The Old Order Changes. A novel

Front matter

The Old Order Changes PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON AMONGST THE MOUNTAINS. From a sketch hy the Earl of Mount-Edgcumbe. EFT The Old Order Changes £ "giotjei BY W. H. MALLOCK AUTHOR OF 'IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?' 'SOCIAL EQUALITY' ETC. 'Cette importune economie politique se glisse partout et se mele a tout, et je crois vraiment que c'est elle qui a dit, nihil Immani a me alienum pnto' — Bastiat NEW EDITION LONDON RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STI in ©rtthrarn to *jir gtiijcsiir % Qntm 1887 Ale rights reserved CONTENTS.

Book I. Chapter Page

I. AMONGST THE MOUNTAINS I II. THE OLD ORDER IO III. A PAGE OF ROMANCE REOPENED 19 IV. A SHADOW FROM THE PAST 27 V. THE SPHINX OF THE MODERN WORLD . . . -34 VI. A CHILD OF THE OLD ORDER 43 VII. SIBYL AND SIREN 52 VIII. A CONFESSION 64

Book II

I. AN ENCHANTED CHATEAU 75 II. 6 RICHARD, 6 MON ROI ! 83 III. PRESENT AND PAST gi IV. THE PAST JUDGES THE PRESENT IOO V. THE RIDDLE OF LIFE BY MOONLIGHT . . . . 105 VI. THE RIDDLE OF LIFE BY DAYLIGHT II3 VII. A MAN WITH A NEW ANSWER 125 VIII. THE PROPHET RESTRAINS HIMSELF 130 IX. THE PROPHET'S FIRST THUNDERS 1 36 X. THE GOSPEL OF REVOLUTION I46 XI. PONDERING IN HER HEART 174

Book III

I. A SEEKER FOR TRUTH SHIPWRECKED . . . . l8g II. A SIREN 202 III. THE GATES OF DREAMLAND VI THE OLD ORDER CHANGES CHAPTER PAGE IV. 'MY HAND IS ON THY BROW ' 2l6 V. THE SIREN'S PRELUDE 2ig VI. DISCORDS 226 VII. THE SIREN'S SPELL 235 VIII. A STRUGGLE IN SLEEP 242 IX. THE SPELL WORKS 249 X. THE BEGINNING OF FEVER ...... 256 XI. THE FEVER CONQUERS 261 XII. A CRISIS 267

Book IV

I. A RETURN FROM DREAMLAND 273 II. REALITIES REAPPEARING ....... 279 III. MORE REALITIES 294 IV. AN ECHO FROM DREAMLAND ...... 302 V. AN UNEXPECTED MONITOR 308 VI. ROUSED AT LAST 315 VII. AN OLD ROAD REOPENING ....... 318

Book V

I. THE PROMISED LAND 327 II. ON THE BRINK OF JORDAN 338 III. UNABLE TO CROSS OVER . 345 IV. A PRISONER OF THE PAST 350 V. A GUIDE THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 357 VI. AN ARBITRESS 365 VII. WAITING FOR JUDGMENT 379 VIII. THE GOSPEL OF RENOVATION 382 IX. WHOSO LOSES HIS LIFE ,gq X. THE CHAINS OF THE PAST LOOSENED 406 XI. THE FUTURE OPENS .t8

Book I. Chapter

I. AMONGST THE MOUNTAINS. ' Mr. Carew, tell me. Do we ever meet without getting on this question ? We discussed it the night before you left London. I only came across you again yesterday after noon ; and see, already we are once more in the middle of it.' 'It is the only question,' said Carew, 'that to me has any practical interest. If our old landed aristocracy ever come to an end, my England will have come to an end also ; and I shall buy a chateau in some Hungarian forest. I should not be leaving my country : my country would have left me. You don't understand me — perhaps I shall never make you. In these social discussions what stands in our way is this : there are so many things which it is very vul gar to say, and which yet at the same time it is vulgar not to feel. However, Mrs. Harley, at a more convenient season, vulgar or not vulgar, I shall come back to my point' ' Very well,' she answered, as she looked at him with a smile of amusement. ' But never — I tell you beforehand — you will never make me a convert.

