CHAPTER XIX.

THE TANGLED WEB UNWOVEN.

In these our days of haste and hurry, steam and telegraph, when all men acknowledge that life seems far too short for what we seek to cram into it, it must not seem incorrect or "a violation of the unities," if we suddenly turn from Persia, and take another glance homeward at the most beautiful, yet, perhaps, most provincial, of all European capitals.

In Edinburgh the night was cold and gusty--the last of April--with occasional blasts of rain and hail. Mr. Gainswood was seated alone in his library; Dove was in the drawing-room, for father and daughter were now more apart than they were wont to be. With something of pleasure he heard her touching the piano. Poor Dove! Tortured and despairing, she had been more than once on the point of yielding to her father's matrimonial wishes, and she seldom thought of her music now. Seldom, indeed, she opened the piano, and even then she was running her pretty fingers over the keys in a wandering and purposeless way; at one time it was a waltz, at another a national melody that Gillian loved; then the lawyer would grind his teeth, as it always ended in "Wild Joanna."

"Poor girl!" he muttered; "she always looks so pale--curse that designing cousin! Her eyes have an expression so mournful and sad that often I feel inclined to take her in my arms and kiss her--but 'tisn't my way. She casts the mercies from her! How like a serpent's tooth it is----"

Then he paused, in doubt whether he was quoting Scripture or some profane writer, to do which beseemed not a man of his religious character.

Sunk back in softly stuffed easy chair, Mr. Gainswood abandoned himself to the luxury of thinking over the riches he had amassed from a very small and very sordid beginning. The lofty room was brilliantly lighted, and its interior contrasted pleasantly with the cold and stormy night without, where the tall trees with the old rookery were swaying in the occasional blasts. Sweeping curtains of rich maroon damask shrouded the windows, and from cornices of walnut-wood, gilded, bearing the Gainswood crest (some cognizance to heraldry unknown) fell on the rich carpet woven in the looms of Aubusson, in the department of Creuse--a carpet wherein the florid crimson roses, mellowed into the pink and yellow of other flowers.

It was a stately room, and everything around him betokened ease combined with splendour.

In the low, deep chair he sat before the fire, his slippered feet stretched out upon the fender of polished steel; and, while listening with dreamy pleasure to the wailing of the wind and the gusts of the storm that he was not exposed to, he thought over all he had amassed (without caring how); of an address he was to make at a religious meeting on the morrow; of cases pending before the Inner and Outer Houses; and then, as the notes of the piano came idly from the distant drawing-room, of Dove's rare beauty---a useless commodity as yet, unless she yielded to him and Campsie; and anon, by the chain of thought, a vision of a face came before him with painful distinctness--the face of the wanderer, him whom he had expelled and robbed of his inheritance--the face of Gillian as he had seen it last.

The war was over in Persia; a peace had been concluded so early as the 4th of March, unknown to Sir James Outram; and the 78th Highlanders, under Havelock, had gone to India, where new and terrible complications were arising. Mr. Gainswood knew all this from the public papers. Many rank and file had fallen in battle he knew; he had gloated over their numbers hopefully. Had Gillian escaped; and, if so, would he escape the greater perils that were to come?

A sour smile gathered in his ferret-eyes, and the bull-dog jaw assumed a set expression of defiance. It passed away, and the former smile of indolent ease and of bland hypocrisy spread over his coarse face, as he thought, and thought, and thought again, of how he "had flourished even as the green bay-tree," till a loud ring of the front door bell echoed through the stone staircase and corridors, after a wheeled vehicle had stopped at the pillared portico without.

Mr. Gainswood glanced inquiringly at his library clock. Who could his visitor be at such an unusual hour?

"A gentleman wishes to see you, sir," said the servant, ushering in a person whom Mr. Gainswood saw to be a stranger, who had come thus suddenly without the prelude of sending up his card. He was a tall, thin man, of haughty and aristocratic bearing and undoubtedly military aspect, bronzed and furrowed in face, with a densely thick moustache that mingled with his flowing and silvery beard. Many years had elapsed since Mr. Gainswood had seen Colonel Lamond, for he it was; he was closely shaven in those days, with hair of a ruddy brown, so he utterly failed to recognize him or even his voice now.

The Colonel threw open his Highland cloak, deposited his hat and leather gloves with something of emphasis on the table, grasped nervously a silver-mounted and heavy malacca cane, and, when asked to "be seated," took a chair, with a keen and scrutinising expression in his eyes that thoroughly roused Mr. Gainswood, who said:

"May I ask whom I have the honour to receive?"

"An extra aide-de-camp of General Sir James Outram," replied the other, wishing to preserve his incognito for some time.

"Your name?"

"That you will have in good time. We have met before."

"Perhaps; but I have no recollection----"

"All the better."

"Your business, sir?"

"Is with you."

"Well?" said Mr. Gainswood sharply, as he decidedly thought his client was a strange one, and felt restless under his keen, bright, steady, and contemptuous glance.

"I have a message to you from Colonel Lachlan Lamond."

"My _late_ brother-in-law!" exclaimed Mr. Gainswood, now thoroughly roused.

The Colonel smiled and twisted his heavy grey moustaches, as he saw that Gainswood's face became livid, and that already drops of clammy perspiration glittered about his temples; but he said:

"Poor old Lachlan! he was killed at Mora by the Bhoteas. Alas! in the midst of life we are in death!"

"He left a son in your care, Mr. Gainswood."

"A profligate, who left me and went forth into the world--I know not where. Were you in the campaign against the Hill Tribe?"

"I was."

"Then what was, or is, your message to me?"

"It concerns the will which Colonel Lamond entrusted to your care--the will by which he bequeathed all he possessed to his son, whom failing, to your daughter."

"I never heard of any such document, and, if it existed, it will, no doubt, be recorded somewhere."

"It was not, so far as I know."

"Then there is no proof of its existence at all."

"Very probably," replied the Colonel, scornfully; "so we shall pass that, and come to the fortune left by the Colonel, out of which you brought up his son, as a species of half-drudge in your office, in total ignorance that such a thing existed."

"A fortune!"

"Thirty thousand pounds and more, transmitted to you from India as a portion of the money to re-purchase Avon-na-gillian."

"You have been dining or are dreaming, sir!" exclaimed Mr. Gainswood, growing pale, but attempting to bully nevertheless, as he started to his feet and approached a bell-handle.

"Sit down, sir, and listen to me, or, by Heaven, I shall stretch you beside that fender!" cried the Colonel, grasping his heavy cane and looking as if he meant to use it.

Mr. Gainswood re-seated himself and affected to listen, with the half-amused and incredulous smile of one who has a lunatic to humour, and lay back in his elbow-chair with the tips of his fingers placed together; but, with all this assumed exterior, there flashed upon his memory the old saying about giving even the tip of one's little finger to Satan.

"Do you mean to deny the existence of this money, as well as that of the will, or that you ever received it?" asked the Colonel, quietly.

"I do."

"Foul liar!"

"Calm yourself, my good sir--calm yourself. Your words, if heard, are actionable; but there is a power above that rules us all and guides us all," replied the lawyer, looking with an air of resignation upward to the crystal gaselier that glittered overhead; "you are labouring under some incomprehensible delusion. If the money, those many thousands, were ever transmitted to me, or anyone else, by my dear dead brother-in-law some vouchers of the fact must be somewhere."

"They are so."

"Indeed; where?"

"In the hands of my banker," replied the other, with a calm smile.

For nearly a minute the two men regarded each other in silence. The trembling lips and pallid cheeks of Gainswood had been the result of his naturally bullying temper, but now they came of craven, abject fear, for terror and alarm were curdling in his coward heart. The malice of the devil was in it, and in his ferret eyes, yet his plight and aspect were pitiable--most pitiable--and the Colonel, even with all his scorn, felt it to be so.

"There are shades of guilt, Mr. Gainswood," said he.

"Shades, sir," stammered the lawyer.

"Yes, sir; shades."

"The All-seeing Eye can pierce all shades----."

"The less we have of this from such a worm as you the better, sir," interrupted his visitor, rising; "there are people of your infamous stamp who think it less guilty to suppress evidence than to destroy it; but that you have done, suppressed or destroyed the will left with you, and other documents that concern the transmitted money; but the proof of that transmission my vouchers can affirm."

"And you, sir," exclaimed the lawyer, fairly brought to bay at last, "who are you?"

"Colonel Lachlan Lamond, of whose existence the Procurator-Fiscal shall convince you to-morrow morning," replied the other sternly, as he carefully drew on his gloves, and eyed with withering scorn the lawyer, who, like a hunted creature, uttered a moan, not of sorrow, but of mingled rage, hate, and baffled desire for defiance, as he covered his face with his trembling hands, and thought perhaps,--

"O what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!"

Here was a turning of the tables with a vengeance. His shame and disgrace, his committal and trial as a felon were in the hands of Colonel Lamond, and judging by himself and his own nature, he felt certain that the injured father would be merciless. He could have no comfort in his religion, for religion had he none. Though ever on his lips, he had about as much of it in his heart as a Zulu Kaffir, or those Bhoteas, who, so unfortunately for him, had not made mince meat of his brother-in-law.

The Colonel had ended buttoning his gloves and highland cloak, and was about to assume his hat, when Mr. Gainswood, whose hands shook like aspen, leaves, stretched them forth deprecatingly, and said:

"Lachlan, for the sake of our dead wives, for the sake of Dove, do not, do not expose me!"

Something of sadness now mingled with the sour scorn that filled the eyes of the old soldier, who, after a pause, said:

"Faithless and false-trickster as you have been, thief as you would be, heartless and cruel though you proved to my poor boy, Gillian, for the memory of those you name, and for the sake of the cousins who have loved each other so well and tenderly, I shall forgive you; but never, while the breath of Heaven is in your nostrils, ask Lachlan Lamond to degrade himself by taking your hand in his!"

"And where is Gillian now?" asked Gideon Gainswood, after a pause.

"Within summons if you wish to see him."

And sooth to say, during all this exciting interview, Gillian, whom we had last seen lying, to all appearances done nigh unto death, on the deck of H.M.S. _Comet_, had been in the adjoining drawing-room, with Dove's head pillowed upon his breast, and his arms around her.

Gillian, she thought, looked certainly haggard, pale, and hairy, and there was an unwonted glitter in his eye that was born of the sufferings he had undergone, but it was blended with the brightness and triumph of his present joy.

Gillian alive, safe, and back home again! It required days to pass ere Dove--in blissful ignorance of the dark and intricate springs on which her fate had turned--would settle down into a calm and delicious state of happiness subsequent to the return of the loved one, so bitterly mourned as lost for ever, that their engagement was permitted, and all barriers, monetary and otherwise, were dissipated and removed.

How differently passed the days now since she knew that he was safe and her own as before. Ah, how wearily they were wont to lag and drag in the dreadful past time, when at dawn and noon she only longed for night, though, when all were abed and asleep, she lay awake, with her heart aching, and her poor little head full of all manner of terrible imaginings, and knew that if she slept, she would, with daylight only come back to a dull sense of all-pervading sorrow.

As for my Lord Campsie, who had been to her a species of Frankenstein, she was relieved of his presence for ever, and with more ease than he was ever likely to be of his monetary embarrassments.

He has since espoused the fair one with the golden locks, thus combining the establishment at St. John's Wood with his own. He has, moreover, become a representative peer by the death of the old viscount, and being chronically "hard up," will have no objection to pocket the salary and figure yearly as H.M. Commissioner to the Kirk, if it will have him, "though it is a doocid bore, don't you know, and so demmed vulgaw." But then "the viscountess would have the upper ten dozen of Edinburgh and their women folk" at her receptions in the long gallery of the kings of Scotland, and there might be a little satisfaction in that.

A FORGOTTEN PRINCE OF WALES.

In the following pages I propose to give the brief history of a Prince of Wales who, had he lived long enough, might, by the brilliance of his talents and the tenor of his character, have changed the whole fate and annals of the British Isles after his own time, in so far, that Cromwell and the great civil war, the Scottish Covenant, the battles of Montrose and Claverhouse, the advents of William and Mary, of Anne, and even the accession of the House of Hanover, _would never have been heard of_.

At three in the morning of Tuesday, the 19th February, 1593, there was born in the Castle of Stirling, Henry, afterwards Prince of Wales, eldest son of James VI. of Scotland and I. of Great Britain, by his queen, Anne, daughter of Frederick II., and sister of the gallant sailor-king, Christian IV. of Denmark, in the fourth year of their marriage. A discharge of twelve great guns announced the event to the town; the king sent for the ministry, desiring that everywhere the people should be called together, to have public thanksgiving; and bale-fires were, as Calderwood records, set ablaze on all the great mountains; and Moyse adds in his memoirs, that so great was the joy of the nation, "that people in all parts appeared to be daft for mirth."

The baptism was deferred for six months, says Dr. Birch, the king having "thought proper to invite several foreign princes and states to send their ambassadors to be present at that solemnity"; but scarcely had that young prince--the future heir of all the British Isles--seen the light ere faction, the old curse of the Scottish nation, began to contemplate employing the unconscious infant for the promotion of its base designs. By the conspirators it was proposed to retain him in their hands as the means of strengthening their own party. To the honour of Lord Zouch, however, to whom the offer was made, he peremptorily declined all concurrence; so the despicable expedient, which had been so successful in past times of Scottish history, was abandoned. In the meantime Zouch, though strictly watched, busied himself, in conformity with his infamous secret instructions from Queen Elizabeth, to intrigue with all the Scottish nobility who were opposed to James's temporising policy, and embroil him with his people.

On the 27th of August the little prince was baptised in the Castle of Stirling, amid unusual magnificence. He was borne from his own room to the queen's chamber of presence, laid on a stately bed, in care of the Countess of Mar and other ladies of rank, who delivered him to Ludovic Stewart, Duke of Lennox, Admiral and Lord High Chamberlain of Scotland, who presented him to the foreign ambassadors. Among these was the representative of Elizabeth, the young Earl of Sussex, who was connected with her by ties of blood, and who came attended with a magnificent retinue, bearer of a letter from his royal mistress, congratulating the king on the auspicious event, and abounding in expressions of friendly feeling, in her own quaint manner; though at that very time she was intriguing for the destruction and death of Maitland, the Lords Home, Huntly, and others who were his most loyal nobles. There too were the ambassadors of the Duke of Brunswick, the States of Holland, the Duke of Mecklenburg, and other princes. "Behind the Earl of Sussex," says Dr. Birch, "stood the Lord Wharton and Sir Henry Bromley, Knight, no other Englishman being admitted into the chapel royal."

Thither the child was borne by Sussex, preceded by Lord Home bearing the ducal crown, Lord Livingstone the napkin, Lord Seaton the basin, and Lord Semple the laver. Above their heads was a great canopy, borne by the Lairds of Buccleuch, Cessford, Dudhope, and Traquair, while the prince's train was held up by the Lords Sinclair and Urquhart. Around was a guard of chosen young men of Edinburgh, richly dressed and armed; and the trumpets sounded as the king seated himself in a chair "adorned with the arms of France."

After a sermon "in the Scots tongue," by one of the king's chaplains, David Cunninghame, Bishop of Aberdeen, preached in Latin on the creed. The child was then baptised and knighted; the trumpets sounded, again the cannon thundered over the Valley of the Forth, while the Lyon King and his heralds from the gates and battlements proclaimed the now-forgotten prince, by the name of "Frederick Henry, Henry Frederick, by the grace of God Knight and Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, Earl of Carrick, Duke of Rothesay, Prince and Great Steward of Scotland" (Calderwood). Gifts were then presented to the infant. Among these were a cupboard of plate worth £3,000 from Elizabeth; two massive gold chains from the King of Denmark; a table enriched with diamonds from the Duke of Mecklenburg; two gold cups from the States of Holland, worth 12,400 crowns, each weighing 400 ounces, and in one were 5,000 florins, the first of the prince's annual donations from the conservator of Scottish privileges at Campvere in Zealand.

History tells us that the pageants which succeeded this ceremony were of the most costly and gorgeous description, "and much ingenuity was expended by Mr. Fowler, Master of the Revels, as well as by the king himself, in planning masks, shows, and triumphs, together with curious and mysterious devices suited to the tastes of that age." Soon after, the prince was committed to the care of John, Earl of Mar, Governor of the Castle of Stirling and Chamberlain of Monteith, &c.; and he was assisted in his charge by his mother, Annabella, Countess Dowager of Mar, a daughter of the Lord Tullybardine.

For these two guardians the little prince, as boyhood crept on, showed such affection that the queen became jealous of them, and endeavoured to remove him into her own custody; but James wrote to the earl, desiring him upon no account to give up the prince to his mother; yet the charge of the old countess ended when, in his sixth year, Adam Newton, a gentleman "learned in languages," was made his tutor. Many attendants of rank were appointed; but chief of all these was still the Earl of Mar. It was at this time, in 1599, that the pedantic James composed for his use in Greek "His Majesty's Instructions to his dearest son, Henry the Prince." In the preface thereto were some passages that puzzled many; for by his bitterness against the Puritans he gave grounds for doubting his Protestantism, and in others he seemed to cherish some vindictiveness against England, though the heir to its throne.

In 1600, when in his seventh year, the prince wrote in his own hand a letter to the States-General, expressing gratitude to and regard for them. This letter, which most probably was dictated by the "Scottish Solomon," was taken to Holland by Sir David Murray. In the year following the prince began to take great pleasure in all manly exercises--in learning to ride, sing, dance, leap, to shoot with the bow and to toss the pike; and in most of these things he became a great proficient, under the care of Sir Richard Preston (of Craigmillar), Constable of Dingwall, and afterwards Earl of Desmond in Ireland. Of his progress in learning we have a proof in the recorded fact that he wrote a letter on his ninth birthday to his father, in which he mentions that "he had begun two years before to write to his Majesty, in order to make him a judge of the proficiency he had made in his studies; and that since his (James's) departure he had read over Terence's _Hecyra_, the third book of Phædrus's _Fables_, and two books of Cicero's _Select Epistles_."

On the death of Elizabeth, at Richmond, in 1603, James succeeded peacefully to the English throne, and soon after took with him to London his heir, still in the custody of the Earl of Mar; but the latter had, for a time, to return to Scotland, where Queen Anne was demanding from his custody her daughter, the Princess Elizabeth (afterwards Queen of Bohemia), and her son, Prince Charles (afterwards Charles I.); but the earl urged again the express commands of the king on the subject, and it is said that the queen never forgave him. Mar resumed his care of the prince, who, together with the earl, when the feast of St. George was celebrated at Windsor, on the 2nd of July, 1603, received the Order of the Garter; and young Henry, now for the first time saluted as Prince of Wales, "was highly commended by the Earl of Nottingham, in the hearing of Edward Howes, our English chronicler of that age, for his quick witty answers, princely carriage, and reverend obeisance to the altar" (Dr. Birch).

Branishill, in Hampshire, was built as a residence for him. He was the _first_ Prince of Wales who ever wore the _triple_ plume, and all the traditions which assign it to the Black Prince and John of Bohemia are totally unsupported by history. The latter at Cressy wore an eagle's pinion in his helmet, and the seal of the former in 1370 shows him wearing a _single_ feather.

On New-year's-day, 1604, when in his eleventh year, he sent to his father a short poem in Latin hexameters, as his first offering of that kind. In the same year the prince, having already evinced a great love for naval affairs, had a vessel specially built for his amusement and instruction at Limehouse; and on the 14th of March it was brought to anchor off the king's lodging in the Tower, where the prince came and showed the lord high admiral and other nobles, with much boyish delight, how he could handle this craft, which was gaily furnished with ensigns and pendants. Anon we are told that it was brought to anchor off Whitehall Stairs, when the prince again went on board with the admiral, the Earl of Worcester, and other persons of rank. The anchor was then weighed, and under her foresail and topsail she dropped down the river to Paul's Wharf, where, with a great bowl of wine, the prince baptised her by the name of the Disdain.

The prince evinced a great love of arms, and was never weary of handling the pike; and in Drayton's _Polyolbion_ we have a portrait of him when about his seventeenth year thus engaged, and the drawing depicts him as handsome in figure, regularly featured, with his hair starting in spouts from an open forehead. He is dressed in rich half-armour, with gauntlets, trunk hose, and the Garter on his left leg. Already men of learning had begun to court him as their patron, and he maintained a correspondence with such as were most eminent for their talent; and he gave such promise of future greatness that foreign princes solicited his friendship, and in a letter which the French ambassador sent home he remarked to the king his master, "that it would be a serious omission in policy to neglect a prince who promised such great things. None of his pleasures savour the least of childish pursuits. He is a particular lover of horses and what belongs to them; but he is not fond of hunting, and when he goes to it, it is rather for the pleasure of galloping than for that which the dogs afford him. He plays willingly enough at tennis, and at another Scots diversion very like mall [golf?], but always with persons older than himself, as if he despised those of his own age. He studies two hours a day, and employs the rest of his time in tossing the pike, or leaping, throwing the bar, shooting with the bow, vaulting, or some other exercise of that kind, for he is never idle. He shows himself likewise very amicable to his dependents, and supports their interests against all persons whatsoever, and pushes what he undertakes for them with such zeal as procures success; and by exerting his whole strength to compass what he desires, is already feared by those who have the management of affairs."

