"We met him at Bonn on our way to a great family gathering here; where, I must tell you, we are assembled for what I call the Congress of Baden! The chief of the house of Kew is here, and what time he does not devote to skittles, to smoking cigars, to the jeu in the evenings, to Madame d'Ivry, to Madame de Cruchecassee, and the foreign people (of whom there are a host here of the worst kind, as usual), he graciously bestows on me. Lord and Lady Dorking are here, with their meek little daughter, Clara Pulleyn; and Barnes is coming. Uncle Hobson has returned to Lombard Street to relieve guard. I think you will hear before very long of Lady Clara Newcome. Grandmamma, who was to have presided at the Congress of Baden, and still, you know, reigns over the house of Kew, has been stopped at Kissingen with an attack of rheumatism; I pity poor Aunt Julia, who can never leave her. Here are all our news. I declare I have filled the whole page; men write closer than we do. I wear the dear brooch you gave me, often and often; I think of you always, dear, kind uncle, as your affectionate Ethel."

Besides roulette and trente-et-quarante, a number of amusing games are played at Baden, which are not performed, so to speak, sur table. These little diversions and jeux de societe can go on anywhere; in an alley in the park; in a picnic to this old schloss, or that pretty hunting-lodge; at a tea-table in a lodging-house or hotel; in a ball at the Redoute; in the play-rooms behind the backs of the gamblers, whose eyes are only cast upon rakes and rouleaux, and red and black; or on the broad walk in front of the conversation rooms, where thousands of people are drinking and chattering, lounging and smoking, whilst the Austrian brass band, in the little music pavilion, plays the most delightful mazurkas and waltzes. Here the widow plays her black suit and sets her bright eyes against the rich bachelor, elderly or young as may be. Here the artful practitioner, who has dealt in a thousand such games, engages the young simpleton with more money than wit; and knowing his weakness and her skill, we may safely take the odds, and back rouge et couleur to win. Here mamma, not having money, perhaps, but metal more attractive, stakes her virgin daughter against Count Fettacker's forests and meadows; or Lord Lackland plays his coronet, of which the jewels have long since been in pawn, against Miss Bags' three-per-cents. And so two or three funny little games were going on at Baden amongst our immediate acquaintance; besides that vulgar sport round the green table, at which the mob, with whom we have little to do, was elbowing each other. A hint of these domestic prolusions has been given to the reader in the foregoing extract from Miss Ethel Newcome's letter: likewise some passions have been in play, of which a modest young English maiden could not be aware. Do not, however, let us be too prematurely proud of our virtue. That tariff of British virtue is wonderfully organised. Heaven help the society which made its laws! Gnats are shut out of its ports, or not admitted without scrutiny and repugnance, whilst herds of camels are let in. The law professes to exclude some goods (or bads shall we call them?)—well, some articles of baggage, which are yet smuggled openly under the eyes of winking officers, and worn every day without shame. Shame! What is shame? Virtue is very often shameful according to the English social constitution, and shame honourable. Truth, if yours happens to differ from your neighbour's, provokes your friend's coldness, your mother's tears, the world's persecution. Love is not to be dealt in, save under restrictions which kill its sweet, healthy, free commerce. Sin in man is so light, that scarce the fine of a penny is imposed; while for woman it is so heavy that no repentance can wash it out. Ah! yes; all stories are old. You proud matrons in your Mayfair markets, have you never seen a virgin sold, or sold one? Have you never heard of a poor wayfarer fallen among robbers, and not a Pharisee to help him? of a poor woman fallen more sadly yet, abject in repentance and tears, and a crowd to stone her? I pace this broad Baden walk as the sunset is gilding the hills round about, as the orchestra blows its merry tunes, as the happy children laugh and sport in the alleys, as the lamps of the gambling-palace are lighted up, as the throngs of pleasure-hunters stroll, and smoke, and flirt, and hum: and wonder sometimes, is it the sinners who are the most sinful? Is it poor Prodigal yonder amongst the bad company, calling black and red and tossing the champagne; or brother Straitlace that grudges his repentance? Is it downcast Hagar that slinks away with poor little Ishmael in her hand; or bitter old virtuous Sarah, who scowls at her from my demure Lord Abraham's arm?

One day of the previous May, when of course everybody went to visit the Water-colour Exhibitions, Ethel Newcome was taken to see the pictures by her grandmother, that rigorous old Lady Kew, who still proposed to reign over all her family. The girl had high spirit, and very likely hot words had passed between the elder and the younger lady; such as I am given to understand will be uttered in the most polite families. They came to a piece by Mr. Hunt, representing one of those figures which he knows how to paint with such consummate truth and pathos—a friendless young girl cowering in a doorway, evidently without home or shelter. The exquisite fidelity of the details, and the plaintive beauty of the expression of the child, attracted old Lady Kew's admiration, who was an excellent judge of works of art; and she stood for some time looking at the drawing, with Ethel by her side. Nothing, in truth, could be more simple or pathetic; Ethel laughed, and her grandmother looking up from her stick on which she hobbled about, saw a very sarcastic expression in the girl's eyes.

"You have no taste for pictures, only for painters, I suppose," said Lady Kew.

"I was not looking at the picture," said Ethel, still with a smile, "but at the little green ticket in the corner."

"Sold," said Lady Kew. "Of course it is sold; all Mr. Hunt's pictures are sold. There is not one of them here on which you won't see the green ticket. He is a most admirable artist. I don't know whether his comedy or tragedy are the most excellent."

"I think, grandmamma," Ethel said, "we young ladies in the world, when we are exhibiting, ought to have little green tickets pinned on our backs, with 'Sold' written on them; it would prevent trouble and any future haggling, you know. Then at the end of the season the owner would come to carry us home."

Grandmamma only said, "Ethel, you are a fool," and hobbled on to Mr. Cattermole's picture hard by. "What splendid colour; what a romantic gloom; what a flowing pencil and dexterous hand!" Lady Kew could delight in pictures, applaud good poetry, and squeeze out a tear over a good novel too. That afternoon, young Dawkins, the rising water-colour artist, who used to come daily to the gallery and stand delighted before his own piece, was aghast to perceive that there was no green ticket in the corner of his frame, and he pointed out the deficiency to the keeper of the pictures. His landscape, however, was sold and paid for, so no great mischief occurred. On that same evening, when the Newcome family assembled at dinner in Park Lane, Ethel appeared with a bright green ticket pinned in the front of her white muslin frock, and when asked what this queer fancy meant, she made Lady Kew a curtsey, looking her full in the face, and turning round to her father, said, "I am a tableau-vivant, papa. I am Number 46 in the Exhibition of the Gallery of Painters in Water-colours."

"My love, what do you mean?" says mamma; and Lady Kew, jumping up on her crooked stick with immense agility, tore the card out of Ethel's bosom, and very likely would have boxed her ears, but that her parents were present and Lord Kew announced.

Ethel talked about pictures the whole evening, and would talk of nothing else. Grandmamma went away furious. "She told Barnes, and when everybody was gone there was a pretty row in the building," said Madam Ethel, with an arch look, when she narrated the story. "Barnes was ready to kill me and eat me; but I never was afraid of Barnes." And the biographer gathers from this little anecdote, narrated to him, never mind by whom, at a long subsequent period, that there had been great disputes in Sir Brian Newcome's establishment, fierce drawing-room battles, whereof certain pictures of a certain painter might have furnished the cause, and in which Miss Newcome had the whole of the family forces against her. That such battles take place in other domestic establishments, who shall say or shall not say? Who, when he goes out to dinner, and is received by a bland host with a gay shake of the hand, and a pretty hostess with a gracious smile of welcome, dares to think that Mr. Johnson upstairs, half an hour before, was swearing out of his dressing-room at Mrs. Johnson, for having ordered a turbot instead of a salmon, or that Mrs. Johnson now talking to Lady Jones so nicely about their mutual darling children, was crying her eyes out as her maid was fastening her gown, as the carriages were actually driving up? The servants know these things, but not we in the dining-room. Hark with what a respectful tone Johnson begs the clergyman present to say grace!

Whatever these family quarrels may have been, let bygones be bygones, and let us be perfectly sure, that to whatever purpose Miss Ethel Newcome, for good or for evil, might make her mind up, she had quite spirit enough to hold her own. She chose to be Countess of Kew because she chose to be Countess of Kew; had she set her heart on marrying Mr. Kuhn, she would have had her way, and made the family adopt it, and called him dear Fritz, as by his godfathers and godmothers, in his baptism, Mr. Kuhn was called. Clive was but a fancy, if he had even been so much as that, not a passion, and she fancied a pretty four-pronged coronet still more.

So that the diatribe wherein we lately indulged, about the selling of virgins, by no means applies to Lady Anne Newcome, who signed the address to Mrs Stowe, the other day, along with thousands more virtuous British matrons; but should the reader haply say, "Is thy fable, O Poet, narrated concerning Tancred Pulleyn, Earl of Dorking, and Sigismunda, his wife?" the reluctant moralist is obliged to own that the cap does fit those noble personages, of whose lofty society you will, however, see but little.

For though I would like to go into an Indian Brahmin's house, and see the punkahs, and the purdahs and tattys, and the pretty brown maidens with great eyes, and great nose-rings, and painted foreheads, and slim waists cased in Cashmir shawls, Kincob scarfs, curly slippers, gilt trousers, precious anklets and bangles; and have the mystery of Eastern existence revealed to me (as who would not who has read the Arabian Nights in his youth?), yet I would not choose the moment when the Brahmin of the house was dead, his women howling, his priests doctoring his child of a widow, now frightening her with sermons, now drugging her with bang, so as to push her on his funeral pile at last, and into the arms of that carcase, stupefied, but obedient and decorous. And though I like to walk, even in fancy, in an earl's house, splendid, well ordered, where there are feasts and fine pictures and fair ladies and endless books and good company; yet there are times when the visit is not pleasant; and when the parents in that fine house are getting ready their daughter for sale, and frightening away her tears with threats, and stupefying her grief with narcotics, praying her and imploring her, and dramming her and coaxing her, and blessing her, and cursing her perhaps, till they have brought her into such a state as shall fit the poor young thing for that deadly couch upon which they are about to thrust her. When my lord and lady are so engaged I prefer not to call at their mansion, Number 1000 in Grosvenor Square, but to partake of a dinner of herbs rather than of that stalled ox which their cook is roasting whole. There are some people who are not so squeamish. The family comes, of course; the Most Reverend the Lord Arch-Brahmin of Benares will attend the ceremony; there will be flowers and lights and white favours; and quite a string of carriages up to the pagoda; and such a breakfast afterwards; and music in the street and little parish boys hurrahing; and no end of speeches within and tears shed (no doubt), and His Grace the Arch-Brahmin will make a highly appropriate speech, just with a faint scent of incense about it as such a speech ought to have; and the young person will slip away unperceived, and take off her veils, wreaths, orange-flowers, bangles and finery, and will put on a plain dress more suited for the occasion, and the house-door will open—and there comes the SUTTEE in company of the body: yonder the pile is waiting on four wheels with four horses, the crowd hurrahs and the deed is done.