I'm sure,' she went on as the idea suddenly struck her, ' if a stranger overheard us discussing vulgarity here, he would think the subject of our conversation a little out of keeping with the scene of it.' B EOOK I. This observation was certainly not unjustified. They were standing by the side ofa lofty mountain road, with a bank of savage rocks abruptly rising behind them, and a weather-stained crucifix, almost lost in the gathering shadows, was stretching its arms over them with a cold forlorn solemnity. The lady was a handsome woman in the girlhood of middle age. The man was apparently some few years younger ; if not handsome, he had a certain air of distinc tion ; and his face was shadowed, if not lit up, by thought. A few paces away from them two other men were standing ; and the pair of disputants, as they brought their discussion to a close, by common consent moved forward and joined their companions.

One of these last, so far as appearances went, was remarkable chiefly for the extreme shabbiness of his dress, coupled somewhat incongruously with a look of the completest self-satisfaction. The other, on the contrary, was the very picture of neatness, from his well-trimmed beard to his hand with its sapphire ring. It was at once evident that he was the lady's husband. ' Listen, George,' she said, laying her hand on his arm. ' As the carriage is so long in coming, I shall go back and sit in it till the coachman sees fit to start ; and you, gentlemen, I shall leave you here to look at the view until I pick you up. No, don't stir, any one of you ; I would rather go alone. If you must know the truth, I am the least bit sleepy, and shall do my best to close my eyes for a minute.' And with a slight but decided wave of the hand, she moved away from them with a firm and elastic step, and was presently lost to view behind an angle of the descending road.

The three men who were thus left to themselves did as they had been told to do, and inspected the view in silence. It was certainly worth the trouble. On either side, and below them, forests of pine and olive fell like a silent cata ract over the enormous slopes ofthe mountains, and, rising again from innumerable dells and gorges, seemed to pour CHAP. I. AMONGST THE MOUNTAINS 3 themselves over pigmy promontories into the faint sea below. Meanwhile the sky overhead was clear, and was already pierced by one or two keen stars, and leagues of a red sunset were lying along the aerial sea-line. It was a scene which at any time would have been striking enough to the imagination, and it was doubly striking now in this soft and deepening twilight. But what mainly gave it its peculiar and romantic character was one solitary object which appeared to dominate everything, as it faced the road from the opposite side of a hollow.

This was an isolated and precipitous rock which, rising abruptly out of a sea of foliage, lifted high into the air a dim cluster of buildings. A stranger might have been tempted to ask whether such a seemingly inaccessible eagle's nest could be in reality a collection of human structures at all, and whether what looked like houses, towers, and ramparts were more than spikes of crag or scars on the bare cliff. The questioner, however, had he cared to look steadily, would have at once been answered by some wreaths of ascending smoke ; and still more conclusively by the sudden note of the Angelus ; which in a few moments vibrated from a domed belfry. It was a singular cracked sound, but it was not unmusical ; rather it was like music in ruins, and it filled the mind with a vague sense of remoteness — a remoteness both of time and place. ' I expect,' said Carew, in a tone of dreamy soliloquy, as if it had acted on him like a kind of mental tuning-fork — ' I expect that a stranger of any kind is a rare apparition here, and, judging from the road, a carriage one rarer still.

Look at these loose stones. They tell their own tale plainly enough. Little disturbs them from year's end to year's end but the peasants' boots and the hoofs of the peasants' mules. Listen : at this moment there are mule-bells tinkling some where, and here come some of the very peasants themselves.' As he spoke a procession of sombre figures, in clusters of twos and threes, slowly emerged out of the twilight, and defiled past them towards the foot of the old town. They B

BOOK I.

