ! I'll show them to you — Bank of England notes . . . May I spend them — I mean a few of them — in hiring the brougham ? It will save you expense in the end." "Do as you choose," said Steven, turning from her. " I have given my opinion. Act as you like for tUe future."

So tUe first fruit of Katharine's generosity was the setting Mrs. Dora up in her hired brougham, which soon, with the small rose and-white over-dressed doll it contained, became pretty well known in tbe eyes of a certain portion of the Parisian public. Dora, just at first, professed herself averse to driving alone, aud poor dear Grizelda's bonnets, she said, were really so unlike what bonnets ought to be that, whatever one's kindly feelings, it was impossible to be seen with her by daylight ; it was therefore manifestly incumbent on Steven to be his wife's com panion. Living in rooms where he could neither breathe nor stand upright, obliged to dress daily in a frock-coat and high hat, dining on Palais Royal dishes that at once sickened and starved him, and now crushed into a little toy-brougham, of which one window at least must be always shut for fear of Dora's complexion, or because the damp took the curl out of feathers, or the crimp out of hair, or other cogent reason !

He bore it for three days ; bore physical sufferings almost equalling those of a wild animal in its eight feet of cage; then struck boldly : " He Avould do many things ; would walk, eat, dress as he was bidden ; would never — so help him heaven ! — torture his limbs into a cursed close car no bigger than a nut-shell again while he lived." " You needn't use bad language, my dear," said Dora, Avith thorough amiability ; Uad the domestic drives been so animated that she need mourn over their discontinuance ? "Amuse yourself well," kissing her band to him as she ran, full-dressed, out of the room, "and I, if I can, must find some one else willing to take your place." Was tUis meant as a threat, Steven wondered afterwards ? Wbo shall say ? Who shall tell whether it was by purest accident or otUemvise that when Mrs. Law rence left her carriage by the lake (for this January afternoon was like June, and all tUe world went to the Bois) she heard the only human voice that had power to make her heart — such a heart as she possessed — flutter, and turning round saw Mr. Clarendon Whyte, unapproachable in his gloves and neck tie as ever, and with beautiful, cruel, Mephis tophelian smiie at Uer side !

After a surly husband at home, a surly husband using bad Avords about one's few poor little pleasures, wUat a change to be in the society of a being whose every mellifluous word is a reproach, flattering to vanity ; whose every look is a compliment ! ..." I have seen you before more than once, but not near enough to bow," said Dot, quietly ; for whether the meeting was planned or accidental it did not seem that either was much taken by surprise now that they had met. " I heard you had arrived, but didn't knoAV whether I ought to call on your— husband," answered Mr. Whyte, with an accent, tragi pathetic, on that word " husband " that made Dora turn her face away, and almost believe in her own mind that she was blush ing. The January afternoon was like June ; and Mrs. Lawrence, well-dressed and animated, met nothing but admiring glances as she walked up and down in the clear winter sun shine with Mr. Clarendon Whyte.

Poor little butterfly Dot ! It was the brightest hour by far that she had known since her marriage, this first hour of amusement in which Steven had no part. He was a good, dear, honest creature, Steven, aud in her very heart she believed she was growing to be fond of him. But then Mr. Clarendon Whyte's coat was so differently cut, and the turn of his moustache was so faultless, and his Ioav calibre of intellect — I use her own words — suited hers so exactly, and this was Paris sunshine, and she was one of the prettiest women walking by that sunny mock lake. And — ah — ah ! (Avithout going too deeply into analyzation of one's happiness) if all life could only be like to-day! All life certainly could not be ; only six more Aveeks, and a fraction, thought Dot ; then let the six weeks and a fraction be turned to the best possible account.

So next day, the sun continuing to shine, the brown brougham at the same hour stopped by tbe lake, and a porcelain marchioness figure, with short fair locks and glittering equipments, tripped out, to be joined in ten minutes by an Adonis almost as glittering as Uerself. And the next day the same thing took place ; and the next ... as the two were walking along : Dot listening with well-pleased face to her companion's murmured platitudes, yet not unmindful of the admiration her OAvn toilette was awakening in the crowd : Steven maladroitly, inopportunely, as is tUe habit of these old-fashioned husbands, came across their path. He stopped for a moment, spoke good humouredly to his Avife, not uncivilly to Mr. Clarendon Whyte ; then went on his Avay, thereby showing more knowledge of life, Dora felt, tUan migUt have been expected of him.