This ceremony amongst us is so stale and common that to be sure there is no need to describe its rites, and as women sell themselves for what you call an establishment every day; to the applause of themselves, their parents, and the world, why on earth should a man ape at originality and pretend to pity them? Never mind about the lies at the altar, the blasphemy against the godlike name of love, the sordid surrender, the smiling dishonour. What the deuce does a mariage de convenance mean but all this, and are not such sober Hymeneal torches more satisfactory often than the most brilliant love matches that ever flamed and burnt out? Of course. Let us not weep when everybody else is laughing: let us pity the agonised duchess when her daughter, Lady Atalanta, runs away with the doctor—of course, that's respectable; let us pity Lady Iphigenia's father when that venerable chief is obliged to offer up his darling child; but it is over her part of the business that a decorous painter would throw the veil now. Her ladyship's sacrifice is performed, and the less said about it the better.

Such was the case regarding an affair which appeared in due subsequence in the newspapers not long afterwards under the fascinating title of "Marriage in High Life," and which was in truth the occasion of the little family Congress of Baden which we are now chronicling. We all know—everybody at least who has the slightest acquaintance with the army list—that, at the commencement of their life, my Lord Kew, my Lord Viscount Rooster, the Earl of Dorking's eldest son, and the Honourable Charles Belsize, familiarly called Jack Belsize, were subaltern officers in one of His Majesty's regiments of cuirassier guards. They heard the chimes at midnight like other young men, they enjoyed their fun and frolics as gentlemen of spirit will do; sowing their wild oats plentifully, and scattering them with boyish profusion. Lady Kew's luck had blessed him with more sacks of oats than fell to the lot of his noble young companions. Lord Dorking's house is known to have been long impoverished; an excellent informant, Major Pendennis, has entertained me with many edifying accounts of the exploits of Lord Rooster's grandfather "with the wild Prince and Poins," of his feats in the hunting-field, over the bottle, over the dice-box. He played two nights and two days at a sitting with Charles Fox, when they both lost sums awful to reckon. He played often with Lord Steyne, and came away, as all men did, dreadful sufferers from those midnight encounters. His descendants incurred the penalties of the progenitor's imprudence, and Chanticlere, though one of the finest castles in England, is splendid but for a month in the year. The estate is mortgaged up to the very castle windows. "Dorking cannot cut a stick or kill a buck in his own park," the good old Major used to tell with tragic accents, "he lives by his cabbages, grapes, and pineapples, and the fees which people give for seeing the place and gardens, which are still the show of the county, and among the most splendid in the island. When Dorking is at Chanticlere, Ballard, who married his sister, lends him the plate and sends three men with it. Four cooks inside, and four maids and six footmen on the roof, with a butler driving, come down from London in a trap, and wait the month. And as the last carriage of the company drives away, the servants' coach is packed, and they all bowl back to town again. It's pitiable, sir, pitiable."

In Lord Kew's youth, the names of himself and his two noble friends appeared on innumerable slips of stamped paper, conveying pecuniary assurances of a promissory nature; all of which promises, my Lord Kew singly and most honourably discharged. Neither of his two companions-in-arms had the means of meeting these engagements. Ballard, Rooster's uncle, was said to make his lordship some allowance. As for Jack Belsize: how he lived; how he laughed; how he dressed himself so well, and looked so fat and handsome; how he got a shilling to pay for a cab or a cigar; what ravens fed him; was a wonder to all. The young men claimed kinsmanship with one another, which those who are learned in the peerage may unravel.

When Lord Dorking's eldest daughter married the Honourable and Venerable Dennis Gallowglass, Archdeacon of Bullintubber (and at present Viscount Gallowglass and Killbrogue, and Lord Bishop of Ballyshannon), great festivities took place at Chanticlere, whither the relatives of the high contracting parties were invited. Among them came poor Jack Belsize, and hence the tears which are dropping at Baden at this present period of our history. Clara Pulleyn was then a pretty little maiden of sixteen, and Jack a handsome guardsman of six or seven and twenty. As she had been especially warned against Jack as a wicked young rogue, whose antecedents were wofully against him; as she was never allowed to sit near him at dinner, or to walk with him, or to play at billiards with him, or to waltz with him; as she was scolded if he spoke a word to her, or if he picked up her glove, or touched her hand in a round game, or caught him when they were playing at blindman's-buff; as they neither of them had a penny in the world, and were both very good-looking, of course Clara was always catching Jack at blindman's-buff; constantly lighting upon him in the shrubberies or corridors, etc. etc. etc. She fell in love (she was not the first) with Jack's broad chest and thin waist; she thought his whiskers as indeed they were, the handsomest pair in all His Majesty's Brigade of Cuirassiers.

We know not what tears were shed in the vast and silent halls of Chanticlere, when the company were gone, and the four cooks, and four maids, six footmen, and temporary butler had driven back in their private trap to the metropolis, which is not forty miles distant from that splendid castle. How can we tell? The guests departed, the lodge-gates shut; all is mystery:—darkness with one pair of wax candles blinking dismally in a solitary chamber; all the rest dreary vistas of brown hollands, rolled Turkey carpets, gaunt ancestors on the walls scowling out of the twilight blank. The imagination is at liberty to depict his lordship, with one candle, over his dreadful endless tapes and papers; her ladyship with the other, and an old, old novel, wherein perhaps, Mrs. Radcliffe describes a castle as dreary as her own; and poor little Clara sighing and crying in the midst of these funereal splendours, as lonely and heart-sick as Oriana in her moated grange:—poor little Clara!

Lord Kew's drag took the young men to London; his lordship driving, and the servants sitting inside. Jack sat behind with the two grooms, and tooted on a cornet-a-piston in the most melancholy manner. He partook of no refreshment on the road. His silence at his clubs was remarked: smoking, billiards, military duties, and this and that, roused him a little, and presently Jack was alive again. But then came the season, Lady Clara Pulleyn's first season in London, and Jack was more alive than ever. There was no ball he did not go to; no opera (that is to say, no opera of certain operas) which he did not frequent. It was easy to see by his face, two minutes after entering a room, whether the person he sought was there or absent; not difficult for those who were in the secret to watch in another pair of eyes the bright kindling signals which answered Jack's fiery glances. Ah! how beautiful he looked on his charger on the birthday, all in a blaze of scarlet, and bullion, and steel. O Jack! tear her out of yon carriage, from the side of yonder livid, feathered, painted, bony dowager! place her behind you on the black charger; cut down the policeman, and away with you! The carriage rolls in through St. James's Park; Jack sits alone with his sword dropped to the ground, or only atra cura on the crupper behind him; and Snip, the tailor, in the crowd, thinks it is for fear of him Jack's head droops. Lady Clara Pulleyn is presented by her mother, the Countess of Dorking; and Jack is arrested that night as he is going out of White's to meet her at the Opera.

Jack's little exploits are known in the Insolvent Court, where he made his appearances as Charles Belsize, commonly called the Honourable Charles Belsize, whose dealings were smartly chronicled by the indignant moralists of the press of those days. The Scourge flogged him heartily. The Whip (of which the accomplished editor was himself in Whitecross Street prison) was especially virtuous regarding him; and the Penny Voice of Freedom gave him an awful dressing. I am not here to scourge sinners; I am true to my party; it is the other side this humble pen attacks; let us keep to the virtuous and respectable, for as for poor sinners they get the whipping-post every day. One person was faithful to poor Jack through all his blunders and follies and extravagance and misfortunes, and that was the pretty young girl of Chanticlere, round whose young affections his luxuriant whiskers had curled. And the world may cry out at Lord Kew for sending his brougham to the Queen's Bench prison, and giving a great feast at Grignon's to Jack on the day of his liberation, but I for one will not quarrel with his lordship. He and many other sinners had a jolly night. They said Kew made a fine speech, in hearing and acknowledging which Jack Belsize wept copiously. Barnes Newcome was in a rage at Jack's manumission, and sincerely hoped Mr. Commissioner would give him a couple of years longer; and cursed and swore with a great liberality on hearing of his liberty.

That this poor prodigal should marry Clara Pulleyn, and by way of a dowry lay his schedule at her feet, was out of the question. His noble father, Lord Highgate, was furious against him; his eldest brother would not see him; he had given up all hopes of winning his darling prize long ago, and one day there came to him a great packet bearing the seal of Chanticlere, containing a wretched little letter signed C. P., and a dozen sheets of Jack's own clumsy writing, delivered who knows how, in what crush-rooms, quadrilles, bouquets, balls, and in which were scrawled Jack's love and passion and ardour. How many a time had he looked into the dictionary at White's, to see whether eternal was spelt with an e, and adore with one a or two! There they were, the incoherent utterances of his brave longing heart; and those two wretched, wretched lines signed C., begging that C.'s little letters might too be returned or destroyed. To do him justice, he burnt them loyally every one along with his own waste paper. He kept not one single little token which she had given him or let him take. The rose, the glove, the little handkerchief which she had dropped to him, how he cried over them! The ringlet of golden hair—he burnt them all, all in his own fire in the prison, save a little, little bit of the hair, which might be any one's, which was the colour of his sister's. Kew saw the deed done; perhaps he hurried away when Jack came to the very last part of the sacrifice, and flung the hair into the fire, where he would have liked to fling his heart and his life too.

