That wild wheel, a novel

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Chapter I

It was the middle of September. Tyburnia and Belgravia were doubtless duly depopulated, and blankly fronted, with shuttered windows, such unfashionable individuals as might occasionally wake the sleeping echoes of their pavement. But in a certain London thoroughfare, on a certain Saturday evening, the life of the great city roared and rushed as usual ; unconscious of the absence of a few thousand individuals, as the main body of a mighty river is unaffected by the ebb and flow that periodically fills and empties some shallow creek.

The air was mild and soft ; and jets of gas flaring nakedly in butchers’ shops and above greengrocers’ stalls made blurs of coarse yellow light in the hazy dusk. The brassy voices of the venders shouting their wares seemed to bear a queer analogy to the flaring lights, and to offend the ear with much the same sort of unpleasant sensation as the crude glare inflicted on the eye.

Certainly none of the senses were caressed by the sights, sounds, and scents of that crowded street. Stalls filled with heterogeneous lumps of raw meat, vast piles of cabbages in various stages of staleness, apples, oranges, onions, fish, mingled their odors with the smell of gas and sawdust, the hot steam from 1

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cookshops, and sickening whiffs from the public- houses, whose doors were swinging backward and forward with ceaseless movement of a pendulum, as the human tide poured in and out at those gaudy, gilded portals. Poverty decent and poverty dirty, poverty defiant and poverty depressed, frowsy rags, flaunting mock velvets, and dog’s-eared artificial flowers, jostled each other on the filthy pavement, and were impartially appealed to by the leather-lunged butcher in a stentorian yell to “ Buy, buy, buy !”

And what a nightmare of faces as they streamed into the quivering glare of the gaslights! Drunken faces, hungry faces, sick faces; brutal, timid, anxious, reckless, smiling faces, in endless variety. Very few with any trace of beauty ; for the throng at that time and place was largely composed of a class so poor as to be often insufficiently fed, and seldom wholesomely fed. Starvation streaked with gin is not a regimen favorable to bodily perfection ; neither has the pallor induced by foul air that creamtinted whiteness admired by some poetic minds.

Nevertheless, a figure belonging to some higher social stratum would now and then come from the crowd into the hazy halo around a gas-jet, pass across it, and recede into comparative dimness. Just as the most energetic of the salesmen outside a large butcher’s shop divided the shuddering air with a tremendous yell, there appeared, strongly illuminated by the meteoric glare of his lights, a face which differed from the faces around it, as the stars differ from the gas. It was rather pretty than beautiful, but its charm lay in its exquisite refinement of expression. It affected one at first sight with a sense of infinite delicacy, sensibility, and purity. Since, however, these qualities are far from being universally attractive, the owner of the face in question passed along without incurring any special attention or admiration.

She was a girl of about twenty years of age, very poorly dressed, and evidently well accustomed to walk about alone. She moved with a swift, steady pace, threading her way composedly through the crowd, and apparently undisturbed by the many repulsive sights and sounds which assailed her senses. It is said that use can harden one to almost anything. But certain very sensitive souls have a peculiar way of retreating within themselves. It is not that they are hardened against coarse impressions ; but they hide from them, and take refuge, like a beleaguered garrison, in

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the innermost citadel, leaving an inferior kind of bodily perceptions to man the outward walls.

Presently the girl turned out of the great thoroughfare into a side street that was comparatively dark and quiet, and stopped at a door with a brass plate bearing the words, “Miss Hughes. Day School for Young Ladies.” The house, like all its neighbors to right and left, was shabby with a positive and hopeless shabbiness — distinctly below anything which could justify the compound epithet “shabby-genteel.” This was shabbiness simple and ungenteel ; and yet the house was marked by one characteristic redeeming it from absolute squalor, and distinguishing it from its neighbors — all those parts of it which could be cleaned by the personal efforts of its inmates were clean. The window-panes glittered without a smear; the brass door-plate was burnished until it shone like gold ; the stone steps leading down into the miserable little area had been carefully swept. That the bricks of which the house was built were incrusted with a deep layer of grime, and that the paint was so dingy as to make its original hue a mere matter of conjecture, gave a peculiar value to these evidences of neatness, which gained a charm by contrast, like the flash of ivory teeth out of a swarthy face.