In the evening, as they Avere sitting alone in their apartment — for now Mrs. Law rence had organized a plan of having exe crable dinners sent in from a neighbouring cook-shop — " Dora," said Steven, all at once, " how long have you known that your friend, Mr. Whyte, was in Paris ?" " Oh, not till to-day," said Dora, rather from sudden loss of self-possession than from a guilty sense that there was anything to conceal. " Mr. Clarendon Whyte has just come to Paris — that is, I didn't know he was here before, and — and he is going to call on you to-morrow, Steven." " He is very kind," said Steven, laconi cally. " It will be pleasant for you to know some one — to be able to associate with men when you are tired of me," cried Dora. "Mr. Whyte, if you like, will introduce you at his club. He told me so to-day."

" He is very kind," said Steven once more ; then took up his hat, and went out — the first time he had done so yet of an evening—leaving Dot to her own thoughts. Did he suspect her, she wondered uneasily, as soon as she found herself alone ? Suspect her, not of the letter that had been written and answered from Ashcot — that was impossible; but of prevarication? Did he know that she and Clarendon Whyte had already met ? Was he going to watch, to mistrust, to coerce her ? In about an hour's time ln Paris. 11 Steven came in again. He walked up to the table where Dot as usual Avas working her brain over some new combination of gorgeous colour for to-morrow, took both her hands, and drawing her to him, bade ber, in the kind of way one would bid a child, look him straight in the face. " Don't tell me falsehoods any more, my dear," he said, in a voice that brought the facile tears into Dot's eyes.

" You were walking yesterday with Claren don Whyte, and Avhat was there in it to hide ? Walk Avith him, with any one you choose, every day of the week. Amuse yourself and get strong and well, my poor little Dora, but don't tell me a falsehood again !" " And never while I live, Steven!" cried Mrs. Lawrence, in a flutter of repentance. " I was afraid you might be cross — I can't help it, you know, but I etm a very little bit afraid of you always. And then," holding down her face, " as I was jealous once about you and Kate, I thought perhaps " " I should be jealous about Mr. Clarendon Whyte ?" said Steven, Avith a chill sort of laugh. " Set your mind at rest, child. When I am jealous of my wife it will be once, and only once ; not without cause, you may be sure ! She Ueld up Uer face ; she threw her arms round his neck.

" You'll never have cause to be jealous of me, Steven ! Don't let us even talk of such horrible things. Now, how could you possibly know, dearest, that I saw Mr. Clarendon Whyte yesterday ? And to think — deceitful man ! — of your never men tioning it to me !" "Nay," said Steven, quietly, "I waited for you to mention it. How I knew it," he added, " was by using my own eyes. I was close behind you when you got out of your carriage by the pond ; but you Avere too much occupied with other people to look at me." To this extent peace was made ; to this extent the renewal of Dora's intimacy Avith Mr. Clarendon Whyte was sanctioned by Dora's husband. Closely following came a time when little Mrs. LaAvrence began to get invitations to balls, through Grizelda Long, through Clarendon Whyte, through any one, every one who could open for her the easy portals of second-class Anglo-Parisian society.

And again, as atfirst startingof the brougham, SteAren's attendance was enforced for a week. The torture of standing for hours in the corners of crowded ball-rooms was not phy sically as unendurable as being imprisoned in a small close carriage for an afternoon at a time, but was bad enough. He did not dance himself; had never, indeed, seen the inside of a ball-room till now ; and there was nothing edifying to him in the spectacle of his wife waltzing with every well-gilt fop — Mr. Clarendon Whyte most — who chose to invite her. So after a week or ten days of ball-going, amicably, without a word of remonstrance on either side, it grew to be a thing of course that Steven should just accompany his wife to tbe scene of her night's dissipation, stand patiently AvitU Uis hat under his arm for two dances or so, then slip away unnoticed from tUe house, and go home to his bed.

Dot found that she breathed immeasurably freer after he Avas gone. Poor dear fellow ! it took away one's enjoyment to know tUat tUere was a long-suffering Uusband, standing like a statue, martyrized for one's selfish pleasure night after night, and really, if one thought of it, what numbers of other married women went out alone, Mrs. D , and Madame C , and Uttle Lady B (poor inch-deep Dora, in what a wake to follow !). What need was there to torture him by that nightly putting on of dress suit and white gloves at all ? Could she not chaperon Gri zelda, find some one or other to go with — manage to spare dear Steven, at all events ? She managed it; dear Steven acquiescing only too readily; and before many days were over was classed by the world in precisely the same rank with her precedents, Mrs. D , and Madame C , and little Lady B ; light, ball-going young women, with more or less of character between them all, and with husbands too indifferent or too large-minded to heed the lateness of their Avives' hours.

Katharine Fane had said rightly that Steven was too straightforward, too simple of heart to suspect evil in others ; but, unhappily, this very straightforwardness, this very sim plicity, rendered him the most unsuited of all guides for a woman like Dora. A man of the world might have given her a reasonable degree of freedom, and yet have held her in wholesome fear as well. To Steven, in this as in everything, there was no medium course. If his wife chose to go her own road once, she might go ! For married women — dressed as women under the empire do dress — to waltz through the midnight hours in their husbands' absence, seemed to him one degree less shameful than for them to do so in their husbands' sight. The first time that he ever saw Dot ball-clad and waltzing, he underwent a feeling of mingled disgust, indignation, and abasement — a feeling for which I scarce, indeed, know how to find a fitting name.

