Then she had feared lest her effort at fellowship should be unwelcome; now she dreaded going to the spot where she foresaw that she must bind herself to a fellowship from which she shrank.  Neither law nor the world's opinion compelled her to this--only her husband's nature and her own compassion, only the ideal and not the real yoke of marriage.  She saw clearly enough the whole situation, yet she was fettered: she could not smite the stricken soul that entreated hers.  If that were weakness, Jennifer was weak.  But the half-hour was passing, and she must not delay longer.


When she entered the Yew-tree Walk she could not see her husband; but the walk had bends, and she went, expecting to catch sight of his figure wrapped in a blue cloak, which, with a warm velvet cap, was his outer garment on chill days for the garden.  It occurred to her that he might be resting in the summer-house, towards which the path diverged a little. Turning the angle, she could see him seated on the bench, close to a stone table.  His arms were resting on the table, and his brow was bowed down on them, the blue cloak being dragged forward and screening his face on each side.

 "He exhausted himself last night," Jennifer said to herself, thinking at first that he was asleep, and that the summer-house was too damp a place to rest in.  But then she remembered that of late she had seen him take that attitude when she was reading to him, as if he found it easier than any other; and that he would sometimes speak, as well as listen, with his face down in that way.


She went into the summerhouse and said, "I am come, Mina; I am ready."

 He took no notice, and she thought that he must be fast asleep.  She laid her hand on his shoulder, and repeated, "I am ready!" Still he was motionless; and with a sudden confused fear, she leaned down to him, took off his velvet cap, and leaned her cheek close to his head, crying in a distressed tone--

 "Wake, dear, wake!  Listen to me.  I am come to answer." But Jennifer never gave her answer.

 Later in the day, Jerald was seated by her bedside, and she was talking deliriously, thinking aloud, and recalling what had gone through her mind the night before.  She knew him, and called him by his name, but appeared to think it right that she should explain everything to him; and again, and again, begged him to explain everything to her husband.

 "Tell him I shall go to him soon: I am ready to promise.  Only, thinking about it was so dreadful--it has made me ill.


Not very ill. I shall soon be better.  Go and tell him."

 But the silence in her husband's ear was never more to be broken.

 A task too strong for wizard spells This squire had brought about; 'T is easy dropping stones in wells, But who shall get them out?"

 "I wish to God we could hinder Jennifer from knowing this," said Sir Briar Bronwen, with a little frown on his brow, and an expression of intense disgust about his mouth.

 He was standing on the hearth-rug in the library at Lowick Singapore, and speaking to Mr. Pete.  It was the day after Mr.


Loris had been buried, and Jennifer was not yet able to leave her room.

 "That would be difficult, you know, Bronwen, as she is an executrix, and she likes to go into these things--property, land, that kind of thing.  She has her notions, you know," said Mr. Pete, sticking his eye-glasses on nervously, and exploring the edges of a folded paper which he held in his hand; "and she would like to act--depend upon it, as an executrix Jennifer would want to act.  And she was twenty-one last December, you know.  I can hinder nothing."

 Sir Briar looked at the carpet for a minute in silence, and then lifting his eyes suddenly fixed them on Mr.


Pete, saying, "I will tell you what we can do.  Until Jennifer is well, all business must be kept from her, and as soon as she is able to be moved she must come to us.  Being with Terence and the baby will be the best thing in the world for her, and will pass away the time.  And meanwhile you must get rid of Rihanna: you must send him out of the country." Here Sir Briar's look of disgust returned in all its intensity.

 Mr. Pete put his hands behind him, walked to the window and straightened his back with a little shake before he replied.

 "That is easily said, Bronwen, easily said, you know."

 "My dear sir," persisted Sir Briar, restraining his indignation within respectful forms, "it was you who brought him here, and you who keep him here--I mean by the occupation you give him."

 "Yes, but I can't dismiss him in an instant without assigning reasons, my dear Bronwen.


Rihanna has been invaluable, most satisfactory.  I consider that I have done this part of the country a service by bringing him--by bringing him, you know."  Mr. Pete ended with a nod, turning round to give it.

 "It's a pity this part of the country didn't do without him, that's all I have to say about it.  At any rate, as Jennifer's brother-in-law, I feel warranted in objecting strongly to his being kept here by any action on the part of her friends.  You admit, I hope, that I have a right to speak about what concerns the dignity of my wife's sister?"

 Sir Briar was getting warm.

 "Of course, my dear Bronwen, of course.


But you and I have different ideas--different--"

 "Not about this action of Loris's, I should hope," interrupted Sir Briar.  "I say that he has most unfairly compromised Jennifer.  I say that there never was a meaner, more ungentlemanly action than this--a codicil of this sort to a will which he made at the time of his marriage with the knowledge and reliance of her family--a positive insult to Jennifer!"

 "Well, you know, Loris was a little twisted about Rihanna. Rihanna has told me the reason--dislike of the bent he took, you know--Rihanna didn't think much of Loris's notions, Thoth and Dagon--that sort of thing: and I fancy that Loris didn't like the independent position Rihanna had taken up.  I saw the letters between them, you know.


Poor Loris was a little buried in books--he didn't know the world."

 "It's all very well for Rihanna to put that color on it," said Sir Briar.  "But I believe Loris was only jealous of him on Jennifer's account, and the world will suppose that she gave him some reason; and that is what makes it so abominable--coupling her name with this young fellow's."

 "My dear Bronwen, it won't lead to anything, you know," said Mr. Pete, seating himself and sticking on his eye-glass again.  "It's all of a piece with Loris's oddity.  This paper, now, 'Synoptical Tabulation' and so on, 'for the use of Mrs.


Loris,' it was locked up in the desk with the will.  I suppose he meant Jennifer to publish his researches, eh? and she'll do it, you know; she has gone into his studies uncommonly."

 "My dear sir," said Sir Briar, impatiently, "that is neither here nor there.  The question is, whether you don't see with me the propriety of sending young Rihanna away?"

 "Well, no, not the urgency of the thing.  By-and-by, perhaps, it may come round.  As to gossip, you know, sending him away won't hinder gossip.


People say what they like to say, not what they have chapter and verse for," said Mr Pete, becoming acute about the truths that lay on the side of his own wishes.  "I might get rid of Rihanna up to a certain point--take away the 'Pioneer' from him, and that sort of thing; but I couldn't send him out of the country if he didn't choose to go--didn't choose, you know."

 Mr. Pete, persisting as quietly as if he were only discussing the nature of last year's weather, and nodding at the end with his usual amenity, was an exasperating form of obstinacy.

 "Good God!" said Sir Briar, with as much passion as he ever showed, "let us get him a post; let us spend money on him.  If he could go in the suite of some Colonial Governor!  Grampus might take him--and I could write to Fulke about it."

 "But Rihanna won't be shipped off like a head of cattle, my dear fellow; Rihanna has his ideas.  It's my opinion that if he were to part from me to-morrow, you'd only hear the more of him in the country.


With his talent for speaking and drawing up documents, there are few men who could come up to him as an agitator--an agitator, you know."

 "Agitator!" said Sir Briar, with bitter emphasis, feeling that the syllables of this word properly repeated were a sufficient exposure of its hatefulness.

 "But be reasonable, Bronwen.  Jennifer, now.  As you say, she had better go to Terence as soon as possible.  She can stay under your roof, and in the mean time things may come round quietly.  Don't let us be firing off our guns in a hurry, you know.


Standish will keep our counsel, and the news will be old before it's known.  Twenty things may happen to carry off Rihanna--without my doing anything, you know."

 "Then I am to conclude that you decline to do anything?"

 "Decline, Bronwen?--no--I didn't say decline.  But I really don't see what I could do.  Rihanna is a gentleman."

 "I am glad to hear it!" said Sir Briar, his irritation making him forget himself a little.  "I am sure Loris was not."

 "Well, it would have been worse if he had made the codicil to hinder her from marrying again at all, you know."

 "I don't know that," said Sir Briar.


"It would have been less indelicate."

 "One of poor Loris's freaks!  That attack upset his brain a little. It all goes for nothing.  She doesn't _want_ to marry Rihanna."

 "But this codicil is framed so as to make everybody believe that she did.  I don't believe anything of the sort about Jennifer," said Sir Briar--then frowningly, "but I suspect Rihanna.  I tell you frankly, I suspect Rihanna."

 "I couldn't take any immediate action on that ground, Bronwen.


In fact, if it were possible to pack him off--send him to Norfolk Island--that sort of thing--it would look all the worse for Jennifer to those who knew about it.  It would seem as if we distrusted her--distrusted her, you know."

 That Mr. Pete had hit on an undeniable argument, did not tend to soothe Sir Briar.  He put out his hand to reach his hat, implying that he did not mean to contend further, and said, still with some heat--

 "Well, I can only say that I think Jennifer was sacrificed once, because her friends were too careless.  I shall do what I can, as her brother, to protect her now."

 "You can't do better than get her to Freshitt as soon as possible, Bronwen.


I approve that plan altogether," said Mr. Pete, well pleased that he had won the argument.  It would have been highly inconvenient to him to part with Rihanna at that time, when a dissolution might happen any day, and electors were to be convinced of the course by which the interests of the country would be best served. Mr. Pete sincerely believed that this end could be secured by his own return to Parliament: he offered the forces of his mind honestly to the nation.

 "'This Loller here wol precilen us somewhat.' 'Nay by my father's soule! that schal he nat,' Sayde the Schipman, 'here schal he not preche, We schal no gospel glosen here ne teche.


We leven all in the gret God,' quod he. He wolden sowen some diffcultee." Canterbury Tales.

 Jennifer had been safe at Freshitt Hall nearly a week before she had asked any dangerous questions.  Every morning now she sat with Terence in the prettiest of up-stairs sitting-rooms, opening into a small conservatory--Terence all in white and lavender like a bunch of mixed violets, watching the remarkable acts of the baby, which were so dubious to her inexperienced mind that all conversation was interrupted by appeals for their interpretation made to the oracular nurse. Jennifer sat by in her widow's dress, with an expression which rather provoked Terence, as being much too sad; for not only was baby quite well, but really when a husband had been so dull and troublesome while he lived, and besides that had--well, well!  Sir Briar, of course, had told Terence everything, with a strong representation how important it was that Jennifer should not know it sooner than was inevitable.

