Chapter VII: Friends in Council

Those persons to whom London is a home--a place to be lived in all the year round, save on the occasion of the two months' holiday, when one rushes off to the North, or to the sea, or to the Continent, returning with a renewed stock of health, and a pleasurable sense of having enjoyed yourself, but with a still more pleasurable sense of being back again in town--are very much amused at a notion prevalent amongst many worthy people who arrive at their own or at a hired house in the month of March, stay there till the end of the month of June, and go away fancying that they know London. Know London! A lifetime's earnest devotion does not suffice for that study, and those people who talk thus have not even the merest smattering of its topography. Their London used to be bounded on the west by the Knightsbridge Barracks--even now they acknowledge nothing beyond Princes Terrace. On the south-west they have penetrated as far as Onslow Square; the territory beyond that might be full of tiger-lairs and hiding-places for dragons, for all they know about it. Of the suburbs, beyond such knowledge as they derive from an occasional visit to the Star and Garter at Richmond, they know absolutely nothing. They do not know, and it would not make the smallest difference to them if they did, that if, instead of cantering up and down that ghastly, treeless, sun-scorched mile of gravel, the Row, they chose to turn their horses' heads north-westward, they could find shade in the green Willesden lanes and air on the breezy Hendon heights. They do not know that within a very short distance of Hyde Park there are shady lanes half hidden in greenery, dotted here and there with quaint old-fashioned houses standing in the midst of large grounds--some with gardens sloping away towards the river; others with enormous trees overhanging them, blotting out all view or vista; and others again with such an expanse of what the auctioneers are pleased to term "park-like grounds" visible from their windows, that you would have no idea of the immediate proximity of London, save for the never-varying presence of the smoke-wreath hanging over the horizon, and the never-ceasing, save on Sundays, dull rumble of distant traffic, which grinds on the ear like the monotonous surging of the waves upon the shore.

In one of these metropolitan suburbs, no matter which, stood and stands the house which at the period of our story was George Wainwright's home, the residence of his father, Dr. Wainwright. It was a big, long, rambling, red-faced old house, with an enormous number of rooms, some large and some small, standing in the midst of a large garden. Tradition said that it had been a favourite residence of Cromwell's; but it was generally believed, and the belief was not ill-founded, that it had been given by the Lord Protector to the husband of his favourite daughter, and that he himself had frequently been in the habit of staying there. At the end of the first quarter of the present century it had a very different occupant from the grim old Ironsides leader, being rented by the Countess Delia Crusca, the wittiest, the most beautiful, the most extravagant, the most fascinating woman of her day. Old Knaves of Clubs still _raffolent_ about the Delia Crusca, her eyes and her poems, her bust and her repartees. She had a husband?--Oh yes! the Count Delia Crusca, ex-officer of Bersaglieri and one of the first naturalists of his day, corresponding member of all the principal European societies, and perfectly devoted to his favourite pursuit; so devoted, that he was invariably away in some distant foreign country, engaged in hunting for specimens. The Countess was an Englishwoman, daughter of Captain Ramus, half-pay, educated at a convent in Paris, under the guidance of her maternal aunt, Miss Coghlan, of Letterkenney in Ireland. Immediately on issuing from the convent she eloped with Count Della Crusca, whose acquaintance she had made in a casual manner in the _coupé_ of one of the diligences belonging to Messrs. Lafitte, Caillard et Cie. A very short time served to prove to them that they had no tastes in common. Madame la Comtesse did not care for natural history, which the Count loved, and she did care for England, which the Count loathed. So he went his way, in pursuit of specimens, and she went hers to England. She arrived in London, and Marston Moor House being to let, she took it.