So Clara was free, and the year when Jack came out of prison and went abroad, she passed the season in London dancing about night after night, and everybody said she was well out of that silly affair with Jack Belsize. It was then that Barnes Newcome, Esq., a partner of the wealthy banking firm of Hobson Brothers and Newcome, son and heir of Sir Brian Newcome, of Newcome, Bart., and M. P., descended in right line from Bryan de Newcomyn, slain at Hastings, and barber-surgeon to Edward the Confessor, etc. etc., cast the eyes of regard on the Lady Clara Pulleyn, who was a little pale and languid certainly, but had blue eyes, a delicate skin, and a pretty person, and knowing her previous history as well as you who have just perused it, deigned to entertain matrimonial intentions towards her ladyship.

Not one of the members of these most respectable families, excepting poor little Clara perhaps, poor little fish (as if she had any call but to do her duty, or to ask a quelle sauce elle serait mangee), protested against this little affair of traffic; Lady Dorking had a brood of little chickens to succeed Clara. There was little Hennie, who was sixteen, and Biddy, who was fourteen, and Adelaide, and who knows how many more? How could she refuse a young man, not very agreeable it is true, nor particularly amiable, nor of good birth, at least on his father's side, but otherwise eligible, and heir to so many thousands a year? The Newcomes, on their side, think it a desirable match. Barnes, it must be confessed, is growing rather selfish, and has some bachelor ways which a wife will reform. Lady Kew is strongly for the match. With her own family interest, Lord Steyne and Lord Kew, her nephews, and Barnes's own father-in-law, Lord Dorking, in the Peers, why shall not the Newcomes sit there too, and resume the old seat which all the world knows they had in the time of Richard III.? Barnes and his father had got up quite a belief about a Newcome killed at Bosworth, along with King Richard, and hated Henry VII. as an enemy of their noble race. So all the parties were pretty well agreed. Lady Anne wrote rather a pretty little poem about welcoming the white Fawn to the Newcome bowers, and "Clara" was made to rhyme with "fairer," and "timid does and antlered deer to dot the glades of Chanticlere," quite in a picturesque way. Lady Kew pronounced that the poem was very pretty indeed.

The year after Jack Belsize made his foreign tour he returned to London for the season. Lady Clara did not happen to be there; her health was a little delicate, and her kind parents took her abroad; so all things went on very smoothly and comfortably indeed.

Yes, but when things were so quiet and comfortable, when the ladies of the two families had met at the Congress of Baden, and liked each other so much, when Barnes and his papa the Baronet, recovered from his illness, were actually on their journey from Aix-la-Chapelle, and Lady Kew in motion from Kissingen to the Congress of Baden, why on earth should Jack Belsize, haggard, wild, having been winning great sums, it was said, at Hombourg, forsake his luck there, and run over frantically to Baden? He wore a great thick beard, a great slouched hat—he looked like nothing more or less than a painter or an Italian brigand. Unsuspecting Clive, remembering the jolly dinner which Jack had procured for him at the Guards' mess in St. James's, whither Jack himself came from the Horse Guards—simple Clive, seeing Jack enter the town, hailed him cordially, and invited him to dinner, and Jack accepted, and Clive told him all the news he had of the place; how Kew was there, and Lady Anne Newcome, and Ethel; and Barnes was coming. "I am not very fond of him either," says Clive, smiling, when Belsize mentioned his name. So Barnes was coming to marry that pretty little Lady Clara Pulleyn. The knowing youth! I dare say he was rather pleased with his knowledge of the fashionable world, and the idea that Jack Belsize would think he, too, was somebody.

Jack drank an immense quantity of champagne, and the dinner over, as they could hear the band playing from Clive's open windows in the snug clean little Hotel de France, Jack proposed they should go on the promenade. M. de Florac was of the party; he had been exceedingly jocular when Lord Kew's name was mentioned, and said, "Ce petit Kiou! M. le Duc d'Ivry, mon oncle, l'honore d'une amitie toute particuliere." These three gentlemen walked out; the promenade was crowded, the was band playing "Home, sweet Home" very sweetly, and the very first persons they met on the walk were the Lords of Kew and Dorking, on the arm of which latter venerable peer his daughter Lady Clara was hanging.

Jack Belsize, in a velvet coat, with a sombrero slouched over his face, with a beard reaching to his waist, was, no doubt, not recognised at first by the noble lord of Dorking, for he was greeting the other two gentlemen with his usual politeness and affability; when, of a sudden, Lady Clara looking up, gave a little shriek and fell down lifeless on the gravel walk. Then the old earl recognised Mr. Belsize, and Clive heard him say, "You villain, how dare you come here?"

Belsize had flung himself down to lift up Clara, calling her frantically by her name, when old Dorking sprang to seize him.

"Hands off, my lord," said the other, shaking the old man from his back. "Confound you, Jack, hold your tongue," roars out Kew. Clive runs for a chair, and a dozen were forthcoming. Florac skips back with a glass of water. Belsize runs towards the awakening girl: and the father, for an instant losing all patience and self-command, trembling in every limb, lifts his stick, and says again, "Leave her, you ruffian." "Lady Clara has fainted again, sir," says Captain Belsize. "I am staying at the Hotel de France. If you touch me, old man" (this in a very low voice), "by Heaven I shall kill you. I wish you good morning;" and taking a last long look at the lifeless girl, he lifts his hat and walks away. Lord Dorking mechanically takes his hat off, and stands stupidly gazing after him. He beckoned Clive to follow him, and a crowd of the frequenters of the place are by this time closed round the fainting young lady.

Here was a pretty incident in the Congress of Baden!



CHAPTER XXIX. In which Barnes comes a-wooing

Ethel had all along known that her holiday was to be a short one, and that, her papa and Barnes arrived, there was to be no more laughing and fun and sketching and walking with Clive; so she took the sunshine while it lasted, determined to bear with a stout heart the bad weather.

Sir Brian Newcome and his eldest born arrived at Baden on the very night of Jack Belsize's performance upon the promenade; of course it was necessary to inform the young bridegroom of the facts. His acquaintances of the public, who by this time know his temper, and are acquainted with his language, can imagine the explosions of the one and the vehemence of the other; it was a perfect feu d'artifice of oaths which he sent up. Mr. Newcome only fired off these volleys of curses when he was in a passion, but then he was in a passion very frequently.

As for Lady Clara's little accident, he was disposed to treat that very lightly. "Poor dear Clara, of course, of course," he said, "she's been accustomed to fainting fits; no wonder she was agitated on the sight of that villain, after his infernal treatment of her. If I had been there" (a volley of oaths comes here along the whole line) "I should have strangled the scoundrel; I should have murdered him."

"Mercy, Barnes!" cries Lady Anne.

"It was a mercy Barnes was not there," says Ethel, gravely; "a fight between him and Captain Belsize would have been awful indeed."

"I am afraid of no man, Ethel," says Barnes fiercely, with another oath.

"Hit one of your own size, Barnes," says Miss Ethel (who had a number of school-phrases from her little brothers, and used them on occasions skilfully). "Hit Captain Belsize, he has no friends."

As Jack Belsize from his height and strength was fitted to be not only an officer but actually a private in his former gallant regiment, and brother Barnes was but a puny young gentleman, the idea of a personal conflict between them was rather ridiculous. Some notion of this sort may have passed through Sir Brian's mind, for the Baronet said with his usual solemnity, "It is the cause, Ethel, it is the cause, my dear, which gives strength; in such a cause as Barnes's, with a beautiful young creature to protect from a villain, any man would be strong, any man would be strong." "Since his last attack," Barnes used to say, "my poor old governor is exceedingly shaky, very groggy about the head;" which was the fact. Barnes was already master at Newcome and the bank, and awaiting with perfect composure the event which was to place the blood-red hand of the Newcome baronetcy on his own brougham.

Casting his eyes about the room, a heap of drawings, the work of a well-known hand which he hated, met his eye. There were a half-dozen sketches of Baden; Ethel on horseback again; the children and the dogs just in the old way. "D—— him, is he here?" screams out Barnes. "Is that young pothouse villain here? and hasn't Kew knocked his head off? Is Clive Newcome here, sir," he cries out to his father. "The Colonel's son. I have no doubt they met by——"

"By what, Barnes?" says Ethel.

"Clive is here, is he?" says the Baronet; "making caricatures, hey? You did not mention him in your letters, Lady Anne."

Sir Brian was evidently very much touched by his last attack.

Ethel blushed; it was a curious fact, but there had been no mention of Clive in the ladies' letters to Sir Brian.

"My dear, we met him by the merest chance, at Bonn, travelling with a friend of his; and he speaks a little German, and was very useful to us, and took one of the boys in his britzska the whole way."

"Boys always crowd in a carriage," says Sir Brian. "Kick your shins; always in the way. I remember, when we used to come in the carriage from Clapham, when we were boys, I used to kick my brother Tom's shins. Poor Tom, he was a devilish wild fellow in those days. You don't recollect Tom, my Lady Anne?"

Further anecdotes from Sir Brian are interrupted by Lord Kew's arrival. "How dydo, Kew!" cries Barnes. "How's Clara?" and Lord Kew walking up with great respect to shake hands with Sir Brian, says, "I am glad to see you looking so well, sir," and scarcely takes any notice of Barnes. That Mr. Barnes Newcome was an individual not universally beloved, is a point of history of which there can be no doubt.

"You have not told me how Clara is, my good fellow," continues Barnes. "I have heard all about her meeting with that villain, Jack Belsize."

"Don't call names, my good fellow," says Lord Kew. "It strikes me you don't know Belsize well enough to call him by nicknames or by other names. Lady Clara Pulleyn, I believe, is very unwell indeed."

"Confound the fellow! How dared he to come here?" cries Barnes, backing from this little rebuff.

"Dare is another ugly word. I would advise you not to use it to the fellow himself."

"What do you mean?" says Barnes, looking very serious in an instant.

"Easy, my good friend. Not so very loud. It appears, Ethel, that poor Jack—I know him pretty well, you see, Barnes, and may call him by what names I like—had been dining to-day with cousin Clive; he and M. de Florac; and that they went with Jack to the promenade, not in the least aware of Mr. Jack Belsize's private affairs, or of the shindy that was going to happen."

"By Jove, he shall answer for it," cries out Barnes in a loud voice.