were men with slouch hats and shy glancing eyes. Some of them bore on their backs burdens of some kind ; others were driving by their side a fantastic shaggy goat ; and pre sently those descending were met by another procession — a small caravan of heavily laden mules with their conductors. Carew stared at these visions as they gradually melted out of sight ; and then with a smile, turning round to his friends, ' Are they really men,' he said, ' or ghosts out of the middle ages?' ' Upon my word,' said Harley, ' one does in a place like this very nearly forget in what century one is living. Rail ways and intelligent voters seem little more than a dream. The old town on the hill, as we see it now against the sky, is just like a single huge castle the stronghold of some robber baron. There is only one thing wanting to make the effect complete, and that is for the baron himself to suddenly appear with his men, seize on our friend Stonehouse here, and send us two back for the ransom.' The shabby man, who had hitherto remained perfectly silent, being thus alluded to, took a glance at his threadbare waistcoat, and plucking out a button that was hanging on by a thread, jerked it away with a smile of amused indiffer ence. ' I am afraid,' he said, ' that the robber baron would find a very poor capture in me.

I have, unless I happen to have dropped it, exactly four francs and fifteen centimes in my pocket ; and Carew's scarf-pin or our excellent Har ley's watch-chain would buy me up as I stand ten times over. My dear fellows, I am the happy vacuus viator; and as I intend to walk part of the way back, you will no doubt think it lucky for me that I am. But, bless my soul,' he exclaimed, suddenly facing round with a small prim smile of minute but condescending interest, ' what the deuce can be coming now ? I doubt if we have this seclusion so com pletely to ourselves as we thought we had.' What had caught his attention, and that of the two others also, was a sound of wheels and horses, evidently approaching them— not up the hill, as their own carriage AMONGST THE MOUNTAINS CHAP. I. 5 would have done, but down it ; and in another moment a right presented itself which, considering the place and hour, might well cause some surprise in them.

This was a large •open landau, with a servant on the box by the coachman, which was descending the road slowly with a lumbering and uneasy caution, and the body of which, to make matters the more strange, was seen, as it passed, to be altogether empty. There were, however, a number of wraps and cloaks dimly visible upon the cushions, and amongst them, in particular, the glimmer of a white shawl. The three men watched it go by in silence, and then broke out together into expressions of conjecture and astonishment. Presently the shabby man, with a gesture of grave face tiousness, exclaimed, ' Of course — I know what it is exactly. It is the chariot of some milor who is making the grand tour. We shall very soon see another carriage following it, with the baggage, the lady's-maid, the valet, the courier, and the blunderbuss.

My dear Harley, you are perfectly right. One could almost fancy one was one's own great grandfather.' 'Carew,' said Harley, 'devoutly wishes he was. Look at him ! His eyes have gone back again to the old town and its battlements ; and he is meditating over those coats of arms which he found above the castle gateway.' The shabby man turned to Carew with a lazy stare of amusement, which, though perfectly good-natured, was only not impertinent because it happened to be not fixed on a stranger. ' Are you a herald,' he said, ' amongst your other many accomplishments? How droll now ! How excessively droll ! ' 'I am a herald only,' said Carew, with a slight dryness of manner, ' in matters of family history. With the shields of which Harley speaks I was interested for a peculiar reason. We, in the seventeenth century, were connected by a marriage with the Lascaris, who were once seigneurs in this part of the country ; and I was pleased to find above one of those mouldering arches two of the quarterings which are above our own lodge gates at Otterton to day.' ' Indeed ! ' said Harley. ' Otterton is a very sine old place, isn't it ? ' ' It is,' said Carew ; ' only two thirds of it are in ruins.' 'This,' went on Harley, 'about the coats of arms is really extremely interesting ' The shabby man, however, did not appear to think so, and ignoring the information as though it were some unsuc cessful joke, he placidly interposed with an air of subdued banter : — ' My dear Carew, now can you tell me what a chevron is, or a pellet ?