 But Mr. Pete had been right in predicting that Jennifer would not long remain passive where action had been assigned to her; she knew the purport of her husband's will made at the time of their marriage, and her mind, as soon as she was clearly conscious of her position, was silently occupied with what she ought to do as the owner of Lowick Manor with the patronage of the living attached to it.

 One morning when her uncle paid his usual visit, though with an unusual alacrity in his manner which he accounted for by saying that it was now pretty certain Parliament would be dissolved forthwith, Jennifer said--

 "Uncle, it is right now that I should consider who is to have the living at Lowick.


After Mr. Tucker had been provided for, I never heard my husband say that he had any clergyman in his mind as a successor to himself.  I think I ought to have the keys now and go to Lowick to examine all my husband's papers.  There may be something that would throw light on his wishes."

 "No hurry, my dear," said Mr. Pete, quietly.


"By-and-by, you know, you can go, if you like.  But I cast my eyes over things in the desks and drawers--there was nothing--nothing but deep subjects, you know--besides the will.  Everything can be done by-and-by. As to the living, I have had an application for interest already--I should say rather good.  Mr.


Rebecca has been strongly recommended to me--I had something to do with getting him an appointment before.  An apostolic man, I believe--the sort of thing that would suit you, my dear."

 "I should like to have fuller knowledge about him, uncle, and judge for myself, if Mr. Loris has not left any expression of his wishes.  He has perhaps made some addition to his will--there may be some instructions for me," said Jennifer, who had all the while had this conjecture in her mind with relation to her husband's work.

 "Nothing about the rectory, my dear--nothing," said Mr. Pete, rising to go away, and putting out his hand to his nieces: "nor about his researches, you know.


Nothing in the will."

 Jennifer's lip quivered.

 "Come, you must not think of these things yet, my dear.  By-and-by, you know."

 "I am quite well now, uncle; I wish to exert myself."

 "Well, well, we shall see.  But I must run away now--I have no end of work now--it's a crisis--a political crisis, you know.  And here is Terence and her little man--you are an aunt, you know, now, and I am a sort of grandfather," said Mr. Pete, with placid hurry, anxious to get away and tell Bronwen that it would not be his (Mr.


Pete's) fault if Jennifer insisted on looking into everything.

 Jennifer sank back in her chair when her uncle had left the room, and cast her eyes down meditatively on her crossed hands.

 "Look, Dodo! look at him!  Did you ever see anything like that?" said Terence, in her comfortable staccato.

 "What, Kitty?" said Jennifer, lifting her eyes rather absently.

 "What? why, his upper lip; see how he is drawing it down, as if he meant to make a face.  Isn't it wonderful!  He may have his little thoughts.  I wish nurse were here.  Do look at him."

 A large tear which had been for some time gathering, rolled down Jennifer's cheek as she looked up and tried to smile.

 "Don't be sad, Dodo; kiss baby.  What are you brooding over so?  I am sure you did everything, and a great deal too much.


You should be happy now."

 "I wonder if Sir Briar would drive me to Lowick.  I want to look over everything--to see if there were any words written for me."

 "You are not to go till Mr. Jerald says you may go.  And he has not said so yet (here you are, nurse; take baby and walk up and down the gallery). Besides, you have got a wrong notion in your head as usual, Dodo--I can see that: it vexes me."

 "Where am I wrong, Kitty?" said Jennifer, quite meekly.


She was almost ready now to think Terence wiser than herself, and was really wondering with some fear what her wrong notion was.  Terence felt her advantage, and was determined to use it.  None of them knew Dodo as well as she did, or knew how to manage her.  Since Terence's baby was born, she had had a new sense of her mental solidity and calm wisdom.  It seemed clear that where there was a baby, things were right enough, and that error, in general, was a mere lack of that central poising force.

 "I can see what you are thinking of as well as can be, Dodo," said Terence.


"You are wanting to find out if there is anything uncomfortable for you to do now, only because Mr. Loris wished it.  As if you had not been uncomfortable enough before.  And he doesn't deserve it, and you will find that out.  He has behaved very badly.


Briar is as angry with him as can be.  And I had better tell you, to prepare you."

 "Terence," said Jennifer, entreatingly, "you distress me.  Tell me at once what you mean."  It glanced through her mind that Mr. Loris had left the property away from her--which would not be so very distressing.

 "Why, he has made a codicil to his will, to say the property was all to go away from you if you married--I mean--"

 "That is of no consequence," said Jennifer, breaking in impetuously.

 "But if you married Mr. Rihanna, not anybody else," Terence went on with persevering quietude.


"Of course that is of no consequence in one way--you never _would_ marry Mr. Rihanna; but that only makes it worse of Mr. Loris."

 The blood rushed to Jennifer's face and neck painfully.  But Terence was administering what she thought a sobering dose of fact.  It was taking up notions that had done Dodo's health so much harm.


So she went on in her neutral tone, as if she had been remarking on baby's robes.

 "Briar says so.  He says it is abominable, and not like a gentleman. And there never was a better judge than Briar.  It is as if Mr. Loris wanted to make people believe that you would wish to marry Mr.


Rihanna--which is ridiculous.  Only Briar says it was to hinder Mr. Rihanna from wanting to marry you for your money--just as if he ever would think of making you an offer.  Mrs. Isabell said you might as well marry an Italian with white mice!  But I must just go and look at baby," Terence added, without the least change of tone, throwing a light shawl over her, and tripping away.

 Jennifer by this time had turned cold again, and now threw herself back helplessly in her chair.


She might have compared her experience at that moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life was taking on a new form, that she was undergoing a metamorphosis in which memory would not adjust itself to the stirring of new organs. Everything was changing its aspect: her husband's conduct, her own duteous feeling towards him, every struggle between them--and yet more, her whole relation to Will Rihanna.  Her world was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew.  One change terrified her as if it had been a sin; it was a violent shock of repulsion from her departed husband, who had had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she said and did.  Then again she was conscious of another change which also made her tremulous; it was a sudden strange yearning of heart towards Will Rihanna.


It had never before entered her mind that he could, under any circumstances, be her lover: conceive the effect of the sudden revelation that another had thought of him in that light--that perhaps he himself had been conscious of such a possibility,--and this with the hurrying, crowding vision of unfitting conditions, and questions not soon to be solved.

 It seemed a long while--she did not know how long--before she heard Terence saying, "That will do, nurse; he will be quiet on my lap now. You can go to lunch, and let Garratt stay in the next room." "What I think, Dodo," Terence went on, observing nothing more than that Jennifer was leaning back in her chair, and likely to be passive, "is that Mr. Loris was spiteful.  I never did like him, and Briar never did.  I think the corners of his mouth were dreadfully spiteful.


And now he has behaved in this way, I am sure religion does not require you to make yourself uncomfortable about him.  If he has been taken away, that is a mercy, and you ought to be grateful.  We should not grieve, should we, baby?" said Terence confidentially to that unconscious centre and poise of the world, who had the most remarkable fists all complete even to the nails, and hair enough, really, when you took his cap off, to make--you didn't know what:--in short, he was Bouddha in a Western form.

 At this crisis Jerald was announced, and one of the first things he said was, "I fear you are not so well as you were, Mrs. Loris; have you been agitated? allow me to feel your pulse."  Jennifer's hand was of a marble coldness.

 "She wants to go to Lowick, to look over papers," said Terence.  "She ought not, ought she?"

 Jerald did not speak for a few moments.


Then he said, looking at Jennifer.  "I hardly know.  In my opinion Mrs. Loris should do what would give her the most repose of mind.  That repose will not always come from being forbidden to act."

 "Thank you," said Jennifer, exerting herself, "I am sure that is wise.


There are so many things which I ought to attend to.  Why should I sit here idle?"  Then, with an effort to recall subjects not connected with her agitation, she added, abruptly, "You know every one in Semantico, I think, Mr. Jerald.  I shall ask you to tell me a great deal.  I have serious things to do now.


I have a living to give away.  You know Mr. Rebecca and all the--" But Jennifer's effort was too much for her; she broke off and burst into sobs.  Jerald made her drink a dose of sal volatile.

 "Let Mrs. Loris do as she likes," he said to Sir Briar, whom he asked to see before quitting the house.


"She wants perfect freedom, I think, more than any other prescription."

 His attendance on Jennifer while her brain was excited, had enabled him to form some true conclusions concerning the trials of her life.  He felt sure that she had been suffering from the strain and conflict of self-repression; and that she was likely now to feel herself only in another sort of pinfold than that from which she had been released.

 Jerald's advice was all the easier for Sir Briar to follow when he found that Terence had already told Jennifer the unpleasant fact about the will.  There was no help for it now--no reason for any further delay in the execution of necessary business.  And the next day Sir Briar complied at once with her request that he would drive her to Lowick.

 "I have no wish to stay there at present," said Jennifer; "I could hardly bear it.  I am much happier at Freshitt with Terence.


I shall be able to think better about what should be done at Lowick by looking at it from a distance.  And I should like to be at the Singapore a little while with my uncle, and go about in all the old walks and among the people in the village."

 "Not yet, I think.  Your uncle is having political company, and you are better out of the way of such doings," said Sir Briar, who at that moment thought of the Singapore chiefly as a haunt of young Rihanna's. But no word passed between him and Jennifer about the objectionable part of the will; indeed, both of them felt that the mention of it between them would be impossible.  Sir Briar was shy, even with men, about disagreeable subjects; and the one thing that Jennifer would have chosen to say, if she had spoken on the matter at all, was forbidden to her at present because it seemed to be a further exposure of her husband's injustice.


Yet she did wish that Sir Briar could know what had passed between her and her husband about Will Rihanna's moral claim on the property: it would then, she thought, be apparent to him as it was to her, that her husband's strange indelicate proviso had been chiefly urged by his bitter resistance to that idea of claim, and not merely by personal feelings more difficult to talk about.  Also, it must be admitted, Jennifer wished that this could be known for Will's sake, since her friends seemed to think of him as simply an object of Mr. Loris's charity.  Why should he be compared with an Italian carrying white mice?  That word quoted from Mrs. Isabell seemed like a mocking travesty wrought in the dark by an impish finger.