After that night, with or without bis presence, smiling upon Mr. Clarendon Whyte or upon another, or upon a score of others, he felt tbat it could matter little to him. Dora had lost her prestige, the ineffable bloom of decent womanhood with Avhich his imagination had invested her : let it pass ! She was not, would never be again, what he had once thought ber, yet was no worse, he told himself, than other women of the world ; was frivolous and pleasure-seeking ; about as good a companion for him, Steven Lawrence (Lord Petres' words verified already) as a gilded butterfly would have been, but bad loved him enough to become bis wife, and so merited infinite forbearance, — infinite patience at his hands ! He was, as he had said, a man capable of being jealous once, and only once. He might feel humiliated, confessing to himself that his humiliation was the result of ignorance, at seeing bis wife among the crowd of a Parisian ball-room.

Small doubts, small fears, small suspicions could have no place in Steven's breast. Poor little Dora was taking her pleasure now, to fortify herself against the ineritable years to come at Ashcot ; and to himself the dressing and the enamelling and the dancingof fashionable ladies was repugnant, like his dinners, like his lodgings, like everything, in short, that belonged to this artificial city life. But only four more weeks of it remained ! four more weeks and he would be back in England, working on bis farm, breathing pure country air, sometimes seeing Katharine's face. Oh, for some way to make these interminable thirty days pass quicker ! A man of seven-and-twenty, of keen ex citement-craving temperament, companion less in Paris, not without money in his pockets, and seeking desperately, but in vain, to make the time pass. To this singularly anomalous pass had Steven Lawrence's life now arrived.

Chapter II. Mademoiselle Babry

IT was Uis habit to rise early ; even in these January mornings was often dressed and abroad in the twilight Champs Elysees or dusky streets before eight o'clock. At eleven, after a three hours' walk, he would come home to breakfast, at which meal his wife, if not too tired, appeared in dressing gown and crimping pins, her face white (more sightly so in Steven's eyes than with the finer complexion it assumed towards noon), her eyes dark and hollow, her hands shaky, her heart and soul occupied with last night's conquests and to-day's projects ; all of which, wdth discreet reservations, she poured forth, not unamusingly, into her husband's ears as she sipped her chocolate. After breakfast ge nerally arrived the milliner, hairdresser, dress maker, or other finery factor for rehearsal of to night's performance, or this afternoon's, or this morning's — Dora was sufficiently advanced vol. in. c now to require at the least four elaborate changes of dress a day — and then the master of the establishment perforce must turn out again into the streets.

The apartment that, as Dot Avould say, " had been sufficient for the Honourable Au gustus Dynevor and his wife," was an un deniable apartment as far as situation went ; an apartment rich in carved cornices and brackets — against which Steven, being in conveniently tall, knocked his head : also in Utrecht velvets, ormolu, and mirrors. " A bijou of an apartment," it was described in the lists of Messrs. Arthur and Webb ; possessing indeed only the trifling drawback that neither fresh air nor light could enter the two six-feet square dungeons called bed-rooms. To fresh air Mrs. Lawrence was as beautifully in different as to most other natural phenomena ; but light, and strong light is imperatively needfulfor toilette-tables of the second empire; and so, "just till midday, just till anybody was likely to call, would dear Steven mind beinw out ?" tUus allowing M. Alphonse, the hair dresser, or Mademoiselle Aglae, the work girl, the use of the salon.

He turned out, whatever the weather, with perfect cheerful ness ; often before he went, poor big Steven ! w-ould be bidden to hold a satin in these folds, or a velvet in that light, while Dot retired, as far as the limited space would allow, to form artistic judgment of its effects. Then commenced the daily task of time-killing ; the daily weary walks in which, with the in evitable lack of interest of an uneducated man, he Avould traverse Paris from one end to the other, and find it all blank. No deeper significance than stones and cement iu the palaces, no pathos in the grey old churches, no heart-stirring history in these imperial boulevards replacing the old streets where the carmagnole was danced, the 9a ira sung, and where a king and queen once passed along upon the tumbril to die ! All Avas blank to Steven Lawrence, just as a picture is blank to a child's intelligence until its meaning has been pointed out by some one better taught than himself.