I am really immensely anxious to know something about a pellet.' 'Carew,' said Harley, in his turn ignoring the interrup tion, ' is exceedingly fortunate in his number of foreign relations. There are his Milanese cousins, who have offered him, during the spring, their beautiful island villa on the Lago Maggiore ; and his French cousins, who have actually lent him the chateau where he is now.' 'A chateau ! ' exclaimed the shabby man, at once showing a little attention. ' You don't mean to say that you are living in a chateau ? ' ■' Didn't you know?' said Harley. 'This lucky Carew has a castle amongst the mountains, lent him for the winter by his relation, the Comte de Courbon-Loubet. It's a genuine castle, with ramparts, tower, and scutcheons, and Heaven knows what else ; and it has a bed in it in which Francis the First slept.

So at least I discover in Murray's Guide Book.' The smile of the shabby man by a subtle change now turned into one of more or less serious interest. ' A chateau in France ! ' he exclaimed, ' and a villa on an Italian lake ! Upon my word, it's a finer thing than I thought to have a French count and an Italian marquis for one's cousins. But I only hope,' he added with a little inward chuckle, CHAP. I. AMONGST THE MOUNTAINS 7 'that you won't be getting into trouble with any more French countesses.' Whatever this allusion may have meant, Carew did not seem much pleased with it, and contracted his brows slightly . The shabby man, whose eyes were sharp as a needle, de tected this at once ; and in a tone of voice that was some what like a slight pat on the shoulder, said, changing the subject, ' My dear Carew, one of these fine mornings I must drive over and breakfast with you.' ' Do,' said Carew ; and he was beginning some further civility, when the sound of wheels and horses was once more audible, coming this time up the hill and not down it. ' Here,' exclaimed the shabby man, with an almost childish satisfaction — ' here is our carriage at last !

I was beginning to get a little bit in a fidget about the time ; and — let me breathe it in your ear — I am also positively ravenous.' His satisfaction, however, proved to be premature. A carriage indeed it was which was now ascending ; but it was not their own : it was the other which had just passed them, and which was now returning, by the way it came, with its company. This proved to consist of an elderly gentleman, seated with his back to the horses, and two ladies opposite to him, one of whom seemed to be about the same age as himself, whilst the other was so muffled to the eyes in a soft white shawl that it was difficult, at a first glance, to form any conjecture about her. But, as she gradually drew nearer to the group at the roadside, above the cloud of the soft white shawl there became distinguishable a cloud of soft fair hair, and also a delicate hand that held the shawl against her lips.

This became distinguishable, and something more than this — the glance of a pair of eyes, which at once, in spite of the twilight, sent a curious thrill through at least one of the party before he was clearly aware what it was that had caused it. Carew — for it was he who had found himself thus sus ceptible — had just become conscious of this singular and unexpected excitement, when, as the carriage was in the act of passing him, some light object fell from it, dropped by one of the occupants. In an instant he had stepped for ward and rescued it, and, with his hand on the door, was presenting it — it was a fan — to whoever might be the owner. A word of pleasure in English escaped from the elder lady, who then proceeded to tender her thanks in French. The former, however, was plainly her own language ; and Carew was pleased to show her he was a fellow-countryman as he expressed a hope that the fan had not been broken.

Mean while his eyes, under the kindly cover of the twilight, had sought those of her companion, and had not sought them in vain. He was one of those happy men who can look at a woman fixedly without the least air of impertinence ; and the woman he was looking at now seemed possessed of the yet rarer faculty, that of returning such a look without the least air of immodesty. In her eyes, as they fixed on his with all their soft fulness, there was not only an abandonment to the impressions and feelings of the moment, but mixed with the tenderness of a woman there was the steadfast frankness of a child. Such a silent conversation between the two perfect strangers could, of course, under the circumstances, last a few moments only ; but by the time the carriage had again moved on Carew could have imagined that it had been an affair of hours.

He felt as if he had been having some new experience, as if he had suddenly had a vision of some enchanting country in May — a land blooming with lilacs and hawthorns, its air breathing with all the longing of spring — a land of promise which filled him with the desire of ex ploring it. In an instant he was sunk deep in a reverie ; and so strangely jealous had he unconsciously become of the subject of it, that he felt, and even showed, some slight irritation when Harley remarked to him, ' What a handsome girl that was ! ' To this he replied with little more than a grunt, and was then suffered to enjoy a brief respite of silence ; but before many minutes his thoughts were again AMONGST THE MOUNTAINS 9 CHAP. I. distracted, and for the time being their train was finally broken, by a sharp crunching sound of something being cracked close to him.