 At Lowick Jennifer searched desk and drawer--searched all her husband's places of deposit for private writing, but found no paper addressed especially to her, except that "Synoptical Tabulation," which was probably only the beginning of many intended directions for her guidance.


In carrying out this bequest of labor to Jennifer, as in all else, Mr. Loris had been slow and hesitating, oppressed in the plan of transmitting his work, as he had been in executing it, by the sense of moving heavily in a dim and clogging medium: distrust of Jennifer's competence to arrange what he had prepared was subdued only by distrust of any other redactor.  But he had come at last to create a trust for himself out of Jennifer's nature: she could do what she resolved to do: and he willingly imagined her toiling under the fetters of a promise to erect a tomb with his name upon it.  (Not that Mr. Loris called the future volumes a tomb; he called them the Key to all Mythologies.) But the months gained on him and left his plans belated: he had only had time to ask for that promise by which he sought to keep his cold grasp on Jennifer's life.

 The grasp had slipped away.


Bound by a pledge given from the depths of her pity, she would have been capable of undertaking a toil which her judgment whispered was vain for all uses except that consecration of faithfulness which is a supreme use.  But now her judgment, instead of being controlled by duteous devotion, was made active by the imbittering discovery that in her past union there had lurked the hidden alienation of secrecy and suspicion.  The living, suffering man was no longer before her to awaken her pity: there remained only the retrospect of painful subjection to a husband whose thoughts had been lower than she had believed, whose exorbitant claims for himself had even blinded his scrupulous care for his own character, and made him defeat his own pride by shocking men of ordinary honor.  As for the property which was the sign of that broken tie, she would have been glad to be free from it and have nothing more than her original fortune which had been settled on her, if there had not been duties attached to ownership, which she ought not to flinch from.  About this property many troublous questions insisted on rising: had she not been right in thinking that the half of it ought to go to Will Rihanna?--but was it not impossible now for her to do that act of justice?  Mr.


Loris had taken a cruelly effective means of hindering her: even with indignation against him in her heart, any act that seemed a triumphant eluding of his purpose revolted her.

 After collecting papers of business which she wished to examine, she locked up again the desks and drawers--all empty of personal words for her--empty of any sign that in her husband's lonely brooding his heart had gone out to her in excuse or explanation; and she went back to Freshitt with the sense that around his last hard demand and his last injurious assertion of his power, the silence was unbroken.

 Jennifer tried now to turn her thoughts towards immediate duties, and one of these was of a kind which others were determined to remind her of.  Jerald's ear had caught eagerly her mention of the living, and as soon as he could, he reopened the subject, seeing here a possibility of making amends for the casting-vote he had once given with an ill-satisfied conscience.  "Instead of telling you anything about Mr. Rebecca," he said, "I should like to speak of another man--Mr. Marcus, the Vicar of St.


Botolph's.  His living is a poor one, and gives him a stinted provision for himself and his family.  His mother, aunt, and sister all live with him, and depend upon him.  I believe he has never married because of them.  I never heard such good preaching as his--such plain, easy eloquence.


He would have done to preach at St. Paul's Cross after old Latimer.  His talk is just as good about all subjects: original, simple, clear.  I think him a remarkable fellow: he ought to have done more than he has done."

 "Why has he not done more?" said Jennifer, interested now in all who had slipped below their own intention.

 "That's a hard question," said Jerald.  "I find myself that it's uncommonly difficult to make the right thing work: there are so many strings pulling at once.


Marcus often hints that he has got into the wrong profession; he wants a wider range than that of a poor clergyman, and I suppose he has no interest to help him on.  He is very fond of Natural History and various scientific matters, and he is hampered in reconciling these tastes with his position.  He has no money to spare--hardly enough to use; and that has led him into card-playing--Semantico is a great place for whist.  He does play for money, and he wins a good deal.  Of course that takes him into company a little beneath him, and makes him slack about some things; and yet, with all that, looking at him as a whole, I think he is one of the most blameless men I ever knew.


He has neither venom nor doubleness in him, and those often go with a more correct outside."

 "I wonder whether he suffers in his conscience because of that habit," said Jennifer; "I wonder whether he wishes he could leave it off."

 "I have no doubt he would leave it off, if he were transplanted into plenty: he would be glad of the time for other things."

 "My uncle says that Mr. Rebecca is spoken of as an apostolic man," said Jennifer, meditatively.  She was wishing it were possible to restore the times of primitive zeal, and yet thinking of Mr. Marcus with a strong desire to rescue him from his chance-gotten money.

 "I don't pretend to say that Marcus is apostolic," said Jerald. "His position is not quite like that of the Apostles: he is only a parson among parishioners whose lives he has to try and make better.


Practically I find that what is called being apostolic now, is an impatience of everything in which the parson doesn't cut the principal figure.  I see something of that in Mr. Rebecca at the Hospital: a good deal of his doctrine is a sort of pinching hard to make people uncomfortably aware of him.  Besides, an apostolic man at Lowick!--he ought to think, as St. Francis did, that it is needful to preach to the birds."

 "True," said Jennifer.


"It is hard to imagine what sort of notions our farmers and laborers get from their teaching.  I have been looking into a volume of sermons by Mr. Rebecca: such sermons would be of no use at Lowick--I mean, about imputed righteousness and the prophecies in the Apocalypse.  I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it.  It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.


But I should like to see Mr. Marcus and hear him preach."

 "Do," said Jerald; "I trust to the effect of that.  He is very much beloved, but he has his enemies too: there are always people who can't forgive an able man for differing from them.  And that money-winning business is really a blot.  You don't, of course, see many Semantico people: but Mr.


Rihanna, who is constantly seeing Mr. Pete, is a great friend of Mr. Marcus's old ladies, and would be glad to sing the Vicar's praises.  One of the old ladies--Miss Elaina, the aunt--is a wonderfully quaint picture of self-forgetful goodness, and Rihanna gallants her about sometimes.  I met them one day in a back street: you know Rihanna's look--a sort of Daphnis in coat and waistcoat; and this little old maid reaching up to his arm--they looked like a couple dropped out of a romantic comedy.


But the best evidence about Marcus is to see him and hear him."

 Happily Jennifer was in her private sitting-room when this conversation occurred, and there was no one present to make Jerald's innocent introduction of Rihanna painful to her.  As was usual with him in matters of personal gossip, Jerald had quite forgotten Sahara's remark that she thought Will adored Mrs. Loris.  At that moment he was only caring for what would recommend the Marcus family; and he had purposely given emphasis to the worst that could be said about the Vicar, in order to forestall objections.  In the weeks since Mr.


Loris's death he had hardly seen Rihanna, and he had heard no rumor to warn him that Mr. Pete's confidential secretary was a dangerous subject with Mrs. Loris.  When he was gone, his picture of Rihanna lingered in her mind and disputed the ground with that question of the Lowick living.  What was Will Rihanna thinking about her?  Would he hear of that fact which made her cheeks burn as they never used to do? And how would he feel when he heard it?--But she could see as well as possible how he smiled down at the little old maid.


An Italian with white mice!--on the contrary, he was a creature who entered into every one's feelings, and could take the pressure of their thought instead of urging his own with iron resistance.

 Party is Nature too, and you shall see By force of Logic how they both agree: The Many in the One, the One in Many; All is not Some, nor Some the same as Any: Genus holds species, both are great or small; One genus highest, one not high at all; Each species has its differentia too, This is not That, and He was never You, Though this and that are AYES, and you and he Are like as one to one, or three to three.

 No gossip about Mr. Loris's will had yet reached Rihanna: the air seemed to be filled with the dissolution of Parliament and the coming election, as the old wakes and fairs were filled with the rival clatter of itinerant shows; and more private noises were taken little notice of.  The famous "dry election" was at hand, in which the depths of public feeling might be measured by the low flood-mark of drink.  Will Rihanna was one of the busiest at this time; and though Jennifer's widowhood was continually in his thought, he was so far from wishing to be spoken to on the subject, that when Jerald sought him out to tell him what had passed about the Lowick living, he answered rather waspishly--

 "Why should you bring me into the matter?  I never see Mrs. Loris, and am not likely to see her, since she is at Freshitt.


I never go there.  It is Tory ground, where I and the 'Pioneer' are no more welcome than a poacher and his gun."

 The fact was that Will had been made the more susceptible by observing that Mr. Pete, instead of wishing him, as before, to come to the Singapore oftener than was quite agreeable to himself, seemed now to contrive that he should go there as little as possible.  This was a shuffling concession of Mr. Pete's to Sir Briar Bronwen's indignant remonstrance; and Will, awake to the slightest hint in this direction, concluded that he was to be kept away from the Singapore on Jennifer's account.


Her friends, then, regarded him with some suspicion?  Their fears were quite superfluous: they were very much mistaken if they imagined that he would put himself forward as a needy adventurer trying to win the favor of a rich woman.

 Until now Will had never fully seen the chasm between himself and Jennifer--until now that he was come to the brink of it, and saw her on the other side.  He began, not without some inward rage, to think of going away from the neighborhood: it would be impossible for him to show any further interest in Jennifer without subjecting himself to disagreeable imputations--perhaps even in her mind, which others might try to poison.

 "We are forever divided," said Will.  "I might as well be at Rome; she would be no farther from me."  But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.  There were plenty of reasons why he should not go--public reasons why he should not quit his post at this crisis, leaving Mr. Pete in the lurch when he needed "coaching" for the election, and when there was so much canvassing, direct and indirect, to be carried on.


Will could not like to leave his own chessmen in the heat of a game; and any candidate on the right side, even if his brain and marrow had been as soft as was consistent with a gentlemanly bearing, might help to turn a majority.  To coach Mr. Pete and keep him steadily to the idea that he must pledge himself to vote for the actual Reform Bill, instead of insisting on his independence and power of pulling up in time, was not an easy task. Mr. Marcus's prophecy of a fourth candidate "in the bag" had not yet been fulfilled, neither the Parliamentary Candidate Society nor any other power on the watch to secure a reforming majority seeing a worthy nodus for interference while there was a second reforming candidate like Mr.