The Duke de Sully tells us in his memoirs that the young prince naturally hated Spain and favoured France, though there seems to have been some strange proposal on foot for having him educated finally in the former country. He also tells us that it was a favourite project of Henri IV to marry his eldest daughter to the prince, to whom he sent "a golden lance and helmet, enriched with diamonds, together with a fencing-master and vaulter" (_Memoirs_, vol. iii.). With all these gifts of mind and person we are told that he was less a favourite with the queen than her second son, Charles, Duke of York and Albany. The company of Merchant Taylors having requested the king to become a member of their guild, he replied that he "was already free of another company," referring to the similar corporation in Edinburgh; but added that his son the prince would avail himself of the honour, and that he would be present at the ceremony. So the king came, and "with his highness was entertained with vocal and instrumental musick--the musick of twelve lutes equally divided, and placed by six and six in a window of the hall; and in the area between them was a gallant ship triumphant, in which were three men dressed like sailors, eminent for their voice and skill, who were accompanied by the lutists."

In vol. i. Coke relates an anecdote which he heard from his father, who about the time was of the prince's age. Being out hunting, a butcher's dog chanced to kill the stag, and thus spoil the sport. As Henry did not resent this, the courtiers, to incense him against the butcher, said, that "if the king his father had been served thus, he would have sworn so that no man could have endured it." "Away," replied the gentle prince; "all the pleasure in the world is not worth one oath!"

In 1612 the cowardly and contemptible Elector Palatine came to London to marry the Princess Elizabeth, whom the scarcely less pitiful James had named after the woman who destroyed his unhappy mother. He was received in London with profound respect, and the court was fully occupied by brilliant entertainments, masques, and joyous diversions in honour of the royal nuptials; but amid them a mortal illness seized upon the promising young prince, who, not conceiving it dangerous, continued to appear in public with the elector till he was unable to leave his bed, on the 27th of October; and he died, between seven and eight o'clock P.M., on the 6th of November. He expired at St. James's Palace, and in the arms of the Earl of Mar.

Of what disease he died none now can say; but, as usual in those days, ugly whispers were abroad.

"He was," says Rapin, combining the encomiums of Wilson, Coke, and Osburn, "the most accomplished prince that ever was--I will not say in all England, but in all Europe. He was sober, chaste, temperate, religious, full of honour and probity. He was never heard to swear, though the example of his father and of the whole court might have been apt to corrupt him in that respect. He took great delight in the conversation of men of honour, and those who were not reckoned as such, were looked upon with a very ill eye at his court. He had naturally a greatness of mind, with noble and generous thoughts, and as much displeased with trifles as his father was fond of them. He frequently said if ever he mounted the throne his first care should be to try and reconcile the Puritans to the Church of England. As this could not be done without concessions on each side, and as such a condescension was directly contrary to the temper of the court and clergy, he was suspected to countenance Puritanism. He was naturally gentle and affable; but, however, in his carriage had a noble stateliness, without affectation. He showed a warlike genius in his passionate fondness for all martial exercises. In short, to say all in a word, though he was only eighteen when he died, no historian has ever taxed him with any vice."

Another annalist tells us that "neither the illusions of passion nor of rank had ever seduced him into any irregular pleasures; business and ambition alone engaged his heart and occupied his mind. Had he lived to come to the throne he might probably have promoted the glory more than the happiness of his people, his disposition being strongly turned to war" (Russell).

Regarding this spirit, Coke tells us that on a French ambassador coming one day to take leave of the prince he "found him tossing a pike"; and on asking "what service he would commend him to the king his master," "Tell him _what I am doing_," was the significant reply.

The weak king his father, on finding that Henry's court at St. James's was more frequented than his own, is said to have exhibited some jealousy on the subject, and was one day heard to ask "if his son would bury him."

The disease of which he died puzzled his physicians so much that the usual vulgar rumour, as I have said, went abroad that he had been poisoned, and Burnet tells us that, without the slightest proof, many actually accused Viscount Rochester of the crime; and thus a post-mortem examination took place, in presence of many physicians and surgeons, who declared on oath that they were unable to detect the slightest symptoms of poison. Howes says that he died of a malignant fever, which in that year "carried away a great many people of all sorts and ages." Balfour calls it "a malignant purpuer fever."

It is somewhat remarkable that the king forbade all court mourning, unless it can be explained that he was loth to cast a gloom over his daughter's recent marriage; but the funeral, which took place in Westminster Abbey on the 7th of December, was a stately one, and cost £2000 of the money of that time (Howes).

Sir Robert Douglas states that, after the prince's death, the faithful old Earl of Mar returned home, and, after being Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, died at a green old age in 1634.

With regard to the well-known plume, perhaps he adopted three feathers to signify the three kingdoms to which he was heir, or because three feathers are the badge of a chief in Scotland; but, whatever the cause, Henry Stuart, Prince of Wales, was the first who gave that crest to the Principality.

The "Scots Magazine" for 1809, contains a copy of the doggrel epitaph--perhaps penned by the pedantic king his father--which was carved upon his tomb in Westminster Abbey.

Many of his letters are inserted in Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature;" and his magnificent suit of armour is still preserved in the Tower of London.

THE STRANGE STORY OF THE DUCHESS OF KINGSTON.

In the twenty-fifth year of the reign of George III. no _cause célèbre_ made greater excitement than the trial of this person, whose appearance at the bar of the House of Lords, on a charge of felony, was long remembered in London.

Elizabeth Chudleigh was the daughter of a colonel in the army, representative of an ancient Devonshire family, a member of which fought valiantly at the defeat of the Armada. He died when Elizabeth was very young, and the care of her education devolved upon her mother, who had little more than her pension as an officer's widow, to add to which she opened a fashionable boarding-house in London, whither she would seem to have come, according to the statement of the Attorney-General, in the year 1740, when her daughter was in the bloom of her beauty, "distinguished for a brilliancy of repartee, and for other qualities highly recommendatory, because extremely pleasing." George II. was then residing at Leicester House, and his son Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales (who died in 1751), had, of course, an establishment of his own elsewhere. To his princess, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, Miss Chudleigh was presented by the famous Mr. Pulteney, who obtained for her, in her eighteenth year, the post of one of her maids-of-honour.

Having secured for her this elevated position, Mr. Pulteney endeavoured to cultivate her understanding, suggested to her a course of reading, and they frequently corresponded on various subjects; but we are told that "the extreme vivacity of her nature" precluded her from acquiring much. Her personal attractions won her many admirers at court, among others, John Duke of Hamilton, who afterwards married Miss Gunning. Indeed they were formally engaged, and their marriage was to take place after his grace, like all men of fashion in those days, had made "the grand tour;" but during his absence distrust ensued between them, and in the interim, at the house of an aunt, whose name was Hanmer, at Laneston, in Hampshire, the Honourable John Augustus Harvey, then a lieutenant in the navy, was introduced to Miss Chudleigh, and fell deeply in love with her. To favour his views, her aunt strangely and treacherously contrived to intercept all the letters of the Duke of Hamilton. His supposed silence roused the indignation of Elizabeth; her pride was easily worked upon, and the attentions of a handsome and winning lover at such a crisis were almost sure to meet with success. Piqued beyond endurance by what she deemed the insulting silence of her betrothed, she agreed to accept the hand of Mr. Harvey, and they were privately married by Mr. Amus, the rector, on the 4th August, 1744, in a private chapel at Laneston, adjoining the mansion of Mr. Merril; and the only surviving witness of _four_, when the subsequent trial ensued, was an old female servant of the family, named Anne Craddock.

The reason given for a _private marriage_ was, as stated by the Attorney-General on that occasion, "that both their situations in life rendered a public marriage very impracticable, as he on one side depended on his friends for his future prospects, and she, on her remaining a single woman, derived her chief rank and support; that such being the situation of the parties, they agreed to marry privately, without the knowledge or consent of their friends." They soon after came to London, and lived privately in Conduit Street, Hanover Square, but in a state of great unhappiness, owing to the dissipated conduct of Harvey, for six months, till he joined his ship in the East Indian Seas, under Sir John Danvers. Her position was now a very painful and anomalous one--Miss Chudleigh and a maid-of-honour in public, Mrs. Harvey and a wife in private! She was still an attractive centre in the higher circles, and the Princess of Wales was still her most particular friend; but she had many more; and few women in London in those days made more conquests. The fame of them reached Harvey, now a captain; and when he returned, at the end of a year and a half, he insisted that she should live with him again; though so great was her aversion of him, that she had resolved never to subject herself to his cruelties again.

However, she would seem to have been prevailed upon, under terror of his threats, to join him again at their house in Conduit Street. One account says that she was lured thither, and had the doors locked upon her, to secure her detention. The result of this union was a boy. "Cæsar Hawkins became the professional confidant on this occasion, and Miss Chudleigh (as the world knew her) removed to Chelsea for change of air, but returned to Leicester House perfectly recovered from her indisposition. The infant soon sank into the arms of death, leaving only the tale of his existence to be related," and his father joined his ship in the Mediterranean.

The year 1748 saw Miss Chudleigh the belle of Tunbridge Wells; and she figures in an old engraving of the period, with the burly Johnson, Cibber, simpering beau Nash, Mr. Pitt (Earl of Chatham), Mr. Whiston, Richardson, and others about her--they in all the glory of bag-wig and sword, high-heeled shoes, and point ruffles. In Richardson's letter to Miss Westcomb he speaks of her as "the triumphant toast," lively, sweetly tempered, and gay. "She moved not without crowds after her; she smiled at every one; every one smiled when they heard she was on the walk. She played, she lost, she won, all with equal good-humour. But, alas! she went off before she was wont to go off, and then the fellows' hearts were almost broken for a new beauty."

It was about this time that, after a long residence abroad, the Duke of Hamilton, who still loved her passionately, had an interview with her, and then the whole Hanmer conspiracy was brought to light, when too late. He again offered her his hand, but knew not why she dared not accept it, and she was compelled to prohibit his visits; thus, four years after, he married Miss Gunning, of Castle Coote. She also refused to marry the Duke of Argyle (who espoused the latter lady in her widowhood, in 1759) and several others. The world of fashion was astonished, and her mother, who was kept in ignorance of her secret marriage, reprehended what she deemed her folly in no measured terms. To be rid of all this she left England, and went to Dresden and Berlin; and her late position in our royal household secured her the attention of the pedantic King of Prussia, who corresponded with her. On her return, we are told that she "ran the course of pleasure, enlivened the court circles, and each year became more ingratiated with the mistress she served; led fashions, played whist with Lord Chesterfield, and revelled with Lady Harrington and Miss Ashe." So passed the days; but with night came reflection, and too often the debauched Harvey, like an evil spirit crossing the path of her whose life he had, to a great measure, blasted. Unable to claim her, in dread of the resentful nature of his father the earl, he nevertheless was exasperated to see her so admired and so immersed in gaiety; and times there were that, in fits of rage, he threatened to disclose the whole affair to the Princess of Wales. In this, however, she would seem to have anticipated him. Her royal mistress heard and pitied her, and continued her friend to the hour of her death. So plans were proposed to rid her of Harvey. One was a divorce, on the plea of his immoral habits; but this she shrank from, as involving many disclosures; the other--a most unwise measure--was to destroy the proofs of their marriage. The clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Amus, who officiated at that ceremony, and many of the witnesses, were dead. She visited the obscure little church at Laneston, where the register-book chanced to be in careless hands. A small sum procured an inspection of it, as if from curiosity, and while the custodian was beguiled with some amusing story, she contrived to "tear out," says a print of the day, "to erase," says the Attorney-General, "every memorial of her marriage with Mr. Harvey." Thus, in her rashness or ignorance, passion or hate, believing she was now free, she bade Harvey defiance; and, as it chanced that about this time he had unaccountably and totally ceased to care for her, he gave her no further inquietude, and ceased, as he was wont, to haunt every rout, ridotto, or ball at which he was likely to find her.

And now her better angel influenced with love for her the heart of a man whom an old magazine styles "the exemplar of amiability." This was Evelyn Pierrepoint, Duke of Kingston, K.G., and Master of the Staghounds north of the Trent, who raised a regiment of horse to act against the Highlanders in 1745, and, when a lieutenant-general, carried St. Edward's staff at the coronation of George III. in 1761.

At this time it appeared that very soon Captain Harvey would succeed to the earldom of Bristol, his grandfather having died in 1751, and his elder brother, who succeeded to the peerage, being unmarried and unlikely to marry. Much as she disliked her husband, rank and fortune were too tempting to Miss Chudleigh, and a very short period before Harvey succeeded to these, she contrived once more to visit Laneston, to procure a re-insertion of her marriage. To achieve this she employed artifice, all the charms of which she was mistress, and spent money with a liberal hand. The officiating clerk, little supposing that his caligraphy would be tested by the legal and critical acumen of the House of Lords, "doctored" the register to her wishes; and from Mr. Merril's house she returned to London, rejoicing that she had now two noble strings to her bow. We are told, "she did, it is true, succeed, but it was laying the groundwork of that very evidence which, in conjunction with oral testimony, operated afterwards to her conviction and disgrace. Here was cunning enveloping the possessor in a net of her own fabricating; and no wonder, when her hour of degradation arrived, that she fell unpitied; but re-married by her own stratagem, the participation of ducal honours became legally impossible."

Ignorant of all this secret plotting, the Duke of Kingston, who had been born in 1705, and was now not much past the prime of life, became the most ardent of her lovers; yet, with the Bristol marriage hanging over her, how was she to accept him? and while loving him she still hoped to die Countess of Bristol. But Harvey's brother, the second earl, lived longer than she anticipated, and she conducted her intrigue--for, after all her brilliant offers, to an intrigue she descended at last--with such care and decorum "that," as a writer says of it, "although their intimacy was a moral, it was not an evidenced, certainty." At last he who was really her husband became third Earl of Bristol in 1775; but five years before this, on the 8th of March, 1769, Elizabeth Chudleigh had been publicly espoused by the Duke of Kingston.

Lord Bristol, ignorant of how the register had been tampered with, and having fallen in love with a new flame, "the civilians were consulted on the matter, a jactitation suit was instituted; _the evidence_ which could prove the marriage _was kept back_." He failed to substantiate the marriage that he might procure a divorce; and raised now to the pinnacle of her fate, the (so-called) duchess defied him, and paraded her new honours for some years in perfect safety till the death of the duke by a stroke of palsy at Bath, on the 23rd September, 1773; and he was "interred with a magnificence becoming his dignity in the family vault at Holme-Pierrepoint in Nottinghamshire" (_Ann. Reg._). It is now the property of Earl Manvers, for Duke Evelyn was the last of his line. His will now produced a fatal storm. It excluded from any benefit an elder nephew and preferred a younger, thus giving rise to a public prosecution of the duchess, which ended in her exile and the beggary of the nephew. Two wills would seem to have been drawn, but only one signed--that by which "the duke bequeathed the income of his estates to his relict during her life, expressly under the condition of her continuing in a state of _widowhood_"; but as this did not suit her ulterior views, she strove in vain, with Mr. Field of the Temple, to have another signed, that was more to her taste.

The moment the vault at Holme-Pierrepoint was closed the duchess sailed for Rome, where Ganganelli, a Pope who bestowed always great attention upon the English, treated her with marked favour and honour. She now built a magnificent yacht--then a most uncommon appendage to an English household--and giving the command of it to Mr. Harding, a lieutenant of the navy, cruised about the Mediterranean, all ignorant that a storm was gathering against her in England, and that a Nemesis was hovering over her in the person of old Anne Craddock, or that a motion was being moved in the Consistory Court of London against "Elizabeth Countess of Bristol, calling herself Duchess of Kingston."

Anne Craddock, being in reduced circumstances, had applied for pecuniary relief to Mr. Field of the Temple, urging her distress and the absence of the duchess, on whose purse she had a just claim as the witness of her first marriage. Lawyer-like, he turned a deaf ear to her, and the old woman, exposed to penury, gave herself up to the task of vengeance and ruin. To the elder nephew of the late duke, she gave all the information in her power, and he, assisted by legal friends, had a bill of indictment for bigamy preferred against the duchess, whom Mr. Field advised at once to return to Britain lest she should be outlawed. The fashionable circles were filled with astonishment by this sudden _exposé_. If there were fraud or collusion, the Earl of Bristol must have acquiesced in both! Evidence in support of the first marriage was fully gone into, and it then came forth that if there was turpitude in the destruction of the register of a marriage with him, there was something extremely covetous in the attempt to restore it; and the latter act a woman named Judith Philips proved beyond a doubt, and the birth of the child was proved by Mr. Cæsar Hawkins.

The opponents of the duchess took every means to prevent her return to England. With Mr. Jenkins, a banker in Rome, she had placed securities for such sums as she might require; but when she requested money to enable her to return home, he so sedulously avoided her, that she at last lost all patience--fearing the sentence of outlawry--and swore that Jenkins was in the interest of her enemies; so, armed with a brace of pistols, she repaired to his house. The usual answer was given her, that he was not at home.

"Here shall I remain a week, a month--yea, a year, till he returns!" was her resolute rejoinder; and finding her inflexible, the banker at last appeared, and a stormy interview ensued. She demanded her money. He attempted to prevaricate; but the production of her pistols ended that. Her cheques were cashed, and she instantly set out on her return by way of the Alps. Excitement and anxiety--shame perhaps at the sudden and terrible exposure about to be made--brought on a fever, and caused an abscess in her side, compelling her to travel in a litter instead of a carriage to Calais; thus after a painful and tedious journey, which in her ignorance of law she feared would end in a London prison, yet resolutely she travelled home, and was joined by Colonel West, brother of John Earl of Delaware, and by the famous Earl of Mansfield, who, from the post of Lord Chief Justice, had been raised to the House of Lords. After her arrival at Kingston House, he soothed her apprehensions, and her natural spirits rose on finding that she had friends of such zeal and ability.

The Dukes of Ancaster, Portland, and Newcastle, Lord Mountstuart, and others, became her warm adherents; and from the moment that recognisances for the appearance of the duchess were entered into, public excitement rose to fever heat, but pending the trial, she suddenly found a new and rather unexpected enemy in the person of Samuel Foote, the famous player. This gentleman was perfectly intimate with the leading features of the duchess's life, and some of the more private matters thereof he obtained from a Miss Penrose. All these he wove up in a piece called _A Trip to Calais_, in which the character of the duchess was humorously and admirably, but disadvantageously, drawn. For its suppression, and before it could appear at the Haymarket, he was mean enough to expect a handsome sum from her, and he had the effrontery, when visiting her, to read at her request those scenes in which she figured as "My Lady Kitty Crocodile." She started up, inflamed with passion.

"Mr. Foote," she exclaimed; "what a wretch you make me!"

"This is not designed for your grace--it is not you," he urged, but in vain.

A long and angry correspondence (which will be found in the "Westminster Magazine" of 1776) ensued between them; and for the suppression of the farce Foote would seem to have demanded £2,000. She proffered him a cheque on Drummond for £1,600. The time for her was most critical, and she felt acutely that, at this crisis of her affair, with a trial impending before the Upper House, the production of this farce might destroy her. Foote held out for the original sum, but was baffled, as he deserved to be, in the end, as the Lord Chamberlain would not permit the _Trip to Calais_ to be acted.

At last the day of trial came inexorably, and on the 15th of April, 1776, she was arraigned at the bar in Westminster Hall, and charged with bigamy and felony. The commission to try her was read. The judges were in their robes, the masters in Chancery in their gowns. The Lord High Steward asked their lordships if it was their pleasure that the judges should be covered; and on an answer being given in the affirmative, the sergeant-at-arms called aloud,

"Elizabeth Duchess of Kingston, come forth and save yourself and your bail, or forfeit your recognisance."

On this the duchess, attended by Mr. Egerton of the Bridgewater family, Mrs. Barrington, widow of the general of that name, Drs. Isaac Schomberg and Warren, entered the court, preceded by the Yeoman Usher of the Black Rod, and was desired to seat herself. We are told that she "was dressed in a black polonaise, with a black gauze cap". She seemed cheerful and composed after the first shock. While she was reading the paper delivered in to the lords, she appeared to be strongly agitated and very sensibly affected. The business of her alleged crimes was then fully gone into; many witnesses were examined; and the trial, which excited the whole country, lasted five days. Anne Craddock's evidence, that of Judith Philips, and others, was fatally conclusive; and after the court adjourned to the chamber of parliament, Lord Mansfield asked each peer in succession whether the prisoner was or was not guilty; and all in succession replied, "Guilty, upon my honour," save the Duke of Newcastle, who added, "_erroneously_, but not intentionally."

On this being announced to her, she claimed "the benefit of the peerage applicable to the statute." She was then discharged on paying her fees; but on learning that, as Countess of Bristol, the prosecutors were preparing a writ of _ne exeat regno_, to prevent her quitting England and to deprive her of her property, she resolved to give them "the slip." She ordered her carriage to be driven about the public thoroughfares, and invited a select party to dine at Kingston; and while they were assembling she was travelling in all haste to Dover, where Harding, the captain of her yacht, met her, and in an open boat conveyed her safely to Calais.