Some of us are yet alive who recollect the little saccharine poems, the plaintive little sonnets, the--well, yes, to speak the truth--the washy three-volume novels which were composed in that sturdy old building and dated thence. Sturdy outside, but lovely within. Such furniture: white satin and gold, black satin and red trimming; such pictures, and statues, and busts; such looking-glasses let into the walls at every conceivable place; such hanging baskets and ormolu clocks, and Dresden and Sèvres china; such Chinese fans, and Indian screens, and Turkish yataghans and Malay creeses; such books--at least, such bindings; such a satinwood desk, at which the Countess penned her inspirations; such a solemn-sounding library clock, which had belonged to Marie Antoinette; such lion-skins and leopard-skins for rugs; such despatch-boxes with the Della Cruscan coronet and cipher; such waste-paper baskets always littered with proof-sheets! The garden! never was anything seen like that! It was not much more than half an acre, but Smiff, the great landscape gardener, made it look more like a square mile. Delightfully rustic and English here, quaintly Dutch there, Italian terraced a little lower down, small avenue, vista broken by the fountain; might be a thousand miles away from London, so everyone said. Everyone said so, because everyone came there. Who was everyone? Well, the Grand-Duke of Schweinerei was someone, at all events. Ex-Grand-Duke, I should have said, recollecting that some years before, the people of Schweinerei, although by no means a strait-laced people, grew so disgusted at the "goings-on" of their reigning potentate, that they rose in revolt, and incontinently kicked him out. Then he came to England, where he has remained ever since, dwelling in a big house, and occupying his spare time with fighting newspapers for libelling him in a very blackguard and un-English manner. His highness is an elderly, short, fat man, with admirably-fitting wig and whiskers of the Tyrian purple. He has dull bleary eyes, pendulous cheeks, and a great fat double chin. He is covered all over with diamonds: his studs are diamonds; he wears a butterfly diamond brooch on the knot of his white cravat; his waistcoat-buttons are diamonds; his sleeve-links are diamonds; and he resembles the old woman of Banbury Cross in having (diamond) rings on his fingers, and probably, for all the historian knows to the contrary, on his toes.

Who else came there? A tall, thin, dark man, with a long face like a sheep's head, a full dull eye, a long nose, a very long upper lip, arid a retreating chin. Prince Bernadotte of the Lipari Isles, also an exile, but one who has since been recalled to his kingdom. Nobody thought much of Prince Bernadotte in those days. He lived in cheap chambers in London, and used to play billiards with _coiffeurs_ and _agents de change_ and _commis voyageurs_ from the hotels in Leicester Square; and who went into a very little English society, where he always sat silent and reserved, and where they thought very little of him. He must have been marvellously misunderstood then, or must have grown into quite a different kind of man when he sat smoking his cigar with his feet on the fender in the Elysée, and to all inquiries made but the one reply, "_Qu'on exécute mes orders!_"--those "ordres" being fulfilled in the massacre of the Boulevards.

Who else? _Savans_, philosophers, barristers, poets, newspaper-writers, novelists, caricaturists, eminent physicians and surgeons, fiddlers, foreigners, anybody who had done anything which had given him the merest temporary notoriety was welcome, so long as he came at the time. And they never failed to do that. The society was so delightful, the welcome was so warm, the eating and drinking were so good, that there was never any chance of an invitation to Marston Moor House being refused. Thither came Fermez, the opera _impresario_, driving down a couple of lords in his phaeton; and Tom Gilks, the scene-painter of Covent Garden, who arrived per omnibus; and Whiston, who had just written that tremendous pamphlet on the religious controversy of the day; and Rupert Robinson, who had sat up all the previous night to finish his burlesque, and who was so enchanted with the personal appearance of the Grand-Duke of Schweinerei, that he wanted to carry him off bodily--rings, diamonds, wig, whiskers, and all--to Madame Tussaud's Exhibition. Dinners and balls, conversazioni and fêtes--with the garden illuminated with Italian lamps, and supper served in extemporised pavilions--two royal dukes, in addition to standard celebrities, and foreign princes in town for the season--without end.

Vain transitory splendour! could not all Retain the tott'ring mansion from its fall?

Apparently not. One morning the servants at Marston Moor House got up, to find their mistress had risen before them, or rather had not been to bed at all, having decamped during the night with the plate and all the portable valuables, and left an enormous army of creditors behind her. There was weeping and wailing round the neighbourhood for months; but tears and outcries did not pay the defrauded tradespeople, and they never had any money. Nobody ever knew who received the money realised by the sale of the furniture, &c, though that ought to have been something considerable, for there never was a sale so tremendously attended, or at which things fetched such high prices. All the ladies of high rank who combined frightful stupidity with rigid virtue, and who would as soon have thought of walking into Tophet as of crossing Madame Della Crusca's threshold, rushed to Marston Moor House so soon as its proprietress had fled, and bought eagerly at the sale. The large looking-glass which formed the back of the alcove in which Madame Delia Crusca's bed was placed now figures in the boudoir, or, as it is generally called, the work-room, of the Countess of Textborough, and is scarcely so happy in its reflections as in former days. The satinwood desk fell to the nod of Mrs. Quisby, who used to follow the Queen's hounds in a deep-pink jacket and a short skirt, and who now holds forth on Sunday afternoons at the infant schools in Badger's Buildings, Mayfair, and is especially hard on the Scarlet Woman. Many of the old _habitués_ attended, and bought well-remembered scraps for _souvenirs_. Finally everything, down to the kitchen pots and pans, the stable buckets and the gardeners' implements, were cleared off, and a big painted board frowned in the great courtyard, informing the British public that that eligible mansion was to let.

