Part 2

‘That could not be,’ she said. ‘I would have no divided attentions; I would have a man’s whole heart, or nothing. I have too long been alone in the world not to realise what a full meed of affection means.’

‘You should have all mine!’ Le Gautier cried, carried away by the torrent of his passions. ‘No longer should the League bind me. I would be free, if it cost ten thousand lives! No chains should hold me then, for, by heaven, I would not hesitate to betray it!’

‘Hush, hush!’ Isodore exclaimed in a startled whisper. ‘You do not understand what you are saying. You do not comprehend the meaning of your words. Would you betray the Brotherhood?’

‘Ay, if you but say the word—ten thousand Brotherhoods.’

‘I am not bound by solemn oath like you,’ Isodore replied sadly; ‘and at times I think it could never do good. It is too dark and mysterious and too violent to my taste; but you are bound in honour.’

‘But suppose I was to come to you and say I was free?’ Le Gautier asked hoarsely. ‘To tell you that my hands were no longer fettered—what words would you have to say to me then—Marie?’ He hesitated before he uttered the last word, dwelling upon it in an accent of the deepest tenderness. Apparently, Isodore did not notice, for her eyes were sad, her thoughts evidently far away.

‘I do not know what I should say to you—in time.’

‘Your words are like new life to me,’ Le Gautier exclaimed; ‘they give me hope and strength, and in my undertaking I shall succeed.’

‘You will do nothing rash, nothing headstrong, without telling me. Let me know when you are coming to see me again, and we will talk the matter over; but I fear, without treachery, you never can be free.’

‘Anything to be my own master!’ he retorted fervently.—‘Good-night, and remember that any step I may take will be for you.’ With a long lingering pressure of the hand and many burning glances, he was gone.

Isodore heard his retreating footsteps echoing down the stairs, and thence along the silent street. The mask fell from her face; she clenched her hands, and her countenance was crossed with a hundred angry passions. Valerie entering at that moment, looked at her with something like fear.

‘Sit down, Valerie,’ Isodore whispered hoarsely, in a voice like the tones of one in great pain, as she walked impatiently about the room, her hands twisted together convulsively. ‘Do not be afraid; I shall be better presently. I feel as if I want to scream, or do some desperate thing to-night. He has been here, Valerie; how I sustained myself, I cannot tell.’

‘Did he recognise you?’ Valerie asked timidly.

‘Recognise me? No, indeed! He spoke about the old days by the Mattio woods, the old times when we were together, and laughed at me for a romantic schoolgirl. I nearly stabbed him then. There is treachery afloat; his plan is prospering. As I told you it would be, Maxwell is chosen for the Roman mission; but he will never do the deed, for I shall warn Visci myself. And he was my bro——Visci’s friend!’

‘But what are you going to do now?’ Valerie asked.

‘He is a traitor. He is going to betray the League, and I am going to be his confidant. I saw it in his face. I wonder how I bear it—I wonder I do not die! What would they say if they saw Isodore now?—Come, Valerie, come and hold me tightly in your arms—tighter still. If I do not have a little pity, my poor heart will break.’

* * * * *

Long and earnestly did Salvarini and Maxwell sit in the latter’s studio discussing the events of the evening, till the fire had burnt down to ashes and the clock in the neighbouring steeple struck three. It was settled that Maxwell should go to Rome, though with what ulterior object they did not decide. Time was in his favour, the lapse of a month or so in the commission being a matter of little object to the League. They preferred that vengeance should be deferred for a time, and that the blow might be struck when it was least expected, when the victim was just beginning to imagine himself safe and the matter forgotten.

‘I suppose I had better lose no time in going?’ Maxwell observed, when they had discussed the matter thoroughly. ‘Time and distance are no objects to me, or money either.’

‘As to your time of departure, I should say as soon as possible,’ Salvarini replied; ‘and as to money, the League finds that.’

‘I would not touch a penny of it, Luigi—no, not if I was starving. I could not soil my fingers with their blood-money.—What do you say to my starting on Monday night? I could get to Rome by Thursday morning at the latest.—And yet, to what good? I almost feel inclined to refuse, and bid them do their worst.’

‘For heaven’s sake, do not!’ Salvarini implored. ‘Such a thing is worse than folly. If you assume a readiness to fulfil your undertaking, something may turn up in your favour.’ Maxwell gazed moodily in the dead ashes, and cursed the hot-headed haste which had placed him in that awful position. Like every right-minded man, he shrank with horror from such a cowardly crime.

‘You will never attain your ends,’ he said. ‘Your cause is a noble one; but true liberty, perfect freedom, turns against cold-blooded murder; for call it what you will, it is nothing else.’