And now began her life of aimless wandering. She repaired to Rome, where she found the palace she had rented there, and in which she had left much property, had been stripped by thieves in her absence; while at home every means were taken to set aside the will of the Duke of Kingston. In a handsome vessel, built at her own expense, and in which "there was a drawing-room, a dining-parlour, and other conveniences," and on board of which she put several of the late duke's most valuable pictures, as a present for the Empress of Russia, she sailed for St. Petersburg, where the novelty of an English lady "braving the billows of the Baltic" excited considerable interest, and a handsome mansion was assigned her. The empress treated her with great distinction, but our ambassador had to keep aloof from her in public. She purchased an estate near St. Petersburg for £12,000, and named it Chudleigh, and thereon she erected a distillery for making brandy! Leaving an Englishman in charge, she again returned to Calais, accompanied by a Russian colonel with his wife and children. The former, says an old _Edinburgh Magazine_, _en route_ "took French leave of the duchess, borrowing one of her watches, merely that he might not be at a loss as to the hour of the day, and taking a couple of rings, the brilliance of which would remind him of the charms of the real owner." Repairing to Paris, she bought a residence at Montmartre, with much land about it, and thence she sent much game to the markets; so the people in London alleged that she had become a Russian distiller and a French rabbit-merchant. In the latter affair she had a legal dispute.

In the August of the following year, when she was at dinner, it was announced that a decision had been given against her concerning the French property. She became greatly agitated, and burst a blood-vessel internally. She appeared to recover; but a few days afterwards, on the 26th of the month, when about to rise from bed, she complained of weakness, had some medicine given her, and was conducted to a couch.

"I shall lie here," she said; "I can sleep, and after a sleep I shall be entirely recovered."

She sank gradually back into a profound sleep, and from that slumber she never awakened.

STORY OF A HUSSAR OF THE REGENCY.

Sir Bernard Burke in recording the name of the _last_ baronet of the old line of Craigie in Ayrshire--the parent stock from which the Scottish patriot sprang--Sir Thomas Wallace, says, that he married a daughter of Agnew Lochryan, "by whom he had one son, a captain of the Guards, who pre-deceased him."

This is all the clue that Sir Bernard gives to one of the most extraordinary and wasted, miserable and wandering, lives that ever existed; for this Captain William Wallace (who was never in the Household troops), early in his career, became embroiled--through the famous Mrs. Mary Anne Clark--with those in high places at Court, and with the Horse Guards, most singularly and fatally for himself; but whether in the future, he was in guilt or error personally, or the victim of a most remarkable plot, it is difficult now to tell. Any way, our ambassador at Paris, Sir Charles Stuart, in writing of his affairs in 1819, asserts that "he considers him to have been the victim of a most unfounded and unprecedented persecution."

In the early part of the present century, there was published by a respectable firm in Stationers' Court, a volume of his memoirs, now out of print, or long since bought up for cogent reasons, and from it this paper is chiefly made out, with constructive evidence of his assertions from other sources.

Born in 1788, this heir of an old and honourable line began his military career in 1802, when he joined the army in India, and served in most of the operations of that war, so successfully waged by Wellington (then General Wellesley), against the Mahrattas, and when we were so signally triumphant on the plains of Assaye; and during that time, young Wallace would seem to have won the affection of his brother officers, and the esteem of his superiors. When the power of Scindiah was broken, and the strife was over, he came home for the recovery of his health, which had been seriously injured by service in India. In his eighteenth year, he was on leave of absence in London, at that time when "H.R.H. the Prince Regent," was the source of so much gossip, and the Pavilion at Brighton was the centre of rank and dissipation; when gloomy Old Bond Street was still in its glory as a fashionable lounge, though rivalled by the New and Piccadilly; when the Life Guards still wore Kevenhüller hats, and the Line rejoiced in their pigtails and pipe-clayed breeches.

Habituated to Oriental splendour and profusion, new to the gay world in which he found himself, by nature warm and impetuous, and, as an only son, too liberally supplied with means, young Wallace fell readily, for some time, into the perpetration of many follies, in the midst of which he was appointed to the 15th Hussars, then commanded by the Duke of Cumberland, and noted as one of the most expensive regiments in the service. Soon after, he found himself engaged to marry one of the richest heiresses in England, and, at this period, in the brilliancy of his expectations, with his natural vivacity, and the example of his wealthy and reckless comrades, he plunged into the most prodigal extravagance, incumbering himself with horses, carriages, and dogs to a useless extent.

In vain did his father, the old baronet, remonstrate with him. His love of adventure and impetuous character, led him into many _intrigues d'amour_, and frequent duels, for every regiment and circle had then its "triers and provers" of a young fellow's courage; but by horsewhipping publicly the Marquis of H---- in Hyde Park, and thrashing a gentleman in the Round Room of the Opera House, with several similar offences, won him many enemies. This wild career caused his marriage to be broken off, and as he had calculated upon it, as a means of paying those debts which he had contracted with the profusion of a Timon, a phalanx of creditors took the field against him.

He asserts in his vindication of himself, that his Colonel, the Duke of Cumberland, assumed a haughty right of interference in his private affairs. Perhaps the Royal Duke was only giving him sound advice; but as he could no longer remain in the 15th Hussars, he begged permission to exchange into the 2nd Life Guards with a Mr. Barrington; but the Duke objected to the personal appearance of the latter, while, on the other hand, if we are to believe the portrait of Captain Wallace, engraved by W. Woolnoth in 1821, the latter was a handsome young man, with regular features, pensive eyes, a well-formed mouth and chin, a slight moustache, and hair shorn very short for the days of the Regency.

He then applied to the Duke for permission to exchange into the 10th Hussars; but the prince, offended by his determination to leave his regiment, gave him a peremptory order to rejoin the 15th Hussars, thus arbitrarily cancelling sick leave of absence which he had obtained from the Commander-in-Chief. Conceiving the Colonel's order illegal, he delayed obeying it, and found himself _superseded_, just about the time he was wounded in a duel with a Captain Ross.

The moment he recovered, he laid the case before the kind Duke of York, through the influence of that fine old soldier the Earl of Cathcart, and was restored to rank and pay; but by being gazetted to the 17th Light Dragoons, then under orders for India, the climate of which he dared not face again in consequence of his broken health, he applied for any cavalry corps in the Peninsula, where Moore was then combating Soult, but memorials were in vain, and at this juncture, his evil star gave him an introduction to--Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke.

This lady took the young dragoon so much into her confidence, as rashly to intrust him with a very remarkable correspondence, which, in kinder days, had passed between her, the Duke of York, and Colonel McMahon, and was now to be of vast service to her in the measures she was about to institute against the former.

Wallace was rash enough to boast of possessing these formidable letters; rumour soon reached those in power of the startling fact, and the most strenuous efforts were made to induce their surrender. He thus drew upon himself the indignation of those whose favours he was at that very time soliciting, and whom it was his interest to have conciliated. About this time, he dined, he states, with the Duke of Sussex and other officers at the Neapolitan Club, where he drank freely, as all men did in those days, and losing all caution, was persuaded, by one who accompanied him home, to destroy those letters, on the publicity of which so much depended. This person, he asserts, was Charles Viscount Falkland, who fell in a duel in 1809. Wallace flung them in the fire. The whole merit of their destruction was attributed to the Viscount; and from that hour his entreaties were vain, and the only answer he received from the Horse Guards was a peremptory order to join his regiment.

Again he urged his health in India, and the injuries he had received by his horse falling back upon him when rearing--injuries so severe, that he was borne to the nearest house, that of the Duchess of Roxburghe; again he urged his services in the Mahratta war, and enclosed medical certificates from Drs. Bailey and Heaviside. We have only his own word for the tenor of this correspondence, which ended, however, by the appearance of his name in the Gazette as having _resigned_ His Majesty's Commission.

"It is impossible for me to attribute this unprecedented treatment," he wrote; "to H.R.H. the Commander-in-Chief, whose well-known liberality and kindness to the army in general, I had formerly experienced in the most marked manner myself; but to a false and malicious representation of the transaction itself."

All hope in the Horse Guards seemed over now, yet, in the ardour of his temperament, young Wallace conceived the romantic idea of all-but wresting back his commission, by quitting his sick-room, and joining our army in the Peninsula, as a cavalry volunteer; but his then evil genius preceded him, and by the malice of certain persons never known, his project was nearly defeated on his arrival in Portugal. His appearance in the ranks, divested of all the insignia of an officer, made him the subject of much, and not always friendly conversation; thus at the dinner-table of Sir Charles Stuart, then our Ambassador at Lisbon, he became embroiled with a Captain Fenwick and a Colonel Mackinnon, the former asserting that he had seen him behaving improperly at Plymouth, and the latter that he held certain of his acceptances. To these officers he sent challenges by the Honourable Dudley Carlton (who died in 1820), and received apologies for the assertions, but a prejudice against him remained in the mind of Sir Arthur Wellesley.

As a volunteer trooper, risking every privation and danger, his bravery with the advanced guard at the Lines of Torres Vedras won him the notice, perhaps the pity, of General Sir William Erskine, who took him out of the ranks and placed him in a temporary situation near his person. On every occasion, reconnoitering, foraging, or harassing the enemy, his peculiar position compelled him to be prominent; but the night-guards, without shelter from the cold or rain, brought back his Indian fever, and the once gay Hussar was reduced to the verge of the grave. A return home was necessary, and furnished with such testimonials as he hoped would restore to him the commission he prized so much, and charged with private despatches from Sir William Erskine, he returned to London, where, while his name was placed on the list at the Horse Guards for reappointment (as the Records show, on the 17th December, 1814), he was assailed by a host of creditors, whose attacks were worse than those of the French, so to avoid them he retired into Scotland.

After a time of gloom, disappointment, and useless regret, he effected a compromise with his creditors, but returned to town only to fall into fresh scrapes, and he became, for a time, the victim and slave of one of the famous and fascinating, beautiful and extravagant of the _demi-monde_, whose name it is useless to record; but who had recently come to the metropolis after queening it at Brighton. Having gone to visit his father, Sir Thomas Wallace, who, after being long a prisoner of war in France, was released by the Treaty of Paris, to his rage and mortification, the fair one on whom he had lavished all, eloped with one of his friends; but such was the weakness of his character, that some time after, on going to a masked ball at the Argyll Rooms, accompanied by Colonel Brown, Captain Moore of the Life-Guards, and two other officers, a lady near him, "either fainted, or affected to faint, and fell into the arms of the bystanders." Her mask was removed, and in all her wonderful beauty he saw the woman he had loved and lost! Pity seized him now; he was silly enough to bear her to her carriage, which drove her and his friends to her house, No. 3, Crawford Street, where a mad night of champagne and deep play ensued, and the losses of Wallace were enormous. Other gambling transactions followed with reckless spirits of the Guards, and many of those military idlers whom the Peace had cast upon the town. In one of these a Mr. Bradburne lost so much that he shot himself, and a paragraph in "The Day" announced that he had been "decoyed (to gamble) by Captain W---- and a Mr. A.," and had put a period to his existence in consequence. Action was taken against the Editor, but too late; the story spread with a thousand additions. Wallace certainly held Bradburne's acceptances for £2,200, which he had fairly won in the attempt of the latter to win _his_ money; yet after receiving a promissory note for the amount on Hoare and Co., he threw it into the fire; but his rash career in London had gained him such a host of enemies, that society viewed him coldly, and accompanied by a friend, named Andrews, he left it. "We determined to proceed to the nearest sea-port town," he states, "and there await the favourable moment at which it was agreed we were to be recalled by our friends, to meet the charges and defeat the machinations of our prosecutors. With this view we departed for Calais."

But his friends failed to recall him, for now began the most extraordinary portion of his misfortunes and adventures.

On the 7th March, 1816, they put up at the Hôtel de Bourbon, Rue de la Paix, Paris, waiting news from London, and then, the maître d'hôtel, Monsieur de Marcel, urged him to go to the Hôtel de Valois, which he kept in the Rue de Richelieu, promising to afford better service and accommodation. "There was an eagerness in the manner of this fellow--an importunity beyond all bounds--that struck me with suspicion of some further motive," says Wallace; "I coldly declined his solicitations, but it did not discourage him; he came almost daily and besieged me with entreaties, and bore repulses with a patience that would have astonished me in any one but a Frenchman." Eventually the friends removed to his other hotel on the 19th of March, and Wallace had soon reason to suspect that his escritoire had been opened and his papers examined, by Marcel and some suspicious-looking men, whom he once surprised in his rooms; but they were partly in their host's power by that time, as Mr. Andrews was 1,040 francs in his debt. For this he gave bills upon his mother and Lord Wallscourt, and then left for Madrid with the Count de Gadez; while Wallace, finding that the bad impression against him in London had passed away, set out for England by the way of Brussels, where he was well received by the many English tourists to whom the continent was now open. Unfortunately a friend induced him to revisit Paris, where more than once he saw his former host, Marcel, who always saluted him with marked respect. He then went to Boulogne, and one evening when he was dining with some friends at the Hôtel Charpentier, a party of gendarmes broke into the room and roughly arrested him, at the instance of Marcel, for a debt of 4,000 francs. He was conducted to prison, where, resolving to resist this infamous attempt to extort money, he employed MM. Lessis and Deslandes, an advocate and attorney, to defend him before the _Tribunal de Première Instance Civile_, which--as Marcel was unable to prove his claim--set Wallace at liberty, and awarded him damages for the insult, the motive for which seemed inexplicable to all.

Reflection showed that Marcel had some secret inducement, and that he was the paid agent of powerful enemies elsewhere. This Marcel had been notorious during the Reign of Terror, and only escaped death by having a friend, whose name was _Martel_, executed, by a strange trick, in his place. He became a member of the secret police, and by his denunciations had long "kept the guillotine in the south of France in continual motion, and Bordeaux in perpetual mourning." Such was the agent of the enemies of Wallace, who states, that when leaving the debtor's prison in accordance with the sentence of the Court, he was, to his rage and astonishment, arrested by the _concierge_ on a charge of _robbery_, and was conducted with a "brigade of convicts," under an armed guard, to Paris--everywhere, as an Englishman--taunted and reviled, for Waterloo was fresh in every Frenchman's mind. He had, however, the use of a cabriolet, which deposited him at the prison of La Force, after being insolently treated by the _Procureur du Roi_, and coldly answered by our ambassador; and then his spirit would have sunk but for the kindness of a young Belgian girl, to whom he had become attached, and who had followed him from Brussels. Of this influence he was soon deprived, by being thrust into a cell with nine _galériens_, who robbed him of money supplied to him by kind Deslandes, the advocate, to pay "the right of entry." His valet was denied access to him, and all his letters were intercepted. Then, surrounded by bolts and bars, the dust and dirt of years, and among such ruffians as France can alone produce, he remained in an agony of perplexity till, on the absurd charge of stealing from the Hôtel de Valois three towels and a shoebrush, the property of M. Marcel, eighteen months before, he was arraigned at the _Palais de Justice_, where Marcel appeared in the double capacity of prosecutor and witness; and though "all were anxious to hear the accusation that would banish an Englishman to the galleys," he totally failed to prove it, and once more Wallace was set at liberty.

Boiling with rage, he hastened into the street, resolving to demand redress from our ambassador, Sir Charles Stuart, when he was seized by an armed party, and beaten by them so severely that he would have been killed but for the intervention of an Irish soldier in the French service. He was then dragged back to La Force, into which he was thrown on a new charge--forgery! A few days after, he was thumbscrewed, and brought under escort, before M. Meslin, the _Juge d'Instruction_, for examination; he was denied the use of an interpreter, and no one was suffered to be present but the _greffier_, an intimate friend of Marcel.

He was told that his name was Philip, not William; that he was a Russian, not a Scotsman, and the _Juge_ alluded to many mysterious events to which William was a total stranger. He was declared incorrigible. "_Gendarmes, remenez-le à La Force!_" was the order, and he was marched back to prison. Eventually he was ordered to be released, when his advocate, the Chevalier Duplessis, discovered through Pozzo di Borgo, the Russian ambassador, that he had been arrested in mistake for another person who had forged a draft upon His Excellency. On Wallace appealing to M. Meslin for some satisfaction for all he had undergone, that official only laughed, and ordered him again to La Force, saying there was a new and more serious charge against him! This was an accusation of swindling. He was flung into the dreadful _Bâtiment-neuf_, where his sufferings, like the horrible scenes he witnessed, are beyond all description. The charge was made at the instance of the inevitable and inexorable Marcel! He based it on the old claim of debt. Duplessis treated the prosecution as a nullity; but Marcel procured a judgment against him by default, and he was tried by the _Cour de Premiere Instance_, on the charge of having obtained credit from Marcel through a bill drawn on a _Lord Wallace_. The bill drawn by Mr. Andrews on Lord _Wallscourt_, and on which the name of Wallace did not appear "either as drawer, or acceptor or indorser," was adduced in evidence against him. The charge fell to the ground. Even the _Procureur du Roi_ was warmly in his favour. He was acquitted, and left the court overjoyed.

As he went forth, he was again arrested in virtue of the judgment obtained by Marcel, through default, and thrown into Ste. Pélagie, the King's Bench of Paris, where his place of confinement was so horrible, that he longed to be back again in La Force. He was now almost heart-broken; but as the wretch who persecuted, failed to aliment him, he was released on the 27th January, 1818; but at the gate he was again arrested by order of the Comte d'Angles, the Prefect of Police, in virtue of a _private letter_, and confined "_au secret!_" No human being could have access to him now, and all intercourse with the outer world was denied. His situation was now harrowing in the extreme. "I felt," he says, "all the difference between the misery that has hope to dwell upon, and that which has none." Without a pretext, his captivity would be without an end, it seemed.

But, on the 28th January, 1818, the _concierge_ abruptly announced an order to set him free; and added that M. Marcel was without with a party of gendarmes. He begged permission to remain till sunset; but the agent of the Secret Police, finding that he did not come forth, entered and dragged him out; and along the quays and bridges he was torn by twelve armed men, followed by a vast unpitying multitude, with a handkerchief thrust into his mouth, and then retaken to Ste. Pélagie, on three charges of murder--for assassinating a British General at Valenciennes, and two bankers in Paris!

On these outrageous charges he pined in prison for eighteen months longer, till consumption began to waste him, and all spirit and all desire for life were gone; for though no attempt was made to substantiate them, the _Cour de Premiere Instance_ had reconfirmed to Marcel the power of detaining him as a debtor for life in Ste. Pélagie. Fortunately, about this time he was discovered by an old English friend, who, by ample bribery, prevailed upon that remarkable scoundrel (who thought his victim was dying) to sign a document, relinquishing all claim, if Wallace would abandon all right of counter prosecution. He also added an invitation to take up a residence in _his house_!

On the 6th October, wasted, worn, penniless, and every way destitute, he quitted Ste. Pélagie, and was conveyed to the humble lodging of his faithful valet in the Faubourg St. Marceau, when on the verge of death. In the solitude of his various prisons, how often must this son of luxury, this butterfly of fashion, who, though brave in battle, was but a Bond Street lounger when at home, have felt bitterly that the shaping of his life had gone beyond him now, ere youth was well-nigh past; and that its illusions, hopes, and enthusiasm had also gone for ever.

Nursed by his old valet he gradually recovered strength, and on receiving an affectionate letter from his father urging that the air of his native country would completely restore him, he gladly turned his back on Paris, and its hated police power.

But he would seem never to have got over the shock of all these accusations, as he sank into a premature grave, thus leaving old Sir Thomas Wallace the last of his line, and without an heir to his baronetcy, which was created in 1669.

A WEIRD STORY OF BRUGES.

Six months ago, when in Bruges, that "quaint old town of art and song," as Longfellow styles it--a town all unchanged since the ancient days of Flanders--I became cognisant of the following events, by happening to be present at the examination of the chief actor in them, before one of the two burgomasters who govern the city.

With a Belgian friend, I had been lounging in a window of the club-house that overlooks the spacious square known as the Grande Place (above which towers the wonderful belfry, from whence one may look down on the frontiers of Holland as on a map, and from whence, it is said, the mouth of the Thames may be seen on a clear day), when a police escort, with swords drawn, conducted a prisoner past, towards the Palais de Justice. He was a young man of the better class, apparently, very pale, very sad, and depressed in aspect, very handsome in face, graceful in bearing, and most unlike a criminal. His hands, however, were manacled, and a crowd of workmen and children clattered noisily around him in their wooden sabots.

As the rumour spread that a terrible assassination had just been committed, we followed the escort to the magnificent old hall in that edifice, which was whilom the Palais du Franc de Bruges, and which contains a chimney-piece occupying one entire side of it, with gigantic statues carved in wood, and marble bas-reliefs representing chastely the story of Susannah and the Elders, as the reader may find in his "John Murray."

From that which transpired at the examination of the prisoner, and what I read in a few subsequent numbers of the little local paper named _La Patrie_, I gleaned the substance of the following story, which, in some of its features, reminds one of the case of Oriental metempsychosis mentioned in the _Spectator_--the passing of the soul from body to body, including the influences of mesmeric, crystalline, and magnetic forces, though I do not pretend to know anything of the learned and mysterious jargon concerning those matters; but much of which I heard that day referred to in the Palais de Justice.