The girl whose footsteps we have been following rang at the bell, and almost immediately the door was opened by an elderly woman servant, who, saluting the young lady by the name of “ Miss Barbara,” observed that she was a bit later than usual.

“ No ; I think not, Larcher,” answered Miss Barbara. Her speech was in delightful harmony with her face. It was pleasant in tone, and had that finished, clear-cut simplicity which denotes culture. Refined gold is a much simpler substance than the rouo;h ore.

“ Ah, well, perhaps it was mistress being impatient to see you made her think you late,” answered the woman.

“I hope Aunt Judith has not been uneasy about me?” said Barbara, taking off her cloak, which she hung on a peg in the narrow passage.

“Oh no, Miss Barbara; not to say uneasy. But she’s been fidgeting for you to come 1101116.” Then, dropping her voice, Larcher added, “She’s had a letter; but of course you’ll hear all about it.”

Without waiting for any further parley, Barbara entered the

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front room, which was the sole sitting-room of the family. Here a round table was spread for tea, and, in spite of the mild temperature out of doors, a glowing fire burned in the grate. A square of dark drugget covered the middle of the floor, the rest of which displayed bare boards, white with many scrubbings. Such pieces of furniture as were modern were of the plainest and cheapest sort; but a few old-fashioned articles — a couple of arm-chairs, a corner cupboard of carved oak, a convex mirror in a gilt frame of the period of the first empire — were handsome and solid. A guitar-case stood in one corner; and, in another, a set of plain deal shelves, edged with red leather neatly nailed along them, held a small collection of books. The most noticeable feature in the room was a number of sketches in oil and water-colors, many of them unframed, which decorated the walls. These drawings were not such as one would expect to find in that shabby house in an obscure back street. Many of them were masterly ; and all, even the roughest, were unmistakably the work of no mean artist.

The only occupant of this room when Barbara opened the door was a little old lady, seated in an arm-chair drawn close up to one side of the hearth, while her feet, supported on a low hassock, were stretched out in front of the fire so as to enjoy its full heat. She had delicate regular features, remarkably beautiful dark eyes, thick black eyebrows, and silky tendrils of snow'-whitc hair curling from beneath her cap down each side of her face.

At the sound of the opening door she looked up eagerly. “Oh, I am so glad you have come, Barbara,” she said, in a fiutc-like old voice, which, though sweet, had lost its freshness, as the worsteds in an elaborate sampler hanging above the round mirror on the wall had faded into mere ghosts of blue and scarlet. But there was nothing at all ghost-like in the appearance of Miss Judith Hughes. She was plump and well-nourished ; with a pink color — somewhat heightened just now by the fire — in her round cheeks.

Her grandniece — for such was the relationship between them — advanced into the room, gently kissed the old lady’s forehead, and remained standing by her side, but withdrawn as far as possible out of the range of the fire. The little room was oppressively warm to one coming from the open air; but a hot fire was one of Aunt Judith’s few' luxuries, and Barbara did not complain.

“ Take off your hat, my dear,” said Miss Hughes. “ No ; don’t

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carry it up-stairs yet. Sit down. I want to speak to you without delay.”

The girl obeyed, seating herself at once, and taking off her shabby black straw hat, which she held as a screen between her face and the fire.

“ First of all, my dear,” continued the old lady, “ I must tell you that I have had a letter from poor Claude — a letter that makes me extremely anxious, and — ”

“ Is my brother ill ?” interrupted Barbara, hastily.

“ No, no, child — that is, not alarmingly ill. But he is never robust, poor dear boy. William does not, I think, quite understand how delicate Claude is.”

“ Uncle William has always been very good to Claude,” put in Barbara, gently.

“ Good! Of course he has been good ! Who should know that better than I ? But a man is sometimes a little too harsh — no ; not harsh, perhaps, but severe ; too strictly severe. Especially towards one of his own sex. William expects a great deal from a young man. And, after all, our poor Claude is but a child in some things still. But now, see here : I want to speak to you about it before your Uncle William comes in.”