"I dare say he will, if you ask him," says the other drily; "but not before ladies. He'd be afraid of frightening them. Poor Jack was always as gentle as a lamb before women. I had some talk with the Frenchman just now," continued Lord Kew gaily, as if wishing to pass over this side of the subject. "Mi Lord Kiou," says he, "we have made your friend Jac to hear reason. He is a little fou, your friend Jack. He drank champagne at dinner like an ogre. How is the charmante Miss Clara? Florac, you see, calls her Miss Clara, Barnes; the world calls her Lady Clara. You call her Clara. You happy dog, you."

"I don't see why that infernal young cub of a Clive is always meddling in our affairs," cries out Barnes, whose rage was perpetually being whipped into new outcries. "Why has he been about this house? Why is he here?"

"It is very well for you that he was, Barnes," Lord Kew said. "The young fellow showed great temper and spirit. There has been a famous row, but don't be alarmed, it is all over. It is all over, everybody may go to bed and sleep comfortably. Barnes need not get up in the morning to punch Jack Belsize's head. I'm sorry for your disappointment, you Fenchurch Street fire-eater. Come away. It will be but proper, you know, for a bridegroom elect to go and ask news of la charmante Miss Clara."

"As we went out of the house," Lord Kew told Clive, "I said to Barnes that every word I had uttered upstairs with regard to the reconciliation was a lie. That Jack Belsize was determined to have his blood, and was walking under the lime-trees by which we had to pass with a thundering big stick. You should have seen the state the fellow was in, sir. The sweet youth started back, and turned as yellow as a cream cheese. Then he made a pretext to go into his room, and said it was for his pocket-handkerchief, but I know it was for a pistol; for he dropped his hand from my arm into his pocket, every time I said 'Here's Jack,' as we walked down the avenue to Lord Dorking's apartment."

A great deal of animated business had been transacted during the two hours subsequent to poor Lady Clara's mishap. Clive and Belsize had returned to the former's quarters, while gentle J. J. was utilising the last rays of the sun to tint a sketch which he had made during the morning. He fled to his own apartment on the arrival of the fierce-looking stranger, whose glaring eyes, pallid looks, shaggy beard, clutched hands, and incessant gasps and mutterings as he strode up and down, might well scare a peaceable person. Very terrible must Jack have looked as he trampled those boards in the growing twilight, anon stopping to drink another tumbler of champagne, then groaning expressions of inarticulate wrath, and again sinking down on Clive's bed with a dropping head and breaking voice, crying, "Poor little thing, poor little devil."

"If the old man sends me a message, you will stand by me, won't you, Newcome? He was a fierce old fellow in his time, and I have seen him shoot straight enough at Chanticlere. I suppose you know what the affair is about?"

"I never heard of it before, but I think I understand," says Clive, gravely.

"I can't ask Kew, he is one of the family; he is going to marry Miss Newcome. It is no use asking him."

All Clive's blood tingled at the idea that any man was going to marry Miss Newcome. He knew it before—a fortnight since, and it was nothing to him to hear it. He was glad that the growing darkness prevented his face from being seen. "I am of the family, too," said Clive, "and Barnes Newcome and I had the same grandfather."

"Oh, yes, old boy—old banker, the weaver, what was he? I forgot," says poor Jack, kicking on Clive's bed, "in that family the Newcomes don't count. I beg your pardon," groans poor Jack.

They lapse into silence, during which Jack's cigar glimmers from the twilight corner where Clive's bed is; whilst Clive wafts his fragrance out of the window where he sits, and whence he has a view of Lady Anne Newcome's windows to the right, over the bridge across the little rushing river, at the Hotel de Hollande hard by. The lights twinkle in the booths under the pretty lime avenues. The hum of distant voices is heard; the gambling-palace is all in a blaze; it is an assembly night, and from the doors of the conversation rooms, as they open and close, escape gusts of harmony. Behind on the little hill the darkling woods lie calm, the edges of the fir-trees cut sharp against the sky, which is clear with a crescent moon and the lambent lights of the starry hosts of heaven. Clive does not see pine-robed hills and shining stars, nor think of pleasure in its palace yonder, nor of pain writhing on his own bed within a few feet of him, where poor Belsize was groaning. His eyes are fixed upon a window whence comes the red light of a lamp, across which shadows float now and again. So every light in every booth yonder has a scheme of its own: every star above shines by itself; and each individual heart of ours goes on brightening with its own hopes, burning with its own desires, and quivering with its own pain.

The reverie is interrupted by the waiter, who announces M. le Vicomte de Florac, and a third cigar is added to the other two smoky lights. Belsize is glad to see Florac, whom he has known in a thousand haunts. "He will do my business for me. He has been out half a dozen times," thinks Jack. It would relieve the poor fellow's boiling blood that some one would let a little out. He lays his affair before Florac; he expects a message from Lord Dorking.

"Comment donc?" cries Florac; "il y avait donc quelque chose! Cette pauvre petite Miss! Vous voulez tuer le pere, apres avoir delaisse la fille? Cherchez d'autres temoins, Monsieur. Le Vicomte de Florac ne se fait pas complice de telles lachetes."

"By Heaven," says Jack, sitting up on the bed, with his eyes glaring, "I have a great mind, Florac, to wring your infernal little neck, and to fling you out of the window. Is all the world going to turn against me? I am half mad as it is. If any man dares to think anything wrong regarding that little angel, or to fancy that she is not as pure, and as good, and as gentle, and as innocent, by Heaven, as any angel there,—if any man thinks I'd be the villain to hurt her, I should just like to see him," says Jack. "By the Lord, sir, just bring him to me. Just tell the waiter to send him upstairs. Hurt her! I hurt her! Oh! I'm a fool! a fool! a d——d fool! Who's that?"

"It's Kew," says a voice out of the darkness from behind cigar No. 4, and Clive now, having a party assembled, scrapes a match and lights his candles.

"I heard your last words, Jack," Lord Kew says bluntly, "and you never spoke more truth in your life. Why did you come here? What right had you to stab that poor little heart over again, and frighten Lady Clara with your confounded hairy face? You promised me you would never see her. You gave your word of honour you wouldn't, when I gave you the money to go abroad. Hang the money, I don't mind that; it was on your promise that you would prowl about her no more. The Dorkings left London before you came there; they gave you your innings. They have behaved kindly and fairly enough to that poor girl. How was she to marry such a bankrupt beggar as you are? What you have done is a shame, Charley Belsize. I tell you it is unmanly and cowardly."

"Pst," says Florac, "numero deux, voila le mot lache."

"Don't bite your thumb at me," Kew went on. "I know you could thrash me, if that's what you mean by shaking your fists; so could most men. I tell you again—you have done a bad deed; you have broken your word of honour, and you knocked down Clara Pulleyn to-day as cruelly as if you had done it with your hand."

With this rush upon him, and fiery assault of Kew, Belsize was quite bewildered. The huge man flung up his great arms, and let them drop at his side as a gladiator that surrenders, and asks for pity. He sank down once more on the iron bed.

"I don't know," says he, rolling and rolling round, in one of his great hands, one of the brass knobs of the bed by which he was seated. "I don't know, Frank," says he, "what the world is coming to, or me either; here is twice in one night I have been called a coward by you, and by that little what-d'-you-call-'m. I beg your pardon, Florac. I don't know whether it is very brave in you to hit a chap when he is down: hit again, I have no friends. I have acted like a blackguard, I own that; I did break my promise; you had that safe enough, Frank, my boy; but I did not think it would hurt her to see me," says he, with a dreadful sob in his voice. "By—I would have given ten years of my life to look at her. I was going mad without her. I tried every place, everything; went to Ems, to Wiesbaden, to Hombourg, and played like hell. It used to excite me once, and now I don't care for it. I won no end of money,—no end for a poor beggar like me, that is; but I couldn't keep away. I couldn't, and if she had been at the North Pole, by Heavens I would have followed her."

"And so just to look at her, just to give your confounded stupid eyes two minutes' pleasure, you must bring about all this pain, you great baby," cries Kew, who was very soft-hearted, and in truth quite torn himself by the sight of poor Jack's agony.

"Get me to see her for five minutes, Kew," cries the other, griping his comrade's hand in his; "but for five minutes."

"For shame," cries Lord Kew, shaking away his hand, "be a man, Jack, and have no more of this puling. It's not a baby, that must have its toy, and cries because it can't get it. Spare the poor girl this pain, for her own sake, and balk yourself of the pleasure of bullying and making her unhappy."

Belsize started up with looks that were by no means pleasant. "There's enough of this chaff I have been called names, and blackguarded quite sufficiently for one sitting. I shall act as I please. I choose to take my own way, and if any gentleman stops me he has full warning." And he fell to tugging his mustachios, which were of a dark tawny hue, and looked as warlike as he had ever done on any field-day.

"I take the warning!" said Lord Kew. "And if I know the way you are going, as I think I do, I will do my best to stop you, madman as you are! You can hardly propose to follow her to her own doorway and pose yourself before your mistress as the murderer of her father, like Rodrigue in the French play. If Rooster were here it would be his business to defend his sister; In his absence I will take the duty on myself, and I say to you, Charles Belsize, in the presence of these gentlemen, that any man who iusults this young lady, who persecutes her with his presence, knowing it can but pain her, who persists in following her when he has given his word of honour to avoid her, that such a man is——"

"What, my Lord Kew?" cries Belsize, whose chest began to heave.

"You know what," answers the other. "You know what a man is who insults a poor woman, and breaks his word of honour. Consider the word said, and act upon it as you think fit."

"I owe you four thousand pounds, Kew," says Belsize, "and I have got four thousand on the bills, besides four hundred when I came out of that place."

"You insult me the more," cries Kew, flashing out, "by alluding to the money. If you will leave this place to-morrow, well and good; if not, you will please to give me a meeting. Mr. Newcome will you be so kind as to act as my friend? We are connexions, you know, and this gentleman chooses to insult a lady who is about to become one of our family."

"C'est bien, milord. Ma foi! c'est d'agir en vrai gentilhomme," says Florac, delighted. "Touchez-la, mon petit Kiou. Tu as du coeur. Godam! you are a brave! A brave fellow!" and the Viscount reached out his hand cordially to Lord Kew.