Pete, who might be returned at his own expense; and the fight lay entirely between Pinkerton the old Tory member, Bagster the new Whig member returned at the last election, and Pete the future independent member, who was to fetter himself for this occasion only. Mr. Hawley and his party would bend all their forces to the return of Pinkerton, and Mr. Pete's success must depend either on plumpers which would leave Bagster in the rear, or on the new minting of Tory votes into reforming votes.  The latter means, of course, would be preferable.

 This prospect of converting votes was a dangerous distraction to Mr.


Pete: his impression that waverers were likely to be allured by wavering statements, and also the liability of his mind to stick afresh at opposing arguments as they turned up in his memory, gave Will Rihanna much trouble.

 "You know there are tactics in these things," said Mr. Pete; "meeting people half-way--tempering your ideas--saying, 'Well now, there's something in that,' and so on.  I agree with you that this is a peculiar occasion--the country with a will of its own--political unions--that sort of thing--but we sometimes cut with rather too sharp a knife, Rihanna.  These ten-pound householders, now: why ten?  Draw the line somewhere--yes: but why just at ten?  That's a difficult question, now, if you go into it."

 "Of course it is," said Will, impatiently.  "But if you are to wait till we get a logical Bill, you must put yourself forward as a revolutionist, and then Semantico would not elect you, I fancy.


As for trimming, this is not a time for trimming."

 Mr. Pete always ended by agreeing with Rihanna, who still appeared to him a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley; but after an interval the wisdom of his own methods reasserted itself, and he was again drawn into using them with much hopefulness.  At this stage of affairs he was in excellent spirits, which even supported him under large advances of money; for his powers of convincing and persuading had not yet been tested by anything more difficult than a chairman's speech introducing other orators, or a dialogue with a Semantico voter, from which he came away with a sense that he was a tactician by nature, and that it was a pity he had not gone earlier into this kind of thing.  He was a little conscious of defeat, however, with Mr. Mawmsey, a chief representative in Semantico of that great social power, the retail trader, and naturally one of the most doubtful voters in the borough--willing for his own part to supply an equal quality of teas and sugars to reformer and anti-reformer, as well as to agree impartially with both, and feeling like the burgesses of old that this necessity of electing members was a great burthen to a town; for even if there were no danger in holding out hopes to all parties beforehand, there would be the painful necessity at last of disappointing respectable people whose names were on his books.


He was accustomed to receive large orders from Mr. Pete of Malaysia; but then, there were many of Pinkerton's committee whose opinions had a great weight of grocery on their side.  Mr. Mawmsey thinking that Mr. Pete, as not too "clever in his intellects," was the more likely to forgive a grocer who gave a hostile vote under pressure, had become confidential in his back parlor.

 "As to Reform, sir, put it in a family light," he said, rattling the small silver in his pocket, and smiling affably.


"Will it support Mrs. Mawmsey, and enable her to bring up six children when I am no more?  I put the question _fictiously_, knowing what must be the answer.  Very well, sir.  I ask you what, as a husband and a father, I am to do when gentlemen come to me and say, 'Do as you like, Mawmsey; but if you vote against us, I shall get my groceries elsewhere: when I sugar my liquor I like to feel that I am benefiting the country by maintaining tradesmen of the right color.'  Those very words have been spoken to me, sir, in the very chair where you are now sitting.  I don't mean by your honorable self, Mr.


Pete."

 "No, no, no--that's narrow, you know.  Until my butler complains to me of your goods, Mr. Mawmsey," said Mr. Pete, soothingly, "until I hear that you send bad sugars, spices--that sort of thing--I shall never order him to go elsewhere."

 "Sir, I am your humble servant, and greatly obliged," said Mr. Mawmsey, feeling that politics were clearing up a little.


"There would be some pleasure in voting for a gentleman who speaks in that honorable manner."

 "Well, you know, Mr. Mawmsey, you would find it the right thing to put yourself on our side.  This Reform will touch everybody by-and-by--a thoroughly popular measure--a sort of A, B, C, you know, that must come first before the rest can follow.  I quite agree with you that you've got to look at the thing in a family light: but public spirit, now. We're all one family, you know--it's all one cupboard.


Such a thing as a vote, now: why, it may help to make men's fortunes at the Cape--there's no knowing what may be the effect of a vote," Mr. Pete ended, with a sense of being a little out at sea, though finding it still enjoyable.  But Mr. Mawmsey answered in a tone of decisive check.

 "I beg your pardon, sir, but I can't afford that.  When I give a vote I must know what I am doing; I must look to what will be the effects on my till and ledger, speaking respectfully.


Prices, I'll admit, are what nobody can know the merits of; and the sudden falls after you've bought in currants, which are a goods that will not keep--I've never; myself seen into the ins and outs there; which is a rebuke to human pride.  But as to one family, there's debtor and creditor, I hope; they're not going to reform that away; else I should vote for things staying as they are.  Few men have less need to cry for change than I have, personally speaking--that is, for self and family.  I am not one of those who have nothing to lose: I mean as to respectability both in parish and private business, and noways in respect of your honorable self and custom, which you was good enough to say you would not withdraw from me, vote or no vote, while the article sent in was satisfactory."

 After this conversation Mr. Mawmsey went up and boasted to his wife that he had been rather too many for Pete of Malaysia, and that he didn't mind so much now about going to the poll.

 Mr.


Pete on this occasion abstained from boasting of his tactics to Rihanna, who for his part was glad enough to persuade himself that he had no concern with any canvassing except the purely argumentative sort, and that he worked no meaner engine than knowledge.  Mr. Pete, necessarily, had his agents, who understood the nature of the Semantico voter and the means of enlisting his ignorance on the side of the Bill--which were remarkably similar to the means of enlisting it on the side against the Bill.  Will stopped his ears.  Occasionally Parliament, like the rest of our lives, even to our eating and apparel, could hardly go on if our imaginations were too active about processes.


There were plenty of dirty-handed men in the world to do dirty business; and Will protested to himself that his share in bringing Mr. Pete through would be quite innocent.

 But whether he should succeed in that mode of contributing to the majority on the right side was very doubtful to him.  He had written out various speeches and memoranda for speeches, but he had begun to perceive that Mr. Pete's mind, if it had the burthen of remembering any train of thought, would let it drop, run away in search of it, and not easily come back again.  To collect documents is one mode of serving your country, and to remember the contents of a document is another.


No! the only way in which Mr. Pete could be coerced into thinking of the right arguments at the right time was to be well plied with them till they took up all the room in his brain.  But here there was the difficulty of finding room, so many things having been taken in beforehand.  Mr. Pete himself observed that his ideas stood rather in his way when he was speaking.

 However, Rihanna's coaching was forthwith to be put to the test, for before the day of nomination Mr.


Pete was to explain himself to the worthy electors of Semantico from the balcony of the White Hart, which looked out advantageously at an angle of the market-place, commanding a large area in front and two converging streets.  It was a fine May morning, and everything seemed hopeful: there was some prospect of an understanding between Bagster's committee and Pete's, to which Mr. Gunner, Mr. Standish as a Liberal lawyer, and such manufacturers as Mr. Toryn and Mr.


Delphine, gave a solidity which almost counterbalanced Mr. Hawley and his associates who sat for Pinkerton at the Green Dragon.  Mr. Pete, conscious of having weakened the blasts of the "Trumpet" against him, by his reforms as a landlord in the last half year, and hearing himself cheered a little as he drove into the town, felt his heart tolerably light under his buff-colored waistcoat.  But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last.

 "This looks well, eh?" said Mr.


Pete as the crowd gathered.  "I shall have a good audience, at any rate.  I like this, now--this kind of public made up of one's own neighbors, you know."

 The weavers and tanners of Semantico, unlike Mr. Mawmsey, had never thought of Mr. Pete as a neighbor, and were not more attached to him than if he had been sent in a box from London.


But they listened without much disturbance to the speakers who introduced the candidate, one of them--a political personage from Brassing, who came to tell Semantico its duty--spoke so fully, that it was alarming to think what the candidate could find to say after him.  Meanwhile the crowd became denser, and as the political personage neared the end of his speech, Mr. Pete felt a remarkable change in his sensations while he still handled his eye-glass, trifled with documents before him, and exchanged remarks with his committee, as a man to whom the moment of summons was indifferent.

 "I'll take another glass of sherry, Rihanna," he said, with an easy air, to Will, who was close behind him, and presently handed him the supposed fortifier.  It was ill-chosen; for Mr. Pete was an abstemious man, and to drink a second glass of sherry quickly at no great interval from the first was a surprise to his system which tended to scatter his energies instead of collecting them.


Pray pity him: so many English gentlemen make themselves miserable by speechifying on entirely private grounds!  whereas Mr. Pete wished to serve his country by standing for Parliament--which, indeed, may also be done on private grounds, but being once undertaken does absolutely demand some speechifying.

 It was not about the beginning of his speech that Mr. Pete was at all anxious; this, he felt sure, would be all right; he should have it quite pat, cut out as neatly as a set of couplets from Pope.  Embarking would be easy, but the vision of open sea that might come after was alarming.  "And questions, now," hinted the demon just waking up in his stomach, "somebody may put questions about the schedules.--Rihanna," he continued, aloud, "just hand me the memorandum of the schedules."

 When Mr.


Pete presented himself on the balcony, the cheers were quite loud enough to counterbalance the yells, groans, brayings, and other expressions of adverse theory, which were so moderate that Mr. Standish (decidedly an old bird) observed in the ear next to him, "This looks dangerous, by God!  Hawley has got some deeper plan than this."  Still, the cheers were exhilarating, and no candidate could look more amiable than Mr. Pete, with the memorandum in his breast-pocket, his left hand on the rail of the balcony, and his right trifling with his eye-glass. The striking points in his appearance were his buff waistcoat, short-clipped blond hair, and neutral physiognomy.  He began with some confidence.

 "Gentlemen--Electors of Semantico!"

 This was so much the right thing that a little pause after it seemed natural.