During this speech Miss Hughes had taken her spectacles from her pocket, adjusted them on her nose, and smoothed out a letter written on foreign paper with a fat little brown hand, on the third finger of which she wore an old-fashioned seal-ring. Then she said, “I had better, perhaps, to save time, just read the most important parts to you, Barbara — the part that explains his leaving Vevcy.”

“ Leaving Yevey !” exclaimed Barbara. The consternation in her tone evidently irritated Miss Hughes, who answered with a quick testiness which made her eyes sparkle and her winter-apple cheeks flush. “ There — there, don’t be explosive, Barbara ! He has not left Yevey — yet.”

Then she began to read : “ ‘ My dearest, best old Auntie, — I am ever so much obliged to you for the enclosure in your last — ’ Oh no; that’s nothing; a little private word of my own to him. Where is it? Oh! Here, I have it: ‘It is with the greatest reluctance that I have come to the conclusion that Yevey does not agree with my health.’ Does not agree : he has scored that un-

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derneath. ‘ I have struggled on, fearing to give trouble at home, and to displease my uncle’ — poor dear boy! — ‘but I grow worse day by day. The air from the lake is so damp. The autumn has set in rainy, and people here say we are likely to have a wet winter. I cough very often, and have pains in my limbs.’ ”

At this point Miss Hughes took off her spectacles and turned an eloquently appealing glance on the girl beside her. But Barbara did not look up. She was sitting quite still, in a listening attitude, her head bent down, her face in shadow, and the lamplight making effects of chiaroscuro among the smooth coils of her brown hair.

“Well!” cried Aunt Judith, “what do you say to that, Barbara ? It is impossible to read such things unmoved. Poor fellow ! — poor Claude ! Coughing and suffering pains in his limbs ! The place is killing him.”

“ When Claude first went there,” said Barbara, thoughtfully, “he liked Yevey very much, and said it suited him.”

“ Ay — ay, that was in the summer ! Of course, in the summer it must be very different. But in autumn and winter — Besides, he is not happy at Madame Martin’s. I can see that very well. Claude is extremely sensitive to the least slight.”

“ People who have to earn their daily bread in that way may, no doubt, meet with some small mortifications now and then. But — they are not unbearable,” said Barbara, with a smile that expressed a great deal of sadness.

Those quickly spoken words touched Aunt Judith’s conscience somewhat. Did she not know how many petty affronts and vulgar impertinences Barbara had to suffer in the course of her business as daily governess among the people who were for the most part her inferiors in mind, morals, and manners? Was she not a daily witness of the patient courage with which the girl performed her hard and miserably paid duties? Oh, certainly, she loved and admired Barbara with all her heart. But for Barbara’s brother Claude she cherished a blindly indulgent fondness. Indulgence, indeed, was uncalled-for in Barbara’s case, and this was the key to the different feelings with which their great-aunt regarded the brother and sister.

Miss Judith Hughes belonged to that order of women whose affection is most surely evoked by demands on their forbearance,

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and who inevitably idolize the most fractious and exacting of their children. In spite of her celibacy Miss Hughes had not escaped the cares which usually belong to marriage. It had been her lot to fill a mother’s place to two generations of nephews and nieces. The son and daughter of her widowed brother, David Hughes, had grown up under her care ; and in later years Fate had thrown upon her and upon her nephew, William Hughes, the charge of her niece’s orphan children, Barbara and Claude Copley.

She was a kindly, generous- hearted woman. But, although claiming nothing for herself, she would make unreasonable demands on behalf of her idol Claude, with a sort of vicarious selfishness which it was not always easy to meet patiently. And, moreover, she was subject to quick spirts of temper, that fizzed and flashed and subsided, all with equal rapidity. The good soul was rather proud of this trait, and was apt to boast that she had hot Welsh blood in her veins, and that the Hugheses had never been meek or mil k-and- watery. But, indeed, if one could imagine a mouse with a hasty temper, that creature could scarcely be more harmless or harbor less ferocious intentions than Judith Hughes.