His purpose was evidently pacific. From Kew he turned to the great guardsman, and taking him by the coat began to apostrophise him. "And you, mon gros," says he, "is there no way of calming this hot blood without a saignee? Have you a penny to the world? Can you hope to carry off your Chimene, O Rodrigue, and live by robbing afterwards on the great way? Suppose you kill ze Fazer, you kill Kiou, you kill Roostere, your Chimene will have a pretty moon of honey."

"What the devil do you mean about your Chimene and your Rodrigue? Do you mean, Viscount——?" says Belsize, "Jack Belsize once more, and he dashed his hand across his eyes. Kew has riled me, and he drove me half wild. I ain't much of a Frenchman, but I know enough of what you said, to say it's true, by Jove, and that Frank Kew's a trump. That's what you mean. Give us your hand, Frank. God bless you, old boy; don't be too hard upon me, you know I'm d——d miserable, that I am. Hullo! What's this?" Jack's pathetic speech was interrupted at this instant, for the Vicomte de Florac in his enthusiasm rushed into his arms, and jumped up towards his face and proceeded to kiss Jack. A roar of immense laughter, as he shook the little Viscount off, cleared the air and ended this quarrel.

Everybody joined in this chorus, the Frenchman with the rest, who said, "he loved to laugh meme when he did not know why." And now came the moment of the evening, when Clive, according to Lord Kew's saying, behaved so well and prevented Barnes from incurring a great danger. In truth, what Mr. Clive did or said amounted exactly to nothing. What moments can we not all remember in our lives when it would have been so much wittier and wiser to say and do nothing?

Florac, a very sober drinker like most of his nation, was blessed with a very fine appetite, which, as he said, renewed itself thrice a day at least. He now proposed supper, and poor Jack was for supper too, and especially more drink, champagne and seltzer-water; "bring champagne and seltzer-water, there is nothing like it." Clive could not object to this entertainment, which was ordered forthwith, and the four young men sat down to share it.

Whilst Florac was partaking of his favourite ecrevisses, giving not only his palate but his hands, his beard, his mustachios and cheeks a full enjoyment of the sauce which he found so delicious, he chose to revert now and again to the occurrences which had just passed, and which had better perhaps have been forgotten, and gaily rallied Belsize upon his warlike humour. "If ze petit pretendu was here, what would you have done wiz him, Jac? You would croquer im, like zis ecrevisse, hein? You would mache his bones, hein?"

Jack, who had forgotten to put the seltzer-water into his champagne, writhed at the idea of having Barnes Newcome before him, and swore, could he but see Barnes, he would take the little villain's life.

And but for Clive, Jack might actually have beheld his enemy. Young Clive after the meal went to the window with his eternal cigar, and of course began to look at That Other window. Here, as he looked, a carriage had at the moment driven up. He saw two servants descend, then two gentlemen, and then he heard a well-known voice swearing at the couriers. To his credit be it said, he checked the exclamation which was on his lips, and when he came back to the table did not announce to Kew or his right-hand neighbour Belsize, that his uncle and Barnes had arrived. Belsize, by this time, had had quite too much wine: when the viscount went away, poor Jack's head was nodding; he had been awake all the night before; sleepless for how many nights previous. He scarce took any notice of the Frenchman's departure.

Lord Kew remained. He was for taking Jack to walk, and for reasoning with him further, and for entering more at large than perhaps he chose to do before the two others upon this family dispute. Clive took a moment to whisper to Lord Kew, "My uncle and Barnes are arrived, don't let Belsize go out; for goodness' sake let us get him to bed."

And lest the poor fellow should take a fancy to visit his mistress by moonlight, when he was safe in his room Lord Kew softly turned the key in Mr. Jack's door.



CHAPTER XXX. A Retreat

As Clive lay awake revolving the strange incidents of the day, and speculating upon the tragedy in which he had been suddenly called to take a certain part, a sure presentiment told him that his own happy holiday was come to an end, and that the clouds and storm which he had always somehow foreboded, were about to break and obscure this brief pleasant period of sunshine. He rose at a very early hour, flung his windows open, looked out no doubt towards those other windows in the neighbouring hotel, where he may have fancied he saw a curtain stirring, drawn by a hand that every hour now he longed more to press. He turned back into his chamber with a sort of groan, and surveyed some of the relics of the last night's little feast, which still remained on the table. There were the champagne-flasks which poor Jack Belsize had emptied, the tall seltzer-water bottle, from which the gases had issued and mingled with the hot air of the previous night's talk; glasses with dregs of liquor, ashes of cigars, or their black stumps, strewing the cloth; the dead men, the burst guns of yesterday's battle. Early as it was, his neighbour J. J had been up before him. Clive could hear him singing as was his wont when the pencil went well, and the colours arranged themselves to his satisfaction over his peaceful and happy work.

He pulled his own drawing-table to the window, set out his board and colour-box, filled a great glass from the seltzer-water bottle, drank some of the vapid liquor, and plunged his brushes in the rest, with which he began to paint. The work all went wrong. There was no song for him over his labour; he dashed brush and board aside after a while, opened his drawers, pulled out his portmanteaus from under the bed, and fell to packing mechanically. J. J. heard the noise from the next room, and came in smiling, with a great painting-brush in his mouth.

"Have the bills in, J. J.," says Clive. "Leave your cards on your friends, old boy; say good-bye to that pretty little strawberry-girl whose picture you have been doing; polish it off to-day, and dry the little thing's tears. I read P.P.C. in the stars last night, and my familiar spirit came to me in a vision, and said, 'Clive, son of Thomas, put thy travelling-boots on.'"

Lest any premature moralist should prepare to cry fie against the good, pure-minded little J. J., I hereby state that his strawberry-girl was a little village maiden of seven years old, whose sweet little picture a bishop purchased at the next year's Exhibition.

"Are you going already?" cries J. J., removing the bit out of his mouth. "I thought you had arranged parties for a week to come, and that the princesses and the duchesses had positively forbidden the departure of your lordship!"

"We have dallied at Capua long enough," says Clive; "and the legions have the route for Rome. So wills Hannibal, the son of Hasdrubal."

"The son of Hasdrubal is quite right," his companion answered; "the sooner we march the better. I have always said it; I will get all the accounts in. Hannibal has been living like a voluptuous Carthaginian prince. One, two, three champagne-bottles! There will be a deuce of a bill to pay."

"Ah! there will be a deuce of a bill to pay," says Clive, with a groan whereof J. J. knew the portent; for the young men had the confidence of youth one in another. Clive was accustomed to pour out his full heart to any crony who was near him; and indeed had he spoken never a word, his growing attachment to his cousin was not hard to see. A hundred times, and with the glowing language and feelings of youth, with the fire of his twenty years, with the ardour of a painter, he had spoken of her and described her. Her magnanimous simplicity, her courage and lofty scorn, her kindness towards her little family, her form, her glorious colour of rich carnation and dazzling white, her queenly grace when quiescent and in motion, had constantly formed the subjects of this young gentleman's ardent eulogies. As he looked at a great picture or statue, as the Venus of Milo, calm and deep, unfathomably beautiful as the sea from which she sprung; as he looked at the rushing Aurora of the Rospigliosi, or the Assumption of Titian, more bright and glorious than sunshine, or that divine Madonna and divine Infant, of Dresden, whose sweet faces must have shone upon Raphael out of heaven; his heart sang hymns, as it were, before these gracious altars; and, somewhat as he worshipped these masterpieces of his art, he admired the beauty of Ethel.

J. J. felt these things exquisitely after his manner, and enjoyed honest Clive's mode of celebration and rapturous fioriture of song; but Ridley's natural note was much gentler, and he sang his hymns in plaintive minors. Ethel was all that was bright and beautiful but—but she was engaged to Lord Kew. The shrewd kind confidant used gently to hint the sad fact to the impetuous hero of this piece. The impetuous hero knew this quite well. As he was sitting over his painting-board he would break forth frequently, after his manner, in which laughter and sentiment were mingled, and roar out with all the force of his healthy young lungs——

"But her heart it is another's, she never—can—be—mine;"

and then hero and confidant would laugh each at his drawing-table. Miss Ethel went between the two gentlemen by the name of Alice Grey.

Very likely, Night, the Grey Mentor, had given Clive Newcome the benefit of his sad counsel. Poor Belsize's agony, and the wretchedness of the young lady who shared in the desperate passion, may have set our young man a-thinking; and Lord Kew's frankness and courage, and honour, whereof Clive had been a witness during the night, touched his heart with a generous admiration, and manned him for a trial which he felt was indeed severe. He thought of the dear old father ploughing the seas on the way to his duty, and was determined, by Heaven's help, to do his own. Only three weeks since, when strolling careless about Bonn he had lighted upon Ethel and the laughing group of little cousins, he was a boy as they were, thinking but of the enjoyment of the day and the sunshine, as careless as those children. And now the thoughts and passions which had sprung up in a week or two, had given him an experience such as years do not always furnish; and our friend was to show, not only that he could feel love in his heart, but that he could give proof of courage, and self-denial, and honour.

"Do you remember, J. J.," says he, as boots and breeches went plunging into the portmanteau, and with immense energy, he pummels down one upon the other, "do you remember" (a dig into the snowy bosom of a dress cambric shirt) "my dear old father's only campaign story of his running away" (a frightful blow into the ribs of a waistcoat), "running away at Asseer-Ghur?"

"Asseer-What?" says J. J. wondering.

"The siege of Asseer-Ghur!" says Clive, "fought in the eventful year 1803: Lieutenant Newcome, who has very neat legs, let me tell you, which also he has imparted to his descendants, had put on a new pair of leather breeches, for he likes to go handsomely dressed into action. His horse was shot, the enemy were upon him, and the governor had to choose between death and retreat. I have heard his brother-officers say that my dear old father was the bravest man they ever knew, the coolest hand, sir. What do you think it was Lieutenant Newcome's duty to do under these circumstances? To remain alone as he was, his troop having turned about, and to be cut down by the Mahratta horsemen—to perish or to run, sir?"

"I know which I should have done," says Ridley.

"Exactly. Lieutenant Newcome adopted that course. His bran-new leather breeches were exceedingly tight, and greatly incommoded the rapidity of his retreating movement, but he ran away, sir, and afterwards begot your obedient servant. That is the history of the battle of Asseer-Ghur."