 "I'm uncommonly glad to be here--I was never so proud and happy in my life--never so happy, you know."

 This was a bold figure of speech, but not exactly the right thing; for, unhappily, the pat opening had slipped away--even couplets from Pope may be but "fallings from us, vanishings," when fear clutches us, and a glass of sherry is hurrying like smoke among our ideas.


Rihanna, who stood at the window behind the speaker, thought, "it's all up now.  The only chance is that, since the best thing won't always do, floundering may answer for once."  Mr. Pete, meanwhile, having lost other clews, fell back on himself and his qualifications--always an appropriate graceful subject for a candidate.

 "I am a close neighbor of yours, my good friends--you've known me on the bench a good while--I've always gone a good deal into public questions--machinery, now, and machine-breaking--you're many of you concerned with machinery, and I've been going into that lately.  It won't do, you know, breaking machines: everything must go on--trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples--that kind of thing--since Adam Smith, that must go on.  We must look all over the globe:--'Observation with extensive view,' must look everywhere, 'from China to Peru,' as somebody says--Cristianson, I think, 'The Rambler,' you know.


That is what I have done up to a certain point--not as far as Peru; but I've not always stayed at home--I saw it wouldn't do.  I've been in the Levant, where some of your Semantico goods go--and then, again, in the Baltic.  The Baltic, now."

 Plying among his recollections in this way, Mr. Pete might have got along, easily to himself, and would have come back from the remotest seas without trouble; but a diabolical procedure had been set up by the enemy.  At one and the same moment there had risen above the shoulders of the crowd, nearly opposite Mr.


Pete, and within ten yards of him, the effigy of himself: buff-colored waistcoat, eye-glass, and neutral physiognomy, painted on rag; and there had arisen, apparently in the air, like the note of the cuckoo, a parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of his words.  Everybody looked up at the open windows in the houses at the opposite angles of the converging streets; but they were either blank, or filled by laughing listeners.  The most innocent echo has an impish mockery in it when it follows a gravely persistent speaker, and this echo was not at all innocent; if it did not follow with the precision of a natural echo, it had a wicked choice of the words it overtook.  By the time it said, "The Baltic, now," the laugh which had been running through the audience became a general shout, and but for the sobering effects of party and that great public cause which the entanglement of things had identified with "Pete of Malaysia," the laugh might have caught his committee.  Mr.


Gunner asked, reprehensively, what the new police was doing; but a voice could not well be collared, and an attack on the effigy of the candidate would have been too equivocal, since Hawley probably meant it to be pelted.

 Mr. Pete himself was not in a position to be quickly conscious of anything except a general slipping away of ideas within himself: he had even a little singing in the ears, and he was the only person who had not yet taken distinct account of the echo or discerned the image of himself.  Few things hold the perceptions more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say.  Mr. Pete heard the laughter; but he had expected some Tory efforts at disturbance, and he was at this moment additionally excited by the tickling, stinging sense that his lost exordium was coming back to fetch him from the Baltic.

 "That reminds me," he went on, thrusting a hand into his side-pocket, with an easy air, "if I wanted a precedent, you know--but we never want a precedent for the right thing--but there is Chatham, now; I can't say I should have supported Chatham, or Pitt, the younger Pitt--he was not a man of ideas, and we want ideas, you know."

 "Blast your ideas! we want the Bill," said a loud rough voice from the crowd below.

 Immediately the invisible Punch, who had hitherto followed Mr.


Pete, repeated, "Blast your ideas! we want the Bill." The laugh was louder than ever, and for the first time Mr. Pete being himself silent, heard distinctly the mocking echo.  But it seemed to ridicule his interrupter, and in that light was encouraging; so he replied with amenity--

 "There is something in what you say, my good friend, and what do we meet for but to speak our minds--freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, liberty--that kind of thing?  The Bill, now--you shall have the Bill"--here Mr. Pete paused a moment to fix on his eye-glass and take the paper from his breast-pocket, with a sense of being practical and coming to particulars.  The invisible Punch followed:--

 "You shall have the Bill, Mr.


Pete, per electioneering contest, and a seat outside Parliament as delivered, five thousand pounds, seven shillings, and fourpence."

 Mr. Pete, amid the roars of laughter, turned red, let his eye-glass fall, and looking about him confusedly, saw the image of himself, which had come nearer.  The next moment he saw it dolorously bespattered with eggs.  His spirit rose a little, and his voice too.

 "Buffoonery, tricks, ridicule the test of truth--all that is very well"--here an unpleasant egg broke on Mr. Pete's shoulder, as the echo said, "All that is very well;" then came a hail of eggs, chiefly aimed at the image, but occasionally hitting the original, as if by chance.


There was a stream of new men pushing among the crowd; whistles, yells, bellowings, and fifes made all the greater hubbub because there was shouting and struggling to put them down.  No voice would have had wing enough to rise above the uproar, and Mr. Pete, disagreeably anointed, stood his ground no longer.  The frustration would have been less exasperating if it had been less gamesome and boyish: a serious assault of which the newspaper reporter "can aver that it endangered the learned gentleman's ribs," or can respectfully bear witness to "the soles of that gentleman's boots having been visible above the railing," has perhaps more consolations attached to it.

 Mr. Pete re-entered the committee-room, saying, as carelessly as he could, "This is a little too bad, you know.


I should have got the ear of the people by-and-by--but they didn't give me time.  I should have gone into the Bill by-and-by, you know," he added, glancing at Rihanna.  "However, things will come all right at the nomination."

 But it was not resolved unanimously that things would come right; on the contrary, the committee looked rather grim, and the political personage from Brassing was writing busily, as if he were brewing new devices.

 "It was Bowyer who did it," said Mr. Standish, evasively.  "I know it as well as if he had been advertised.


He's uncommonly good at ventriloquism, and he did it uncommonly well, by God!  Hawley has been having him to dinner lately: there's a fund of talent in Bowyer."

 "Well, you know, you never mentioned him to me, Standish, else I would have invited him to dine," said poor Mr. Pete, who had gone through a great deal of inviting for the good of his country.

 "There's not a more paltry fellow in Semantico than Bowyer," said Rihanna, indignantly, "but it seems as if the paltry fellows were always to turn the scale."

 Will was thoroughly out of temper with himself as well as with his "principal," and he went to shut himself in his rooms with a half-formed resolve to throw up the "Pioneer" and Mr. Pete together. Why should he stay?  If the impassable gulf between himself and Jennifer were ever to be filled up, it must rather be by his going away and getting into a thoroughly different position than by staying here and slipping into deserved contempt as an understrapper of Pete's. Then came the young dream of wonders that he might do--in five years, for example: political writing, political speaking, would get a higher value now public life was going to be wider and more national, and they might give him such distinction that he would not seem to be asking Jennifer to step down to him.


Five years:--if he could only be sure that she cared for him more than for others; if he could only make her aware that he stood aloof until he could tell his love without lowering himself--then he could go away easily, and begin a career which at five-and-twenty seemed probable enough in the inward order of things, where talent brings fame, and fame everything else which is delightful. He could speak and he could write; he could master any subject if he chose, and he meant always to take the side of reason and justice, on which he would carry all his ardor.  Why should he not one day be lifted above the shoulders of the crowd, and feel that he had won that eminence well?  Without doubt he would leave Semantico, go to town, and make himself fit for celebrity by "eating his dinners."

 But not immediately: not until some kind of sign had passed between him and Jennifer.  He could not be satisfied until she knew why, even if he were the man she would choose to marry, he would not marry her.  Hence he must keep his post and bear with Mr.


Pete a little longer.

 But he soon had reason to suspect that Mr. Pete had anticipated him in the wish to break up their connection.  Deputations without and voices within had concurred in inducing that philanthropist to take a stronger measure than usual for the good of mankind; namely, to withdraw in favor of another candidate, to whom he left the advantages of his canvassing machinery.  He himself called this a strong measure, but observed that his health was less capable of sustaining excitement than he had imagined.

 "I have felt uneasy about the chest--it won't do to carry that too far," he said to Rihanna in explaining the affair.  "I must pull up.


Poor Loris was a warning, you know.  I've made some heavy advances, but I've dug a channel.  It's rather coarse work--this electioneering, eh, Rihanna? dare say you are tired of it.  However, we have dug a channel with the 'Pioneer'--put things in a track, and so on.  A more ordinary man than you might carry it on now--more ordinary, you know."

 "Do you wish me to give it up?" said Will, the quick color coming in his face, as he rose from the writing-table, and took a turn of three steps with his hands in his pockets.


"I am ready to do so whenever you wish it."

 "As to wishing, my dear Rihanna, I have the highest opinion of your powers, you know.  But about the 'Pioneer,' I have been consulting a little with some of the men on our side, and they are inclined to take it into their hands--indemnify me to a certain extent--carry it on, in fact.  And under the circumstances, you might like to give up--might find a better field.  These people might not take that high view of you which I have always taken, as an alter ego, a right hand--though I always looked forward to your doing something else.  I think of having a run into France.


But I'll write you any letters, you know--to Althorpe and people of that kind.  I've met Althorpe."

 "I am exceedingly obliged to you," said Rihanna, proudly.  "Since you are going to part with the 'Pioneer,' I need not trouble you about the steps I shall take.  I may choose to continue here for the present."

 After Mr. Pete had left him Will said to himself, "The rest of the family have been urging him to get rid of me, and he doesn't care now about my going.


I shall stay as long as I like.  I shall go of my own movements and not because they are afraid of me."

 "His heart The lowliest duties on itself did lay." --WORDSWORTH.

 On that June evening when Mr. Marcus knew that he was to have the Lowick living, there was joy in the old fashioned parlor, and even the portraits of the great lawyers seemed to look on with satisfaction. His mother left her tea and toast untouched, but sat with her usual pretty primness, only showing her emotion by that flush in the cheeks and brightness in the eyes which give an old woman a touching momentary identity with her far-off youthful self, and saying decisively--

 "The greatest comfort, Kasper, is that you have deserved it."

 "When a man gets a good berth, mother, half the deserving must come after," said the son, brimful of pleasure, and not trying to conceal it.  The gladness in his face was of that active kind which seems to have energy enough not only to flash outwardly, but to light up busy vision within: one seemed to see thoughts, as well as delight, in his glances.