This sound proved to proceed from the shabby man, who was beguiling the time and taking the edge off his appetite by eating a gingerbread nut. A few brown crumbs were still clinging to his lips, and as soon as he saw that Carew had noticed him, he produced another from amongst the folds of his pocket-handkerchief, and holding it out, said, with his mouth full, ' Have one ? ' The offer being declined, he bit a large crescent out of it himself, and then went back to a point he had before touched upon — the lateness of the carriage and his own impatience in consequence. He was at last relieving his feelings by saying to Harley, ' I am afraid that this robber baron we have all heard so much about has seized on it and carried it off — it, with your wife into the bargain,' when both made their appearance, and set his agitation at rest.

As soon as the party were settled, and had begun to move on, Carew asked Mrs. Harley if she had seen the interesting strangers. Mrs. Harley had ; but she had not much to tell him about them, except that their carriage had met them at the foot of the old town, and that they must have walked down to it from the road above, through the olive woods. The conversation then turned to the old town itself ; and Harley alluded to Carew's curious discovery — that of a ' family scutcheon,' he said, ' under the marquis's coronet on the gateway.' The shabby man, meanwhile, had been sunk in a placid silence, but this last remark suddenly roused his attention ; and with an animation surprising in one who professed such an ignorance of heraldry, ' My dear Harley,' he said, ' that was not a marquis's coronet at all ; it was the coronet of a French vicomte, which is a very different thing.' This was all he said till the rough road they had been ascending at last joined a magnificent beaten highway ; and here, as the horses were just quickening their pace, he startled the coachman with a sudden call to stop. ' What on earth is the matter ? ' Mrs. Harley inquired of him. ' Well,' he said, ' much as I dislike to leave this exceedingly pleasant carriage, I am obliged to get out here, and walk down by a mule path, through these terrific forests, to the little railway station which lies directly under us.

I shall just catch the train, and my servant will meet me with a portmanteau. I arrive in that way forty minutes sooner than I should if I allowed myself the pleasure of being driven to Nice by you.' Mrs. Harley was full of surprised remonstrances. ' Surely,' she ended by saying, ' you can't be in such a hurry as all that ? ' ' The truth is,' said the other, who was by this time in the road, ' I am engaged to dine to-night with my friend the Grand Duke at Mentone ; and as to time, upon these occasions I am always most punctilious. Besides,' he added just as he was saying good-bye, ' besides ' — and he laid his finger on his nose with a kind of solemn waggery — ' you will observe that I save seventy-five centimes on my railway ticket.'

Chapter II. The Old Order

' Who,' exclaimed Mrs. Harley, as the figure of the shabby man disappeared from them, ' would take him for the heir to one of the richest dukedoms in England ? ' ' Stonehouse,' said her husband, smiling, ' always amuses me. Life in general he seems to regard as a kind of vulgar joke, which assumes a classical character when embodied in a great magnate like himself.' ' I,' said Carew, ' should be the last person to abuse him ; for on one occasion, with his shrewdness, he was an excellent friend to me. You remember, Mrs. Harley, the trouble I had with my uncle when he took it into his head I was going to marry that French lady. It was Stonehouse entirely who managed to put things right for me. Still I must say this of him, and I don't mean it for a compliment. Though he may not look to a stranger like the typical heir to a duke dom, to all who know him he is the very type of a modern AVhig — I mean,' Carew added, ' a Whig who is shrewd enough to see his position, and has no desire to hide what he sees from his friends.' ' I'm sure,' said Mrs. Harley, ' you, with your strong feel ings about family, ought to find in Lord Stonehouse a man after your own heart.