A mile or so on the level highway beyond the beautiful round towers of the loopholed and embattled Porte St. Croix, one of the still remaining barriers of the old fortifications, there stands at a little distance from the road, a quaint old Flemish dwelling-house, built of red brick, and almost hidden among chestnut and apple-trees. If we are to believe the "Chronyke Van Vlanderen," it was once a shooting-box of Charles the Bold, and near it Mary of Burgundy received the fall from her horse which proved so fatal. Be all this as it may, it is a house with many pointed gables, strange outshots and beams of quaintly-carved oak; and therein, with his nephew, Hendrik, and an old housekeeper, resided Dr. Van Gansendonck, called Doctor, not from his profession, but for his learning, as he enjoyed the reputation of understanding all languages, living and dead, and being master of every science, human and divine; and was regarded by the simple and religious Brugois, as altogether a miracle of a man in some respects.

Some there were who deemed him a dangerous dupe to his own powers, and these were the clergy especially who, with something of repugnance, drew their black cloaks closer about them when "the doctor" passed them, on the highway or in the narrow unpaved streets as it was notorious that he never crossed the threshold of a church, or was known to lift his hat either to them or to the numerous Madonnas that decorate every street corner, and many a doorway too, in Bruges.

The Herr Doctor, now past his sixtieth year, had, in some respects, decidedly a bad reputation, and a hundred and fifty years ago or so, might have ended his studies amid a blaze of tar-barrels in the Grande Place as a wizard, but in this our age of steam and telegraphy he was viewed as simply a learned eccentric, and as a dabbler in mesmerism, clairvoyance, the odic light, and second sight; but these occult mysteries, which the church condemns, he would seem to have carried to a length that seems strangely out of place in these days of hard facts and practical common-sense.

A forehead high and bald, a head tonsured round by a fringe of silvery hair, eyes keen and quick as those of a rattlesnake--eyes that seemed to glare through his gold-rimmed glasses, made the face of Herr Van Gansendonck so remarkable, that those who saw it never failed to be impressed by its strange expression of intellectual power, tinged with somewhat of insanity; but his visitors were few. His time was chiefly spent in his library; and as he was rich, being proprietor of more than one of those gigantic mills, the sails of which overshadow the grassy ramparts, he could afford to please himself by living as he chose, and seclusion was his choice. He seemed to have but one favourite only--Hendrik--a brother's orphan son, whom he had adopted, educated, and who was to be his heir.

Hendrik was now in his twentieth year, decidedly handsome, but with dreamy blue eyes that had an expression in them one could not easily forget; yet the lad's temperament was poetic and enthusiastic, and now he had but recently returned to Bruges, after undergoing a course of study, and attending those lectures which are given on science, literature, and art at the library of the Museum in Brussels.

The grim old student hailed the return of the younger one with a pleasure that he did not conceal, and there was at least one more in Bruges that did so with joy.

This was Lenora, the daughter of Madame Van Eyck, a widow lady, residing in one of those quaint old houses at the Quai Espagnol. To her he had been betrothed, and the monetary plans of his uncle alone were awaited for their marriage, young though Hendrik was.

Bruges, according to an old monkish rhyme, has ever been celebrated for its pretty girls, but Lenora Van Eyck, a bright blonde of eighteen, was more than pretty--she was charming, with that wonderful bloom of complexion which is so truly Belgian; light, laughing, hazel eyes that were full of merriment, and all her ways and modes of expression piquant and attractive.

She had been one of the six young ladies who, clothed and veiled in white, were selected on the last Corpus Christi day to bear the gilt Madonna through the streets before the bishop. Lenora had been with her family at Blankenburg--the little Brighton of the Brugois--for several weeks after the return of Hendrik to the house of his uncle; and when again they met at their favourite trysting place, the long walk of stately poplars by the canal near the Porte St. Croix, she soon became conscious of a strange and painful change in the bearing, the manner, and the eyes of her lover. Languor seemed to pervade every action; his face had become pale, his eyes more dreamy than ever, and he was unusually taciturn and abstracted.

Why was this? Lenora asked of herself, while she watched him with that keenness of eye and anxiety of heart that are born of love and tenderness, for there was a singular mystery now about the once happy Hendrik that filled her with grave perplexity. Had his love for her changed? His eyes, though sad, were loving in expression as ever, when they met hers--yet even his smile was sad--so very sad!

Again and again, in her most winning way, she would implore Hendrik to reveal to her any secret that weighed upon his mind, but in vain. Why was it, she asked, that he, whom she had left so lively in bearing and happy in spirit, had now become so moody? and why was it that there were times when he seemed to feel himself compelled, as it were, to leave her suddenly and in haste, without a word of explanation, apology, or excuse? She pleaded without avail; Hendrik could but avert his pallid face, or cover his eyes with his hand, as if to shut out some painful vision or crush some worrying thought.

He dared not tell her--lest she should deem him mad, and so shrink from him--that his uncle, the Herr Van Gansendonck, had, mesmerically, acquired a mysterious and terrible influence over him, and that by the mere power of will he could summon him to his presence at all times, wherever he might be, or with whomsoever he was engaged--even with herself; and that he, Hendrik, found himself totally powerless and incapable of effecting his emancipation from the bodily and mental thraldom under which he writhed!

He dared not tell her all this, or, further, that Herr Van Gansendonck had the power to set him asleep on a chair in his library, and then to cause his spirit (for this was alleged in the Palais de Justice) to disengage itself from the body, and go on distant missions through the air for thousands of miles in the course of a few minutes, or that when thus put to sleep, the Herr, by exciting his organ of ideality, could obtain such information as he wished on strange and abstruse subjects.

That he had become a helpless and nerve-shattered mesmeric medium, he thought at times he might confide to her; but even in this his courage failed him, for other and more terrifying convictions were creeping upon him; thus he shrank from telling the girl who loved him so dearly, that when his spiritual essence was despatched to distant lands, the Herr, by the same power, permitted other spirits to enter his body and use its members for purposes of their own. The horror of this idea, it was alleged, made the youth's life insupportable, for on awaking from these strange and involuntary trances, he would at times find on his person cuts and bruises he was all unconscious of receiving; sometimes his purse would be gone, or in its place might be found strange money and letters to and from individuals of whose existence he knew nothing.

All this was done by one whose power he could neither repel nor defy; and now he had the natural dread that if his body was made to obey the behests of these spiritual intruders, he might be led into some horrible predicament--the committal of a dreadful crime. Another might even come in his place and meet Lenora!

One evening as they sat on the grassy rampart that overlooked the great canal, the girl strove to rouse or soothe him by singing with great sweetness one of Jan Van Beer's Flemish songs; but the music of her voice and the poetry of the author of "Zeik Jongeling" fell on Hendrik's ear in vain. When she paused,

"I dreamt of you last night, darling Lenora," said the young man, looking at her with inexpressible tenderness; "but such dreams are so tantalising, even more so than the dreams one has by day."

"All your life seems one hazy dream now, Hendrik," said Lenora somewhat petulantly.

"Forgive me, dearest, you know not what you talk of. My mind, I grant you, is a chaos, full of strange terrors, perplexity, and confusion; and times there are when I fear for my reason," he added wildly, passing a hand over his forehead, and looking aside.

"Dear Hendrik, do not speak thus, I implore you."

"I must--in whom can I confide, if not in you? And yet I dare not--I dare not!"

After a pause he spoke again, but with his eyes fixed, not on her, but on the still, deep water of the shining canal.

"This much I will tell you, Lenora. Yesterday, my uncle sent me on some business of his to the house of an advocate, Père Baas, near the Béguinage, a house in which I had never been before, and I was shown into a room to wait. On looking round, to my astonishment, every article in it--and the room itself--the ceiling, the stove, the windows, and the paintings--especially one by Hans Hemling--were all familiar to me, and I seemed to recognise every object there. 'I was never here before,' thought I; 'and yet I must have been--but when? If so, there is a little window behind this picture, which opens to the garden of the Béguinage.' I turned the picture, and lo! there was the little window in question; I saw through it the garden with all its cherry-trees and two or three béguines flitting about. Oh, Lenora, there is indeed some power beyond matter, proving that the soul is independent of the body!"

"It must have been a dream."

"It was no dream," replied Hendrik gloomily.

"But how do you account for the strange fancy?"

"My disembodied spirit must have been there, sent on some accursed errand by my uncle!"

"But you would die, Hendrik."

"Not if another tenant were at hand," replied Hendrik, gnashing his teeth.

Then the girl wept to hear him, as she naturally deemed it, raving thus.

"Such things cannot be," said she, sobbing.

"My uncle says they may; and the theory is as old as the days of Pythagoras."

"I know nothing of Herr Pythagoras; but this I know, that the Herr Van Ganseudonck is a strange and bad man. Pardon me, dear Hendrik; but he never enters a church door, nor has he been to mass or confession for years. Leave him, and Bruges too, rather than become the victim of such dreadful delusions."

"To do either is to leave and to lose you! I am his heir; and we have but to wait his pleasure--or, it may be, his death, to be so happy," replied Hendrik, sadly: and then they relapsed into silence. With Lenora it was silence induced by sorrow and alarm, while her lover seemed to let his thoughts slip away into dreamland. The sultry summer evening breeze rustled the leaves near them; the honey-bees buzzed and hummed among the wild flowers and buttercups that grew on the old rampart; and far away could be heard the ceaseless chirping of the crickets.

Lenora's head rested on Hendrik's shoulder, and he was lost in thought, though mechanically toying with her hair, which shone like ripples of gold in the light of the setting sun.

He was aware that Lenora had begun to speak to him again; her voice seemed to mingle with the drowsy hum of the bees and the evening chimes or carillons in the distant spires; but he heard as if he heard her not; till suddenly a thrill seemed to pass over him, as a secret and intuitive sense or knowledge that his terrible relation required his immediate presence, made him start from the grassy bank, snatch a hasty kiss, and hurry away by the arch of the Porte St. Croix, leaving Lenora mortified, sorrowful, and utterly bewildered by the abruptness of his departure.

"Oh, how changed he is!" thought she, as she proceeded slowly in the other direction towards her home on the Quai Espagnol.

On two or three occasions the unhappy Hendrik had, what he conceived to be, undoubted proof of his body having been, in the intervals of mesmeric trances, tenanted by another spirit than his own; and this strange and wild conviction caused such intense horror and loathing of his uncle that the expressions to which he gave utterance to more than one of his friends--more than all to Lenora--were recalled, most fatally for himself, at a future time.

One day, in the Rue des Augustines, he was accosted by brother Eusebius, a Capuchin.

"Friend Hendrik," said he, severely and gravely, "was it becoming in you to be roystering as you were yesterday at the low estaminet in the market-place, and with such companions--fellows in blouses and sabots?"

"Impossible, Brother Eusebius; I was not there," faltered Hendrik, as the usual fear crept over him.

"I myself saw you. And, moreover, you looked at me."

"When--at what hour?"

"Six in the evening."

"Six!"

Hendrik felt himself grow pale. He remembered that at that identical time he was under the hands of his uncle. He groaned in sore and dire perplexity, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, while the Capuchin continued to address him in tones of rebuke and earnest remonstrance.

"Have I a double-ganger, or am I becoming crazed?" urged Hendrik. "Believe me, Brother Eusebius, I was not there!" he added, piteously and earnestly.

"At the hour of six?" persisted the unbelieving Capuchin.

"I swear to you that at the hour of six I was, and had been for some time, in one of those unaccountable trances in which my uncle has the power to cast me--one of those hours of bodily torpor that have come upon me," he added, while the perspiration poured in bead-drops from his pallid brow. "I awoke about eight. I heard the chimes ringing in the church of St. Giles, and near me sat my uncle, pen in hand, as if in the act of questioning me and committing to paper that which I had been revealing in my magnetic slumber. Oh! am I the victim of necromancy?"

"Scarcely, in this age of the world," replied the Capuchin, but now with more of pity than rebuke in his manner.

"I swear to you by the Holy Blood that I speak the truth!" continued Hendrik, referring to the famous relique of the Brugois in the little chapel near the Hôtel de Ville. "I last remember hearing the voice of my uncle as I sank into sleep; my arms fell powerless by my side; my eyes closed; waves of magnetic fluid or air seemed to flow over me; and my spirit passed away, at his behest, to other lands."

"What madness--what raving is this, Hendrik?" said the sandalled friar, with sadness and severity. "Do you mean to tell me that your uncle is another Cagliostro--a veritable Balsamo?"

"I fear it--I fear it," said Hendrik, with clasped hands.

"Learn first to fear the potations of the estaminet," replied the Capuchin, as he turned coldly and bluntly away, believing that the young man was intoxicated.

On another occasion Hendrik failed to keep an appointment with Lenora Van Eyck, who waited for him anxiously till long past the time named, and then proceeded pensively homeward. As she approached the steep and antique bridge that leads from the Rue des Augustines to the Quai Espagnol she saw Hendrik cross it, and look at her calmly and deliberately the while, but without a glance or smile of recognition. Her heart, which at first had beat happily, now became perplexed as he turned abruptly up the opposite bank of the canal, and dropped into a little skiff, which he proceeded to unmoor, and, in doing so, cut his right hand severely.

"Hendrik! Hendrik!" she called aloud; but he heard her not, and, shipping a pair of sculls, pulled swiftly out of sight.

When next they met, and she upbraided him with this strange conduct, the same emotion of fear that had come over him when confronted by the Capuchin again filled his heart, and he called Heaven to witness that it was not he whom she had seen.

"But here, Hendrik, love, is the wound on your hand," urged the astonished girl.

"I know not how I received it," he moaned, "though aware that a wound is there."

"This passes all comprehension!" said Lenora mournfully. "Oh! Hendrik, I thought a love like ours would never die; yet doubt and terror are destroying it now."

Something like a sob came into Hendrik's throat, and through his clenched teeth he muttered hoarsely and fiercely--

"This kind of life--a double life, it would seem--cannot last for ever. Nothing does last for ever, and the end will come anon." And as he spoke he fixed his moist and now hollow eyes as if on some distant horizon which he alone could see.

"Hendrik!--dearest Hendrik!" urged the girl soothingly, as she caressed his face between her soft and pretty hands, for her heart was full of alarm as well as love; it was a conviction so dreadful, the fear that he was perhaps becoming insane.

"Can over-study at Brussels have made the poor boy ill," thought Lenora, in the solitude of her chamber that night. "Oh! must I give him up after all--after all? Dare I go through life as the wife of one so strange, so wayward, and so moody? No; better be a béguine like Aunt Truey. I am so happy at home. Why do girls marry? and for what do I want to marry?" And as she pondered thus, she sat looking at her white hands, and changing Hendrik's betrothal ring--an opal set with diamonds--from one finger to another, till it slipped from her and rolled away on the varnished floor, whence she snatched it up with a little cry of alarm, for the event seemed ominous of evil. "Oh, I must indeed consult Brother Eusebius about this matter," was her concluding thought, more especially as the Capuchin had told her that 'opals were unlucky.'

And when he dropped in for his post-prandial cup of coffee with her mother that evening, Lenora did take him into her confidence; but the friar only imbibed pinch after pinch of snuff from the huge wooden box which he carried in the sleeve pocket of his brown frock; hinted of what he had seen at the estaminet, and shook his shaven head, adding that "Hendrik Van Gansendonck came of a bad stock, and should be avoided." So the Capuchin was consulted no more on the subject.

Hendrik now broke many appointments made with Lenora. He seemed to be no longer the master of his own actions, and he was so frequently reproached by her for his inattention and unkindness, that he feared to make a promise to her at all, and two entire days passed without their meeting.

Could he tell her that which he now confidently believed to be the case; that Herr Van Gansendonck had cast him into a mesmeric trance, leaving him in that condition, and intending to come back in an hour or so; but, having been summoned away on business, had left him, to all appearance spell-bound and helpless, to the terror of the old housekeeper at the château?

On the third day he met her coming from vespers in the church of the Béguinage, where she had been to visit her Aunt Truey.

Lenora was very pale; her eyes were full of tears, and, as Hendrik could perceive, they were sparkling with resentment. She was in the very summer of her beauty--that age when all girls seem pretty. Hendrik gazed upon her carelessly, and would have kissed her, but the walk was a public one, and the _blanchisseurs_ were busy amid the Minnewater. Lenora was so prettily dressed, too: and most suitably did her silver-grey costume, trimmed with rose-coloured ribbon, become her blonde beauty, her purity of complexion, and fair shining tresses. Fresh, young, and graceful, there was a delicacy and softness in all her air and person, yet anger was apparent in her eyes; and those of Lenora were what a writer has described, as "wonderful golden eyes--eyes which painters dare not imitate, because the colour is so subtle, and the light in them so living--eyes that are called hazel, but are not hazel."

"I now know the reason of your avoiding me in the Rue des Augustines, and also where you were going on that evening in the skiff," said she.

"Lenora, have I not already said----"

"Hendrik," interrupted the girl, with severity, "I have for some time feared that you were crazed; now I find that you are wicked, and that Brother Eusebius was right after all."

"Wicked--my darling!"

"Do not speak to me thus; I have good reason to be most indignant with you," she continued, stamping her little foot on the ground.

"For what, dearest?" asked Hendrik, whose heart was sinking with vague apprehension as usual.

"Cease to twist your moustache, and answer me this: was it right or proper of you to be drinking with soldiers at the Rampart de Caserne last evening?--and worse still, to be toying with and caressing little Mademoiselle Dentelle, the lace-maker, who lives there--toying with her actually in the open street, while mamma and I passed you?" added Lenora, whose eyes were flashing through their tears, though her cheek was pale, as Hendrik's now became.

He was voiceless, and could make neither response nor reply, for he knew that at the time to which he referred he had been, as he simply phrased it, "put to sleep in his kinsman's study," and that on awaking he had found himself not there, but lying on the grassy bank near the Rampart de Caserne, and that, instead of his hat, he found on his head the kepi of a soldier of the 2nd Regiment, then quartered in Bruges, and a pipe, of which he knew nothing, dangling from a button of his coat! The stars were shining, and the dew was on the grass, but how long he had been there, or how he came to be there, were alike mysteries to him.

He felt bitterly the utter hopelessness of urging more to Lenora; yet he attempted to falter out some explanation.

"This is juggling, Hendrik," replied the girl passionately; "another face--another love has come between us, otherwise you would not dare to treat me thus?"

"Your suspicion is false, dearest Lenora," said he. "Oh, pardon me, sweet one! but I feel as if I were in a dream--as if I were some one else, and not myself!"

"Again, dreams!" said Lenora scornfully, as she drew his betrothal ring from her finger, dashed it at his feet, and left him. Night after night had Lenora lain awake, brooding over the change that had come upon Hendrik, weeping the while, with wide-open eyes in the darkness, and now she had come to the firm resolution to dismiss him for ever; but when she left him, silent, stunned, and confounded by the Minnewater, her heart yearned for him again, and she repented her severity, lest his mind might be, as she too justly feared, affected.

And now he, while gazing wistfully after her retiring figure, thought with loathing and horror of the keen visage, the hawk-like nose, the cold, yet clear glittering eyes and gold spectacles of that odious relative to whom he was unhappily indebted even for food and raiment, for his past education, and all his future prospects in life--Lenora included; but who seemed to possess over him a power so unaccountable, so terrible and diabolical! Much of this he said to one or two friends whom he met on his way homeward, and the expressions were also remembered against him in the time that was to come.

Soon after he found himself secretly and imperatively summoned to the presence of the Herr, who--as he afterwards told the Burgomaster in the Palais de Justice--"bade him go sleep," and sent his spirit on some mysterious errand, hundreds of miles away. What happened in the library of that lonely little château outside the Porte St. Croix, while his spiritual essence was thus absent, the unhappy Hendrik never could know; but when it re-entered his body--or when he awoke--he was horrified to find his learned uncle lying dead on the floor amid a pool of blood, his face and throat gashed by dreadful wounds, which had evidently been inflicted by a blood-spotted knife which Hendrik found clutched in his own right hand! Blood gouts were over all his clothes, the pockets of which were found to be stuffed with money, jewels, end other valuables taken from a bureau and desk, which had been burst open and ransacked.

The soul of Hendrik died within him! Even if he had committed this crime in frenzy--and he felt certain that he did not do so--why should he have sought to rob his uncle? He then thought of Lenora, and of the sorrow and shame that would come upon her now; he reeled and fell senseless on the floor. The cries of the old housekeeper speedily brought aid; Hendrik was arrested, charged with assassination and robbery, and was at once consigned, as already described, to the Palais de Justice, where all the weird story came to light. The hatred and horror he had expressed of his dead uncle were now remembered fatally by all who had heard them; but the knife he had in his hand was, singularly enough, found to be the property of a soldier of the 2nd Belgian Infantry.

To the last Hendrik asserted his innocence, when tried and convicted for that which was, not unnaturally, deemed a most cruel and ungrateful crime; and his advocate, Père Baas, who, singularly enough, was also a dabbler in mesmerism, laboured hard in his cause, but in vain. When brought to the scaffold in the Grande Place, Hendrik, attended by Brother Eusebius, had all the bearing of a martyr, as he fully believed that the crime committed, if by his hand, was at least by the dictate of another spirit.

Lenora visited him in the dreary cell the night before he died, and, according to "La Patrie," as they parted, Hendrik said:

"Death, even on the scaffold, has no terror for me now. I know where my spirit will go, and that none on earth can recall it. You will come to me, beloved Lenora," he added, pointing upwards; "you will come to me there in heaven, where there can be no parting, no death, and no sorrow."