After Barbara’s little speech about mortifications not being unbearable, the old lady sat silent for a short while. At length, looking up appealingly — almost humbly — for her conscience was bearing testimony as to Barbara’s right to speak as she had spoken, she said :

“But his health, Barbara!” Then, finding that Barbara did not answer, she added more emphatically, “ His health , my dear ! Surely that ought to be a paramount consideration !”

“Certainly, Aunt Judith, his health ought to be considered. Only—”

“ Only — ?”

“ Claude sometimes exaggerates, you know.”

Miss Hughes made a little impatient gesture of the shoulders, and drummed with her fingers on the arms of the chair she sat in.

“ I see I shall get no help from yon, Barbara,” she said. “ I did so hope you would stand by me in persuading your Uncle William — ! I wonder you can be so hard to the poor boy.

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Don’t you know he is not strong; ? lie has been delicate from a baby.”

“ Uncle William is sure to judge wisely and kindly,” answered Barbara, trying to evade an irritating discussion.

“It is a miserable sort of position for Claude,” said Aunt Judith, fretfully.

“ Of course it is not a brilliant position to be secretary in a second-rate Swiss pension. But, after all, Madame Martin is kind-hearted. And she is stretching a point to serve us in employing Claude at all. He is gaining experience which may be of great value to him hereafter. He is lodged, fed, and furnished with money enough to buy his clothes. When I remember the difficulty we — you had, you and Uncle William, to find a place for him at all, it seems to me that on the whole Claude has been lucky.”

“ I see. I see very well the line you mean to take. And I do say it is hard, Barbara, when I know that William would let Claude come home at once if you would but join me in urging it.”

“Come home! And what is he to do here? How could we provide for him? How 7 could we ask Uncle William to take any new burden on his heavily laden shoulders?”

“ Then we are to let the poor boy die without making an effort to save him ! Would William wish that ?”

“ Dear Aunt Judith, you and I are both quite sure of Uncle William’s tender goodness. Whatever else we doubt, we can neither of us doubt that.”

Whether intended or not, there was an implied reproach in these words, which stung Aunt Judith. She answered sharply, “It is not merely a question of goodness, but of judgment. I presume you will not maintain that your uncle is infallible !”

At this moment the sound of a key in the lock of the streetdoor checked her speech. She stopped abruptly. “ Here is William,” she said. At the words Barbara sprang up joyfully, and ran into the passage.

And since in the case of the keenest-eyed and most sympathetic of us all, a little knowledge of a man’s previous history helps us to judge him understandingly, it will be well, before he comes forward to speak for himself, to assist the reader in interpreting the present William Hughes by giving a brief summary of his past.

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Chapter II

The Hugheses were tradespeople who, when William was a child, had already been established for two generations in a thriving YV estern seaport. Hut their Welsh blood enabled some members of the family to boast of those “claims of long descent,” which, however they may be smiled at by “ the grand old gardener and his wife,” are undeniably coveted and valued by many millions of their posterity.

Perhaps it may be due to the more imaginative cast of the Celtic mind, as compared with the dull (and often extremely inconvenient) English prejudice in favor of proved facts and plain truths, that among the Welsh, the Highlanders, and the Irish, the happiness afforded by a long genealogy is so very generally diffused. Their royal and martial progenitors of the dimmest antiquity live upon the tongue, and in the internal self-satisfaction of many a Mac, O’, and Ap, whose neighbor Smith or Dobbs can barely set forth the Christian-name of his grandfather. Thus Judith Hughes, although her grandfather did keep a shop, was not to be balked of her birthright, and would proudly repeat that her mother had been an Ap Thomas, and that she thus enjoyed the valuable privilege of being pure Welsh by both sides of the house. She openly regretted that her patronymic, originally Ap Hugh, had been degraded into plain Hughes (which, however, she admitted, she preferred to the more usual form, Hugh) by her grandfather when he crossed the border of the Principality and set up as a bookseller and stationer in the busy mercantile harbor of Marypool. And there is no doubt that she had a great deal of enjoyment in making speeches of this sort.