Not for long did that black-and-white board blossom in that flinty soil. Within three weeks of the sale a rumour ran through London that an _al-fresco_ place of entertainment on a magnificent scale was about to be opened on what had been the Della-Cruscan property, and that Wuff, the great Wuff, the most enterprising man of his day, was at the back of it. Straightway the board was pulled down, and an army of painters, and decorators, and plumbers, and builders, and Irish gentlemen in flannel jackets, and Italian gentlemen in slouch wideawakes and paint-stained gaberdines, took possession of the place. Big rooms were converted into supper and dining-rooms, and small rooms into _cabinets particuliers_; a row of supper-boxes on the old Vauxhall pattern sprang up in the grounds, which, moreover, were tastefully planted with gas-lamps, with plaster-of-Paris statues, with two or three sham fountains, and with grottos made of slag and shiny-faced bricks. Then, on an Easter Monday, the place was opened with a ballet, with dancing on the circular platform, with Signor Simioso's performing monkeys, and with a grand display of fireworks. Very good, all this; but somehow it didn't draw. The great Wuff did all he could; sent an enormous power of legs into the ballet; engaged the most excruciatingly funny comic singers, put silver rosettes into the button-holes and silver-gilt wands into the hands of all the masters of the ceremonies on the circular platform; and had Guffino il Diavolo flying from the top of the pasteboard Leaning Tower of Pisa into the canvas Lake of Geneva, down a wire, with a squib in his cap, and one in each of his heels--and yet the public would not come. The great Wuff tried it for two seasons, and then gave it up in despair.

Up went the black-and-white board again; to be taken down at the bidding of Mrs. Trimmer, who, having a very good boarding-school for young ladies at Highgate, thought she might increase her connection by establishing herself in a more eligible neighbourhood. The board had been up so long, that the proprietor of the house was willing, not merely to take a reduced rent, but to pull up the gas-lamps, and pull down the supper-boxes, and restore the garden, not indeed to its original state of beauty, but to decency and order. The rooms were repapered (it must be owned that Wuff's taste in decoration had been loud), and the name of the house changed from Marston Moor to Cornelia. Then Mrs. Trimmer took possession, and brought her young friends with her, and they throve and multiplied exceedingly; and all went well until Mrs. Trimmer died, and there was no one to carry on the business; and the board went up, and remained up longer than ever.

No one knew exactly when or how the house was taken again. The proprietor, hoping to get another school-keeper for a tenant, the house being too large for ordinary domestic purposes, had bought Mrs. Trimmer's furniture--the iron bedsteads and school fittings--for a song, and had placed an old woman in charge. One day this old woman put her luggage, consisting of a blue bundle, and herself into a cab, and went away. A few carpenters had arrived from town in the morning, and had occupied themselves in fitting iron bars to the interior of some of the windows. During the greater portion of that night carriages were heard rolling up the lane in which the back entrance to the house was situated, and the next day smoke was seen issuing from the chimneys; a big brass plate with the name of "Dr. Bulph" was screwed on to the iron gates of the carriage-drive, and two or three strong-built men were noticed going in and out of the premises. Gradually it became known that Dr. Bulph was a physician celebrated for his treatment of the insane, a "mad-doctor," as the neighbours called him; and women and children used to skurry past the old red garden-walls as though they thought the inmates were climbing over to get at them. But the house was so thoroughly well-conducted, so quietly and with such excellent discipline, that people soon thought nothing of it, any more than of any other of the big mansions in the neighbourhood; and when Dr. Bulph retired, and Dr. Wainwright succeeded him, the door-plate had actually been changed for some days before the neighbours noticed it.