‘You are right, my friend,’ Salvarini mournfully replied. ‘No good can come of it; and when reprisals come, as they must, they shall be swift and terrible.—But Frederick,’ he continued, laying his hand on the other’s shoulder, ‘do not blame me too deeply, for I will lay down my own life cheerfully before harm shall come to you.’

Maxwell was not aware that Sir Geoffrey Charteris was a member of the League, as Le Gautier had taken care to keep them apart, so far as business matters were concerned, only allowing the baronet to attend such meetings as were perfectly harmless in their general character, and calculated to inspire him with admiration of the philanthropic schemes and self-denying usefulness of the Brotherhood; nor was it the Frenchman’s intention to admit him any deeper into its secrets; indeed, his admission only formed part of the scheme by which the baronet, and through him his daughter, should be entirely in the Frenchman’s power. The cards were sorted, and, once Maxwell was out of the way, the game was ready to be played. All this the artist did not know.

With a heavy heart and a foreboding of coming evil, he made the simple preparations for his journey. He had delayed to the last the task of informing Enid of his departure, partly from a distaste of alarming her, and partly out of fear. It would look more natural, he thought, to break it suddenly, merely saying he had been called to Rome on pressing business, and that his absence would not be a prolonged one. Till Saturday, he put this off, and then, bracing up his nerves, he got into his cab, and was driven off rapidly in the direction of Grosvenor Square. He was roused from his meditations by a shock and a crash, the sound of broken glass, the sight of two plunging horses on the ground—roused by being shot forward violently, by the shouts of the crowd, and above all, by the piercing scream of a woman’s voice. Scrambling out as best he could, he rose to his feet and looked around. His cab had come violently in collision with another in the centre of Piccadilly. A woman had attempted to cross hurriedly; and the two cabs had swerved suddenly, coming together sharply, but not too late to save the woman, who was lying there, in the centre of an eager, excited crowd, perfectly unconscious, the blood streaming down her white face, and staining her light summer dress. A doctor had raised her a little, and was trying to force some brandy between the clenched teeth, as Maxwell pushed his way through the crowd.

‘Nothing very serious,’ he said, in answer to Maxwell’s question. ‘She is simply stunned by the blow, and has sustained, I should say, a simple fracture of the right arm. She must be moved from here at once.—If you will call a cab, I will take her to a hospital.’

‘No, no!’ Maxwell cried, moved to pity by the pale fair face and slight girlish figure. ‘I am mainly responsible for the accident, and you must allow me to be the best judge. My cab, you see, is almost uninjured; put her in there, and I will tell you where to drive.’

They lifted the unconscious girl and placed her tenderly on the seat. There were warm hearts and sympathetic hands there, as you may notice on such occasions as these, and there was a look of feeling in every face as the cab drove slowly away.

‘Go on to Grosvenor Square,’ Maxwell instructed his man. ‘Drive slowly up New Bond Street. We shall be there as soon as you.’

They arrived at Sir Geoffrey’s house together, considerably astonishing the footman, as, without ceremony, they carried the sufferer in. Alarmed by strange voices and the shrieks of the servants, who had come up at the first alarm, Enid made her appearance to demand the meaning of this unseemly noise; but directly she heard the cause, as coherently as Maxwell could tell her, her face changed, and she became at once all tenderness and womanly sympathy.

‘I knew you would not mind, darling,’ he whispered gratefully. ‘I hardly knew what to do, and it was partly my fault.’

‘You did quite right. Of course I do not mind. Fred, what do you take me for?’ She knelt down beside the injured woman there in the hall, in the presence of all the servants, and helped to carry her up the stairs.

Lucrece looked on for a moment, and then a startled look came in her face. ‘Ah!’ she exclaimed, ‘I know that face—it is Linda Despard.’

Enid heard these words, but did not heed them at the time. They carried the girl into one of the rooms and laid her on the bed. At a sign from the doctor, the room was cleared, with the exception of Enid and Lucrece, and the medical man proceeded to look to the broken limb. It was only a very simple fracture, he said. The gravest danger was from the shock to the system and the wound upon the forehead. Presently, they got her comfortably in bed, breathing regularly, and apparently asleep. The good-natured doctor, waving aside all thanks, left the room, promising to call again later in the day.

FOUNDLING QUOTATIONS.

Quotations play no small part in conversation and general literature. There are some which we know must inevitably be made under certain circumstances. It is almost impossible, for instance, for the conventional novelist, when he wants to convey to his readers the fact that his heroine’s nose is of a particular order—which, formerly, through our lack of invention, we could only describe by a somewhat ungraceful term—to avoid quoting Lord Tennyson’s description of the feature as it graced Lynette’s fair face—‘Tip-tilted like the petal of a flower.’ We feel sure that it must come; and there is now, happily, no occasion for a young lady in the position of one of Miss Braddon’s earlier heroines, when listening to a detailed description of her appearance, to interrupt the speaker, as he is about to mention the characteristics of her nose, with a beseeching, ‘Please, don’t say _pug_!’