No one has those feelings more strongly than a genuine Whig.' 'There,' said Carew, 'is the very point where you miss my meaning. It is perfectly true that, as his father's heir no one sets a higher, though a less imaginative, value on him self than does Stonehouse ; but of family feeling, in my sense of the words, he has nothing, or next to nothing. His family is for him not so much a family as a firm, which has been established so many years, and has so many millions of capital. I was amused just now to discover this in him — his knowledge of heraldry ends with the shape of his own coronet ; and by the way, Harley, he was perfectly wrong when he tried to correct you about the coronet on the castle gate. That was the coronet, not of a French vicomte, but of a marechal of France, which, seen at a distance, is very like that of a marquis.

It has eight parsley leaves with a pearl between each, whereas the other is simply charged with four large pearls. I think it is four ' 'Really, Mr. Carew,' broke in Mrs. Harley, 'you remind me of a treatise on heraldry there used to be in my father's library, which began by saying that ha?-dly a subject existed more worthy of the attention of princes and of gentlemen than the origin of those titles and dignities which distinguish them from the rest of mankind.' Carew laughed good-naturedly. ' My dear Mrs. Harley,' he said, ' I'm not quite such a fool about these things as you think me. I may be prejudiced, but I don't think I'm insane. As for heraldic signs, of course they are signs merely. Is

BOOK I.

our national flag more ? That, in itself, is merely a rag of canvas. You may call it a scarecrow, or you may die for it. A coat of arms— I don't mean one supplied by the coach maker — is for each family which is worth calling a family, the Union Jack of its own past : and what I am saying of Stonehouse and Whigs like him is, that for their past, as their past, they have no feeling whatever.' ' My dear Mr. Carew,' interposed Mrs. Harley, ' what is it but their past which keeps men like Lord Stonehouse from going over to the Conservatives?' 'They merely^feel,' said Carew, 'like a true trading firm, that they would lose, if they did, the good-will of their poli tical business ; as a grocer would if he suddenly turned shoemaker. No doubt the Whigs value their past in one way. They know that it has a power over the opinions of others, and that it helps to surround them with a certain ready-made deference.

Of course in this way it adds to their own self-importance, but only as might the possession of some remote ancestral castle, which they like to possess but have no inclination to visit. They are proud to think of it as a celebrated show-place which oppresses the imagination of the tourist, but which never elevates the imagina tion of the owner. It speaks for them, but it does not speak to them. They don't listen for the voice which haunts, if they would only hear it, every mouldering turret and every gnarled oak-tree ; the voice which whispers to them that they are different from the rest of the world, not because they are rich, but that they are rich (if they happen to be so) because they are different from the rest of the world. It is only people to whom the past conveys this feeling who really know the meaning of the words Noblesse oblige.' ' If you are talking about Lord Stonehouse,' said Mrs. Harley, ' you are very possibly right.

You know him far better than I do. But about the Whigs in general I am quite sure you are wrong. Look at the 's, look at the ■'s, look at the 's. No one — not the most bigoted Tory in England — for bad and for good both, is more closely wedded than they are to this gratifying seeling you speak of.' ' Well,' said Carew, with a certain vindictive energy, 'if they are wedded to it, they keep their wife locked up ; and they never speak in public without denying the marriage. However,' he went on, ' as I said just now, we will have all this out more fully some day. It shall be when you come to see me at my castle among the mountains. I am longing to show you that. Everything about us will be on my side there, and will explain my meaning, and I think make you agree with it — at all events partly.

The old village still clings to the shelter of the feudal ramparts. In the valley below you look down on the lord's mill, whose black wheel still turns in the blue-green snow-water. The villagers all touch their hats to you and seem proud of your presence. For miles round every hectare belongs to the House of Courbon-Loubet. The concierge delights in pointing out to a stranger certain of the scutcheons in the courtyard, and telling him that Monsieur le Comte has Bourbon blood in his veins ; and there is a huge five-sided tower, that still stands erect and stares at the landscape with all its old effrontery. Indeed, if it were not for a glimpse of the railway which that tower gives you, you could fancy that you were living before the French Revolution. Now, Mrs. Harley, when are you coming to see me, and leave the epoch of progress and the sovereign people behind you ?