Her brother, David Hughes, deprived his children of that full comfort in their pedigree which Judith derived from hers, by marrying a young woman named Timmins. But as Harriet Hughes, born Timmins, was not only a remarkably pretty, but a very gentle, sweet-natured young creature, her warm-hearted

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sister-in-law soon loved her as tenderly as she could have loved a lineal descendant of Glendower, and possibly even a little more.

The father of David and Judith had given them an excellent education — an education greatly superior to that of most of their social equals in those days ; and, in the case of the son, the school teaching had been followed by wide and intelligent reading. David Hughes was a man of unusual abilities, and his abilities were of an unusual sort. Had he been free to improve them according to the natural bent of his mind, he would probably have attained distinction. His temperament and talents were essentially artistic. But circumstances so shaped his life as to give him but small opportunity for manifesting the faculties that he possessed. One loophole towards the light, however, was vouchsafed to him. When he inherited the bookseller’s business, which his father had conducted successfully, he inherited with it the ownership of a small local newspaper, which old Mr. Hughes had bought cheap as a speculation.

The life of this obscure little print had appeared to be almost extinct when David Hughes came into possession of it. But its flickering existence soon began to revive under his care, and before very long flamed up with a light that could not be hidden under a bushel. Within a few years it had prospered sufficiently to justify him — or so he thought — in abandoning altogether the dingy book-shop behind whose counter his father and grandfather had stood, and in devoting his fiery energies (which were great) and his available capital (which was small) to the improvement and diffusion of the Phoenix newspaper. After a while he transformed it from a weekly to a daily print — a change that ate up nearly every penny he had in the world. But he was still little past the prime of life, strong and vigorous, and he confidently looked forward to the time when he should receive large profits from the venture, and when the Phoenix would be a handsome property to bequeath to his children.

He had two daughters and- a son. His wife having died when they were still in the nursery, the girls were brought up under the care of their Aunt Judith, who had embarked her little patrimony in establishing a boarding-school at a fashionable watering-place not very far from Marypool. The school prospered exceedingly. Miss Hughes could not pretend to the possession of various

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modern accomplishments, but she had the good sense to secure competent teachers of them by liberal pay, and her native shrewdness was seldom deceived in judging of her subaltern’s qualifications.

David Hughes’s son William, the youngest of his children, inherited his father’s temperament, refined and developed by a more congenial training than his father had ever enjoyed ; and David Hughes was resolved that his son’s genius should have due play. The young fellow was enthusiastically desirous to become a painter, and a painter he should be. At any rate, it should not be David’s fault if he were not one. Mr. Hughes had no dislike or mistrust of art as a calling in life — a state of mind very rare in those days among the class to which he belonged, and not so common at the present enlightened epoch as some people may fondly suppose. Full of hope and high spirits, the lad entered on his chosen career. After some preliminary studies his father sent him to Rome, where he lived strictly within his moderate allowance, worked with enthusiasm, and became a genei'al favorite among the cosmopolitan society of young artists whom he met there.

It was a happy time for the whole family. The Phoenix was daily rising in reputation; Aunt Judith’s school was flourishing; Winifred, the elder of David Hughes’s daughters — a brilliant creature, and the idol of her father’s heart — had obtained an excellent situation as governess in the family of a fashionable London physician ; and her younger sister, Olive, was engaged to marry the son of a wealthy merchant in her native town. This last circumstance was considered by all their neighbors as the crowning good fortune of the Hugheses. And although David did not quite share this feeling, having but a moderately high opinion of Arthur Maddison, his daughter’s betrothed, and disliking a certain purse-proud air of patronage towards him and his which was assumed by the Maddison family generally, yet, since his pretty gentle Olive’s heart was set on the marriage, he did not oppose it.

Yes; that was a happy time for the whole family. But one morning a letter arrived in Marypool which shattered their fortunes and ruined their lives.

Winifred Hughes had eloped from her situation in London with a married man.