Dr. Wainwright made many changes in the establishment. He was a man of great fame for several specialities, and was constantly being called away to patients in the country. He considerably enlarged the old house, and brought to it a better and wealthier class of patients, who were attended, under his supervision, by two resident surgeons. Dr. Wainwright did not live in the house. In addition to his practice he worked very hard with his pen, contributing largely to the principal medical Scientific reviews and journals, and corresponding with many continental _savans_. For all this work he required solitude and silence; and, as he was a widower, he was able to enjoy both in a set of chambers in the Albany, where he could go in and out as he liked, and where no unwelcome visitor could get at him. He had consulting-rooms in Grosvenor Square; and when in town, was to be found there between ten and one; but after those hours it was impossible to know where to catch him.

But George Wainwright lived at the old house, or rather in an outbuilding in the grounds, sole remainder of Mr. Wuff's erections; which had been converted to his use, and which yielded him a large, high-roofed, roomy studio, and a capital bedroom, both on the ground floor. The studio was no misnomer for the living-room; for, in addition to his Civil-Service work, George followed art with deep and earnest devotion, and was known and recognised as one of the best amateurs of the day. Men whose names stood very high in the art-world were his friends; and on winter nights the studio would be filled with members of that pleasant Bohemian society, discussing their craft and its members and such cognate subjects. George was a great reader also, and had a goodly store of books littering the tables or ranged on common shelves, disputing possession of the walls with choice bits of his friends' painting or half-finished attempts of his own. In the middle of the room stood a quaintly-carved old black-oak desk, ink-blotted and penknife-hacked, with some pages of manuscript and some slips of proof lying on it--for George, who had been educated in Germany, was in the habit of contributing essays on abstruse questions of German philosophy and metaphysics to a monthly review of very portentous weight--and in the corner was a cabinet piano, covered with loose leaves of music, scraps from oratorios, _studenten-lieder_, bits of Bach and Glück, glees of Purcell and Arne, and even ballads by Claribel. Some of George's painter friends had formed themselves into a singing-club and sang very sweetly; and the greatest treat that could be offered to the inmates of the house was these fellows' musical performances. The young swells of the Stannaries Office wondered why George Wainwright was never seen at casino, singing and supper-houses, or other of those resorts which they specially affected. They looked upon him as somewhat of a fogey, and could not understand what a bright, genial, jolly fellow like Paul Derinzy could see to like in him. He was kind and good-natured and all that, they owned, as indeed they had often proved by loans of "sovs" and "fivers," when the end of the quarter had left them dry; but he was an uncomfortable sort of chap, they said, and was always by himself.

He was by himself the evening of the day after that on which he had seen Paul Derinzy walking with Daisy in Kensington Gardens. He had had a light dinner at his club, and thence walked straight away home, where, on his arrival at his den, he had lit a big pipe and thrown himself into an easy-chair, and sat watching the blue smoke curling above his head, and pondering over the present and the future of his friend. George Wainwright had a stronger feeling than mere liking for Paul; there was a touch of romance in the regard which the good-looking, bright, easy-going young man had aroused in his steady, sober, practical senior. George was too much a man of the world to thrill with horror because he had seen his friend in the company of a pretty girl, and come across what was evidently a lovers' meeting. But his knowledge of Paul's character was large and well-founded; in the mere glance which he had got of the pair as they stood together in the act of saying adieu, he had caught an expression in his friend's face which intuitively led him to feel that the woman who could call up such a look of intense earnest devotion was no mere passing light-o'-love; and as George thought over the scene, and reproduced it, time after time, from the storehouse of his memory, he puffed fiercer blasts from his pipe, and shook his head in an unsettled, not to say desponding manner.

While he was thus occupied he heard steps on the gravel-walk outside, then a tap at the door. Opening it, Paul Derinzy stood before him.

"Just the man I was thinking about, and come exactly in the nick of time! _Alma quies optata, veni!_ Not that you can be called _alma quies_, you restless bird of the night! What's the matter? what are you making signs about?" asked George.

"That idiot, Billy Dunlop, is with me," replied Paul, grinning; "he is doing some of his pantomime nonsense outside;" and, indeed, George Wainwright, peering out in the darkness, could make out a stout figure approaching with cautious gestures, which, when it emerged into the lamplight, proved to be Mr. Dunlop.

"Hallo, Billy! what are you at? Come in, man; light a pipe, and be happy."