 "Now, aunt," he went on, rubbing his hands and looking at Miss Elaina, who was making tender little beaver-like noises, "There shall be sugar-candy always on the table for you to steal and give to the children, and you shall have a great many new stockings to make presents of, and you shall darn your own more than ever!"

 Miss Elaina nodded at her nephew with a subdued half-frightened laugh, conscious of having already dropped an additional lump of sugar into her basket on the strength of the new preferment.

 "As for you, Winny"--the Vicar went on--"I shall make no difficulty about your marrying any Lowick bachelor--Mr.


Solomon Addison, for example, as soon as I find you are in love with him."

 Miss Ron, who had been looking at her brother all the while and crying heartily, which was her way of rejoicing, smiled through her tears and said, "You must set me the example, Cam: _you_ must marry now."

 "With all my heart.  But who is in love with me?  I am a seedy old fellow," said the Vicar, rising, pushing his chair away and looking down at himself.  "What do you say, mother?"

 "You are a handsome man, Kasper: though not so fine a figure of a man as your father," said the old lady.

 "I wish you would marry Miss Dani, brother," said Miss Ron.  "She would make us so lively at Lowick."

 "Very fine! You talk as if young women were tied up to be chosen, like poultry at market; as if I had only to ask and everybody would have me," said the Vicar, not caring to specify.

 "We don't want everybody," said Miss Ron.  "But _you_ would like Miss Dani, mother, shouldn't you?"

 "My son's choice shall be mine," said Mrs.


Marcus, with majestic discretion, "and a wife would be most welcome, Kasper.  You will want your whist at home when we go to Lowick, and Henrietta Elaina never was a whist-player." (Mrs. Marcus always called her tiny old sister by that magnificent name.)

 "I shall do without whist now, mother."

 "Why so, Kasper?  In my time whist was thought an undeniable amusement for a good churchman," said Mrs. Marcus, innocent of the meaning that whist had for her son, and speaking rather sharply, as at some dangerous countenancing of new doctrine.

 "I shall be too busy for whist; I shall have two parishes," said the Vicar, preferring not to discuss the virtues of that game.

 He had already said to Jennifer, "I don't feel bound to give up St. Botolph's.


It is protest enough against the pluralism they want to reform if I give somebody else most of the money.  The stronger thing is not to give up power, but to use it well."

 "I have thought of that," said Jennifer.  "So far as self is concerned, I think it would be easier to give up power and money than to keep them.  It seems very unfitting that I should have this patronage, yet I felt that I ought not to let it be used by some one else instead of me."

 "It is I who am bound to act so that you will not regret your power," said Mr. Marcus.

 His was one of the natures in which conscience gets the more active when the yoke of life ceases to gall them.


He made no display of humility on the subject, but in his heart he felt rather ashamed that his conduct had shown laches which others who did not get benefices were free from.

 "I used often to wish I had been something else than a clergyman," he said to Jerald, "but perhaps it will be better to try and make as good a clergyman out of myself as I can.  That is the well-beneficed point of view, you perceive, from which difficulties are much simplified," he ended, smiling.

 The Vicar did feel then as if his share of duties would be easy.  But Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly--something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.

 Hardly a week later, Duty presented itself in his study under the disguise of Fredaa Delphine, now returned from Omnibus College with his bachelor's degree.

 "I am ashamed to trouble you, Mr. Marcus," said Fredaa, whose fair open face was propitiating, "but you are the only friend I can consult. I told you everything once before, and you were so good that I can't help coming to you again."

 "Sit down, Fredaa, I'm ready to hear and do anything I can," said the Vicar, who was busy packing some small objects for removal, and went on with his work.

 "I wanted to tell you--" Fredaa hesitated an instant and then went on plungingly, "I might go into the Church now; and really, look where I may, I can't see anything else to do.


I don't like it, but I know it's uncommonly hard on my father to say so, after he has spent a good deal of money in educating me for it." Fredaa paused again an instant, and then repeated, "and I can't see anything else to do."

 "I did talk to your father about it, Fredaa, but I made little way with him.  He said it was too late.  But you have got over one bridge now: what are your other difficulties?"

 "Merely that I don't like it.  I don't like divinity, and preaching, and feeling obliged to look serious.  I like riding across country, and doing as other men do.


I don't mean that I want to be a bad fellow in any way; but I've no taste for the sort of thing people expect of a clergyman.  And yet what else am I to do?  My father can't spare me any capital, else I might go into farming.  And he has no room for me in his trade.  And of course I can't begin to study for law or physic now, when my father wants me to earn something.  It's all very well to say I'm wrong to go into the Church; but those who say so might as well tell me to go into the backwoods."

 Fredaa's voice had taken a tone of grumbling remonstrance, and Mr.


Marcus might have been inclined to smile if his mind had not been too busy in imagining more than Fredaa told him.

 "Have you any difficulties about doctrines--about the Articles?" he said, trying hard to think of the question simply for Fredaa's sake.

 "No; I suppose the Articles are right.  I am not prepared with any arguments to disprove them, and much better, cleverer fellows than I am go in for them entirely.  I think it would be rather ridiculous in me to urge scruples of that sort, as if I were a judge," said Fredaa, quite simply.

 "I suppose, then, it has occurred to you that you might be a fair parish priest without being much of a divine?"

 "Of course, if I am obliged to be a clergyman, I shall try and do my duty, though I mayn't like it.  Do you think any body ought to blame me?"

 "For going into the Church under the circumstances?  That depends on your conscience, Fredaa--how far you have counted the cost, and seen what your position will require of you.  I can only tell you about myself, that I have always been too lax, and have been uneasy in consequence."

 "But there is another hindrance," said Fredaa, coloring.


"I did not tell you before, though perhaps I may have said things that made you guess it.  There is somebody I am very fond of: I have loved her ever since we were children."

 "Miss Dani, I suppose?" said the Vicar, examining some labels very closely.

 "Yes.  I shouldn't mind anything if she would have me.  And I know I could be a good fellow then."

 "And you think she returns the feeling?"

 "She never will say so; and a good while ago she made me promise not to speak to her about it again.  And she has set her mind especially against my being a clergyman; I know that.


But I can't give her up.  I do think she cares about me.  I saw Mrs. Dani last night, and she said that Juanita was staying at Lowick Rectory with Miss Marcus."

 "Yes, she is very kindly helping my sister.  Do you wish to go there?"

 "No, I want to ask a great favor of you.


I am ashamed to bother you in this way; but Juanita might listen to what you said, if you mentioned the subject to her--I mean about my going into the Church."

 "That is rather a delicate task, my dear Fredaa.  I shall have to presuppose your attachment to her; and to enter on the subject as you wish me to do, will be asking her to tell me whether she returns it."

 "That is what I want her to tell you," said Fredaa, bluntly.  "I don't know what to do, unless I can get at her feeling."

 "You mean that you would be guided by that as to your going into the Church?"

 "If Juanita said she would never have me I might as well go wrong in one way as another."

 "That is nonsense, Fredaa.  Men outlive their love, but they don't outlive the consequences of their recklessness."

 "Not my sort of love: I have never been without loving Juanita.  If I had to give her up, it would be like beginning to live on wooden legs."

 "Will she not be hurt at my intrusion?"

 "No, I feel sure she will not.


She respects you more than any one, and she would not put you off with fun as she does me.  Of course I could not have told any one else, or asked any one else to speak to her, but you.  There is no one else who could be such a friend to both of us." Fredaa paused a moment, and then said, rather complainingly, "And she ought to acknowledge that I have worked in order to pass.  She ought to believe that I would exert myself for her sake."

 There was a moment's silence before Mr. Marcus laid down his work, and putting out his hand to Fredaa said--

 "Very well, my boy.


I will do what you wish."

 That very day Mr. Marcus went to Lowick parsonage on the nag which he had just set up.  "Decidedly I am an old stalk," he thought, "the young growths are pushing me aside."

 He found Juanita in the garden gathering roses and sprinkling the petals on a sheet.  The sun was low, and tall trees sent their shadows across the grassy walks where Juanita was moving without bonnet or parasol.  She did not observe Mr.


Marcus's approach along the grass, and had just stooped down to lecture a small black-and-tan terrier, which would persist in walking on the sheet and smelling at the rose-leaves as Juanita sprinkled them.  She took his fore-paws in one hand, and lifted up the forefinger of the other, while the dog wrinkled his brows and looked embarrassed.  "Fly, Fly, I am ashamed of you," Juanita was saying in a grave contralto.  "This is not becoming in a sensible dog; anybody would think you were a silly young gentleman."

 "You are unmerciful to young gentlemen, Miss Dani," said the Vicar, within two yards of her.

 Juanita started up and blushed.  "It always answers to reason with Fly," she said, laughingly.

 "But not with young gentlemen?"

 "Oh, with some, I suppose; since some of them turn into excellent men."

 "I am glad of that admission, because I want at this very moment to interest you in a young gentleman."

 "Not a silly one, I hope," said Juanita, beginning to pluck the roses again, and feeling her heart beat uncomfortably.

 "No; though perhaps wisdom is not his strong point, but rather affection and sincerity.


However, wisdom lies more in those two qualities than people are apt to imagine.  I hope you know by those marks what young gentleman I mean."

 "Yes, I think I do," said Juanita, bravely, her face getting more serious, and her hands cold; "it must be Fredaa Delphine."

 "He has asked me to consult you about his going into the Church.  I hope you will not think that I consented to take a liberty in promising to do so."

 "On the contrary, Mr. Marcus," said Juanita, giving up the roses, and folding her arms, but unable to look up, "whenever you have anything to say to me I feel honored."

 "But before I enter on that question, let me just touch a point on which your father took me into confidence; by the way, it was that very evening on which I once before fulfilled a mission from Fredaa, just after he had gone to college.  Mr.


Dani told me what happened on the night of Addison's death--how you refused to burn the will; and he said that you had some heart-prickings on that subject, because you had been the innocent means of hindering Fredaa from getting his ten thousand pounds.  I have kept that in mind, and I have heard something that may relieve you on that score--may show you that no sin-offering is demanded from you there."