And, with one long embrace, they parted for ever.

The editor of "La Patrie," writing of these things next day, said, not without truth, "Hendrik Van Gansendonck was, too probably, crazed; and if so, should not have been executed."

AGNES SOREL, "THE LADY OF BEAUTY."

This celebrated favourite of Charles VII. of France--one who has inherited from her own time to ours, after a lapse of more than four centuries, the distinctive sobriquet of "the beautiful Agnes"--was the daughter of M. Soreau (vulgarly called Sorel, according to De Mezerai), the Seigneur de St. Geran, a noble gentleman of Touraine, and not the child of a humble house, _de petite basse maison_, as George Chastelain, her personal enemy, would have us to believe in his "Chronique des Ducs de Bourgogne."

She was born in 1409, and in 1431, when in her two-and-twentieth year, received the appointment of attendant or lady of honour to Isabella, queen of Naples and Sicily, from whose court and service she passed into that of Mary, daughter of Louis II., Duke of Anjou, afterwards queen of Charles VII., where her rank, education, and more than these, her marvellous beauty, all conspired to win her the perilous attention of a king who was younger than herself. Agnes was _not_ seventeen, as the fair authoress of the "Histoire des Favorites," asserts she was, at this time; but had attained the more mature age of at least twenty-eight--perhaps thirty, as Oliver de la Marche, a contemporary, when recording some event which took place in 1444, tells us that "the king had just then elevated a poor lady, a pretty woman, called Agnes Sorel, and placed her in such triumph and power that her state was comparable to that of the greatest princess of the realm."

Her features were beautiful, and expressive of extreme gentleness; her skin has been described as being of the hue of alabaster, and her hair was marvellously golden in its brightness. She was then in the full bloom and beauty of womanhood, and possessed a vivacity of manner which "spread an air full of charm on the least of her actions, so that the most insensible souls could not resist her" ("Histoire des Favorites"). "Heaven," says this authoress, "had not only endowed Agnes with the charms of face; she had an air full of grace, an admirable figure, more wit than any other woman in the world, and the most delicate and finely turned, with a certain greatness of soul which led her naturally to generosity; all her inclinations were noble; she was attentive, compassionate, ardent in friendship, discreet, sincere, and, in short, altogether fitted to make herself beloved to distraction" (p. 102).

De Mezerai writes of her as "a very agreeable and generous lady, who, by setting herself up as the equal of the greatest princesses, became the envy of the court and the scandal of France." With all her errors, Agnes was admitted to be lavish to the poor, to be pious, generally humble, and always patriotic and full of public spirit. The majority of historians have written most favourably of her, and never did the mistress of a king--especially a king who was her junior--make so wise a use of her perilous power, which she ever employed only for the good of others. Pride, and an extreme love of dress, are the chief errors alleged against her; but to her influence over Charles VII. must be attributed all the good that ever appeared in him, and the effort to which he was roused--that essay by which, at last, the invading English were driven from the soil of France; for he had been a lover of pleasure, "and of the fair sex, which never can be a vice," adds Voltaire, "save when it leads to vicious actions."

Charles was neither a warlike nor a high-spirited king. The influence of England in France after the death of its conqueror, Henry V., was so nobly sustained by his brother, the Duke of Bedford, that after the demise of Charles VI., his successor had been crowned at Poictiers, Rheims being then in possession of the foe; and he was but the monarch of a nominal kingdom, France having greatly aided the English invaders, as she was rent by two rival factions, one led by the Duke of Burgundy and the other by the Duke of Orleans. Charles VI. had been alternately the prisoner of each, and the dauphin was the scoff of both--often a fugitive, and always in danger of destruction.

When the latter became Charles VII., aided by an alliance with Scotland--the usual "cat's-paw" of the French in their English wars--and by a body of Scottish troops under the Earl of Buchan, who was constable of France, he made some show of resistance, when all hope seemed at an end, and to this unwonted activity he was roused by Agnes Sorel.

He had already conceived the feeble idea of retiring into Languedoc or Dauphiny, and contenting himself with the defence of these minor provinces, which must, eventually, have been wrested from him. Mary of Anjou, a princess of great prudence and merit, vehemently opposed this measure, which she saw would lead to a general desertion of his cause by the French people.

"The fair Agnes Sorel," says Hume, "who lived in entire amity with the queen, seconded all her remonstrances, and threatened that if he (Charles) thus pusillanimously threw away the sceptre of France, she would seek at the court of England a fortune that was correspondent to her wishes." Thus, the love of her on one hand, and dread of losing her on the other, roused in the breast of Charles VII. a glow of courage which neither just ambition, nor pure patriotism, could kindle, and he resolved to dispute every inch of French soil with his imperious enemies, rather than yield ingloriously to an evil fortune, and to the loss of his crown and mistress. And thus, in urging him to the field, Mary of Anjou was forced to seek the assistance of that fair rival who had supplanted her; and she seems at all times to have borne with singular sweetness of temper--with a resignation that some might think savoured of indifference or stupidity--the alienation of the king's love for herself; and neither by action or word does she seem ever to have reproached the reigning favourite.

But now a new ally came, in the person of Joan of Arc; victory attended her banners, and in two months Charles VII. was crowned again, a step considered necessary after the double coronation of young Henry of England at Westminster and Paris. The loss of the latter city soon followed. The maid of Orleans perished at the stake, but her mission was accomplished: France was free, and England was glad to sign the treaty of Arras.

After this consummation, Charles abandoned himself entirely to the society of Agnes Sorel; "ease and prosperity," according to De Mezerai, "plunged him into dalliance and effeminate softness." She was his greatest passion, states Duclos, and was the most worthy of it; she loved Charles tenderly for himself, and had no other object in her conduct than the glory of her somewhat soft lover and the good of the state. Agnes Sorel, he adds, distinguished herself by qualities preferable to those which are usually found in her sex--a rather obscure phrase. But, despite what some allege of her humility, ostentation and a love of splendour are said by others to have been among her weaknesses; but such are pardonable enough in a beautiful woman.

At court she appeared in all the state of a royal princess; her apartments were more expensively decorated with hangings of silk and taffeta, with furniture and tapestries, than those of the queen, Mary of Anjou; she had a larger and more splendid retinue of servants than her royal mistress, and had quite as much reverence shown her. Her couches, her linen, her vessels of gold and silver, her rings and other jewelry, all surpassed in beauty and in value those of the queen. Even her kitchen surpassed that of the neglected wife; "for with this woman, called Agnes, whom I have seen and known," says the author of the "Chronique des Ducs de Bourgogne," "the king was terribly besotted."

Her robes were more costly, and her trains were longer, than those worn by any of the royal princesses; and it was remembered that to show the extreme fairness of her skin and beautiful contour of her bust, she had all her dresses more _décolletées_, or cut lower in front, than had ever been the custom at the court of France. Enguerand de Monstrelet, in his "Chronicles," corroborates the statements of Chastelain concerning her love of finery. "This fair Agnes had been five years in the service of the queen," he writes, "during which time she enjoyed all the pleasures of life, in wearing rich clothes, furred robes, golden chains, and precious stones."

But what young and pretty woman, in any age of the world, has ever been quite careless of such accessories to enhance her natural charms? And in being somewhat _décolletée_, Agnes might perhaps only have followed others, for the same was said of Isabella of Bavaria, queen of Charles VI., whose love of dress was carried to a length so fantastic, that the doors of the palace of Vincennes had to be altered to permit her and the ladies of her suite to pass with their lofty horned headdresses.

In some burst of temper, Agnes has been accused of having so arrogantly disregarded the feelings of the queen, that she was struck on the mouth by the son of the latter, the dauphin, afterwards the cruel, subtle, and savage Louis XI., in whose whole character there was but one undeniably redeeming point--a love for his mother, with a tender reverence for her memory.

Alain Chartier, secretary to Charles VII., and author of a history of that king--a writer whom Pasquin compares to Seneca--extols the "perfect purity" of Agnes and the unsullied love which she had for her royal master; which sounds comical enough, when we know that she bore him three daughters during the few years she held his heart in undivided sway. De Mezerai asserts that these three daughters of Charles were by three different ladies of the court.

Agnes died in the year 1450, as many historians have affirmed, of poison, a common suspicion in those days, and for long after. De Mezerai states the circumstance broadly and clearly, that when the king was at Jumièges, fourteen miles from Rouen, where there was then a vast and famous abbey containing no less than two thousand four hundred monks and lay brethren, "they (_i.e._ the courtiers) poisoned his dear Agnes de Soreau, without whom he could not live one moment."

No one was ever punished for this alleged poisoning, which scandal hinted to have been the work of Louis the dauphin; but the mutual ill-will they bore each other, and the old quarrel and affront, might readily serve to fix such a stigma and suspicion on one who was so crafty and so cruel by nature.

Her illness was violent and spasmodic, and carried her off in her fortieth year, while she was still in the bloom of her wonderful beauty. In her last hours she was attended by the Sieur de la Trimouille, the lady of the seneschal of Poitou, and M. Gouffier, an equerry of Charles VII., to all of whom she spoke eloquently and pathetically of the littleness of human life and human vanity. "She was very contrite," records Monstrelet, "and sincerely repented her sins. She often remembered Mary Magdalen, who had been a great sinner, and devoutly invoked God and the Blessed Virgin Mary to her aid."

She distributed alms and gifts to the value of sixty thousand crowns; she begged her confessor to give her absolution for all her sins and wickedness, conformable to an absolution which she said had been accorded to her at Loches; and the confessor thereupon absolved her. After receiving the last sacraments, she called for a missal, in which she had, with her own hand, written "the little prayer of St. Bernard," which ends, "O Mother of the Eternal Word, adopt me as thy child and take upon thee the care of my salvation. Do not let it be said that I have perished, when no one ever found but grace and salvation."

With a loud shriek she called once more "on the mercy of God and support of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and gave up the ghost on Monday, the 9th February, about six o'clock in the afternoon. May God have mercy on her soul and admit it into Paradise!" adds the old chronicler Monstrelet, who never showed her any particular favour.

Then we are told that the fair and tender body of Agnes was interred in the abbey church of Our Lady at Loches, which had been often enriched by her liberality. A black marble tomb was placed over it, surmounted by an effigy the size of life, and of the purest white marble. Two kneeling angels supported the pillow on which the head of this recumbent statue reclined, and, in allusion to her name, a lamb was carved at its feet.

Her heart was sent to the church of St. Philibert the Abbot, at Jumièges, and deposited near the high altar, a circumstance to which we may attribute the attachment of her lover Charles for that place, where he had an apartment in the abbey fitted up for his especial use, when he chose to come thither for meditation.

In a valley of the forest of Loches, there are still traceable the remains of a hunting lodge, or "rendez-vous de chasse," built by Charles VII., and where he spent many a day in the society of Agnes. Beneath it is a cave, in which lies a prodigious treasure, according to tradition, but watched by the usual guardian of such things in Touraine--a fiery dragon.

It is stated that Francis I., who lived about a century after her, believed in the gentleness and patriotism of "the Lady of Beauty," as she was named, and, finding a picture of her, among others, he wrote the following lines under it:--

"Gentille Agnès! plus d'honneur tu mérites, La cause étant de France recouvrée, Que ce que peut dans un cloître ouvrer Close nonnain, ou bien dévote hermite."

At the period of the Revolution a band of ruffians, when desecrating the church of Loches, broke open the tomb of Agnes Sorel; rent the coffin asunder, and scattered her bones in the streets.

"The rancour of her own sex has long ceased to persecute the memory of Fair Rosamund, and even of the more guilty Jane Shore," says a clever but sneering writer; "and the most harshly virtuous of the sex in the present day are good enough to hope that both the one and the other have found that grace which was given to Mary Magdalen and Rahab. Under the notion, which is the prevailing one in the present day, that Agnes Sorel was an extremely amiable sinner, a lover of her country and her country's glory, a set of quadrilles bearing her name is admitted to a place on virtuous pianos; just as Nell Gwynne is at this day introduced on the stage in decent comedies."

Charles survived her seven years, and died literally of hunger, in his nervous dread of poison from the dauphin, and not knowing from what hand to take his food without peril; but his days of mourning for his lost Agnes would seem to have been few; and there is something curiously ironical in the manner in which De Mezerai dismisses the subject of his sorrow.

"To comfort him, Antoinette de Maignelais, Dame de Villequier, cousin of the deceased, took her place; but she was not the sole mistress." Others followed this Lady of Beauty in rapid succession, and the last who was taken into the favour of the most Christian king was the daughter of a pastry-cook!

Prior to the outrage committed at the Revolution, we have an interesting account of the remains of Agnes Sorel, as described in a French work, entitled "Amours et Galanteries des Rois de France," by M. Saint-Edme.

He tells us that in 1777, Louis XVI., in compliance with reiterated requests of the canons of Loches, consented to the removal of the tomb of Agnes Sorel from the choir to the nave of the church, with the express injunction that no part of the body which it contained should be disturbed; but curiosity is often destructive of the feelings of humanity.

Of the remains found in the tomb, nothing was in a state of preservation but the head, and alas! for human beauty--of that little more than the bones. On attempting to raise it, the hair remained in the hand, together with the two maxillary bones, which, as well as the lower jaw, were furnished with all the teeth.

The hair _crêpé_, from four or five inches in height, and from nine to ten inches in width, formed the upper part of the head-dress of Agnes, while on each side were two flowing curls. The hair at the back of the head, in tresses of from eighteen to twenty inches in length, was gathered up and fastened under the _crêpé_. The hair was of a light brown or ash colour (_brun clair, ou cendré_). At this point of exhumation only one tress of Agnes's hair was purloined; but under the _régime_ of the convention the remainder of the hair was stolen, the jaws were broken up for the extraction of her beautiful teeth, and her remains were scattered as we have described.

THE VEILED PORTRAIT.

It has been asserted that one cannot hold intercourse with that which is generally called the Unseen World, or behold anything supernatural, and live; but these ideas, from my own experience, I am inclined to doubt.

In the year subsequent to the great Bengal mutiny, I found myself at home on sick leave. My health had been injured by service in India, and by our sufferings consequent on the revolt; while my nervous system had been so seriously shaken by a grape-shot wound received at Lucknow, that it was completely changed, and I became cognisant of many things so utterly new to me, and so bewildering, that until I read Baron Reichenbach's work on magnetism and crystalism, I feared that I was becoming eccentric. I was sensible of the power of a magnet over me, though it might be three rooms distant, and twice, in darkness which seemed perfect to others, my room became filled with light; but the Baron holds that darkness is full of light, and that to increase the sensitiveness of the visual organs is to render that rare and dissipated light susceptible, with all that it may contain.

I was now compelled to acknowledge the existence of that new power in nature which the Baron calls the Odic Light, and of many other phenomena that are described in "Der Geist in der Natur," of Christian Oersted--the understanding that pervades all things.

But to my story.

Nearly a year had elapsed since the mutiny. The massacres at Delhi, Lucknow, Cawnpore, and elsewhere had been fearfully avenged by that army of retribution which marched from Umballah, and I found myself in London, enfeebled, enervated, and, as the saying is, "weak as a child." The bustle of the great capital stunned and bewildered me; thus I gladly accepted a hearty invitation which I received from Sidney Warren, one of "ours," but latterly of the Staff Corps, to spend a few weeks--months if I chose--at his place in Herts; a fine old house of the Tudor times, approached from the London road by an avenue that was a grand triumphal arch of nature's own creation, with lofty interlacing boughs and hanging foliage.

Who, thought I, that was lord of such a place could dream of broiling in India--of sweltering in the whitewashed barrack at Dumdum, or the thatched cantonments of Delhi or Meerut!

My friend came hurrying forth to meet me.

"How goes it, old fellow? Welcome to my new quarters," he exclaimed.

"Well, Sidney, old man, how are you?"

Then we grasped each other's hands as only brother soldiers do.

I found Warren, whom I had not seen since the commencement of the revolt, nearly as much changed and shattered in constitution as myself; but I knew that he had lost those whom he loved most in the world amid the massacre at Meerut. He received me, however, with all the warmth of an old comrade, for we had a thousand topics in common to con over; while the regiment, which neither of us might see again--he certainly not, as he had sold out--would prove an endless source of conversation.

Sidney Warren was in his fortieth year, but looked considerably older. His once dark hair and coal-black moustache were quite grizzled now. The expression of his face was one of intense sadness, as if some secret grief consumed him; while there was a weird and far-seeing expression that led me to fear he was not fated to be long in this world. Yet he had gone through the storm of the Indian war without receiving even a scratch! Why was this?

Before I had spent two days with Sidney, he had shown me all the objects of interest around the Warren and in it--the portrait gallery, with its courtiers in high ruffs, and dames in the long stomachers of one period and _décolletée_ dresses of another; his collection of Indian antiquities, amassed at the plundering of Delhi; and those which were more interesting to me, ponderous suits of mail which had been hacked and battered in the wars of the Roses, and a torn pennon unfurled by Warren's troop of horse, "for God and the King," at Naseby.

But there was one object which he would neither show nor permit me to look upon, and which seemed to make him shiver or shudder whenever it caught his eye, and this was a picture of some kind in the library--a room he very rarely entered. It was the size of a life-portrait, but covered closely by a green-baize hanging. Good taste compelled me to desist from talking to him on the subject, but I resolved to gratify my curiosity on the first convenient occasion; so one day when he was absent at the stable court, I drew back the hanging of this mysterious picture.

It proved to be the full-length portrait of a very beautiful girl--a proud and stately one, too--bordering on blooming womanhood. Her features were clearly cut and classic; she had an olive-coloured complexion, that seemed to tell of another land than England, yet the type of her rare beauty was purely English. Her forehead was broad and low; her dark eyes, that seemed to haunt and follow me, were deeply set, with black brows well defined; her chin was rather massive, as if indicating resolution of character, yet the soft, ripe lips were full of sweetness; while the gorgeous coils of her dark hair were crisp and wavy. Her attire was a green riding-habit, the skirt of which was gathered in her left hand, while the right grasped the bridle of her horse.

It was not a portrait of his wife, whom I remember to have been a fair-haired little woman; so who was this mysterious lady? I cannot describe the emotion this portrait excited within me; but I started and let fall the curtain, with a distinct sensation of some one, or something I could not see, being close beside me; so I hurried from the shady library into the sunshine. Lovely though the face--I can see it yet in all its details--it haunted me with an unpleasant pertinacity, impossible either to analyse or portray. But I was a creature of fancies then.

"Herein," thought I; "lurks some mystery, which may never be cleared up to me." But in this surmise I was wrong, for one night--the night of Sunday, the 10th May, _the first anniversary_ of the outbreak at Meerut, after we had discussed an excellent dinner, with a bottle or two of Moselle, and betaken us to iced brandy _pawnee_ (for so we still loved to call it), and to the "soothing weed," on the sofas of the smoking-room, Warren became suddenly seized by one of those confidential fits which many men unaccountably have at such times, and, while he unsparingly and bitterly reproached himself for the part he had acted in it, I drew from him, little by little, the secret story of his life.

Some ten years before those days of which I write, when in the Guards, and deeply dipped in debt by extravagance, he had, unknown to his family, married secretly a beautiful girl who was penniless, at the very time his friends were seeking to retrieve his fortune by a wealthy alliance. An exchange into the Line--"the sliding scale"--became necessary, thus he was gazetted to our regiment in India, at a period when his young wife was in extremely delicate health; so much so that the idea of her voyaging round the Cape--there were no P. and O. Liners then--was not to be thought of, as it was expressly forbidden by the medical men; so they were to be separated for a time; and that time of parting, so dreaded by Constance, arrived inexorably.

The last fatal evening came--the last Sidney was to spend with her. His strapped overlands and bullock-trunks, his sword and cap, both cased, were already in the entrance hall; the morrow's morning would see him off by the train for Southampton, and his place would be vacant; and she should see his fond hazel eyes no more.

"Tears again!" said he, almost impatiently, while tenderly caressing the dark and glossy hair of his girl-wife; "why on earth are you so sad, Conny, about this temporary separation?"

"Would that I could be certain it is only such!" she exclaimed. "Sad; oh, can you ask me, Sidney, darling? The presentiment of a great sorrow to come is hanging over me."

"A presentiment, Constance! Do not indulge in this folly."

"If I did not love you dearly, Sidney, would such a painful emotion rack my heart?"

"It is the merest superstition, darling, and you will get over it when I am fairly away."

Her tender eyes regarded him wistfully for a moment, and then her tears fell faster at the contemplation of the coming loneliness.

After a pause, she asked:

"Are there many passengers going out with you?"

"A few--in the cuddy," he replied carelessly.

"Do you know any of them?"

"Yes; one or two fellows on the staff."

"And the ladies?" she asked, after another pause.

"I don't know, Conny dear; what do they matter to you or me?"

"I heard incidentally that--that Miss Dashwood was going out in your vessel."

"Indeed; I believe she will."

Constance shivered, for with the name of this finished flirt that of her husband had been more than once linked, and his change of colour was unseen by her as he turned to manipulate a cigar. So for four, perhaps six months, these two would be together upon the sea.