But Mr. Dunlop, true to his character of comic man, did not enter the room quietly, but came in with a little rush, and then, his knees knocking together in simulated abject terror, asked:

"Am I safe? Can none of them get at me?"

"None of whom?"

"None of the patients. I was in such a fright coming up that garden, I could scarcely speak. I thought I saw eyes behind every laurestinus; and--I suppose the staff of keepers is adequate, in case any of 'em _should_ prove rampagious?"

"Oh yes, it's all right. Have you never been here before?"

"Never, sir; and I don't think, provided I get safe away this time, that I'm ever likely to come again."

"You're complimentary; but now you are here, sit down and have a drink. Spirits there in that stand, soda-water here in the window-seat, ice in that refrigerator by the door. Or stay, let me make you the new Yankee drink that has just come up--a cobbler. There are plenty of straws somewhere about."

"I should think so," said Billy, in a stage-whisper to Paul. "He gets 'em out of the patients' heads. Lunatics always stick straws in their heads, vide the drama _passim_. I say, Wainwright, while you're mixing the grog, may I run out and have a look at the night-watch?"

"The what?" asked George, raising his head.

"The night-watch, you know;" and Mr. Dunlop sat down at the piano, squared his elbows, contorted his face, and with much ludicrous exaggeration burst forth:

"Hush-sh-sh-sh! 'tis the NIGHT-WATCH!! he gy-ards my lonely cell!

"Now don't you say that he doesn't, you know, because I've Mr. Henry Russell's authority that he does. So produce your night-watch!"

"Don't make such a row, Billy!" cried Paul; "there's no night-watch, or anything else of the sort."

"What! do you mean to say that I did not see her dancing in the hall? that I am not cold, bitter cold? that his glimmering lamp no more I see? and that no, no, by hav-vens, I am not ma-a-ad?" With these words, uttered in the wildest tones, Mr. Dunlop cast himself at full length on the sofa, whence arising immediately with a placid countenance, he said: "Gentlemen, if you wish thus to uproot and destroy the tenderest associations of childhood, I shall be happy, when I have finished my drink, to wish you a good-evening, and return home."

"I can't think what the deuce you came for," said Paul, with a smile. "He looked in at the club where I was dining, hoping to meet you, and where I heard you had been and gone, and asked me whether I wasn't going to evening service. When I told him 'yes,' he said he would come with me; and all the way along he has done nothing but growl at the pace I was walking, and the length of the way."

"Don't mind me, Mr. Wainwright," said Billy, politely; "pray let the gentleman go on. I am not the Stannaries Stag, sir, and I never laid claim to the title; consequently it's no degradation to me to avow that I can't keep on heeling and toeing it at the rate of seven miles an hour for long. As it happens, I have a friend in the neighbourhood, a fisherman, who has managed to combine a snack-bend with a Kirby hook in a manner which he assures me--pardon me, dear sirs, those imbecile grins remind me that I am speaking to men who don't know a stone-fly from a gentle; that I have been throwing my--I needn't finish the sentence. I have finished the drink. Mr. Wainwright, have the goodness to see me off the premises, and, in the words of the distraught Ophelia--to whom, by-the-way, I daresay your talented father would have been called in, had he happened to live in Denmark at the time--'let out the maid who'--goodnight!"

When George Wainwright returned, alone, he found Paul, who had lighted a cigar, walking up and down the room, his hands plunged in his pockets, his chin down upon his chest. George went up to him, and putting his hand affectionately on his shoulder, said:

"What brought you down here to-night, young 'un? The last rats must have deserted the sinking ship of Fashion and Season when you clear out of it to come down to Diogenes in his tub. Not but that I'm delighted to see you; all I want to know is why?"

"I was nervous and restless, George; a little tired of fools and frippery, and--and myself. I wanted you to blow a little of the ozone of common sense into me, you know!"

"Oh yes, I know," said George Wainwright; but he uttered the words in such deep solemn tones that Paul turned upon him suddenly, saying:

"You know? Well, what do you know?"

"I know why you could not play tennis, or come to the Oval, or walk to Hendon with me yesterday afternoon."

"The deuce you do! And why?"

"For a very sufficient reason to a young fellow of five-and-twenty!" said George, with a rather melancholy grin. "Look here, Paul; I don't think you'll imagine I'm a spy, or a meddling, impertinent busybody, and I'm sure you'll believe it was by the merest accident that I was crossing Kensington Gardens last evening, and there saw a friend of mine in deep conversation with a very handsome young lady."