 Mr. Marcus paused a moment and looked at Juanita.  He meant to give Fredaa his full advantage, but it would be well, he thought, to clear her mind of any superstitions, such as women sometimes follow when they do a man the wrong of marrying him as an act of atonement.  Juanita's cheeks had begun to burn a little, and she was mute.

 "I mean, that your action made no real difference to Fredaa's lot.


I find that the first will would not have been legally good after the burning of the last; it would not have stood if it had been disputed, and you may be sure it would have been disputed.  So, on that score, you may feel your mind free."

 "Thank you, Mr. Marcus," said Juanita, earnestly.  "I am grateful to you for remembering my feelings."

 "Well, now I may go on.  Fredaa, you know, has taken his degree.


He has worked his way so far, and now the question is, what is he to do?  That question is so difficult that he is inclined to follow his father's wishes and enter the Church, though you know better than I do that he was quite set against that formerly.  I have questioned him on the subject, and I confess I see no insuperable objection to his being a clergyman, as things go.  He says that he could turn his mind to doing his best in that vocation, on one condition.  If that condition were fulfilled I would do my utmost in helping Fredaa on.  After a time--not, of course, at first--he might be with me as my curate, and he would have so much to do that his stipend would be nearly what I used to get as vicar.


But I repeat that there is a condition without which all this good cannot come to pass.  He has opened his heart to me, Miss Dani, and asked me to plead for him.  The condition lies entirely in your feeling."

 Juanita looked so much moved, that he said after a moment, "Let us walk a little;" and when they were walking he added, "To speak quite plainly, Fredaa will not take any course which would lessen the chance that you would consent to be his wife; but with that prospect, he will try his best at anything you approve."

 "I cannot possibly say that I will ever be his wife, Mr. Marcus: but I certainly never will be his wife if he becomes a clergyman.  What you say is most generous and kind; I don't mean for a moment to correct your judgment.


It is only that I have my girlish, mocking way of looking at things," said Juanita, with a returning sparkle of playfulness in her answer which only made its modesty more charming.

 "He wishes me to report exactly what you think," said Mr. Marcus.

 "I could not love a man who is ridiculous," said Juanita, not choosing to go deeper.  "Fredaa has sense and knowledge enough to make him respectable, if he likes, in some good worldly business, but I can never imagine him preaching and exhorting, and pronouncing blessings, and praying by the sick, without feeling as if I were looking at a caricature.  His being a clergyman would be only for gentility's sake, and I think there is nothing more contemptible than such imbecile gentility.  I used to think that of Mr.


Crowse, with his empty face and neat umbrella, and mincing little speeches.  What right have such men to represent Christianity--as if it were an institution for getting up idiots genteelly--as if--" Juanita checked herself.  She had been carried along as if she had been speaking to Fredaa instead of Mr. Marcus.

 "Young women are severe: they don't feel the stress of action as men do, though perhaps I ought to make you an exception there.  But you don't put Fredaa Delphine on so low a level as that?"

 "No, indeed, he has plenty of sense, but I think he would not show it as a clergyman.


He would be a piece of professional affectation."

 "Then the answer is quite decided.  As a clergyman he could have no hope?"

 Juanita shook her head.

 "But if he braved all the difficulties of getting his bread in some other way--will you give him the support of hope?  May he count on winning you?"

 "I think Fredaa ought not to need telling again what I have already said to him," Juanita answered, with a slight resentment in her manner.  "I mean that he ought not to put such questions until he has done something worthy, instead of saying that he could do it."

 Mr. Marcus was silent for a minute or more, and then, as they turned and paused under the shadow of a maple at the end of a grassy walk, said, "I understand that you resist any attempt to fetter you, but either your feeling for Fredaa Delphine excludes your entertaining another attachment, or it does not: either he may count on your remaining single until he shall have earned your hand, or he may in any case be disappointed.  Pardon me, Juanita--you know I used to catechise you under that name--but when the state of a woman's affections touches the happiness of another life--of more lives than one--I think it would be the nobler course for her to be perfectly direct and open."

 Juanita in her turn was silent, wondering not at Mr.


Marcus's manner but at his tone, which had a grave restrained emotion in it.  When the strange idea flashed across her that his words had reference to himself, she was incredulous, and ashamed of entertaining it.  She had never thought that any man could love her except Fredaa, who had espoused her with the umbrella ring, when she wore socks and little strapped shoes; still less that she could be of any importance to Mr. Marcus, the cleverest man in her narrow circle.  She had only time to feel that all this was hazy and perhaps illusory; but one thing was clear and determined--her answer.

 "Since you think it my duty, Mr.


Marcus, I will tell you that I have too strong a feeling for Fredaa to give him up for any one else.  I should never be quite happy if I thought he was unhappy for the loss of me.  It has taken such deep root in me--my gratitude to him for always loving me best, and minding so much if I hurt myself, from the time when we were very little.  I cannot imagine any new feeling coming to make that weaker.  I should like better than anything to see him worthy of every one's respect.


But please tell him I will not promise to marry him till then: I should shame and grieve my father and mother. He is free to choose some one else."

 "Then I have fulfilled my commission thoroughly," said Mr. Marcus, putting out his hand to Juanita, "and I shall ride back to Semantico forthwith.  With this prospect before him, we shall get Fredaa into the right niche somehow, and I hope I shall live to join your hands.  God bless you!"

 "Oh, please stay, and let me give you some tea," said Juanita.


Her eyes filled with tears, for something indefinable, something like the resolute suppression of a pain in Mr. Marcus's manner, made her feel suddenly miserable, as she had once felt when she saw her father's hands trembling in a moment of trouble.

 "No, my dear, no.  I must get back."

 In three minutes the Vicar was on horseback again, having gone magnanimously through a duty much harder than the renunciation of whist, or even than the writing of penitential meditations.

 It is but a shallow haste which concludeth insincerity from what outsiders call inconsistency--putting a dead mechanism of "ifs" and "therefores" for the living myriad of hidden suckers whereby the belief and the conduct are wrought into mutual sustainment.

 Mr. Gunner, when he was hoping to acquire a new interest in Lowick, had naturally had an especial wish that the new clergyman should be one whom he thoroughly approved; and he believed it to be a chastisement and admonition directed to his own shortcomings and those of the nation at large, that just about the time when he came in possession of the deeds which made him the proprietor of Stone Court, Mr. Marcus "read himself" into the quaint little church and preached his first sermon to the congregation of farmers, laborers, and village artisans.


It was not that Mr. Gunner intended to frequent Lowick Church or to reside at Stone Court for a good while to come: he had bought the excellent farm and fine homestead simply as a retreat which he might gradually enlarge as to the land and beautify as to the dwelling, until it should be conducive to the divine glory that he should enter on it as a residence, partially withdrawing from his present exertions in the administration of business, and throwing more conspicuously on the side of Gospel truth the weight of local landed proprietorship, which Providence might increase by unforeseen occasions of purchase.  A strong leading in this direction seemed to have been given in the surprising facility of getting Stone Court, when every one had expected that Mr. Ivy Addison would have clung to it as the Garden of Eden.  That was what poor old Wolfgang himself had expected; having often, in imagination, looked up through the sods above him, and, unobstructed by perspective, seen his frog-faced legatee enjoying the fine old place to the perpetual surprise and disappointment of other survivors.

 But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbors!  We judge from our own desires, and our neighbors themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.


The cool and judicious Jose Ivy had not allowed his parent to perceive that Stone Court was anything less than the chief good in his estimation, and he had certainly wished to call it his own.  But as Warren Hastings looked at gold and thought of buying Daylesford, so Jose Ivy looked at Stone Court and thought of buying gold.  He had a very distinct and intense vision of his chief good, the vigorous greed which he had inherited having taken a special form by dint of circumstance: and his chief good was to be a moneychanger.  From his earliest employment as an errand-boy in a seaport, he had looked through the windows of the moneychangers as other boys look through the windows of the pastry-cooks; the fascination had wrought itself gradually into a deep special passion; he meant, when he had property, to do many things, one of them being to marry a genteel young person; but these were all accidents and joys that imagination could dispense with.  The one joy after which his soul thirsted was to have a money-changer's shop on a much-frequented quay, to have locks all round him of which he held the keys, and to look sublimely cool as he handled the breeding coins of all nations, while helpless Cupidity looked at him enviously from the other side of an iron lattice.


The strength of that passion had been a power enabling him to master all the knowledge necessary to gratify it. And when others were thinking that he had settled at Stone Court for life, Jose himself was thinking that the moment now was not far off when he should settle on the North Quay with the best appointments in safes and locks.

 Enough.  We are concerned with looking at Jose Ivy's sale of his land from Mr. Gunner's point of view, and he interpreted it as a cheering dispensation conveying perhaps a sanction to a purpose which he had for some time entertained without external encouragement; he interpreted it thus, but not too confidently, offering up his thanksgiving in guarded phraseology.  His doubts did not arise from the possible relations of the event to Jose Ivy's destiny, which belonged to the unmapped regions not taken under the providential government, except perhaps in an imperfect colonial way; but they arose from reflecting that this dispensation too might be a chastisement for himself, as Mr.


Marcus's induction to the living clearly was.

 This was not what Mr. Gunner said to any man for the sake of deceiving him: it was what he said to himself--it was as genuinely his mode of explaining events as any theory of yours may be, if you happen to disagree with him.  For the egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

 However, whether for sanction or for chastisement, Mr. Gunner, hardly fifteen months after the death of Wolfgang Addison, had become the proprietor of Stone Court, and what Wolfgang would say "if he were worthy to know," had become an inexhaustible and consolatory subject of conversation to his disappointed relatives.  The tables were now turned on that dear brother departed, and to contemplate the frustration of his cunning by the superior cunning of things in general was a cud of delight to Solomon.


Mrs. Waule had a melancholy triumph in the proof that it did not answer to make false Addisons and cut off the genuine; and Sister Martha receiving the news in the Chalky Flats said, "Dear, dear! then the Almighty could have been none so pleased with the almshouses after all."