"And now for the moral," says J. J., not a little amused.

"J. J., old boy, this is my battle of Asseer-Ghur. I am off. Dip into the money-bag: pay the people: be generous, J. J., but not too prodigal. The chambermaid is ugly, yet let her not want for a crown to console her at our departure. The waiters have been brisk and servile; reward the slaves for their labours. Forget not the humble boots, so shall he bless us when we depart. For artists are gentlemen, though Ethel does not think so. De—No—God bless her, God bless her," groans out Clive, cramming his two fists into his eyes. If Ridley admired him before, he thought none the worse of him now. And if any generous young fellow in life reads the Fable, which may possibly concern him, let him take a senior's counsel and remember that there are perils in our battle, God help us, from which the bravest had best run away.

Early as the morning yet was, Clive had a visitor, and the door opened to let in Lord Kew's honest face. Ridley retreated before it into his own den; the appearance of earls scared the modest painter, though he was proud and pleased that his Clive should have their company. Lord Kew indeed lived in more splendid apartments on the first floor of the hotel, Clive and his friend occupying a couple of spacious chambers on the second story. "You are an early bird," says Kew. "I got up myself in a panic before daylight almost; Jack was making a deuce of a row in his room, and fit to blow the door out. I have been coaxing him for this hour; I wish we had thought of giving him a dose of laudanum last night; if it finished him, poor old boy, it would do him no harm." And then, laughing, he gave Clive an account of his interview with Barnes on the previous night. "You seem to be packing up to go, too," says Lord Kew, with a momentary glance of humour darting from his keen eyes. "The weather is breaking up here, and if you are going to cross the St. Gothard, as the Newcomes told me, the sooner the better. It's bitter cold over the mountains in October."

"Very cold," says Clive, biting his nails.

"Post or Vett.?" asks my lord.

"I bought a carriage at Frankfort," says Clive, in an offhand manner.

"Hulloh!" cries the other, who was perfectly kind, and entirely frank and pleasant, and showed no difference in his conversation with men of any degree, except perhaps that to his inferiors in station he was a little more polite than to his equals; but who would as soon have thought of a young artist leaving Baden in a carriage of his own as of his riding away on a dragon.

"I only gave twenty pounds for the carriage; it's a little light thing, we are two, a couple of horses carry us and our traps, you know, and we can stop where we like. I don't depend upon my profession," Clive added, with a blush. "I made three guineas once, and that is the only money I ever gained in my life."

"Of course, my dear fellow, have not I been to your father's house? At that pretty ball, and seen no end of fine people there? We are young swells. I know that very well. We only paint for pleasure."

"We are artists, and we intend to paint for money, my lord," says Clive. "Will your lordship give me an order?"

"My lordship serves me right," the other said. "I think, Newcome, as you are going, I think you might do some folks here a good turn, though the service is rather a disagreeable one. Jack Belsize is not fit to be left alone. I can't go away from here just now for reasons of state. Do be a good fellow and take him with you. Put the Alps between him and this confounded business, and if I can serve you in any way I shall be delighted, if you will furnish me with the occasion. Jack does not know yet that our amiable Barnes is here. I know how fond you are of him. I have heard the story—glass of claret and all. We all love Barnes. How that poor Lady Clara can have accepted him the Lord knows. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, especially women."

"Good heavens," Clive broke out, "can it be possible that a young creature can have been brought to like such a selfish, insolent coxcomb as that, such a cocktail as Barnes Newcome? You know very well, Lord Kew, what his life is. There was a poor girl whom he brought out of a Newcome factory when he was a boy himself, and might have had a heart one would have thought, whom he ill-treated, whom he deserted, and flung out of doors without a penny, upon some pretence of her infidelity towards him; who came and actually sat down on the steps of Park Lane with a child on each side of her, and not their cries and their hunger, but the fear of his own shame and a dread of a police-court, forced him to give her a maintenance. I never see the fellow but I loathe him, and long to kick him out of window and this man is to marry a noble young lady because forsooth he is a partner in a bank, and heir to seven or eight thousand a year. Oh, it is a shame, it is a shame! It makes me sick when I think of the lot which the poor thing is to endure."

"It is not a nice story," said Lord Kew, rolling a cigarette; "Barnes is not a nice man. I give you that in. You have not heard it talked about in the family, have you?"

"Good heavens! you don't suppose that I would speak to Ethel, to Miss Newcome, about such a foul subject as that?" cries Clive. "I never mentioned it to my own father. He would have turned Barnes out of his doors if he had known it."

"It was the talk about town, I know," Kew said dryly. "Everything is told in those confounded clubs. I told you I give up Barnes. I like him no more than you do. He may have treated the woman ill, I suspect he has not an angelical temper: but in this matter he has not been so bad, so very bad as it would seem. The first step is wrong, of course—those factory towns—that sort of thing, you know—well, well, the commencement of the business is a sad one. But he is not the only sinner in London. He has declared on his honour to me when the matter was talked about, and he was coming on for election at Bays's, and was as nearly as any man I ever knew in my life,—he declared on his word that he only parted from poor Mrs. Delacy, (Mrs. Delacy, the devil used to call herself) because he found that she had served him—as such women will serve men. He offered to send his children to school in Yorkshire—rather a cheap school—but she would not part with them. She made a scandal in order to get good terms, and she succeeded. He was anxious to break the connexion: he owned it had hung like a millstone round his neck and caused him a great deal of remorse—annoyance you may call it. He was immensely cut up about it. I remember, when that fellow was hanged for murdering a woman, Barnes said he did not wonder at his having done it. Young men make those connexions in their early lives and rue them all their days after. He was heartily sorry, that we may take for granted. He wished to lead a proper life. My grandmother managed this business with the Dorkings. Lady Kew still pulls stroke oar in our boat, you know, and the old woman will not give up her place. They know everything, the elders do. He is a clever fellow. He is witty in his way. When he likes he can make himself quite agreeable to some people. There has been no sort of force. You don't suppose young ladies are confined in dungeons and subject to tortures, do you? But there is a brood of Pulleyns at Chanticlere, and old Dorking has nothing to give them. His daughter accepted Barnes of her own free will, he knowing perfectly well of that previous affair with Jack. The poor devil bursts into the place yesterday and the girl drops down in a faint. She will see Belsize this very day if he likes. I took a note from Lady Dorking to him at five o'clock this morning. If he fancies that there is any constraint put upon Lady Clara's actions she will tell him with her own lips that she has acted of her own free will. She will marry the husband she has chosen and do her duty by him. You are quite a young un who boil and froth up with indignation at the idea that a girl hardly off with an old love should take on with a new——"

"I am not indignant with her," says Clive, "for breaking with Belsize, but for marrying Barnes."

"You hate him, and you know he is your enemy; and, indeed, young fellow, he does not compliment you in talking about you. A pretty young scapegrace he has made you out to be, and very likely thinks you to be. It depends on the colours in which a fellow is painted. Our friends and our enemies draw us,—and I often think both pictures are like," continued the easy world-philosopher. "You hate Barnes, and cannot see any good in him. He sees none in you. There have been tremendous shindies in Park Lane a propos of your worship, and of a subject which I don't care to mention," said Lord Kew, with some dignity; "and what is the upshot of all this malevolence? I like you; I like your father, I think he is a noble old boy; there are those who represented him as a sordid schemer. Give Mr. Barnes the benefit of common charity at any rate; and let others like him, if you do not.

"And as for this romance of love," the young nobleman went on, kindling as he spoke, and forgetting the slang and colloquialisms with which we garnish all our conversation—"this fine picture of Jenny and Jessamy falling in love at first sight, billing and cooing in an arbour, and retiring to a cottage afterwards to go on cooing and billing—Psha! what folly is this! It is good for romances, and for misses to sigh about; but any man who walks through the world with his eyes open, knows how senseless is all this rubbish. I don't say that a young man and woman are not to meet, and to fall in love that instant, and to marry that day year, and love each other till they are a hundred; that is the supreme lot—but that is the lot which the gods only grant to Baucis and Philemon, and a very, very few besides. As for the rest, they must compromise; make themselves as comfortable as they can, and take the good and the bad together. And as for Jenny and Jessamy, by Jove! look round among your friends, count up the love matches, and see what has been the end of most of them! Love in a cottage! Who is to pay the landlord for the cottage? Who is to pay for Jenny's tea and cream, and Jessamy's mutton-chops? If he has cold mutton, he will quarrel with her. If there is nothing in the cupboard, a pretty meal they make. No, you cry out against people in our world making money marriages. Why, kings and queens marry on the same understanding. My butcher has saved a stockingful of money, and marries his daughter to a young salesman; Mr. and Mrs. Salesman prosper in life, and get an alderman's daughter for their son. My attorney looks out amongst his clients for an eligible husband for Miss Deeds; sends his son to the bar, into Parliament, where he cuts a figure and becomes attorney-general, makes a fortune, has a house in Belgrave Square, and marries Miss Deeds of the second generation to a peer. Do not accuse us of being more sordid than our neighbours. We do but as the world does; and a girl in our society accepts the best party which offers itself, just as Miss Chummey, when entreated by two young gentlemen of the order of costermongers, inclines to the one who rides from market on a moke, rather than to the gentleman who sells his greens from a handbasket."

This tirade, which his lordship delivered with considerable spirit, was intended no doubt to carry a moral for Clive's private hearing; and which, to do him justice, the youth was not slow to comprehend. The point was, "Young man, if certain persons of rank choose to receive you very kindly, who have but a comely face, good manners, and three or four hundred pounds a year, do not presume upon their good-nature, or indulge in certain ambitious hopes which your vanity may induce you to form. Sail down the stream with the brass-pots, Master Earthen-pot, but beware of coming too near! You are a nice young man, but there are prizes which are some too good for you, and are meant for your betters. And you might as well ask the prime minister for the next vacant garter as expect to wear on your breast such a star as Ethel Newcome."

Before Clive made his accustomed visit to his friends at the hotel opposite, the last great potentiary had arrived who was to take part in the family Congress of Baden. In place of Ethel's flushing cheeks and bright eyes, Clive found, on entering Lady Anne Newcome's sitting-room, the parchment-covered features and the well-known hooked beak of the old Countess of Kew. To support the glances from beneath the bushy black eyebrows on each side of that promontory was no pleasant matter. The whole family cowered under Lady Kew's eyes and nose, and she ruled by force of them. It was only Ethel whom these awful features did not utterly subdue and dismay.