And then, does anybody ever expect to read a description of a certain celebrated Scotch ruin, without being told that

If thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moonlight?

or to get through an account of the ancient gladiatorial games at Rome without coming across the line,

Butchered to make a Roman holiday?

You know, perhaps, what praise Mark Twain took to himself because he did _not_ quote this line. ‘If any man has a right,’ he says, ‘to feel proud of himself and satisfied, surely it is I; for I have written about the Coliseum, and the gladiators, the martyrs, and the lions, and yet have never used the phrase, “Butchered to make a Roman holiday.” I am the only free white man of mature age who has accomplished this since Byron originated the expression.’ This little piece of self-congratulation rather reminds one of the lady who was accused of never being able to write a letter without adding a P.S. At last, she managed to write one without the usual addition; but when she saw what she had succeeded in doing, she wrote: ‘P.S.—At last, you see, I have written a letter without a P.S.’ And so, though Mark Twain managed to steer clear of the hackneyed quotation in the body of his account, he could not help running against it in a P.S.

Then we have all the multitude of Shaksperean quotations which are sure to be heard in their accustomed places, many of which, indeed, have become—to quote again—such ‘household words,’ that to very many people they do not appear to be quotations at all, but merely every-day expressions, of the same order as ‘A fine day’ or ‘A biting wind.’

Again, when we read of some cheerful fireside scene, when the curtains are drawn closely against the winter wind that is roaring round the house, and the logs are crackling and spitting in the grate, and the urn is hissing and steaming upon the table, don’t we know that a reference to the ‘cup which cheers but not inebriates’ is certainly coming? This, by the way, is a line that is almost invariably incorrectly quoted, and it is the usual and incorrect form that we have given. We shall leave our readers to turn up the line for themselves, and see what the correct form is, and then, perhaps, the trouble they will thereby have had will serve to impress it upon their minds, and prevent them again quoting it incorrectly.

But it was not with the intention of talking about these well-known and every-day quotations from Tennyson, Scott, Byron, Shakspeare, and Cowper that we thought of writing this paper. We want to talk about a few quotations, quite as well known as those to which we have already alluded, which have been so bandied about that all trace, or nearly all trace, of their original parish and paternity has been lost; and, though they are as familiar to us as the most hackneyed phrases from our best known poets, no one can say with certainty by whom they were first spoken or written.

A good many wagers have been made as to the source of the well-known and much-quoted couplet:

He that fights and runs away, May live to fight another day.

The popular belief is that they are to be found in Butler’s _Hudibras_. But the pages of that poem may be turned over and over again, and the lines will not be found in them. We may as well say at once that they cannot be found anywhere in the exact form in which they are usually quoted. The late Mr James Yeowell, formerly sub-editor of _Notes and Queries_, once thought that he had discovered their author in Oliver Goldsmith, as a couplet, varying very slightly from the form we have given, occurs in _The Art of Poetry on a New Plan_, which was compiled by Newbery—the children’s publisher—more than a century ago, and revised and enlarged by Goldsmith. But the lines are to be found in a book that was published some thirteen years before _The Art of Poetry_, namely, Ray’s _History of the Rebellion_. There they appear as a quotation, and no hint is given as to the source from which they are taken. Ray gives them as follows (first edition, 1749, page 54):

He that fights and runs away, May turn and fight another day.

Though this is the earliest appearance in print of the exact words, or almost the exact words, in which the quotation is now usually given, it is by no means the earliest appearance of a similar thought. Even as far back as Demosthenes we find it. It appears, too, in Scarron, in his _Virgile Travesti_, if we remember rightly. And now we must confess that the still prevailing belief that the lines occur in _Hudibras_ is not entirely without a _raison d’être_, and it is not impossible that Ray may have thought he was quoting Butler, preserving some hazy and indistinct recollection of lines read long ago, and putting their meaning, perhaps quite unwittingly and unconsciously, into a new and unauthorised form. This, however, is mere conjecture. The lines, as they appear in _Hudibras_ (part iii. canto iii., lines 243, 244), are as follows:

For those that fly, may fight again, Which he can never do that’s slain.

We may just add that Collet, in his _Relics of Literature_, says that the couplet occurs in a small volume of miscellaneous poems by Sir John Mennis, written in the reign of Charles II. With this book, however, we are unacquainted, and cannot, therefore, discuss the appearance of the foundling lines in it, or what claims its author may have to be their legitimate parent.

All readers of Tennyson—and who that reads at all is not numbered amongst them?—know well the opening stanza of _In Memoriam_:

I held it truth, with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things.