Paris was a vast mart of ex pensive toys, be saw ; toys through which it was his present lot to walk with closed pockets and averted eyes, but of which his wife, in the millinery department, migUt take her fill. A mart in which it was his portion to wander unoccupied from morning till night, seeking to kill the implacable enemy that every day grew more vital, wish home inter ludes of barbers and dressmakers, scandal in which be took no interest, and gold powderc ing, dressing, enamelling, and general re hearsing for a world in whose scenes he bore, and wished to bear, no part. His favourite resting-place of a forenoon, when it happened neither to rain nor snow, aud when even his stout limbs grew tired of ceaseless pacing along the pavement, was the Luxembourg Gardens. He never felt so little in Paris as when he sat doAvn there under the leafless chestnuts, smoking (he smoked ten hours a day now) in the morning sunshine, and with only children and nurses, an occasional priest, book in hand, or slow paced grey old pensioner to break the soli tude.

And so to the sunny Luxembourg one sunny forenoon, destined to begin an episode of some importance in his life, Ste ven Lawrence went ; sat down on his accustomed bench ; lit his cigar, and began to think — of Ashcot and Katharine, and how to-day, Wednesday, she and the Squire would be riding to tbe meet, and if tUe weather at home was like this, what a day for hunting it would be, with the sun break ing the night's thin frost, and a blue sky already sprinkled with promising fleecy clouds over-head ! " Kate, my child," said a man's A'oice, in English but with a curious halfforeign, half- Irish accent ; " are you sure now that it's not too cold for you to be sit ting down ?" Steven started, his heart set beating in a moment, and saw, not his — I mean not Lord Petres' — Kate, but a pale, poorly dressed little girl of nineteen or twenty, in tUe act of sitting down by him on the bench, and with an elderly man, evidently from the likeness between them her father, on her other side.

"It isn't too cold for me, papa," she said, in one of those fresh flute-like voices tbat, if you are fortunate, you may come across three or four times in your life ; and tUen Steven turned his head, irresistibly attracted, and looked at Uer full. The girl was not handsome, still less pretty, yet Uers was a face few men could pass unnoticed even amidst the meretricious beauty, the fine complexions and bright-hued locks of the Champs Elysees or the boulevards. The pale cheeks, the brown hair drawn straight off the temples, the plain little bonnet, the well-worn black silk frock, all told of a woman shunning rather than courting attention. And still you were forced to attend to Uer ! to remark that she had a slender foot and band ; a graceful tread ; that the dress, however poor, was exquisitely clean and modest — in fine, that something more than beauty drew a sharp line of de marcation between her and the crowd of women amongst whom she walked.

Sbe looked with a pair of deep-set grey eyes straight up at Steven. He felt as if she had spoken to him ; took his cigar from his lips and flung it away. " Pray don't let us disturb you, sir," said the father, looking round and slightly raising his hat. " My little daughter is not very strong, and I chose this bench for her to be in the sun ; but pray don't leave off smok ing or we shall feel that we have disturbed you." The tone would have been that of a well bred man, had it not been just a shade more polite, more apologetic than the occasion re quired. But Steven, never hypercritical, was glad of the sound of an EnglisU voice, and in a few minutes' time found himself talking, or rather listening while the stranger talked, about all the current gossip of Paris : The Emperor's last race-horse, and the Em press's last carriage, the increasing price of apartments, and tbe new piece that was to be brought out at the Opera Comique — the usual innocuous gossip with which English- Mademoiselle Ba rry. 23 men abroad are forced to supplant our na tional staple of politics and weather as material for small-talk.

" Well, I have no doubt that Paris, for people witU town tastes, is all tUat you say," said Steven at last, tUe stranger Uaving given his opinion as to the superiority of Paris over every other European city. "For myself, I speak openly, I've never been so tired of my life as during these few weeks I've spent here. Bricks and mortar don't concern me. I find more to look at in a forest or prairie than in all the palaces and show-places that Avere ever built." A quiet little smile came round the corners of the girl's lips. " Do you see notUing interesting in the show-place we are sitting under ?" she said, glancing up over her shoul der at the grey walls of the Luxembourg. " Nothing at all," answered Steven. " It's a fine building — so are the Madeleine and the Bourse, and when you have seen one, you have seen all of them.

In a prairie — in an English turnip-field — you will find life, of one sort or another, and change. In palaces and churches you have dead bricks and mortar, nothing more." "And all that the bricks and mortar, all that this old Luxembourg must have looked on at when your prairies and fields were — just what they are to-day, and will be till the end of the world ! Why," the girl's eyes kindled, " I tUink one can hardly look up at those windows above us without seeing the prisoners' eager white faces crowding there — the prisoners, don't you remember, who heard the tocsin and saw men wave to them from the housetops, but didn't know whether Robespierre's downfall was to mean their deliverance or their death ?" Steven was silent. He had learned French history at school — for Joshua Lawrence al ways conscientiously bade the master give him as good an education as could be got for money — but at this lapse of time had grown uncertain about names and dates.