Constance knew too well the irritable nature of her husband's temper to say more on the subject of her secret thoughts; and deeply loth was she that such ideas should embitter the few brief hours they were to be together now; so a silence ensued, which, after a time, she broke, while taking between her slender fingers a hand of Sidney, who was leaning half moodily, half listlessly against the mantelpiece, twisting his moustache with a somewhat mingled expression of face.

"Sidney, darling," said she entreatingly; "do forgive me if I am dull and sad--so _triste_--this evening."

"I do forgive you, little one."

"You know, Sidney, that I would die for you!"

"Yes; but don't, Conny--for I hate scenes," said he, playfully kissing her sweetly sad, upturned face; and the poor girl was forced to be contented with this matter-of-fact kind of tenderness.

So the dreaded morrow came with its sad moment of parting.

To muffle the sound of the departing wheels she buried her head, with all its wealth of dark, dishevelled hair, among the pillows of her bed, and some weeks--weeks of the most utter loneliness, elapsed, ere she left it, with the keen and ardent desire to recover health and strength, to the end that she might follow her husband over the world of waters and rejoin him; but the strength and health, so necessary for the journey, were long of coming back to her.

She had hoped he would write her before sailing from Southampton--a single line would have satisfied the hungry cravings of her heart; but, as he did not do so, she supposed there was not time; yet the transport lay three days in the docks after the troops were on board. He would write by some passing ship, he had said, and one letter, dated from Ascension, reached her; but its cold and careless tone struck a mortal chill to the sensitive heart of Constance, and one or two terms of endearment it contained were manifestly forced and ill-expressed.

"He writes me thus," she muttered, with her hand pressed upon her heaving bosom; "thus--and with that woman, perhaps, by his side!"

She consulted the map, and saw how far, far away on the lonely ocean was that island speck. Months had elapsed since he had been there; so she knew that he must be in India now, and she had the regular mails to look to with confidence--a confidence, alas! that soon faded away. Long, tender, and passionate was the letter she wrote in reply; she fondly fixed the time when she proposed to leave England and rejoin him, if he sent her the necessary remittances; but mail after mail came in without any tidings from Sidney, and she felt all the unspeakable misery of watching the postman for letters that never, never came!

Yet she never ceased to write, entreating him for answers, and assuring him of unswerving affection.

Slowly, heavily, and imperceptibly a year passed away--a whole year--to her now a black eternity of time!

"Could Sidney be dead?" she asked herself with terror; but she knew that his family (who were all unaware of _her_ existence) had never been in mourning, as they must infallibly have been in the event of such a calamity; and in her simplicity she never thought of applying to the Horse Guards for information concerning him--more information than she might quite have cared to learn.

Her old thoughts concerning Miss Dashwood took a strange hold of her imagination now; a hundred "trifles light as air" came back most gallingly to memory and took coherent and tangible shapes; but a stray number of the "Indian Mail" informed her of the marriage of Miss Dashwood--her _bête-noire_--to a Major Milton; and also that the regiment to which Sidney belonged "was moving up country," a phrase to her perplexing and vague.

Her funds were gone--her friends were few and poor. Her jewels--his treasured presents--were first turned into cash; then the furniture of her pretty villa, and next the villa itself with its sweet rose-garden, had to be exchanged for humbler apartments in a meaner street; and, ere long, Constance Warren found, that if she was to live, it must be by her own unaided efforts; and for five years she maintained a desperate struggle for existence--five years!

A lady going to India "wanted a young person as a governess and companion."

To India--_to India!_ On her knees Constance prayed that her application might prove successful; and her prayer was heard, for out of some hundred letters--from a few which were selected--the tenor of hers suited best the taste of the lady in question. She said nothing of her marriage or of her apparent desertion; but as her wedding ring, which, with a fond superstition of the heart, she never drew from her finger, told a tale, she had to pass for a widow.

So in the fulness of time she found herself far away from England, and duly installed with an Anglo-Indian family in one of the stately villas of the European quarter of Calcutta--a veritable palace in the city of palaces, overlooking the esplanade before Fort William--in charge of one sickly, but gentle little pale-faced girl.

She had been a month there when her employer's family proposed to visit some relatives at Meerut, where she heard that Sidney's regiment was cantoned! To her it seemed as if the hand of Fate was in all this. O the joy of such tidings! Some one there must be able to unravel the horrible mystery involving his fate; for by this time she had ascertained that his name was out of the corps; but her heart suggested that he might have exchanged into another.

"If alive, is he worth caring for?" She often asked this of herself, but thrust aside the idea, and pursued with joy the long journey up country by river steamers, dawk-boats, and otherwise, on the Ganges to Jehangeerabad, from whence they were to travel by carriages to the place of their destination, some fifty miles distant.

On the way Constance had an addition to her charge in the person of a little boy, who, with his _ayah_, was going to join his parents at Meerut. This little boy was more than usually beautiful, with round and dimpled cheeks, dark hazel eyes, curly golden hair, and a sweet and winning smile. Something in the child's face or its expression attracted deeply the attention of Constance, and seemed to stir some memory in her heart. Where had she seen those eyes before?

She drew the boy caressingly towards her, and when kissing his fair and open forehead, her eyes fell involuntarily on a ring that secured his necktie, a mere blue riband. It was of gold, and on it were graven the initials C. and S. with a lover's knot between. These were those of herself and her husband, and the ring was one she had seen him wear daily. Constance trembled in every limb; she felt a deadly paleness overspread her face, and the room in which she sat swam round her; but on recovering her self-possession, she said:

"Child, let me look at this ring."

The wondering boy placed in her hand the trinket, which she had not the slightest doubt of having seen years before in London.

"Who gave you this, my child?" she asked.

"My papa."

"Your papa!--what is your name?"

"Sidney."

"What else?" she asked, impetuously.

"Sidney Warren Milton."

"Thank God! But how came you to be named so? There is some mystery in this--a mystery that must soon be solved now. Where were you born, dear little Sidney?"

"In Calcutta."

"What is your age, child?"

"Next year, I shall be seven years old."

"Seven--how strange it is that you have the name you bear!"

"It is my papa's," said the boy, with a little proud irritability of manner.

"Where did your papa live before he came to Calcutta?"

"I don't know--in many places--soldiers always do."

"He is a soldier?"

"My papa is Major Milton, and lives in the cantonments at Meerut."

"A little time, and I shall know all," replied poor Constance, caressing the boy with great tenderness.

On arriving at Meerut, however, she found herself ill--faint and feverish--so that for days she was confined to her bed, where she lay wakeful by night, watching the red fire-flies flashing about the green jalousies, and full of strange, wild dreams by day. She had but one keen and burning desire--to see Major Milton, and to learn from his lips the fate of her husband. On the evening of the fifth day--the evening of the 10th of May--she was lying on her pillow, watching the red sunshine fading on the ruined mosques, and Abu's stately tomb, when just as the sunset gun pealed over the cantonments, the _ayah_ brought her a card, inscribed, "Major Milton--Staff Corps."

"Desire the Major to come to me!" said Constance, in a broken voice, and terribly convulsed emotion; for now she was on the eve of knowing all.

"Here to the _mehm sahib's_ bedside?" asked the astonished _ayah_.

"Here instantly--go--go!"

Endued with new strength, as the woman withdrew, she sprang from her bed, put on her slippers, threw round her an ample cashmere dressing robe, and seated herself in a bamboo chair, trembling in every fibre. In a mirror opposite she could see that her face was as white as snow. The door was opened.

"Major Milton," said a voice that made her tremble, and attired in undress uniform, pith-helmet in hand, her husband, looking scarcely a day older, stood gazing at her in utter bewilderment. He gave one convulsive start, and then stood rooted to the spot; but no expression or glance of tenderness escaped him. His whole aspect bore the impress of terror.

Years had elapsed as a dream, and they were again face to face, those two, whom no man might put asunder. Softness, sorrow, and reproach faded from the face of Constance. Her broad, low forehead became stern; her deep-set, dark eyes sparkled perilously, her full lips became set, and her chin seemed to express more than ever, resolution.

"Oh, Constance--Constance," he faltered; "I know not what to say!"

"It may well be so, Sidney" (and at the utterance of his name her lips quivered). "So _you_ are Major Milton, and the supposed husband of Miss Dashwood?"

There was a long pause, after which she said:

"I ask not the cause of your most cruel desertion, but whence this name of Milton?"

"A property was left me--and--but, of course, you have long since ceased to love me, Constance?"

"_You_ actually dare to take an upbraiding tone to me!" she exclaimed, her dark eyes flashing fire. Then looking upward appealingly, she wailed, "Oh, my God! my God! and _this_ is the man for whom, during these bitter years, I have been eating my own heart!"

"Pardon me, Constance; you may now learn that there is no gauge to measure the treachery of which the human heart in its weakness is capable. Yet there has been a worm in mine that has never died."

She wrung her hands, and then said, with something of her old softness of manner:

"You surely loved me once, Sidney?"

"I did." He drew nearer, but she recoiled from him.

"Then whence this cruel change?"

"Does not some one write, that we love, and think we love truly, and yet find another to whom one will cling as if it required these two hearts to make a perfect whole?"

"Most accursed sophistry! But if you have no pity, have you not fear?"

"I have great fear," said he, in a broken voice; "thus, Constance, by the love you once bore me, I beseech you to have pity, not on me, but on my little boy, and his poor mother--preserve their happiness----"

"And sacrifice my own?" said she, in a hollow voice.

"Spare, and do not expose me--my commission--my position here----"

"Neither shall be lost through me," she replied, in a voice that grew more and more weak; "but leave me--leave me--the air is suffocating--the light has left my eyes. Farewell, Sidney--kiss your child, for my sake."

He drew near to take her hand, but she repulsed him with a wild gesture of despair, and throwing up her arms, fell back in her seat, with a gurgle in her throat, her head on one side, and her jaw fallen.

"Dead--quite dead!" was his first exclamation, and with his terror was blended a certain selfish emotion of satisfaction and relief at his escape. The blood again flowed freely in his veins, and he was roused by the cantonment _ghurries_ clanging the hour of nine.

"Help--help!" cried he; but no help came, and as he hurried away, the sudden din of musket-shots, of shrieks and yells, announced that the great revolt had begun at Meerut, and that the expected massacre of the Europeans had commenced. In that butchery, those he loved most on earth perished, and midnight saw him, wifeless and childless, lurking in misery and alone in a mango tope, on the road to Kurnaul.

* * * *

While listening to the narrative of my friend Sidney, whom I had always known as Warren, rather than Milton, the clock on the mantelpiece struck nine, and he said, in a broken voice:

"It was at this very hour, twelve months ago, that my boy and his mother were murdered by the 3rd Cavalry, at the moment that Constance was dying!"

As he spoke, a strange white light suddenly filled one end of the smoking-room, and amid it there came gradually, but distinctly to view, two figures, one was a little boy with golden hair, the other a woman whose left arm was around him--a beautiful woman, with clearly-cut features, masses of dark hair curling over a low, broad forehead, lips full and handsome, with a massive chin and classic throat--the woman of the veiled picture, line for line, but to all appearance living and breathing, with a beautiful smile in her eyes, and wearing, not the riding-habit, but a floating crape-like white garment, impossible to describe. There was a strange, weird brightness in her face--the transfigured brightness of great joy and greater love.

"Constance--Constance and my child!" cried Sidney, in a voice that rose to a shriek; and like a dissolving view, the light, and all we looked on with eyes transfixed, faded away!

I was aware of an excess of sensitiveness, and that my heart was beating with painful rapidity. I did not become insensible, but some time elapsed before I became aware that lights were in the room, and that several servants, whom my friend's cry had summoned in haste and alarm, were endeavouring to rouse him to consciousness from a fit that had seized him; but from that fit he never recovered. His heavy stertorous breathing gradually grew less and less, and ere a doctor came, he had ceased to respire.

His death--sudden as hers on that eventful night, but a retributive one--was declared to be apoplexy; but I knew otherwise. Since then, though the effect of the grape-shot wound on my nervous system has quite passed away, I feel myself compelled to agree with the hackneyed remark of Hamlet, that "there are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in our philosophy."

A LEGEND OF THE OLD 55TH; OR, THE REGIMENT OF FLANDERS.

For the truth of the following remarkable story, which is much more fact than fiction, we must refer the reader to the quarto "History of the Mauritius," privately printed in London in 1801, from the papers of the late Governor thereof, under Louis XVI., Baron Grant, Maréchal of France, and edited by his son, Charles Grant, "Vicomte de Vaux sur Seule, Normandie," who knew well the family of the hero, and of his father, M. de Grenville, with whom he had become intimate at the house of another Scoto-French gentleman (whom he styles M. Grant d'Anelle, then in the Isle of France), and of whom he writes thus, page 219:--

"This gentleman (M. de Grenville, of an ancient family in Normandy) is an old officer who has served with honour both in France and India; and may, with truth, be represented as superior to the generality of mankind, from his understanding, his knowledge, and the qualities of his character. He is distinguished here, by the title of the Philosopher, and he deserves it. In the early part of his life, the vivacity of his temper, heightened by the military spirit of the period, engaged him in frequent affairs of honour; and the last having taken place with a nobleman in the service of the Court, in the Garden of Versailles, and under the very windows of the king's apartment, it threatened the most serious consequences. But M. de Maupou, then in high office, to whom he was related, procured him a commission in India, where he served with distinction.

"If it were consistent with the objects of this work, it would be a delightful circumstance to dwell on the virtues and extraordinary qualities of this family. I must, however, confine myself to one, M. de Grenville de Forval, the second son of M. de Grenville.

"Some events relative to him are so connected with the manners of these islands, and are so remarkable (and romantic) in themselves, that they will at the same time heighten the interest, as well as add to the information of this work (_i.e._ the History of the Mauritius).

"In these islands there is not a single example of a deformed or crooked shape, which must arise from the natural and unrestrained mode of education which prevails there. To these advantages, Forval united a martial air, blended with a slight appearance of severity, and an approved courage, to the most noble and generous sentiments that are to be found in the human heart."

But to quote the gossipping old Baron at greater length, would be only to anticipate the legend to which we refer.

At the time when the Comte de Malartic was first appointed commander-in-chief and governor-general for the most Christian king of the Isles of France and Bourbon, and over all the French establishments eastward of the Cape of Good Hope, there was stationed in the Mauritius (as we now name the Isle of France) a battalion of the old French Regiment de Flandre, then numbered as the 77th of the monarchy, and afterwards as the 55th regiment of the line, under Napoleon III.--the same corps in which the father of Victor Hugo, author of "Notre Dame" and "Les Misérables," served with honour as a captain.

Among the officers who came with a detachment from France to join this famous regiment were the Chevalier René d'Esterre and Captain Forval de Grenville, the representative of one of the oldest families in Normandy, the same stock from whence spring the English Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos.

Forval was a gay and handsome man, and in the prime of life. Baron Grant, the Vicomte de Vaux, in his history of the island, records as stated, that he had a martial air, with a slight appearance of severity, and that he was a man of the most approved courage. He was always attired in the height of fashion when not in uniform; but he generally preferred the latter, as the costume of the Regiment de Flandre was very handsome, and became his dark complexion well, being white, faced with light blue, and laced with gold.

Whether in uniform or out of it, he was never known to be without his sword, in the use of which he excelled, and with which he had fought many a duel, sometimes about the powdered and jewelled ladies of the court, and quite as often about ballet-girls and actresses--all were the same to Forval de Grenville.

His reckless career in France was, however, brought suddenly to a close by a flirtation with a _chanoinesse_--the famous Comtesse de V----, which by its scandal and extravagance drove him to seek shelter in the distant Isle of France from the rage of the noble families of Segonzac, Sainte-Croix, and Cressi, with whom she was allied.

His affair with the high-born countess might have had a perilous end--the Bastille St. Antoine, perhaps--but for his acceptance of foreign service, and the aid given him by his friend, René d'Esterre, who, as he had pursued a similar career of folly and extravagance, had a fellow-feeling for him, and we all know that a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind.

The monotonous pleasures of the island soon palled upon the _blasé_ Forval and his friend, and they sighed for the gaieties of Paris, or rather to be anywhere but where they were.

"Morbleu!" exclaimed Forval, as he and D'Esterre sat over their wine one evening at an open window in a _café_ of Port Louis, after being long silent, and gazing dreamily on the sea, whose waves were rippling in gold and purple against the rocks and bastions of the little Isle aux Tonneliers, which lies before the harbour, and while the red rays of the sun, now sinking in the Indian Sea, lingered on the rocky and fantastic Tête de Peter Bott. "Morbleu, chevalier! but this atrocious Isle of France does grow irksome."

"Yet it is the land of Paul and that sweet little Virginia, for another such as whom we have sought over all the isle."

"And have sought in vain. Diable, yes! Such miracles--such sphinxes--exist only in the pages of Bernardin St. Pierre and such like fellows."

"Perhaps so," sighed D'Esterre, as he emptied his glass. "However, I am sick unto death of this island and its utter monotony. Paris----"

"Ah, dear, dear Paris! when shall we see it again?"

"When our debts are paid, perhaps."

"Don't speak of impossibilities, please. How strange to think that the tide of life flows there--that the great world rolls on all the same as when we mounted guard at the Louvre, and not content with that, sighed to be on duty at Versailles or the dear little Trianon."

"You always preferred the latter," said D'Esterre. "The Comtesse de V----, that dazzling little creature, was always about the queen."

"Don't speak of her now, when all those thousand miles of bridgeless sea are rolling between us," exclaimed Forval, with knitted brows. "That hulking fellow, Baron Zurlerben, of the Gardes Suisses, will no doubt be on her staff now. She could never exist without an affair of the heart. Well, I am at one with you--sick indeed of duty here."

"The comtesse was devoted to the chevaliers of the army," said René d'Esterre, musingly.

"All the girls in Paris favoured us immensely."

"All the girls in France, you mean," said the chevalier, complacently.

"How comes it to pass, René? Is it the handsome uniform or the risk we run in war that gives us such an advantage over the mere bourgeoisie?"

"I don't know what it is; but the interest is very pleasant, and I trust it will never cease. So 'Vive le Regiment de Flandre! Vive la ligne!'" cried René, draining a bumper of wine.

"Stop! A thought strikes me," said Forval. "Suppose that for a little temporary excitement one of us should get married?"

"Agreed," cried D'Esterre. "Here is a golden louis; we shall toss up for who is to marry the first pretty Creole girl we meet. The losing man shall dance at the other's wedding."

"What if the pretty girl refuse?"

"Refuse one of the Regiment de Flandre! My dear fellow, such an outrage on good taste is not to be anticipated. She shall be married after a month's engagement."

"Ah, likely enough. People do strange things in the Indian isles."

"Is it a low state of finances?"

"No, a high state of the thermometer. A month may see us ordered off to Pondicherry; but you must be the victim, chevalier. I have an affianced in France."

"And I have three! Parbleu!"

"Well, to kill time, we have nothing for it but to volunteer for the next slave-hunting expedition to the Isle Dauphine. What say you, chevalier--will you go?"

"Think of the distance--by sea, too!"

"Something less than five hundred miles."

"And the feeding----"

"Will not be up to the Parisian mark; but; then, we shall have some excitement."

"A little fighting?" said René.

"Yes; and I had better be shot with honour than shoot myself."

"Very well, I shall go with you. Let the war support the war. We shall feed ourselves at the bayonet's point among the Madagasees."

So in this spirit, when the time came, did M. Forval de Grenville and his friend René d'Esterre set out for Madagascar, or, as the French then named it, the Isle Dauphine.

A scarcity of slaves for manual labour in the Isles of France and Bourbon rendered such predatory expeditions to Madagascar and the coast of Africa necessary. Vessels were generally equipped for the purpose by the Comte de Malartic and wealthy merchants, and certain detachments of troops were sent with them to favour and enforce the object of the voyage; and with two hundred men of the Regiment de Flandre, Forval and D'Esterre, having volunteered for the first slaving expedition, sailed in two vessels for Madagascar in the month of May, which is the finest and most healthy season for operations in the island.

The vessels, with the troops on board, ran along the eastern coast, and on disembarking, a camp was formed on the small rocky isle of Sainte Marie, called Ibrahim by the natives. There they found the remains of a _chaloupe_, or sloop, which had been constructed out of the shattered hull of the ship _Utile_ (which had been wrecked there some forty years before), but had never been launched. Her crew being only French negroes, no attempt was ever made to succour or to save them, so they all perished miserably of hunger, and their whitened bones, bleached by the sun, lay all over the little rocky isle when Forval and his comrades landed. These remains he had collected and interred, while despatching messengers to Adrian Baba, the king of the island, to acquaint his sable majesty of the errand on which he had come, offering him for every man and woman in full health, and between the ages of thirteen and forty years, two muskets, fifteen hundred leaden bullets, and the same number of flints.

"Corbœuf!" said the Chevalier D'Esterre, "I hope we shall not be detained long on this rock of Sainte Marie. I am all curiosity to see the wonders of Madagascar. Does not La Croix tell us that the woods abound with snow-white apes having black tails, and that there is a kind of creature in the cane-brakes as large as a heifer, with a round head, a man's face, and hands and feet like a monkey?"

"La Croix was an ass to record such rubbish, and you are exceedingly simple to believe it," replied Forval, laughing at his friend's credulity.

King Adrian, who had been at war with some of his African neighbours, had, or pretended to have, plenty of prisoners in his hands, and sent to M. Forval most friendly replies, together with presents.