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Pat crudely and briefly, that was the announcement made to her father. But the latter was not brief. It was diffuse and incoherent, and, above all, angry — furiously angry; for the writer of it was Mrs. Kirby, Winifred’s employer, and the companion of Winifred’s flight was Mrs. Kirby’s brother.

But the blow was not aggravated by Mrs. Kirby’s eloquence. When a man is stabbed to the heart, what matter whether the weapon be blunt or keen, rusty or shining? Aunt Judith, hastily summoned the same day by poor trembling little Olive, found on reaching Marypool that her brother had started for London ; and upon her fell the bitter task of writing to William. On Olive the effect of the news was almost to paralyze thought. She passed hour after hour sitting motionless and dry-eyed, with a dumb weight of misery oppressing her soul like some monstrous dream. Their Winifred — their proud, high-spirited, brilliant Winifred, to have plunged into this black abyss of shame and misery ! No ! It was incredible — impossible !

A considerable time elapsed before the miserable story was, bit by bit, made clear to them. Nor could any explanation of how it came to pass have given them consolation. In the home where Winifred’s name had been a household word, uttered with profound affection, the chance sound of it came to be like the touch of a cruel hand upon a wound. A few words will suffice to tell all that need be said of her here.

Mrs. Kirby’s brother, Christopher Dalton, had married unhappily, and, when he first met Winifred, had long lived apart from his wife. Winifred at first supposed him to be a widower — a belief which Mrs. Kirby took no pains to overthrow. She only wished it had been well-founded. She regarded her sister-in-law with the strongest aversion, and desired that her very existence should be ignored or forgotten. Mr. Dalton resided habitually in the south of France ; but when Winifred Hughes had been but a few months installed as governess to Dr. Kirby’s daughters, Dalton came, in an evil hour, to England on a visit to his sister. He was a cultivated man, far better able to appreciate Miss Hughes’s unusually brilliant intelligence and accomplishments than were any of the Kirbys. He took the habit of frequenting the schoolroom at first in order to superintend his nieces’ French and Italian studies. And so the end came.

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Mr. Hughes, as lias been said, hurried up to London immediately after receiving the fatal letter ; and after an interview with Dr. Kirby, resolved on starting for the Continent in pursuit of his daughter, but the following morning he was found dead in his bed at the hotel where he had alighted : killed, the doctors said, by a stroke of apoplexy, but, in his sister Judith’s phrase, “dead of a broken heart.”

William, who had set out from Rome in wild haste on receipt of his aunt’s letter, arrived to find his father dead, and his sister Olive deserted by her lover, who had (in deference to the wishes of his family, as he said) broken off his engagement in consequence of the scandal and disgrace which attached in Marypool to the name of Hughes. Blow followed blow. Mr. Hughes’s death put an end to all chance of the prosperous future he had anticipated for the Phoenix. The position of the paper was not yet so assured that it could afford to lose his animating influence, his intelligent inspiration. The Phoenix was sold, and scarcely fetched more than the original cost of its purchase. This meant utter financial ruin to the Hugheses. Their old house was given up, the furniture sold, and the afflicted family had to face the world with poverty added to their load of sorrow.

“ But, God be thanked, we owe not a sixpence,” said Aunt Judith. “ Everything is paid, and we have my school to fall back upon.”

Alas ! the school proved to be a broken reed. It was ruined by the same disaster which had already done so much evil. The watering-place where Miss Judith Hughes had established herself was so near to Marypool as to be within reach of the gossip that was on every tongue there. Various circumstances combined to give notoriety to the wretched story. The fact that Olive’s betrothed belonged to a rich and influential mercantile family in Marypool caused the breaking-off of her engagement to bo a matter of considerable local interest ; and then Mr. Hughes’s sudden death in London, and the subsequent inquest, gave the story fresh publicity by means of the press. Judith struggled on desperately in the teeth of difficulty. Rebuffs met her on every side ; mortifications of all kinds assailed her, and her daily bread was steeped in bitterness. It would have been wiser not to attempt the struggle. Had the good-will of the school been sold without delay, it