Besides Lady Kew, Clive had the pleasure of finding his lordship, her grandson, Lady Anne and children of various sizes, and Mr. Barnes; not one of whom was the person whom Clive desired to behold.

The queer glance in Kew's eye directed towards Clive, who was himself not by any means deficient in perception, informed him that there had just been a conversation in which his own name had figured. Having been abusing Clive extravagantly as he did whenever he mentioned his cousin's name, Barnes must needs hang his head when the young fellow came in. His hand was yet on the chamber-door, and Barnes was calling his miscreant and scoundrel within; so no wonder Barnes had a hangdog look. But as for Lady Kew, that veteran diplomatist allowed no signs of discomfiture, or any other emotion, to display themselves on her ancient countenance. Her bushy eyebrows were groves of mystery, her unfathomable eyes were wells of gloom.

She gratified Clive by a momentary loan of two knuckly old fingers, which he was at liberty to hold or to drop; and then he went on to enjoy the felicity of shaking hands with Mr. Barnes, who, observing and enjoying his confusion over Lady Kew's reception, determined to try Clive in the same way, and he gave Clive at the same time a supercilious "How de dah," which the other would have liked to drive down his throat. A constant desire to throttle Mr. Barnes—to beat him on the nose—to send him flying out of window, was a sentiment with which this singular young man inspired many persons whom he accosted. A biographer ought to be impartial, yet I own, in a modified degree, to have partaken of this sentiment. He looked very much younger than his actual time of life, and was not of commanding stature; but patronised his equals, nay, let us say, his betters, so insufferably, that a common wish for his suppression existed amongst many persons in society.

Clive told me of this little circumstance, and I am sorry to say of his own subsequent ill behaviour. "We were standing apart from the ladies," so Clive narrated, "when Barnes and I had our little passage-of-arms. He had tried the finger business upon me before, and I had before told him, either to shake hands or to leave it alone. You know the way in which the impudent little beggar stands astride, and sticks his little feet out. I brought my heel well down on his confounded little varnished toe, and gave it a scrunch which made Mr. Barnes shriek out one of his loudest oaths."

"D—— clumsy ——!" screamed out Barnes.

Clive said, in a low voice, "I thought you only swore at women, Barnes."

"It is you that say things before women, Clive," cries his cousin, looking very furious.

Mr. Clive lost all patience. "In what company, Barnes, would you like me to say, that I think you are a snob? Will you have it on the Parade? Come out and I will speak to you."

"Barnes can't go out on the Parade," cries Lord Kew, bursting out laughing: "there's another gentleman there wanting him." And two of the three young men enjoyed this joke exceedingly. I doubt whether Barnes Newcome Newcome, Esq., of Newcome, was one of the persons amused.

"What wickedness are you three boys laughing at?" cries Lady Anne, perfectly innocent and good-natured; "no good, I will be bound. Come here, Clive." Our young friend, it must be premised, had no sooner received the thrust of Lady Kew's two fingers on entering, than it had been intimated to him that his interview with that gracious lady was at an end. For she had instantly called her daughter to her, with whom her ladyship fell a-whispering; and then it was that Clive retreated from Lady Kew's hand, to fall into Barnes's.

"Clive trod on Barnes's toe," cries out cheery Lord Kew, "and has hurt Barnes's favourite corn, so that he cannot go out, and is actually obliged to keep the room. That's what we were laughing at."

"Hem!" growled Lady Kew. She knew to what her grandson alluded. Lord Kew had represented Jack Belsize, and his thundering big stick, in the most terrific colours to the family council. The joke was too good a one not to serve twice.

Lady Anne, in her whispered conversation with the old Countess, had possibly deprecated her mother's anger towards poor Clive, for when he came up to the two ladies, the younger took his hand with great kindness, and said, "My dear Clive, we are very sorry you are going. You were of the greatest use to us on the journey. I am sure you have been uncommonly good-natured and obliging, and we shall all miss you very much." Her gentleness smote the generous young fellow, and an emotion of gratitude towards her for being so compassionate to him in his misery, caused his cheeks to blush and his eyes perhaps to moisten. "Thank you, dear aunt," says he, "you have been very good and kind to me. It is I that shall feel lonely; but—but it is quite time that I should go to my work."

"Quite time!" said the severe possessor of the eagle beak. "Baden is a bad place for young men. They make acquaintances here of which very little good can come. They frequent the gambling-tables, and live with the most disreputable French Viscounts. We have heard of your goings-on, sir. It is a great pity that Colonel Newcome did not take you with him to India."

"My dear mamma," cries Lady Anne, "I am sure Clive has been a very good boy indeed." The old lady's morality put a stop to Clive's pathetic mood, and he replied with a great deal of spirit, "Dear Lady Anne, you have been always very good, and kindness is nothing surprising from you; but Lady Kew's advice, which I should not have ventured to ask, is an unexpected favour; my father knows the extent of the gambling transactions to which your ladyship was pleased to allude, and introduced me to the gentleman whose acquaintance you don't seem to think eligible."

"My good young man, I think it is time you were off," Lady Kew said, this time with great good-humour; she liked Clive's spirit, and as long as he interfered with none of her plans, was quite disposed to be friendly with him. "Go to Rome, go to Florence, go wherever you like, and study very hard, and make very good pictures, and come back again, and we shall all be very glad to see you. You have very great talents—these sketches are really capital."

"Is not he very clever, mamma?" said kind Lady Anne, eagerly. Clive felt the pathetic mood coming on again, and an immense desire to hug Lady Anne in his arms, and to kiss her. How grateful are we—how touched a frank and generous heart is for a kind word extended to us in our pain! The pressure of a tender hand nerves a man for an operation, and cheers him for the dreadful interview with the surgeon.

That cool old operator, who had taken Mr. Clive's case in hand, now produced her shining knife, and executed the first cut with perfect neatness and precision. "We are come here, as I suppose you know, Mr. Newcome, upon family matters, and I frankly tell you that I think, for your own sake, you would be much better away. I wrote my daughter a great scolding when I heard that you were in this place."

"But it was by the merest chance, mamma, indeed it was," cries Lady Anne.

"Of course, by the merest chance, and by the merest chance I heard of it too. A little bird came and told me at Kissingen. You have no more sense, Anne, than a goose. I have told you so a hundred times. Lady Anne requested you to stay, and I, my good young friend, request you to go away."

"I needed no request," said Clive. "My going, Lady Kew, is my own act. I was going without requiring any guide to show me to the door."

"No doubt you were, and my arrival is the signal for Mr. Newcome's bon jour. I am Bogey, and I frighten everybody away. By the scene which you witnessed yesterday, my good young friend, and all that painful esclandre on the promenade, you must see how absurd, and dangerous, and wicked—yes, wicked it is for parents to allow intimacies to spring up between young people, which can only lead to disgrace and unhappiness. Lady Dorking was another good-natured goose. I had not arrived yesterday ten minutes, when my maid came running in to tell me of what had occurred on the promenade; and, tired as I was, I went that instant to Jane Dorking and passed the evening with her, and that poor little creature to whom Captain Belsize behaved so cruelly. She does not care a fig for him—not one fig. Her childish inclination is passed away these two years, whilst Mr. Jack was performing his feats in prison; and if the wretch flatters himself that it was on his account she was agitated yesterday, he is perfectly mistaken, and you may tell him Lady Kew said so. She is subject to fainting fits. Dr. Finck has been attending her ever since she has been here. She fainted only last Tuesday at the sight of a rat walking about their lodgings (they have dreadful lodgings, the Dorkings), and no wonder she was frightened at the sight of that great coarse tipsy wretch! She is engaged, as you know, to your connexion, my grandson, Barnes:—in all respects a most eligible union. The rank of life of the parties suits them to one another. She is a good young woman, and Barnes has experienced from persons of another sort such horrors, that he will know the blessing of domestic virtue. It was high time he should. I say all this in perfect frankness to you.

"Go back again and play in the garden, little brats" (this to the innocents who came frisking in from the lawn in front of the windows). "You have been? And Barnes sent you in here? Go up to Miss Quigley. No, stop. Go and tell Ethel to come down; bring her down with you. Do you understand?"

The unconscious infants toddle upstairs to their sister; and Lady Kew blandly says, "Ethel's engagement to my grandson, Lord Kew, has long been settled in our family, though these things are best not talked about until they are quite determined, you know, my dear Mr. Newcome. When we saw you and your father in London, we heard that you too-that you too were engaged to a young lady in your own rank of life, a Miss—what was her name?—Miss MacPherson, Miss Mackenzie. Your aunt, Mrs. Hobson Newcome, who I must say is a most blundering silly person, had set about this story. It appears there is no truth in it. Do not look surprised that I know about your affairs. I am an old witch, and know numbers of things."

And, indeed, how Lady Kew came to know this fact, whether her maid corresponded with Lady Anne's maid, what her ladyship's means of information were, avowed or occult, this biographer has never been able to ascertain. Very likely Ethel, who in these last three weeks had been made aware of that interesting circumstance, had announced it to Lady Kew in the course of a cross-examination, and there may have been a battle between the granddaughter and the grandmother, of which the family chronicler of the Newcomes has had no precise knowledge. That there were many such I know—skirmishes, sieges, and general engagements. When we hear the guns, and see the wounded, we know there has been a fight. Who knows had there been a battle-royal, and was Miss Newcome having her wounds dressed upstairs?

"You will like to say good-bye to your cousin, I know," Lady Kew continued, with imperturbable placidity. "Ethel, my dear, here is Mr. Clive Newcome, who has come to bid us all good-bye." The little girls came trotting down at this moment, each holding a skirt of their elder sister. She looked rather pale, but her expression was haughty—almost fierce.

Clive rose up as she entered, from the sofa by the old Countess's side, which place she had pointed him to take during the amputation. He rose up and put his hair back off his face, and said very calmly, "Yes, I'm come to say good-bye. My holidays are over, and Ridley and I are off for Rome; good-bye, and God bless you, Ethel."