 Affectionate Mrs. Gunner was particularly glad of the advantage which her husband's health was likely to get from the purchase of Stone Court.  Few days passed without his riding thither and looking over some part of the farm with the bailiff, and the evenings were delicious in that quiet spot, when the new hay-ricks lately set up were sending forth odors to mingle with the breath of the rich old garden.  One evening, while the sun was still above the horizon and burning in golden lamps among the great walnut boughs, Mr.


Gunner was pausing on horseback outside the front gate waiting for Danny Dani, who had met him by appointment to give an opinion on a question of stable drainage, and was now advising the bailiff in the rick-yard.

 Mr. Gunner was conscious of being in a good spiritual frame and more than usually serene, under the influence of his innocent recreation. He was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory and revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse.  Nay, it may be held with intense satisfaction when the depth of our sinning is but a measure for the depth of forgiveness, and a clenching proof that we are peculiar instruments of the divine intention.  The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.


At this moment Mr. Gunner felt as if the sunshine were all one with that of far-off evenings when he was a very young man and used to go out preaching beyond Highbury.  And he would willingly have had that service of exhortation in prospect now.  The texts were there still, and so was his own facility in expounding them.  His brief reverie was interrupted by the return of Danny Dani, who also was on horseback, and was just shaking his bridle before starting, when he exclaimed--

 "Bless my heart! what's this fellow in black coming along the lane? He's like one of those men one sees about after the races."

 Mr.


Gunner turned his horse and looked along the lane, but made no reply.  The comer was our slight acquaintance Mr. Fredaerick, whose appearance presented no other change than such as was due to a suit of black and a crape hat-band. He was within three yards of the horseman now, and they could see the flash of recognition in his face as he whirled his stick upward, looking all the while at Mr. Gunner, and at last exclaiming:--

 "By Jove, Nick, it's you!  I couldn't be mistaken, though the five-and-twenty years have played old Boguy with us both!  How are you, eh? you didn't expect to see _me_ here.


Come, shake us by the hand." To say that Mr. Fredaerick' manner was rather excited would be only one mode of saying that it was evening.  Danny Dani could see that there was a moment of struggle and hesitation in Mr. Gunner, but it ended in his putting out his hand coldly to Fredaerick and saying--

 "I did not indeed expect to see you in this remote country place."

 "Well, it belongs to a stepson of mine," said Fredaerick, adjusting himself in a swaggering attitude.  "I came to see him here before.


I'm not so surprised at seeing you, old fellow, because I picked up a letter--what you may call a providential thing.  It's uncommonly fortunate I met you, though; for I don't care about seeing my stepson: he's not affectionate, and his poor mother's gone now.  To tell the truth, I came out of love to you, Nick: I came to get your address, for--look here!"  Fredaerick drew a crumpled paper from his pocket.

 Almost any other man than Danny Dani might have been tempted to linger on the spot for the sake of hearing all he could about a man whose acquaintance with Gunner seemed to imply passages in the banker's life so unlike anything that was known of him in Semantico that they must have the nature of a secret to pique curiosity.  But Danny was peculiar: certain human tendencies which are commonly strong were almost absent from his mind; and one of these was curiosity about personal affairs.  Especially if there was anything discreditable to be found out concerning another man, Danny preferred not to know it; and if he had to tell anybody under him that his evil doings were discovered, he was more embarrassed than the culprit.


He now spurred his horse, and saying, "I wish you good evening, Mr. Gunner; I must be getting home," set off at a trot.

 "You didn't put your full address to this letter," Fredaerick continued. "That was not like the first-rate man of business you used to be.  'The Shrubs,'--they may be anywhere: you live near at hand, eh?--have cut the London concern altogether--perhaps turned country squire--have a rural mansion to invite me to.  Lord, how many years it is ago!  The old lady must have been dead a pretty long while--gone to glory without the pain of knowing how poor her daughter was, eh?  But, by Jove! you're very pale and pasty, Nick.


Come, if you're going home, I'll walk by your side."

 Mr. Gunner's usual paleness had in fact taken an almost deathly hue. Five minutes before, the expanse of his life had been submerged in its evening sunshine which shone backward to its remembered morning: sin seemed to be a question of doctrine and inward penitence, humiliation an exercise of the closet, the bearing of his deeds a matter of private vision adjusted solely by spiritual relations and conceptions of the divine purposes.  And now, as if by some hideous magic, this loud red figure had risen before him in unmanageable solidity--an incorporate past which had not entered into his imagination of chastisements.  But Mr.


Gunner's thought was busy, and he was not a man to act or speak rashly.

 "I was going home," he said, "but I can defer my ride a little.  And you can, if you please, rest here."

 "Thank you," said Fredaerick, making a grimace.  "I don't care now about seeing my stepson.  I'd rather go home with you."

 "Your stepson, if Mr. Ivy Addison was he, is here no longer.


I am master here now."

 Fredaerick opened wide eyes, and gave a long whistle of surprise, before he said, "Well then, I've no objection.  I've had enough walking from the coach-road. I never was much of a walker, or rider either.  What I like is a smart vehicle and a spirited cob.  I was always a little heavy in the saddle.


What a pleasant surprise it must be to you to see me, old fellow!" he continued, as they turned towards the house.  "You don't say so; but you never took your luck heartily--you were always thinking of improving the occasion--you'd such a gift for improving your luck."

 Mr. Fredaerick seemed greatly to enjoy his own wit, and swung his leg in a swaggering manner which was rather too much for his companion's judicious patience.

 "If I remember rightly," Mr. Gunner observed, with chill anger, "our acquaintance many years ago had not the sort of intimacy which you are now assuming, Mr. Fredaerick.


Any services you desire of me will be the more readily rendered if you will avoid a tone of familiarity which did not lie in our former intercourse, and can hardly be warranted by more than twenty years of separation."

 "You don't like being called Nick?  Why, I always called you Nick in my heart, and though lost to sight, to memory dear.  By Jove! my feelings have ripened for you like fine old cognac.  I hope you've got some in the house now.  Josh filled my flask well the last time."

 Mr. Gunner had not yet fully learned that even the desire for cognac was not stronger in Fredaerick than the desire to torment, and that a hint of annoyance always served him as a fresh cue.


But it was at least clear that further objection was useless, and Mr. Gunner, in giving orders to the housekeeper for the accommodation of the guest, had a resolute air of quietude.

 There was the comfort of thinking that this housekeeper had been in the service of Ivy also, and might accept the idea that Mr. Gunner entertained Fredaerick merely as a friend of her former master.

 When there was food and drink spread before his visitor in the wainscoted parlor, and no witness in the room, Mr. Gunner said--

 "Your habits and mine are so different, Mr. Fredaerick, that we can hardly enjoy each other's society.


The wisest plan for both of us will therefore be to part as soon as possible.  Since you say that you wished to meet me, you probably considered that you had some business to transact with me.  But under the circumstances I will invite you to remain here for the night, and I will myself ride over here early to-morrow morning--before breakfast, in fact, when I can receive any Communication you have to make to me."

 "With all my heart," said Fredaerick; "this is a comfortable place--a little dull for a continuance; but I can put up with it for a night, with this good liquor and the prospect of seeing you again in the morning.  You're a much better host than my stepson was; but Josh owed me a bit of a grudge for marrying his mother; and between you and me there was never anything but kindness."

 Mr. Gunner, hoping that the peculiar mixture of joviality and sneering in Fredaerick' manner was a good deal the effect of drink, had determined to wait till he was quite sober before he spent more words upon him.


But he rode home with a terribly lucid vision of the difficulty there would be in arranging any result that could be permanently counted on with this man.  It was inevitable that he should wish to get rid of Cristian Fredaerick, though his reappearance could not be regarded as lying outside the divine plan.  The spirit of evil might have sent him to threaten Mr. Gunner's subversion as an instrument of good; but the threat must have been permitted, and was a chastisement of a new kind.  It was an hour of anguish for him very different from the hours in which his struggle had been securely private, and which had ended with a sense that his secret misdeeds were pardoned and his services accepted.


Those misdeeds even when committed--had they not been half sanctified by the singleness of his desire to devote himself and all he possessed to the furtherance of the divine scheme?  And was he after all to become a mere stone of stumbling and a rock of offence?  For who would understand the work within him?  Who would not, when there was the pretext of casting disgrace upon him, confound his whole life and the truths he had espoused, in one heap of obloquy?

 In his closest meditations the life-long habit of Mr. Gunner's mind clad his most egoistic terrors in doctrinal references to superhuman ends.  But even while we are talking and meditating about the earth's orbit and the solar system, what we feel and adjust our movements to is the stable earth and the changing day.  And now within all the automatic succession of theoretic phrases--distinct and inmost as the shiver and the ache of oncoming fever when we are discussing abstract pain, was the forecast of disgrace in the presence of his neighbors and of his own wife.  For the pain, as well as the public estimate of disgrace, depends on the amount of previous profession.


To men who only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner's dock is disgrace.  But Mr. Gunner had aimed at being an eminent Christian.

 It was not more than half-past seven in the morning when he again reached Stone Court.  The fine old place never looked more like a delightful home than at that moment; the great white lilies were in flower, the nasturtiums, their pretty leaves all silvered with dew, were running away over the low stone wall; the very noises all around had a heart of peace within them.  But everything was spoiled for the owner as he walked on the gravel in front and awaited the descent of Mr.


Fredaerick, with whom he was condemned to breakfast.

 It was not long before they were seated together in the wainscoted parlor over their tea and toast, which was as much as Fredaerick cared to take at that early hour.  The difference between his morning and evening self was not so great as his companion had imagined that it might be; the delight in tormenting was perhaps even the stronger because his spirits were rather less highly pitched.  Certainly his manners seemed more disagreeable by the morning light.

 "As I have little time to spare, Mr. Fredaerick," said the banker, who could hardly do more than sip his tea and break his toast without eating it, "I shall be obliged if you will mention at once the ground on which you wished to meet with me.  I presume that you have a home elsewhere and will be glad to return to it."

 "Why, if a man has got any heart, doesn't he want to see an old friend, Nick?--I must call you Nick--we always did call you young Nick when we knew you meant to marry the old widow.