In a short time Adrian Baba arrived in person, and crossed the little strait which separated the Isle of St. Marie from the mainland in a gaily painted pirogua, accompanied by much barbaric pomp, and was received by the little party of French troops with all the honours they could present to European royalty, and with keen and covetous eyes he surveyed their handsome white uniforms and gold epaulettes, their fine muskets, swords, chests of arms, and so forth, for which the slaves were to be bartered, and he was heard to say to a prince of the second class who accompanied him:

"Why may I not keep my people, and make lawful spoil of all these things? The Isle of Ibrahim is mine, and what do these Frenchmen do here?"

His voice was soft and his manner persuasive, and he easily persuaded Forval and D'Esterre to cross from the island, and encamp a portion of their troops--of whose discipline and resolute aspect he had a wholesome dread--on the mainland, and to leave the rest on the isle, or send them on board the ships at their anchorage; but Forval warily preferred the former plan, and left them in their tents at the first encampment under a lieutenant.

With a hundred infantry he pitched his tents in a pleasant spot about a mile from the sea. Adrian, who yet hoped to have even the two ships, if their crews could be massacred, loaded Forval and his friend with presents and attentions, and showing them a vast herd of cattle, asked them, in the pride of his heart, if the King of France was as great a king as he.

To this the polite Frenchmen, who both knew the Polynesian language of the Madagasees, made a courteous but dubious reply, which caused the eyes of the half-savage monarch to sparkle with satisfaction.

Charmed by the friendly bearing and character of the king and his people, and lulled into a sense of trustful security, on the third day, after forming a little camp for half his force on the mainland, Forval de Grenville doffed his uniform, and clad in a light white hunting suit, took his gun, and followed by a favourite dog, set forth into the adjacent forest in search of game, attended by a negro boy, who carried his bag.

At last he reached a place where the forest became more open and the ground more rocky. Overcome by the heat of the day, the young French officer hailed with pleasure a little tarn, or pool, which lay at the base of some rocks, and was completely surrounded by lofty trees.

Forval lay down on the sward, half hidden by the giant leaves of the wild gourds that grew there. He lay long, sunk in a reverie, till a very strange and startling sight aroused him; and he sprang to his feet and peered through the bushes.

A girl was in the act of disrobing for the purpose of bathing in the pool, and already she was seated on its bank ere Captain de Grenville could speak. In fact, he knew not what to say or do, and so, wholly hidden among the great green leaves, he looked on in breathless wonder, for that she was a Madagasee was evident; but then her skin, though brown, was fair for a native of that sunny isle.

She was in the full bloom, the first blush, of budding womanhood, and the fire of love, as yet unkindled, was doubtless hidden in her heart.

So thought the French officer as he stood there among the leaves.

The form of the young girl was perfection. Her eyes were large and black, and her hair rolled in silky masses over her smooth brown shoulders.

Advancing to the edge of the pool, she put in one tiny foot and tapered ankle. The water seemed to strike her with a chill, for she drew back, and seemed all unconscious that a human eye was upon her.

"Here is an adventure," muttered Forval. "Could I but catch such a slave as this, old Monsieur le Comte de Malartic, governor of the Isle of France, and so forth, should not have her from me even for a pile of golden louis as high as the Tête de Peter Bott itself. Ah, could I but catch her now! But how am I to set about it? The finest girl in Paris is but a cub when compared with her."

The unknown beauty was still trembling on the brink when one of those monster bats peculiar to those woods, blinded by the rays of light, flew against her. On this she uttered a cry of terror, and sprang, half-robed as she was, into the pool, where she swam about like a Naiad of classic antiquity, her beautiful head and shoulders rising above the silver ripples that seemed to kiss her as she shot from side to side in the cool, deep pool.

Forval remained in doubt what to do. The wonderful beauty of the girl had inspired him with a desire to know more of her--to capture her, in fact. But, then, he was far away from his little camp, and she might have friends or armed attendants near, for by her dress and ornaments--particularly a necklace of great pearls--her rank seemed to be high in the land, and he might pay a terrible penalty for even seeing, without molesting her.

Loth to retire, lest he should lose her, and afraid to advance lest he should alarm or offend her; he lurked among the leaves, feeling, with a blush upon his cheek, that he was committing an offence against propriety even in that savage land, for though a _roué_, and a wild one too, Forval de Grenville was, withal, a gentleman.

He longed for the sudden arrival of some wild beast, from which he might defend or save her with his gun, even with his life, but longed in vain, as there are no such animals in the Isle of Madagascar.

He turned to search for the slave boy who bore his game bag. The latter lay there, but its sooty bearer was gone. He had disappeared, concealed himself, or fled, and even this circumstance was calculated to inspire Forval with alarm. He felt if his hunting-knife was loose in its sheath, and looked to the flints and priming of his gun, into each barrel of which he now slipped a ball, so that he might be ready for any emergency.

By the time he had done this quietly and slowly in his hiding place, the girl had quitted the pool, and rapidly and completely attired herself in the simple but graceful costume then worn by a Madagasee lady--a long and loose robe of brilliantly coloured silk, without sleeves--and she was in the act of shaking out the water from the heavy masses of her shining black hair, when our adventurous Frenchman, fearful of losing her, suddenly started from his lair among the leaves and gourds, and advanced towards her, praying in very choice words that she would linger for one moment and speak with him, as he had lost his way in the forest.

But, instead of according him any reply, with her cheeks paled by terror and her large eyes dilated, she turned and fled with the speed of an antelope.

Obeying his first impulse, and undeterred by danger, Forval dashed after her in pursuit; but, strong and active though he was, she proved too swift of foot for him. Carried away by her fears, or aided by the activity natural to a savage race, she clambered over the cliffs of rock crystal, where he dared not follow her, and when he reached the other side by a detour round the pool she had vanished, and not a trace of her was to be found.

Forval was intensely perplexed and provoked that he had not attempted her capture while in the pool. Then he repelled the idea, by considering that such an act would have been unbecoming a French gentleman.

"Bah!" thought he, after all; "she is only a little Madagasee, and I may get her as a slave for a few old muskets. I must speak to Sa Majesté le Roi--to King Adrian about it on the first opportunity."

Neglecting his soldiers on one hand, and the purchase of slaves on the other, for three entire consecutive days did Forval haunt the vicinity of the sequestered pool; but the beautiful Naiad came there no more.

On a stated day the king was to hand over to Forval and D'Esterre five hundred male and female slaves, in exchange for one thousand old regimental muskets and the requisite proportion of flints and ammunition.

"If I can but get the girl from him, whoever she is, I'll give him a couple of ship cannon."

"And all our empty champagne bottles," added D'Esterre; "but you may have some difficulty in describing her."

"Nay, her beauty and extreme fairness of skin--fairness at least amid this dusky people--as well as a string of enormous pearls of great purity which she wears round her neck, must make her known; and they are pearls to which those of Monseigneur de Rohan's famous necklace were but a joke."

Forval was all excitement when he went for presentation to the king, in his capital of Antanarivo, which contained some twenty thousand inhabitants then, but many more now; the houses of which are of wood, covered with plantain leaves, and entirely surrounded by a fortification of palisades.

Here Adrian Baba could easily have cut off his unsuspecting visitor; but the Chevalier René d'Esterre remained in camp with the small band of troops, and Forval was accompanied only by two faithful sergeants, armed with their swords, and a double brace of loaded pistols under their coats.

Adrian Baba received him very graciously in a chamber, the furniture of which consisted chiefly of some seamen's chests and other _débris_ of an occasional wreck or piracy, and mats of red and yellow straw, which served as seats or beds, as occasion required, and around him were his sub-princes, the lords of villages and districts, learned men, guards, and slaves, all arrayed in their best robes, with swords, darts, and feathers and beads in great plenty; others with shield, knife, and war club, and all looking most unpleasantly numerous, savage, and warlike.

But what was the astonishment of Captain de Grenville on beholding by the side of the king, clothed in a long robe of fine silk, striped alternately with scarlet and yellow, the Naiad of the lonely pool, with her brown but yet beautiful arms bare to the shoulder, and adorned only by strings of snowy pearls, like those which were woven in her dark hair--pearls outshone by her own teeth.

Perceiving that the eyes of the French officer were fixed on her with wonder and admiration, old Adrian Baba said, in the language of his country:

"My daughter, Ranavolana."

"She is beautiful enough to be the daughter of--of perfection," said the French officer, bowing low, and kissing her hand, while he half knelt before her--a courtesy, a bearing of adoration which astonished the girl, and provoked the sneering smiles of those who looked on. "But how wonderfully white for a Madagasee--the daughter of this old King of the Cannibal Islands," thought he. "Here is a discovery! I don't believe he will give her up even for a dozen of old ship guns, and all D'Esterre's empty bottles into the bargain. Were they full, we might have a better chance of success."

The soft dark eyes of the young princess regarded the handsome Frenchman, as he thought shrewdly, with a strange and sorrowful interest, and it was evident that, as he was now in the uniform of the Regiment de Flandre, she did not recognize him, and he afterwards learned that the extreme fairness of her skin was to be accounted for by the circumstance that her mother had been the daughter of a notorious English pirate, who bore the extremely prosaic name of Tom Simcolls, and who for a time had made himself the petty king of a portion of the isle, till Adrian Baba overthrew him in battle, and made spoil of all he possessed, including a favourite daughter, who became the mother of Ranavolana.

Adrian's treacherous plans with regard to the French were not yet completed, so it was arranged that on the following day Forval was to come with a hundred infantry to receive over the slaves for embarkation.

That night, in the tent of Forval, he and the Chevalier D'Esterre lingered long over their wine, and their hopes that a European war might bring their regiment home, till, weary and sleepy, and considerably overpowered by wine, René d'Esterre retired to his own quarters.

Forval remained in his tent, stretched upon a couch, feeling far from sleepy--very wide awake, indeed--and gazing through the open triangular door of his canvas habitation on the dark blue waters of the strait that lay between the mainland and the Isle of Sainte Marie.

His mind was dwelling on the singular beauty of Ranavolana, the girl whom he had seen by the side of Adrian, and closing his eyes, as if to concentrate his thoughts, he drew in glowing fancy again and again the vision he had seen of her in the forest pool.

Suddenly there was a sound as of rustling silk, a soft hand touched his shoulder lightly and timidly, he looked up, and Ranavolana, the island princess, stood before him, and alone.

She must have glided unseen past his sentinels; but then he thought not of that. Though large and sparkling, her eyes were pensive, and wonderfully beautiful in expression, in form of lid and length of lash, "especially for a savage," as Forval thought; and in his time he had seen some of the brightest eyes in Paris and Versailles droop beneath the saucy and loving glances of his own.

"I disturb your sleep," said she, timidly drawing back a pace, as Forval sprang from his camp bed.

"Do you think I would have slept, mademoiselle, had I expected you?"

"Not with the tidings I have for you," she replied, gravely.

"Tidings of what?"

"Death."

"Death?"

"A cruel one, too."

"I do not understand all this. But we have met before."

"At my father's court to-day."

"And elsewhere?"

"Indeed!"

"Pardon me, but I had the delight of seeing you bathing in a pool in yonder forest."

"You it was who pursued me?"

"Yes, mademoiselle, and I crave your pardon now," said he, kneeling.

She blushed painfully, and, as Forval thought, angrily.

"What have I to fear here when your father, the good old Adrian Baba, is my friend?"

"He deceives you. My father has neither prisoners to sell nor slaves to give you on the morrow."

"Am I mocked or snared?" asked Forval, haughtily.

"You are both."

"And I am to be killed, lady--eh?",

"You and all who are with you," said she, mournfully.

"Well, so far as I am concerned, the loss will not be great," replied Forval, with true French _sang froid_.

"Why?"

"I have five brothers in France, all wilder fellows than I, so France can well spare one of us."

"But is life, indeed, so valueless to you?" she asked.

"To me perhaps it is; but you could shed a light upon it, lovely girl, and make that sunshine which at present is all gloom to Forval de Grenville."

She did not quite understand him, save that he was paying her a compliment, and half savage though she was, she smiled with pleasure. A brilliant light filled her eyes, a species of dusky fire, and casting them down, she said, in her own soft language:

"You have seen me but thrice. You cannot love me already?"

Forval was somewhat bewildered by the suddenness of this remark; but he was too gallant a gentleman to leave her long in doubt.

"Not love you!" he exclaimed, while endeavouring to take her hands in his; "ah, who could look upon you and not love you?"

"Would you not wish me changed--whiter, I mean?" she asked, with a timid smile.

"Changed in what respect? Are you not as near perfection as possible? Nay, you are perfection itself."

She laughed, and so did Forval, for he thought of what some of the powdered and patched, painted and furbelowed dames and demoiselles at whose feet he had knelt in the gilded salons of Paris and Versailles, would have said, had they seen him--Captain De Grenville, of the Regiment de Flandre--on his knees in apparent adoration of a little Malay girl!

"But, _vive la bagatelle_!" thought he.

Starting up, he sought to kiss her; but she shrank back.

"Do you hate me?" he asked, sadly.

"No--oh no!"

"Do you love me then?" he asked, in a different key.

"No----"

"Parbleu! you must do either one or other."

"You did not let me finish what I was about to say--that I neither hate nor like people until I have known them for a time; but in your case----"

She paused.

"Ah, well--in my case?"

"I love you!" said she, looking fully and tenderly into his dark eyes.

Forval's heart leaped, for few women had ever made such an avowal to him before; but the abruptness and strangeness of it in such a place, and at such a time, rendered the Frenchman suspicious. He began to fear some snare, and remembered the manner in which she had commenced this singular conversation.

"Accept my gratitude, lovely girl," said he, laying a hand upon his heart; "but you did not come to tell me this alone--you came to warn me of some impending danger?"

"I did. Would you wish to sacrifice my life to save your own?"

"Heavens! I should think not!" he exclaimed.

"Well, a plot has been formed against your life, and the lives of all who accompany you. I am full of sorrow that so handsome and kind a white man should perish" (here the captain drew himself up and bowed low) "and I shall tell you all, on one condition."

"Name it."

"That you will take me away with you."

"To the Isle of France?"

"Yes; and make me your wife."

Forval, still more astonished by her simplicity and trust, charmed by her beauty and grace, and bewildered by the whole affair, forgot all about poor Mademoiselle De Motteville and a dozen other fine ladies, and registered a solemn and most energetic vow that he would do as she required.

Taking her right hand between his own, he pressed it to his lips, and thinking what a faultlessly beautiful little hand it was, he said,

"And now, lady, speak. What is this terrible plot?"

"I must have one promise from you."

"Indeed! something beyond marriage?"

"Yes," said she, beginning to weep. "For you I am about to sacrifice my father's throne, which, as I am an only child, is my inheritance. For you, my country, my friends, my native customs, and that liberty which is so dear to me. My kinsmen, who would deem me dishonoured, will detest me, and if you leave me to their vengeance I shall be reduced to the endurance of tortures worse even than the death they propose for you."

"Heavens! but this is a terrible prologue to our matrimonial comedy."

"Promise to grant me what I demand, swear that your soldiers will not injure my people, and I will reveal all that is necessary for you to know."

With growing admiration and astonishment, Forval gave another solemn assurance.

"Well," said she, with tremulous accents, while her tears fell fast, "the king, my father, will come here to-morrow by sunrise. He will seem to be attended apparently by only a few; but followers to the number of thousands, armed with poisoned arrows, lances, and hatchets, are to be concealed in a wood close by; and at a given signal they will rush upon and massacre all your people."

"Indeed!"

"For you is reserved a peculiar mode of death, suggested by the learned men of the nation."

"And this flattering distinction is----"

"That you be taken to the summit of the cliff which rises in the centre of the city, and be hurled from thence alive."

Forval grew pale with rage on hearing all this, for he knew that the place referred to is the Tarpeian Rock of Madagascar, where the vilest criminals are executed by being hurled headlong down a precipice of eighty feet, at which depth his battered remains, after being received on some scattered masses of rock, fall four hundred feet below to the base of the hill.

"You are thus to be offered up as a solemn sacrifice to the gods of Madagascar," she said.

"Offered up to them? Thrown down, you mean! Here's a scheme! But the signal you speak of, what is it?"

"To-morrow, if my father breaks a white wand which he usually carries, it seals the fate of you and all your followers."

"Is no other sign, to be given?"

"Only one more. If the king should see fit to change his mind, and wish his people to return, he will cast his plumed cap towards them, as if the heat or weight of it oppressed him."

Forval loaded his beautiful visitor with thanks and caresses; but as the night had nearly passed, and the morning would soon be at hand, no time was to be lost in preparing for the coming emergency. He sent her on board the _Madame de Pompadour_, and the ships he ordered to prepare for sea, to be hove short on their anchors, to have all the cannon loaded, and the boats in readiness to embark the troops the moment a rocket was discharged.

These he immediately got under arms, and brought from the Isle of Sainte Marie the hundred who were there under the lieutenant. His mind was full of deep gratitude. But for the timely revelations of this generous and merciful girl, how terribly for him and for his comrades must the morrow have closed!

René d'Esterre was still more astonished when he heard of the adventures of the night; but alarm was mingled with his thoughts.

"Now, by St. Denis!" he exclaimed, "or rather by St. Lawrence, after whom this rascally island was once named, we should broil this demon of a king on a gridiron of ramrods, even as St. Lawrence himself was broiled!"

"And over eggshells, as the Bollandists have it?"

"No; but over a pile of good pine faggots."

"But you forget my promises to the girl; and then, to broil one's father-in-law--the idea is not to be thought of."

"Ah! the charming savage! Why did I not see her?" exclaimed D'Esterre, laughing, as he loaded a pair of pistols and placed them in his embroidered belt.

"Come, come," said Forval, with an air of mock serenity, to cover the avowal under which he winced; "I must again remind you that the king is to be the father-in-law of Forval de Grenville."

"Oho!" laughed D'Esterre, "Mademoiselle Rana--Rana--what's her name?--la Princesse de l'Ile Dauphine--is not at all a marrying young lady--quite passionless in all her proceedings, it would appear!"

"'Pon my soul, René, I'll parade you at twelve paces after this business is over."

"No you won't. You were not to marry Mademoiselle de Motteville until you were a colonel, and now, as a captain, you are about to espouse---- Oh, it is too absurd," and the chevalier laughed till he nearly shook his epaulettes off.

"The girl is lovely, and you have not seen her. But now day is breaking. Let the men get under arms, and fall in in front of the line of tents."

"Ah, we wanted a little excitement, and now we have it with a vengeance."

"By the gods of the Greeks, I should think so. We are but two hundred Frenchmen, and in yonder wood the savages muster in thousands."

"But we belong to the Regiment de Flandre," said René, proudly, as he took his sword and left the tent.

Forval felt his heart beat with many strange emotions, amid which rage and alarm were not wanting, when, about sunrise, he saw the treacherous king coming very deliberately towards the little camp, mounted, and having borne above his head a large gilded umbrella with a deep scarlet fringe. He wore his royal robes of flowing silk of many colours, with his plumed cap, and in his right hand was a long white wand--the death-signal--and he was accompanied by about a dozen young princes, all handsomely equipped and unusually well armed. Their countenances betrayed nothing of the deadly purpose they had in view.

As Adrian Baba dismounted, and gave his bridle to a slave, the French drums beat a salute and the ranks presented arms--arms that were carefully loaded--while Forval and D'Esterre saluted with their swords. He approached Forval, who already saw, or thought he saw, the dark visages clustering thick as bees among the underwood of the adjacent forest.

When within three paces of Forval, the king snapped his white wand in two pieces.

"Thunder of heaven!" cried the Frenchman, as he seized him by the throat, and placed a pistol at his head. "Treacherous dog, throw your cap towards those scoundrels in the wood, or you die!"

"Shoulder arms--ready!" commanded the Chevalier D'Esterre, and suddenly the ranks closed, and the two hundred soldiers cocked their muskets.

"Sire, forgive my _brusquerie_; but really----" Forval paused with suppressed rage, and fierce mockery in his eyes, as he pressed the cold muzzle of the pistol against the head of Adrian Baba.

Terrified by the unexpected discovery and seizure, the king cast his royal cap in the direction indicated. On this the savages in the wood disappeared; nay, more, on a shot or two being fired, his attendant princes took to their heels in ignominious haste, and left him a prisoner in the hands of Forval, who resolutely kept him as a hostage until he had the whole of his force, with all their tents and stores, embarked; and ere night fell he found himself far out upon the lonely seas, standing once more towards the Mauritius, with the coast of Madagascar and the Ile aux Prunes sunk to a stripe upon the starboard quarter, the Princess Ranavolana being the sole trophy of the famous expedition on which the Comte De Malartic had sent him.

There was a chaplain on board, and despite all that the more wary D'Esterre and others could say, Forval, who was a man of his word, prepared regularly to espouse her on the following day.

"My dear Forval, are you mad? Think of your family," exclaimed his friend, who he knew loved him well.

"What do my family think of me?" was the petulant response.

"That you are _étourdi_--nay more, a _vaurien_, perhaps."

"And they are right."

"But think of your ancestors--of Richard de Grenville, who was Lord of Rouen and Caen in Normandy! What says La Roque of them in his 'Treatise on Nobility?'"