She gave him her hand and said, "Good-bye, Clive," but her hand did not return his pressure, and dropped to her side, when he let it go.

Hearing the words good-bye, little Alice burst into a howl, and little Maude, who was an impetuous little thing, stamped her little red shoes and said, "It san't be good-bye. Tlive san't go." Alice, roaring, clung hold of Clive's trousers. He took them up gaily, each on an arm, as he had done a hundred times, and tossed the children on to his shoulders, where they used to like to pull his yellow mustachios. He kissed the little hands and faces, and a moment after was gone.

"Qu'as-tu?" says M. de Florac, meeting him going over the bridge to his own hotel. "Qu'as-tu, mon petit Claive? Est-ce qu'on vient de t'arracher une dent?"

"C'est ca," says Clive, and walked into the Hotel de France. "Hulloh! J. J.! Ridley!" he sang out. "Order the trap out and let's be off." "I thought we were not to march till to-morrow," says J. J., divining perhaps that some catastrophe had occurred. Indeed, Mr. Clive was going a day sooner than he had intended. He woke at Fribourg the next morning. It was the grand old cathedral he looked at, not Baden of the pine-clad hills, of the pretty walks and the lime-tree avenues. Not Baden, the prettiest booth of all Vanity Fair. The crowds and the music, the gambling-tables and the cadaverous croupiers and chinking gold, were far out of sight and hearing. There was one window in the Hotel de Hollande that he thought of, how a fair arm used to open it in the early morning, how the muslin curtain in the morning air swayed to and fro. He would have given how much to see it once more! Walking about at Fribourg in the night, away from his companions, he had thought of ordering horses, galloping back to Baden, and once again under that window, calling Ethel, Ethel. But he came back to his room and the quiet J. J., and to poor Jack Belsize, who had had his tooth taken out too.

We had almost forgotten Jack, who took a back seat in Clive's carriage, as befits a secondary personage in this history, and Clive in truth had almost forgotten him too. But Jack having his own cares and business, and having rammed his own carpet-bag, brought it down without a word, and Clive found him environed in smoke when he came down to take his place in the little britzska. I wonder whether the window at the Hotel de Hollande saw him go? There are some curtains behind which no historian, however prying, is allowed to peep.

"Tiens, le petit part," says Florac of the cigar, who was always sauntering. "Yes, we go," says Clive. "There is a fourth place, Viscount; will you come too?"

"I would love it well," replies Florac, "but I am here in faction. My cousin and seigneur M. le Duc d'Ivry is coming all the way from Bagneres de Bigorre. He says he counts on me:—affaires mon cher, affaires d'etat."

"How pleased the duchess will be! Easy with that bag!" shouts Clive. "How pleased the princess will be!" In truth he hardly knew what he was saying.

"Vous croyez; vous croyez," says M. de Florac. "As you have a fourth place, I know who had best take it."

"And who is that?" asked the young traveller.

Lord Kew and Barnes, Esq., of Newcome, came out of the Hotel de Hollande at this moment. Barnes slunk back, seeing Jack Belsize's hairy face. Kew ran over the bridge. "Good-bye, Clive. Good-bye, Jack." "Good-bye, Kew." It was a great handshake. Away goes the postillion blowing his horn, and young Hannibal has left Capua behind him.



CHAPTER XXXI. Madame la Duchesse

In one of Clive Newcome's letters from Baden, the young man described to me, with considerable humour and numerous illustrations as his wont was, a great lady to whom he was presented at that watering-place by his friend Lord Kew. Lord Kew had travelled in the East with Monsieur le Duc and Madame la Duchesse d'Ivry—the prince being an old friend of his lordship's family. He is the "Q" of Madame d'Ivry's book of travels, Footprints of the Gazelles, by a daughter of the Crusaders, in which she prays so fervently for Lord Kew's conversion. He is the "Q" who rescued the princess from the Arabs, and performed many a feat which lives in her glowing pages. He persists in saying that he never rescued Madame la Princesse from any Arabs at all, except from one beggar who was bawling out for bucksheesh, and whom Kew drove away with a stick. They made pilgrimages to all the holy places, and a piteous sight it was, said Lord Kew, to see the old prince in the Jerusalem processions at Easter pacing with bare feet and a candle. Here Lord Kew separated from the prince's party. His name does not occur in the last part of the Footprints; which, in truth, are filled full of strange rhapsodies, adventures which nobody was but the princess, and mystic disquisitions. She hesitates at nothing, like other poets of her nation: not profoundly learned, she invents where she has not acquired: mingles together religion and the opera; and performs Parisian pas-de-ballet before the gates of monasteries and the cells of anchorites. She describes, as if she had herself witnessed the catastrophe, the passage of the Red Sea: and, as if there were no doubt of the transaction, an unhappy love-affair between Pharaoh's eldest son and Moses's daughter. At Cairo, apropos of Joseph's granaries, she enters into a furious tirade against Putiphar, whom she paints as an old savage, suspicious and a tyrant. They generally have a copy of the Footprints of the Gazelles at the Circulating Library at Baden, as Madame d'Ivry constantly visits that watering-place. M. le Duc was not pleased with the book, which was published entirely without his concurrence, and which he described as one of the ten thousand follies of Madame la Duchesse.

This nobleman was five-and-forty years older than his duchess. France is the country where that sweet Christian institution of mariages de convenance (which so many folks of the family about which this story treats are engaged in arranging) is most in vogue. There the newspapers daily announce that M. de Foy has a bureau de confiance, where families may arrange marriages for their sons and daughters in perfect comfort and security. It is but a question of money on one side and the other. Mademoiselle has so many francs of dot; Monsieur has such and such rentes or lands in possession or reversion, an etude d'avoue, a shop with a certain clientele bringing him such and such an income, which may be doubled by the judicious addition of so much capital, and the pretty little matrimonial arrangement is concluded (the agent touching his percentage), or broken off, and nobody unhappy, and the world none the wiser. The consequences of the system I do not pretend personally to know; but if the light literature of a country is a reflex of its manners, and French novels are a picture of French life, a pretty society must that be into the midst of which the London reader may walk in twelve hours from this time of perusal, and from which only twenty miles of sea separate us.

When the old Duke d'Ivry, of the ancient ancient nobility of France, an emigrant with Artois, a warrior with Conde, an exile during the reign of the Corsican usurper, a grand prince, a great nobleman afterwards, though shorn of nineteen-twentieths of his wealth by the Revolution,—when the Duke d'Ivry lost his two sons, and his son's son likewise died, as if fate had determined to end the direct line of that noble house, which had furnished queens to Europe, and renowned chiefs to the Crusaders—being of an intrepid spirit, the Duke was ill disposed to yield to his redoubtable energy, in spite of the cruel blows which the latter had inflicted upon him, and when he was more than sixty years of age, three months before the July Revolution broke out, a young lady of a sufficient nobility, a virgin of sixteen, was brought out of the convent of the Sacre Coeur at Paris, and married with immense splendour and ceremony to this princely widower. The most august names signed the book of the civil marriage. Madame la Dauphine and Madame la Duchesse de Berri complimented the young bride with royal favours. Her portrait by Dubufe was in the Exhibition next year, a charming young duchess indeed, with black eyes, and black ringlets, pearls on her neck, and diamonds in her hair, as beautiful as a princess of a fairy tale. M. d'Ivry, whose early life may have been rather oragious, was yet a gentleman perfectly well conserved. Resolute against fate his enemy (one would fancy fate was of an aristocratic turn, and took especial delight in combats with princely houses; the Atridae, the Borbonidae, the Ivrys,—the Browns and Joneses being of no account), the prince seemed to be determined not only to secure a progeny, but to defy age. At sixty he was still young, or seemed to be so. His hair was as black as the princess's own, his teeth as white. If you saw him on the Boulevard de Gand, sunning among the youthful exquisites there, or riding au Bois, with a grace worthy of old Franconi himself, you would take him for one of the young men, of whom indeed up to his marriage he retained a number of the graceful follies and amusements, though his manners had a dignity acquired in old days of Versailles and the Trianon, which the moderns cannot hope to imitate. He was as assiduous behind the scenes of the opera as any journalist, or any young dandy of twenty years. He "ranged himself," as the French phrase is, shortly before his marriage, just like any other young bachelor: took leave of Phryne and Aspasie in the coulisses, and proposed to devote himself henceforth to his charming young wife.

The affreux catastrophe of July arrived. The ancient Bourbons were once more on the road to exile (save one wily old remnant of the race, who rode grinning over the barricades, and distributing poignees de main to the stout fists that had pummelled his family out of France). M. le Duc d'Ivry, who lost his place at court, his appointments which helped his income very much, and his peerage would no more acknowledge the usurper of Neuilly, than him of Elba. The ex-peer retired to his terres. He barricaded his house in Paris against all supporters of the citizen king; his nearest kinsman, M. de Florac, among the rest, who for his part cheerfully took his oath of fidelity, and his seat in Louis Philippe's house of peers, having indeed been accustomed to swear to all dynasties for some years past.

In due time Madame la Duchesse d'Ivry gave birth to a child, a daughter, whom her noble father received with but small pleasure. What the Duke desired, was an heir to his name, a Prince of Moncontour, to fill the place of the sons and grandsons gone before him, to join their ancestors in the tomb. No more children, however, blessed the old Duke's union. Madame d'Ivry went the round of all the watering-places: pilgrimages were tried: vows and gifts to all saints supposed to be favourable to the d'Ivry family, or to families in general:—but the saints turned a deaf ear; they were inexorable since the true religion and the elder Bourbons were banished from France.

Living by themselves in their ancient castles, or their dreary mansion of the Faubourg St. Germain, I suppose the Duke and Duchess grew tried of one another, as persons who enter into a mariage de convenance sometimes, nay, as those who light a flaming love-match, and run away with one another, will be found to do. A lady of one-and-twenty, and a gentleman of sixty-six, alone in a great castle, have not unfrequently a third guest at their table, who comes without a card, and whom they cannot shut out, though they keep their doors closed ever so. His name is Ennui, and many a long hour and weary night must such folks pass in the unbidden society of this Old Man of the Sea; this daily guest at the board; this watchful attendant at the fireside; this assiduous companion who will walk out with you; this sleepless restless bedfellow.