"The deuce you did!" cried Paul, turning very red. "What then?"

"Ah!" said George, filling his pipe, "that's exactly the point--what then?"

"What a provoking old beggar you are! Why do you echo me? Why don't you go on?"

"It's for you to go on, my boy! What are your relations--or what are they to be--with this handsome girl?"

"She is handsome, is she not?"

"Beautiful!"

"'Gad! she must be to strike fire out of an old flint like you, George!" cried Paul. "What are my relations with her? Strictly proper, I give you my word."

"And you intend to marry her?"

"How the man jumps at an idea! Well, no; I don't know at all that I intend that."

"Not the--the other thing, Paul? No; you're, to say the least of it, too much of a gentleman. You don't intend that."

"I don't intend anything, I tell you. Can't a man talk to a pretty girl without 'intention'?"

"I don't know, Paul. I'm quite incompetent to pronounce any opinion on such matters; only--only see here: I look on you as on a younger brother, and, prompted by my regard for you, I may say many things which you may dislike."

"Well, say away, old George; you won't offend me."

"Well, then, if this is a good honest girl, and you don't intend to marry her, you ought not to be meeting her, and walking with her, and leading her to believe that she will attain to a position through you which she never would otherwise; and if she isn't an honest girl you ought never to have spoken to her."

Paul Derinzy laughed, the quiet easy chuckle of a man of the world, as he replied to his simple senior:

"She _is_ a good, honest girl, no doubt of that. But suppose the question of marriage had never risen between us, and she still liked to meet me and to walk with me, what then? In the gravel paths of Kensington Gardens, Pamela herself might have strolled with Captain Lovelace himself without fear. Why should not I with--with this young lady?"

"Because, though you don't know it, you're deceiving yourself and deceiving her; because the whole thing is incongruous and won't fit, however you may try to make it do so; because it's wrong, however much you may slur it over. Look here, Paul; suppose, just for the sake of argument, that you wanted to marry this girl--you're as weak as water, and there's no accounting for what you might wish--you know your people would oppose it in the very strongest way, and----"

"Oh, if I chose it, my 'people,' as you call them, must have it, or leave it alone, which would be quite immaterial to me."

"Yes, yes, no doubt; but still----"

"Look here, George; let's bring this question to a practical issue. I'm ten times more a man of the world than you, though you are an old fogey, and clever and sensible and all that. What you are aiming it is that I must give up this girl. Well, then, shortly, I won't!"

"And why won't you?"

"For a reason you can't understand, you old mole, burrowed down here under your paintings, and your fugues, and your dreary old German philosophers--because I love her; because I think of her from morning till night, and from night till morning again; because her bright face and her gay creamy skin come between me and those beastly old minutes and memoranda that we have to write at the shop; and when I'm lying awake in Hanover Street, or even sitting surrounded by a lot of gabbling idiots in the smoking-room of the club, I can see her gray eyes looking at me, and----"

"Oh Lord!" said George Wainwright, with a piteous smile; "I had no idea I'd let myself in for this!"

"You have, my dear old George, and for a lot more at a future time. Just now I came out to you because I was horribly restless, and Billy fastened himself on to me at the club, and I could not shake him off. But I want to talk to you about it seriously, George--seriously, you understand!"

"Whenever you like, Paul; but I expect you'll only get one scrap of advice out of me, repeated, as I fear, _ad nauseam_."

"And that is?"

"Give her up! give her up! give her up! Cato's powers of iteration in the _delenda est Carthago_ business will prove weak as compared to mine in this."

"You'll find me stubborn, George."

"Buffon gives stubbornness as a characteristic of your class, Paul. Goodnight, old man."

"Goodnight, God bless you! To-morrow as per usual, I suppose?" and he was gone.

Alone once more, George Wainwright threw himself again into the easy-chair and renewed his pipe; but he shook his head more than ever, and when he did speak, it was only to mutter to himself: "Worse than I thought! Don't see the way out of that. Must look into this, and take care that Paul does not make a fool of himself."

When the clock struck midnight he rose, yawned, stretched, and seemed more than half inclined to turn towards his cosy bedroom, which opened from the studio; but he shook himself together, and saying, "Poor dear, she would not sleep if I did not say goodnight to her, I suppose!" lit a lamp, and took his way across the garden to the house.