"I neither know nor care. I can do nothing for my ancestors, and they nothing for me. What is done is done."

"But not that which is to do. I grant you that the girl is beautiful, and that you might make a fortune out of her----"

"Where?" asked Forval, sharply.

"At the Théàtre des Funambules (ropedancers), in the Boulevard du Temple."

"Sacré! but now you go too far," cried Forval, with a hand on his sword; but he felt himself compelled to withdraw it, as his friend was choking with laughter.

"In all your love affairs at home, I have heard you declare that you would never be 'in love' with any one."

"Ah, but, René, this is very different. My little Malay is so piquante."

"And you have been so long bored with ennui."

"Perhaps I shall sicken at the sight of the Peter Bott. Besides, I have passed my word to her."

"Think of your betrothed in France," urged René, with great seriousness; "think of Mademoiselle de Motteville, whom sedulously you taught to love you well, and who had more wedding rings offered her than she had pretty fingers--refusing all because she was infatuated about you. Think of that charming Countess V----; think of----"

"I'll think of nothing but my pledged word and my piquante little savage, so cease, chevalier, I command you," responded Forval, impetuously.

The chevalier shrugged his shoulders, and said:

"Well, I am safe from all such spells."

"How so?"

"I left my heart----"

"Or that which did duty for it?"

"In France behind me."

"Pity you did not leave your sagacious head there, chevalier."

"Why?"

"Both would have been spared the chance of having a bullet through them."

"Here we may face many bullets, Forval, and yet never win the cross or cordon of St. Louis."

"I have always had a prejudice in favour of a well-dressed wife, with a fashionable _trousseau_--of a bride with kid gloves and well-made boots, with a modern costume, instead of only a string of beads, and a robe like your grandmother's sacque. But the climate here is so different; and then fancies are prejudices--yes, in faith, mere prejudices, and my little Malay is charming without any of our fashionable absurdities."

"So, courage, Forval, my friend you may one day be king of the Isle Dauphine, this infernal Madagascar, on which those perfidious and grasping English have had their eyes for some time past."

M. l'Abbé, the chaplain, had some scruples about wedding a Christian gentleman like Forval to a believer in Rahillimaza, Ramahavely, and Co.; but they were overcome, and he was formally married to Ranavolana, the Captain of the _Pompadour_ transport officiating in place of Adrian Baba, and he landed with her as his wife, to the astonishment of all the people in the Isle of France, the sole trophy of his great slaving expedition.

Not long after this her father, the treacherous Adrian Baba, died. The people of Madagascar, who are ardently attached to the blood of their native kings, sought her out, and the government of the island was offered to her and her husband by ambassadors in the name of the people.

"The king is dead! Long live the king!" cried the volatile and reckless René D'Esterre on parade that morning.

"Long live Forval, the king of the Isle Dauphine! Long live the Regiment de Flandre!" cried the entire battalion.

"Forval," said Ranavolana, "you had the generosity to marry me in opposition to the wishes of your friends and the prejudices of your religion and your country when I had nothing to offer you but my humble person, and those charms which, whatever they might have been considered in my native country, fell far short of the women of France; but I have now my inheritance, and, Forval, it is yours."

So Captain de Grenville became King of Madagascar, and those who wish to see the documentary details of his story will find them in the "History of the Isle of France," by Charles Grant, Vicomte de Vaux, and it was their granddaughter, Queen Ranavolana, whose outrages on the English residents and French missionaries--all suggested by her lover, a renegade Frenchman, in the name of the false gods--that caused a British armament to destroy, by shot and shell, her principal town in the year 1845, and it is a singular circumstance that the name of her renegade lover was D'Esterre, the grandson of Forval's friend and comrade.

The Chevalier René returned to France and married Mademoiselle de Motteville, whose engagement had been a conditional one, and their descendant it was who, for complicity in the affairs of 1848, had to fly from France, and found a stormy home in the Isle of Madagascar.

THE FATAL VOYAGE OF THE 'LAURA;' OR, THE STORY OF JACK MILMAN.

It was in the midsummer of this year that my friend Milman, of the Household Brigade, invited me to accompany him on a trip in his new steam yacht, the _Laura_, along the shores of the Baltic.

She was a well-formed, smart--indeed, elegant--little vessel, the _Laura_, a good sea-going boat, as well as a safe coaster.

We were five of a party. Little Tom Tucker, fresh from Oxford; his chum, Harry Winton, ditto; Morton Parker, of the late Bengal Army, home on two years' leave--great on the subjects of niggers, hog and tiger hunting, chutney, and curry--Jack, and myself; and a merry party of thoughtless addlepates we were.

We had "done" the entire Baltic, and the Gulfs of Finland and Bothnia, and had come to the conclusion that the said Baltic was all very slow, stupid, and that there was "nothing in it," though we had seen Cronstadt; the Malta of that sea, with all its batteries and countless cannon, had flirted with the fair-haired girls of the Rue de Goths and Amalien Gade at Copenhagen, drunk lager beer at Dantzig, steamed past Elsinore, and actually, with our four six-pounders, had exchanged salutes with a Danish man-o'-war in the Cattegat, as poor King Christian IX. has been an ill-used man; and then we stood down the Skager Rack for old England.

My friend Jack, or Long Milman, as we called him, for he was above six feet, was the _beau ideal_ of a fine young Englishman. "A trump, a brick," and so forth, Jack was termed by all who knew him; but he was a finished gentleman and a thorough good fellow, a prime bat and bowler, always had the stroke oar at Oxford, and was a good rifle-shot.

All the girls envied her who waltzed with Jack. He was a king of every pic-nic, and always shone in amateur theatricals, disdaining such tame characters as John Mildmay, and choosing such as Sir Affable Hawk, in which (privately) it was Jack's weakness to think that he quite equalled Mr. Charles Mathews.

As the very antipodes of his home costume and Guards' uniform, on this voyage Jack wore a round blue jacket, with anchor buttons, a straw hat, with a blue ribbon (changed occasionally for a sou'-wester), and a black handkerchief knotted loosely round his neck. In London Jack wore the best fitting gloves that Houbigant could produce; but now he disdained any such coverings for his digits, which were as dark as salt water, tar, and exposure could make them, for Jack was every inch a man, and could tally on to a rope with the best seaman on board.

"By Jove, if _Laura_ could only see me with these paws!" he would sometimes say; and then we laughed, for we knew who _Laura_ was, and rather envied Jack's ascendency in that quarter.

The yacht was under steam, with her fore and aft, fore and mainsails set, as we sat at dinner, on the day we quitted the Skager Rack, and the summer weather was soft and balmy.

Jack proposed that, instead of standing through the North Sea for the coast of England, we should steam westward, and visit some of the Scottish Isles before returning.

"Impossible," said Harry Winton.

"And wherefore impossible, thou man of objections?"

"I'm due in London by the end of the month."

"So am I," said Jack; "but we'll manage it in time. Pass the bottles. Consider the magnificent scenery we shall see."

"Pshaw--scenery! It is, as some one writes, but a weak invention of artists and innkeepers."

"'Oh, blessed are they that sneer!'" exclaimed Jack, brandishing his cigar case; "'for they shall never make fools of themselves.' An addition to the list of beatitudes well becoming the spirit of the present day. Try another glass of that glorious old port--it's 1820 vintage--and see how my project looks then. Buttons, wine for Mr. Winton."

"I certainly have a curiosity to see some of those islands, where no one ever goes to, and no one ever comes from," said Morton Parker.

"Mere curiosity," replied Harry, while sipping his wine; "but beware of it. It was their wives' thirst for unwise knowledge which wrecked alike the peace of Father Adam and of Bluebeard."

Winton's opposition was soon laughed down. Jack Milman consulted his skipper, and the yacht's head was at once trimmed west and by north.

"We shall only be a fortnight or so longer absent," said Parker; "no heart will break in that time."

"Laura will be sure to think I am lost," said Jack, in a low voice to me.

"It may excite her."

"No difficult matter, by Jove?" replied Jack, laughing; for Laura Hammond was a girl who was fond of all excitement--made up her book on the Oaks and Derby, and had herself photographed on horseback, on skates, at archery meetings, in fancy dresses, and all manner of ways, as we well knew, by the albums with which Jack's cabin was plentifully strewn.

On the second day after this, while at luncheon, we heard the cry of "Land ahead!" and saw a stern and rocky coast rising slowly from a dark grey and rather bleak and stormy sea.

It was the Scaw of Lambness, the most northern point of the Shetland Isles, towering up amid foam, with mist resting on its scalp, and the wild seabirds whirling round it.

"Deuced glad we are drawing near home, anyway," said Jack, as he tied his sou'-wester on, and levelled his telescope at this shore of most uninviting aspect.

"Ugh!" said little Tom Tucker, who hailed from, the region of Bayswater. "Heavens, Jack, do you call this home?"

"Well, Tom, it is the first instalment of it. We are four hundred miles from the Tweed, as a bird flies."

"So that beastly chart below tells me."

"Seven hundred and fifty, at least, from Bayswater, Tom," I added, laughing.

"And we have polished off the most of our wines," said Jack. "Buttons gave us the last bottle of that tidy Bordeaux yesterday, and to-day he has opened our last case of Cliquot, so we shan't stay hereabout long, I promise you, Tom."

By nightfall we had run through the Sound of Yell, amid little sandy holms and mossy rocks, where the eider-duck and grey gull seemed the only inhabitants, and where whales appeared spouting at times, and the young sillocks were in swarms. We came to anchor in a quiet and sheltered little voe (as the inlets are there named), and then we discovered from a fisherman who came on board that we were off Northmaven, part of the mainland of Shetland, one of the most northern and primitive of the almost countless isles of Scotland, forty-four leagues west of Bergen, in Norway, and forty-seven north of the coast of Buchan.

Night was setting in when the "native," "the Sawney Bean," as some of us termed him, was brought down to the cabin for our inspection, and his own delectation in the matter of grog.

Magnus Kolbainson--for so this northern named himself--was a rough and weather-beaten old stump of a Shetlander, in his seventieth year; but hardy, hale, and active as a southron of half his age, with a clear, bright grey eye, and a face which, though a mass of wrinkles, was still ruddy and fresh.

He removed a black fur cap from his white, silvery hairs, and glanced round the little cabin with much of wonder in his face, for he was quite unused to luxury, and had spent all the years of a long life amid storms and shipwrecks, in pursuit of the whale and the walrus.

He drank horn after horn of stiff boatswain's grog, and his conversation--in a strange dialect, and at times unintelligible--consisted of weird tales of wrecks upon the rocks of Eaglesbay and Gunister, or of whales stranded by hundreds in the shallow voes of Burra, Quayfirth, and Gluss; of the terrors of the Holes of Scraada; of witches' spells; of spirits haunting holms and dunes, and Pict-houses; of names, places, and things that seemed and sounded strange and barbarous to us; and yet this queer old man was a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, and a Briton like ourselves, though he knew as much about steam or electricity as Noah or Tubal Cain might have known. Hence we questioned and surveyed him with wonder and speculation.

From subsequent circumstances I am thus particular in describing old Magnus Kolbainson.

When he rose to go ashore in his little punt, the summer moon was shining brightly, and we could see all the rocky indentations of that most picturesque coast with great clearness. As he crossed the deck, he suddenly started, and after an exclamation expressive of surprise and alarm, asked:

"When was that man drowned?"

"Who?--where?--what man?" asked Jack Milman.

"He there!"

"Where?"

"Lying by the capstan, with a white handkerchief over his face," said Magnus, gravely and earnestly.

"Stuff! my good fellow," said Milman. "There is no man lying there. It is a shadow you've seen--or has our grog been too strong for you, old boy?"

The old man, with fear and wonder in his face and manner, approached the spot he had indicated, and passed his hands over the planks, and then across his eyes.

"Strange!" said he; "I thought I saw a man lying there, dead and cold, wet and dripping. It must have been the shadow of a bird or a cloud--perhaps a spirit--between us and the moon."

"The poor old fogey is screwed," said Jack, as we carefully assisted him into his little punt, and, with honest anxiety, watched until we saw him safe ashore, and proceeding in the pale moonshine up the steep rocks, to where a red light shone in the window of his hut. The skipper was ordered to get the yacht close in shore, and alongside the rocks, in the morning, so that we might land as easily and as often as we pleased, as we had resolved to pic-nic on the island.

The morning proved a lovely one. Breakfast over, Buttons packed a hamper to take ashore, while Jack produced from his armoury guns of all kinds, double and single-barrelled, muzzle and breech-loaders, as we meant to make a great slaughter among the gulls, cormorants, seals, and whatever else came within range of our fire.

"Buttons, my boy, give us plenty of the Cliquot," said Jack to his steward. "Chuck in the old Melton pie for Mr. Tucker--chutney for Captain Parker; he'll die without it--Bengal chutney."

We all landed with our guns and game-bags, and, under the guidance of old Magnus Kolbainson, made our way along the slopes of Mons Ronaldi, which is said to be the highest hill in all those isles, being nearly four thousand feet in altitude; and to Londoners--we travelled Londoners, as we rather flattered ourselves we were--the scene we witnessed was certainly novel, exciting, and terrible.

We shot a few seabirds, but they were scarcely worth picking up; and we scared great herds of the wild ponies, and made them scamper to and fro.

With many a strange tale of the rude and antique tower that crowns the mountain, and of the chain of watch-houses or Pictish dunes that guard the coast, our quaint old cicerone beguiled the way, all unsuspicious of how we "chaffed, and trotted him out," though puffing, blowing, and perspiring sorely, for the heat of the weather was great, and the mountain paths were steep, rugged, and tortuous, and seldom trodden by aught but sheep, rabbits, and wild ponies.

At last we reached the western side of the peninsula, where the cliffs are stupendous in height, and seem to have been rent and torn by billows, earthquakes, and volcanic throes, into strange and fearful shapes.

In these cliffs are the perpendicular caverns known as the Holes of Scraada.

These are two immense natural perforations, distant from the sea-cliffs two hundred and fifty feet inland, sinking down collaterally like two deep pits, separated only by a bridge-like mass of grass-covered rock, under which the sea communicates by a cavernous tunnel, where the waves, surging with the whole force of the Atlantic, boil, suck, gurgle, and thunder, with the most appalling sound.

Little Tommy Tucker shrank back, and could by no means be persuaded to approach, and, though stigmatised by Jack as "a muff," candidly wished himself at Bayswater, or anywhere else. Even Morton Parker, who had seen more of the world than any of us, and had peeped into the Bloody Well of Cawnpore, felt timid, while plucky Harry Winton declared it "doocid good, and the best got up thing of the kind he had ever seen."

"So well got up, indeed, old fellow, that I mean to make a sketch of it for Laura Hammond's album," said Jack Milman, producing his sketch-book, and seating himself in a secluded spot, unpleasantly near the verge, though.

"What the dickens, Jack," said Tucker, ruefully; "you don't mean to say that you are about to bother and make a sketch of this place?"

"And why not, by my halidame, by'r lady, or anything else?"

"It will occupy the whole afternoon, and it is past two now. I'm a lineal descendant of that Mr. Thomas Tucker who sang for his supper, and I'm dying for something to eat."

"And I for something to drink," chorused we all.

"Well," said Jack; "till I've made my sketch for Laura Hammond, I won't budge--that's flat! You know where Buttons has opened the hampers and spread out the grub. Walk slowly back, and I'll rejoin you, Keep a bottle of the sparkling in a cool runnel for me--I won't be twenty minutes behind you. Now be off, those who are hungry. Meantime, I'll have a quiet weed, and sketch this truly infernal hole!"

"All right," said Tommy; "but if you are late, Jack, I hope you won't give us the trouble of coming up this awful road after you; for really it's rather hard upon a fellow in his thirties, and on the confines of fogeydom."

"Never fear! I may see something else to sketch. Away! I'll be on board the _Laura_, dead or alive, by four o'clock--dead or alive! Look after that old Sawney Kolbainson--supply his little wants, and now, _au revoir_!"

Shrugging his shoulders as if he wished to be rid of us, Jack commenced his sketch, and as we descended, we saw him contemplating it from time to time complacently, with his head on one side, and a cigar between the fingers of his left hand.

Pure hunger and an intense thirst, conduced by exercise, heat, and the keen breeze from the sea, made us enjoy the luncheon of cold fowl, Russian tongue, and other condiments provided for us by Buttons, who had spread a snow-white cloth on the grassy sward, and in a runnel that gurgled close by he had the most acceptable of all viands, the Cliquot, sunk among the pebbles for coolness.

We were all very merry, and uncorked bottle after bottle of champagne; and great was the astonishment of old Magnus Kolbainson, after imbibing such a beverage as he had never seen or heard of before, and to his throat it was new and strange as the ambrosia of the gods.

Inspired thereby, however, he told us a long, weird story of the stone ship we saw, and how it was the craft of a pirate, on whom a spell or curse had fallen; and then he sang us a strange and uncouth song, which sounded exactly like a Norse ballad.

"Four o'clock," said Tucker, looking suddenly at his watch.

"And yet no appearance of Jack," said I, starting up.

"He spoke of twenty minutes. His sketch has taken longer."

"Less, I should say. There is Jack half a mile off, and making his way straight for the yacht!"

"Without us," cried Parker.

"Without lunch, too. Strange. I hope we hav'n't offended him in any way," suggested Tucker.

"Should be sorry if so. Milman's the best fellow in the world. Hallo! Jack--Jack Milman!"

But Jack walked steadily on by the rugged and descending road, which led to the voe where the yacht lay. Leaving Buttons and two of the crew to pack the _débris_ of the luncheon, we picked up our guns, and a few of those birds which we proposed to have stuffed in London as souvenirs of our sojourn in Ultima Thule, and hurried after Milman, who had now disappeared in a conie, or hollow. We had evidently gained on him though, for when he reappeared we were much nearer him.

"He's in a devil of a hurry, surely," said Parker. "Thinks, perhaps, we've polished off the Cliquot, and wants some of that '41 Lafitte, or brandy and seltzer."

We shouted singly and together; but received no answer.

Jack's conduct was unaccountable, and we began to fear that something untoward had happened. Jack had neither his gun, straw hat, nor shot-belt; the back of his jacket was rent open, and his right arm seemed to dangle helplessly by his side.

Thoroughly alarmed by these indications, we ran on to overtake him, but were not quick enough. He reached the steamer before us, and, unnoticed, apparently, by the crew, stepped from the rocks upon the gangway, crossed the deck, and, after lingering for a moment, as if looking at the sky, descended into the cabin.

We soon followed, and dived below; but Jack was nowhere to be seen. We searched all the state-cabins, and every locker and bunk, without finding a trace of him.

"He's hiding somewhere," said I. "Come along, Jack; show yourself. Are you ill, old fellow, or only up to some of your usual larks?"

There was no reply, and after a minute search we became painfully certain of the fact that Jack Milman was not on board at all!

We questioned the crew on deck. All denied having seen him, and the skipper, who had been seated all the time in the cabin, had seen no one enter, heard no one come down. What mystery was this?

All our weariness vanished now; and, with emotions of alarm, astonishment, and anxiety difficult to describe, we retraced our steps towards the western side of Northmaven, just as the sun was verging towards the Atlantic, expecting to meet Jack returning; but no trace of him was seen till we reached the brink of the Black Holes of Scraada, where the sea boiled through its subterraneous caverns, in surf and foam, with the dreadful sound I have described.

By the edge of the rocks, we found a double barrelled gun, a half-smoked cigar, and a pencil lying. Lower down lay a sketch-book open, with its leaves fluttering in the wind; the grass of the bridge or middle rock was torn and rent, as if someone had fallen there, and clung thereto; and lower down, alas! a hundred feet or more, was the body of poor Jack Milman, appearing and disappearing momentarily, as it was tossed upward or sucked down, a drowned, sodden, and battered corpse, the sport of the furious waves, in that appalling hole.

Bewildered and in silent horror, we stood for a time looking at it, and in each other's blanched faces. Old Magnus Kolbainson alone took off his fur cap, and said:

"The Lord receive his soul! Mind ye o' his parting words, that at four o'clock he would be on board, _dead or alive_, and he hath kept his word!"

We knew not what to think of all this, and sat by the margin of the dreadful place, utterly crushed.

Not so old Magnus. Aided by his sons and grandsons, all hardy Islemen, who now came to our assistance, he was slung by a rope down into that watery profundity. He fastened a line to the body; it was drawn reverently upward, and laid on the grassy slope. Then we found that the face and hands had been sorely bruised by the rocks, and that his right arm was broken in three places, just as it had appeared in that of the figure we had followed on board the steamer.

Poor Jack had kept his promise; but at the moment we were questioning the skipper, he had been for three hours a drowned corpse.

Slowly and sadly we bore him down from that frightful place to the _Laura_. When we brought him on board, the ghostly moon was shining clearly; and that a complete fulfilment of the strange foreshadowing of his fate might not be wanting, it chanced that we laid him down by the capstan, and spread a handkerchief over his pallid face; and as we did so, the last night's vision of Magnus Kolbainson rushed vividly and painfully on the memory of us all.

Poor Jack Milman, the king of good fellows, lay there!

After such an adventure as this, it may well be conceived that the next morning found us running, as fast as steam, and wind could take us, on our homeward path, towards the Orkneys and the mainland of Scotland.

THE END.

BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.