These lines contain another quotation of the order we have designated as ‘Foundling Quotations.’ Who is the singer, ‘to one clear harp in divers tones,’ to whom Lord Tennyson refers? Passages from Seneca and from St Augustine (Bishop of Hippo) have been suggested as inspiring the poet when he penned the lines; but neither Seneca nor St Augustine can be said to _sing_ ‘to one clear harp in divers tones.’ Perhaps the most reasonable hypothesis is that Lord Tennyson had in his mind Longfellow’s beautiful poem of _St Augustine’s Ladder_, the opening lines of which are:

Saint Augustine! well hast thou said, That of our vices we can frame A ladder, if we will but tread Beneath our feet each deed of shame!

and the closing ones:

Nor deem the irrevocable Past As wholly wasted, wholly vain, If, rising on its wrecks, at last To something nobler we attain.

The question, however, though Lord Tennyson is still alive, is one that is not likely ever to be clearly solved; for we have very good authority for saying that he has himself quite forgotten of what poet or verses he was thinking when he composed the first stanza of _In Memoriam_.

The equally well-known

This is truth the poet sings, That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things,

in _Locksley Hall_, refers, of course, to the line in Dante’s _Inferno_.

The trite ‘Not lost, but gone before,’ might alone provide subject-matter for a fairly long essay. Like the other quotations which we are discussing, it can be definitely assigned to no author. The thought can be traced back as far as the time of Antiphanes, a portion of whose eleventh ‘fragment,’ Cumberland has translated, fairly literally, as follows:

Your lost friends are not dead, but gone before, Advanced a stage or two upon that road Which you must travel, in the steps they trod.

Seneca, in his ninety-ninth Epistle, says: ‘Quem putas periisse, præmissus est’ (He whom you think dead has been sent on before); and he also has: ‘Non amittuntur, sed præmittuntur’ (They are not lost, but are sent on before), which corresponds very closely with the popular form of the quotation. Cicero has the remark that ‘Friends, though absent, are still present;’ and it is very probable that it is to this phrase of Cicero that we are really indebted for the modern, ‘Not lost, but gone before.’ We may note that Rogers, in his _Human Life_, has, ‘Not dead, but gone before.’

Then there is the somewhat similar, ‘Though lost to sight, to memory dear,’ which no one has succeeded in satisfactorily tracing to its original source. It was said, some years ago, that the line was to be found in a poem published in a journal whose name was given as _The Greenwich Magazine_, in 1701, and written by one Ruthven Jenkyns. The words formed the refrain of each stanza of the poem. We give one of them as a sample:

Sweetheart, good-bye! the fluttering sail Is spread to waft me far from thee; And soon before the fav’ring gale My ship shall bound upon the sea. Perchance all desolate and forlorn, These eyes shall miss thee many a year, But unforgotten every charm— Though lost to sight, to memory dear.

Mr Bartlett, however, in the last edition of his _Dictionary of Quotations_, has demolished this story of Mr Ruthven Jenkyns; and the line is still unclaimed and fatherless. Probably, as in the case of the last mentioned, ‘Not lost, but gone before,’ its germ is to be found in an expression of Cicero.

There is a Latin line familiar to all of us, ‘Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis’ (The times change, and we change with them), which we are frequently hearing and seeing. This is a much-abused line; probably there is none more so; and we do not think we shall be guilty of exaggeration if we say that it is misquoted ten times for every time it is correctly cited. The positions of the _nos_ and the _et_ are usually interchanged; the result being, of course, a false quantity; for the line is a hexameter. Now, who first wrote this line? The answer must be, as in the cases of all our other ‘Foundling Quotations,’ that we do not know. But in this particular instance we may venture to be a little more certain and definite in our remarks concerning its pedigree than we have dared to be in previous ones. There can be little doubt that the line is a corruption of one to be found in the _Delitiæ Poetarum Germanorum_ (vol. i. page 685), amongst the poems of Matthias Borbonius, who considers it a saying of Lotharius I., who flourished, as the phrase goes, about 830 A.D. We give the correct form of the line in question, and the one which follows it:

Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis; Illa vices quasdem res habet, illa suas.

There is another foundling Latin line, almost as frequently quoted as the one we have just been discussing, namely, ‘Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat’ (Whom the gods would destroy, they first madden). Concerning this there is a note in the fifth chapter of the eighth volume of Mr Croker’s edition of Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_, in which it is said to be a translation from a Greek iambic of Euripides, which is quoted; but no such line is to be found amongst the writings of Euripides. Words, however, expressing the same sentiment are to be found in a fragment of Athenagoras; and it is most likely that the Latin phrase now so commonly quoted is merely a translation from this writer’s Greek, though by whom it was first made we cannot say. The same sentiment has been expressed more than once in English poetry.

Dryden, in the third part of _The Hind and the Panther_, has:

For those whom God to ruin has designed, He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind.