Chapter II: His Story (5)

My answer took him by surprise. "No, senor, no!" I exclaimed loudly and repeatedly--so loudly that the attention of the group at the gangway was drawn to us. When I saw this, I stepped in front of Sleigh, and before he guessed what I would be at, I was at the officer's side. "Sir," I said, raising my hat, "do you speak French?"

"Parfaitement, monsieur," he answered, politely returning my salute.

"I am an Englishman, and I wish to lay an information," I said, speaking in French, and pausing there that I might look at Sleigh. As I had expected, he did not understand French. His baffled and perplexed face assured me of that. He tried to interrupt me, but the courteous official waved him aside.

"The man who is trying to shut my mouth is a smuggler of foreign watches," I resumed. "He has them about him, and is going to take them ashore. They are in a number of pockets made for the purpose in the lining of his coat. I am connected with the watch trade, and my firm will give ten pounds reward to any one who will capture and prosecute him."

"I understand," the officer replied. And, turning to Sleigh, who, ignorant of what was going forward, was fretting and fuming in a fever of distrust, he addressed some words to him. He spoke in Spanish and quickly, and I could not understand what he said. That it was to the point, however, the engineer's face betrayed. It fell amazingly, and he cast a vengeful glance at me.

That which followed was ludicrous enough. My heart was beating fast, but I could not suppress a smile as Sleigh, clasping the threatened coat about him, backed from the police. He poured out a torrent of fluent Spanish, and emphatically denied the charge; but, alas! he cherished the coat--at which the police were making tentative dives--overmuch for an innocent man with no secret pockets about him.

His "No, senor, no!" his "Por dios!" and "Madre de Dios!" and the rest were breath wasted. At a sign from the grim-looking officer, two of the policemen seized him, and in a twinkling, notwithstanding his resistance, had the thick coat off him, and were probing its recesses. It was the turn of the by-standers to cry, "Madre de Dios!" as from pocket upon pocket came watch after watch, until five dozen lay in sparkling rows upon the deck. I could see that there were those among the ship's company besides the culprit who gazed at me with little favour; but the eyes of the police officer twinkled with gratification as each second added to the rich prize. And that was enough for me.

Still I knew that all was not done yet, and I stood on my guard. Sleigh, taken into custody, had desisted from his prayers and oaths. I saw, however, that he was telling a long story, of which I could make out little more than the word "Inglese" repeated more than once. It was his turn now. If he had not understood my French, neither could I understand his Spanish. And I noticed that the officer, as the story rolled on, looked at me doubtfully. I judged that the crisis was near, and I interfered. "May I beg to know, sir, what he says?" I asked courteously.

"He tells me a strange story, Mr. Englishman," was the answer; and the speaker eyed me with curiosity. "He says that Morrissey, the villainous Englishman--your pardon--who was at the bottom of the affair of last Sunday, has had the temerity to return to the scene of his crime, and is on this vessel."

I shrugged my shoulders. "A strange story!" I answered. "But it is for Monsieur to do his duty. I am the only Englishman on board, as the steward will inform you; and for me, permit me to hand you my papers. Your prisoner wishes, no doubt, to be even with me!"

He nodded as he took the papers. And that upon which I counted happened. The engineer in his rage and excitement had not made his story plain. No one dreamt of the charge being aimed against another Englishman. No one knew of another Englishman. The steward sullenly corroborated me when I said that I was the only one on board; and all who heard Sleigh--befogged, perhaps, by his Spanish, which, good enough for ordinary occasions, may have failed him here--did not doubt that his was a counter-accusation preferred _en revanche_.

For one thing, the improbability of Morrissey's return had weight with them; and my credentials were ample and in order. Among these, too, a note for two hundred and fifty pesetas had slipped, which had disappeared when they were returned to me. Need I say how it ended? Or that while the police officer bowed his courteous "Adios" to me, and his men gathered up the watches, and the crew scowled, the prisoner was removed to the boat, foaming at the mouth, and screaming to the last threats which my ears were long in forgetting. I walked up and down the deck, brazening it out, but very sick at heart.

However, the _San Miguel_, despite her engineer's mishap, duly left in half an hour--a nervous half-hour to me. With a thankful heart I watched the fort-crowned hills about Carthagena change from brown to blue, and blue to purple, until at length they sank below the horizon.

But officers and men looked coldly on me; and that evening, at Almeria, I took up bag and baggage and left the _San Miguel_. I had had enough of the thanks, and more than enough of the company, of my cabin-fellow, whom I left where I had found him--behind the sailcloth. I believe that he succeeded in making his escape. For fully a month later a friend of mine staying at the Hotel de la Paz, at Madrid, was placed under arrest on suspicion of being Morrissey; so that the latter must at that time have been at liberty.

KING PEPIN AND SWEET CLIVE.

KING PEPIN AND SWEET CLIVE.

Upon arriving at the middle of the Close the Dean stopped. He had been walking briskly, his chin from custom a little tilted, but his eyes beaming with condescension and goodwill, while an indulgent smile playing about the lower part of his face relieved its massive character. His walking-stick swung to and fro in a loose grasp, his feet trod the pavement of the precincts with the step of an owner, he felt the warmth of the sun, the balminess of the spring air, and somewhere at the back of his mind he was conscious of a vacant bishopric, and that he was the husband of one wife. In fine he presented the appearance of a contented, placid, unruffled dignitary, until he reached the middle of the Close. There, alas! the ferrel of his stick came to the ground with a thud, and the sweetness and light faded from his eyes as they rested upon Mr. Swainson's plot. The condescension and goodwill became conspicuous only by their absence. The Dean was undisguisedly angry; he disliked opposition as much as lesser men, and met with it more rarely. For Bicester is old-fashioned, and loves both Church and State, but especially the former, and looks up to principalities and powers, and even now, on account of a mistake he made, execrates the memory of a recreant Bicestrian, otherwise reputable. It was at a public dinner. "I remember," said this misguided man, "going in my young days to the old and beautiful cathedral of this city. (Great applause.) I was only a child then, and my head hardly rose above the top of the seat, but I remember I thought the Dean the greatest of living men. (Whirlwinds of applause.) Well (smiling), perhaps, I do not think quite that now." (Dead silence.) And so dull at bottom may a man be whose name is known in half the capitals of Europe, that this degenerate fellow never guessed why the friends of his youth during the rest of the day turned their backs upon him.

Such is the faith of Bicester, but even in Bicester there are heretics. To say that the Dean rarely met with opposition is to say that he rarely met with Mr. Swainson, and that he seldom saw Mr. Swainson's plot. As a rule, when he crossed the Close he averted his eyes by a happy impulse of custom, for he did not like Mr. Swainson, and as for the latter's plot, it was _anathema maranatha_ to him. The Dean was tall, Mr. Swainson was taller; the Dean was stubborn, Mr. Swainson was obstinate; so that there arose between them the antagonism that is born of similarity. On the other hand the Dean was stout and Mr. Swainson a scarecrow; the Dean was comely and clerical, but not over-rich, Mr. Swainson was pallid, lantern-jawed, wealthy, and a lawyer, and hence the dislike born of difference. Moreover, years ago, when Mr. Swainson had been Mayor of Bicester, there had been a little dispute between the Chapter and the Bishop, and he had shown so much energy upon the one side as to earn the nickname of the "Mayor of the Palace." Finally Mr. Swainson delighted in opposition as a cat in milk, and cared as little to have a good reason for his antagonism as puss in the dairy about a sixty years' title to the cream-pan.

But a sixty years' title to his plot was the very thing which Mr. Swainson did claim to have. Exactly opposite his house--his father's and grandfather's house in which, said his enemies, they have lived and grown fat upon cathedral patronage--lay this debatable land. His front windows commanded it, and on such a morning as this he loved to stand upon his doorstep and gaze at it with the air of a dog watching the spot where his bone lies buried. But if Mr. Swainson was right, that was just what was not buried there; there were no bones there. True, the smoothly shorn surface of the little patch was divided from the green turf round the cathedral only by a slight iron railing, but, said Mr. Swainson, ponderously seizing upon his opponent's weapon and using it with effect, it was of another sort altogether; of a very different nature. It had never been consecrated, and close as it lay to the sacred pile, being separated from it on two sides but by a sunk fence, it did not belong to it, it was not of it; it was private property, the property of Erasmus John Swainson, and the appanage of his substantial red-brick house just across the Close.

And no one could refute him, though several tried their best, to his delight. It cannot now be computed by how many years the discovery of his rights prolonged his life--but certainly by some. His liver demanded activity, namely a quarrel, and what a coil this was! If he had been given the choice of all possible opponents, he would have selected the Dean and Chapter, they were so substantial, wealthy, and formidable. And such a thorn in the side of those comfortable personages as these rights of his were like to prove he could hardly have imagined in his most sanguine dreams, or hoped for in his happiest moments.

It was great fun stating his claim, flouting it in their faces, displaying it through the city, brandishing it in season and out of season; but when it came to making a hole in the smooth turf hitherto so sacred, and setting up an unsightly post, and affixing to it a board with "Trespassers will be prosecuted. E. J. Swainson," the fun became furious. So did the Dean, so did the Chapter, so did every sidesman and verger. Bicester was torn in pieces by the contending parties, but Mr. Swainson was firm. The only concession which could be wrung from him was the removal of the obnoxious board. Instead he set a neat iron railing round his property, enclosing just thirty feet by fifteen. Such was the _status in quo_ on this morning, and with it the Dean had for some time been forced to rest content.

Yet, sooth to say, the greatest pleasure of the very reverend gentleman's life was gone with this accession to the roundness and fulness of Mr. Swainson's. No more with the thorough satisfaction of the past could he conduct the American traveller through the ancient crypt, or dilate to the Marquis of Bicester's visitors upon the beauty of the quaint gargoyles. No; that railed-in spot became a plague-spot to him, ever itching, an eyesore even when invisible, a thing to be evaded and dodged and given the slip, as a Dean who is a Dean should scorn to evade anything. He winced at the mere thought that the inquisitive sightseer might touch upon it, and probe the matter with questions. He hurried him past it with averted finger and voluble tongue, nor recovered his air of kindly condescension, or polished ease (as the case might be), until he was safe within his own hall. Only in moments of forgetfulness could the Dean now walk in his Close of Bicester with the grace of old times.

But on this particular morning the sunshine was so pleasant, the wind so balmy, that he walked halfway across the Close as if the river of Lethe flowed fathoms deep over Mr. Swainson's plot. Then it chanced that his eyes in a heedless moment rested upon the enclosure: and he saw that a man was at work in it, and he paused. The Dean knew Mr. Swainson too well to trust him. What was this? By the man's side lay a small heap of greyish-white things, and he was holding a short-handled mallet, which he was using to drive one of the greyish-white things into the ground. From him the Dean's eyes travelled to a couple of parti-coloured sticks, one at each end of the plot. What was this? A thing so terrible that the Dean stood still, and that change came over him which we have described.

Great men rise to the occasion. It was only a moment he thus stood and looked. Then he turned and walked to a house. A tall thin man was standing upon the steps of the house, with the ghost of a smile upon his face. For a moment the Dean could only stammer. It was such a dreadful outrage.

"Is that," he said at last, "is that, sir, being done by your authority?" With a shaking finger he pointed to Mr. Swainson's plot. The tall man in a leisurely way settled a pair of eye-glasses upon his nose and looked in the direction indicated. "Ah, I see what you mean," he said at last. "Certainly, Mr. Dean, certainly!"

"Are you aware, sir, what it is?" gasped the clergyman; "it is sacrilege!"

"Nothing of the kind, I assure you, my dear sir. It's croquet!"

The tone was one of explanation, and the words were uttered with so transparent an air of frankness, that the veins in the Dean's temples swelled and his face grew, if possible, redder than before.

"I won't stay to bandy words with you!" he cried.

"Bandy!" returned the tall man, intensely amused. "Ha, ha, ha! you thought it was hockey! Bandy! Oh, no, you play it with hoops and a mallet. Drive the balls through--so!"

And to the intense delight of the Close people, many of whom were at their windows, Mr. Swainson executed an ungainly kind of gambado upon the steps. "Disgusting," the Dean called it afterwards, when talking to sympathetic ears. Now he merely put it away from him with a wave of the hand.

"I will not discuss it now, Mr. Swainson," he said. "If your feelings of decency and of what is right and proper do not forbid this--this profanity--I can call it nothing else--I have but one word to add. The Chapter shall prevent it."

"The Chapter!" replied the other, in a tone of contempt, which gave place to temper as he continued, "you are well read in history, Mr. Dean, they tell me. Doubtless you remember what happened when King Canute bade the tide come no further. I am the tide, and you and the Chapter--sit in the chair of Canute."

The Dean, it must be confessed, was no little taken aback by this defiance. He was amazed. The two glared at one another, and the clergyman was the first to give way; baffled and disconcerted, yet swelling with rage, he strode towards the Deanery. His antagonist followed him with his eyes, then looked more airily than ever at his plot and the progress made there, considered the weather with his chin at the decanal angle, finally with a flirt of his long coat-tails he went into the house, a happy man and the owner of a vastly improved appetite.

But the Dean had more to suffer yet. At the door of his garden he ran in his haste against some one coming out. Ordinarily, great man as he was, he was also a gentleman. But this was too much. That, when the father had insulted him, the son should collide with him on his own threshold, was intolerable; at any rate at a moment when he was smarting under a sense of defeat.

"Good morning, Mr. Dean," said the young fellow, raising his hat with an evident desire to please that was the antipodes of his father's manner--only the Dean was in no mood to discriminate--"I have just been having a delightful game of croquet."

It is to be regretted, but here a short hiatus in the narrative occurs. The minor canons, than whom no men are more wanting in reverence, say that the Dean's answer consisted of two words, one of them pithy and full of meaning, but in the mouth of a Dean, however choleric, impossible. Accounting this as a gloss, we are driven to conjecture that the Dean's answer expressed mild disapprobation of the game of croquet. Certain it is that young Swainson, surprised by so novel and original a sentiment, answered only--

"I beg your pardon."

"Hem!" the Dean exclaimed. "I mean to say that I do not approve of this. I will come to the point. I must ask you to discontinue your visits at my house." The young man stared as if he thought the excited divine had gone mad; the Deanery was almost a home to him. "Your father," the Dean went on more coherently, "has taken a step so unseemly, so--so indecent, has used language so insulting to me, sir, that I cannot, at any rate at present, receive you."

Young Swainson was a gentleman; moreover, for a very good reason, the Dean failed to anger him. He raised his hat as respectfully as before, bowed in token of acquiescence, and went on his way sorrowfully.

He had a singularly pleasant smile, this young man, though this was not a time to display it. Mrs. Dean had once pronounced him a pippin grafted on a crab-stock, and thereafter in certain circles he had become known as King Pepin. He was tall and straight and open-eyed, with faults enough, but of a generous youthful kind, easily overlooked and more easily forgiven. Doubtless Mr. Swainson would have had his son more practical, cool-headed, and precise, but the shoot did not grow in the same way as the parent tree. Old Swainson would not have been happy without an enemy, nor young Swainson as happy with one; and if, as the former often said, the latter's worst enemy was himself, he was likely to have a prosperous life.

In a space of time inconceivably short, the doings of the old lawyer and the Dean's remonstrance were all over Bicester. Nay, fast as the stone rolled, it gathered moss. It was asserted by people who rapid-grew to be eye-witnesses, that Mr. Swainson had danced a hornpipe in the middle of his plot, snapping his fingers at the Dean, while the latter prodded him as well as he could through the railings with his umbrella; finally that only the arrival of Mr. Swainson's son had put an end to this disgraceful exhibition.

Neither side wasted time. The Dean, the Canon in residence, and the Praecentor, an active young fellow, consulted their lawyer, and talked largely of ejectment, title, and seisin. Mr. Swainson, having nine points of the law in his favour, and as well acquainted with the tenth as his opponent's legal adviser, devoted himself to the fighter pursuit of the mallet and hoop. In a state of felicity undreamt of before, he played, or affected to play, croquet, his right hand against his left, the former giving the latter two hoops and a cage. He played with a cage and a bell; it was more cheerful.

Of course all Bicester found occasion to pass through the Close and see this great sight, while every window in the precincts was raised, that visitors might hear the tap, tap of the sacrilegious mallet. The Cathedral lawyer, urged to take some step, and well versed in the strength of the enemy's position, was fairly nonplussed. While he pondered, with a certain grim amusement, over Mr. Swainson's crotchet, which did not present itself to his legal mind in so dreadful a light as to the mind clerical, some unknown person took action, and made it war to the knife.

"Who did it?" Bicester asked when it rose one morning, to find Mr. Swainson in a state of mind which seemed to call for a padded room and a strait waistcoat. Some one during the night had thrown down the iron railing, taken up and broken the hoops, crushed the bell, and snapped the pegs; all this in the neatest possible manner, and with no damage to the turf. War to the knife indeed! Mr. Swainson, like the famous Widdrington, would have fought upon his stumps on such a provocation.

He expressed his opinion with much heat that this was the work of "that arrogant priest," and that he should smart for it. A clergyman in this kind of context becomes a priest.

The Dean said, if hints went for anything, that it was a more or less direct interposition of Providence.

Young Swainson said nothing.

The vergers followed his example, but smiled broadly.

The Dean's lawyer said it was a very foolish act, whoever did it. Mrs. Dean said that she should like to give the man who did it five shillings. Perhaps her inclination mastered her.

The Dean's daughter sighed.

And Bicester said everything except what young Swainson said.

I have not mentioned the Dean's daughter before. It is the popular belief that she was christened Sweet Clive, and if people are mistaken in this, and the name "Sweet" does not appear upon the favoured register, what of it? It is but one proof the more of the utter want of foresight of godfathers and godmothers. They send into the world the future lounger in St. James's handicapped with the name of Joseph or Zachary, and dub the country curate Tom or Jerry. No matter; Clive, whatever her name, could be nothing but sweet. She was not tall nor short; she was just as tall and just as short as she should have been, with a well-rounded figure and a grave carriage of the head. Her hair was wavy and brown, and sometimes it strayed over a white brow, on which a frown came so rarely that its right of entry was barred by the Statute of Limitations. There were a few freckles about her well-shaped nose. But these charms grew upon one gradually; at first her suitors were only conscious of her grey wide-open eyes, so kind and frank and trustful, and so wise, that they filled every young man upon whom she turned them with a certainty of her purity and goodness and lovableness, and sent him away with a frantic desire to make her his wife without loss of time. With all this, she overflowed with fun and happiness--except when she sighed--and she was just nineteen. Such was Sweet Clive. If her picture were painted to-day, there would be this difference: she is older and more beautiful.

To return to Mr. Swainson's enclosure. Bicester watched with bated breath to see what Mr. Swainson would do. No culprit was forthcoming, and it seemed as if the day were going against him. He made no sign; only the broken hoops, the cage and battered bell, so lately the instruments and insignia of triumph, were cleared away and, at the ex-mayor's strenuous request, taken in charge by the police. Even the iron railing was removed. The excitement in the Close rose high. Once more the Cathedral vicinage was undefiled by lay appropriation, but the Dean knew Mr. Swainson too well to rejoice. The ground was cleared, but only, as he foresaw, that it might be used for some mysterious operations, of which the end and aim--his own annoyance--were clear to him, but not the means. What would Mr. Swainson do?

The strange unnatural calm lasted several days. The Cathedral dignitaries moved in fear and trembling. At length the dwellers in the Close were aroused one night by a peculiar hammering. It was frequent, deep, and ominous, and it came from the direction of Mr. Swainson's plot. To the nervous it seemed as the knocking of nails into an untimely coffin; to the guilty--and this was near the Cathedral--like the noise of a rising scaffold, to the brave and those with clear consciences, such as Clive, it more nearly resembled the erection of a hoarding. Indeed, that was the thing it was, and round Mr. Swainson's plot.

But what a hoarding! When the light of day discovered it to waking eyes, the Dean's fearful anticipations seemed slight to him, as the boy's vision who dreaming he is about to be flogged, awakes to find his father standing over him with a strap. It was so unsightly, so gaunt, so unpainted, so terrible; the stones of the Cathedral seemed to blush a deeper red at discovering it, and the oldest houses to turn a darker purple. Had the Dean possessed the hundred tongues of Fame (which in Bicester possessed many more) and the five hundred fingers of Briareus, he could not hope to prevent the Marquis's visitors asking questions about _that_, nor to divert the attention of the least curious American. He recognised the truth at a glance, and formed his plan. Many generals have formed it; before; it was--retreat. He despatched his butler to borrow a continental Bradshaw from the club, and he shut himself up in his study. The truly great mind is never overwhelmed.

The vergers alone inspected the monster unmoved. They eyed it with glances not only of curiosity, but of appreciative intelligence. Not so, later in the day. Then Mr. Swainson appeared, leading by a strong chain a brindled bull-dog, of the most ferocious description and about sixty pounds dead weight. The animal contemplated the nearest verger with satisfaction, and licked his chops; it might be at some grateful memory. The verger, who was in a small way a student of natural history, pronounced it a lick of anticipation, and appeared disconcerted. Mr. Swainson entered with the dog by a small door at the corner, and came out without him. The other vergers left.

Their coming and going was nothing to Mr. Swainson. It was enough for him that he stood there the cynosure of every eye in the Close; even Mrs. Dean was watching him from a distant garret window. In slow and measured fashion he walked to the steps of his own house, and, taking thence a board he had previously placed there, he returned to the entrance of his plot, now enclosed to the height of about ten feet by his terrible hoarding. Above the door he hung the board and drew back a few feet to take in the effect. Mrs. Dean sent down for her opera-glasses, but there was no need of them. The legend in huge black letters on a white ground ran thus: "No Admittance! Beware of the Dog!!!" A smile of content crept slowly over Mr. Swainson's face, and he said aloud--

"Trump that card, Mr. Dean, if you can."

As he turned--Mrs. Dean saw it distinctly and declared herself ready to swear to it in a court of justice--he snapped his fingers at the Deanery. And the dog howled!

It was the first of many howls, for he was a dog of great width of chest; not even the surgeon of an insurance company, if he had lived twenty-four hours in Bicester Close, would have found fault with his lungs. Why he howled during the night, for it was not the time of full moon, became the burning question of each morning. That he joined in the Cathedral services with a zest which rendered the organ superfluous, and drove the organist to the verge of resignation, was only to be expected. There was nothing strange in that, nor in his rivalry of the Praecentor's best notes, whose voice was considered very fine in the Litany. The voluntary, Tiger made his own; of the sermon he expressed disapproval in so marked a manner that it was hard to say which swelled more with rage, the Dean within or the dog without. Their rage was equally impotent.

Things went so far that the Dean publicly wrung his hands at the breakfast-table. "You could not hear the benediction this morning?" he wailed, with tears in his eyes. "And I was in good voice too, my dear!"

"You should appeal to the Marquis," his wife suggested. It must be explained that the Marquis in Bicester ranks next to and little beneath Providence. But the Dean shook his head. He put no faith in the power even of the Marquis to handle Mr. Swainson. "I will lay it before the Bishop, my dear," he said humbly. And then, then indeed, Mrs. Dean knew that the iron had entered into his soul, and that the hand of the Mayor of the Palace was very heavy upon him; and her good, wifely heart grew so hot that she felt she could have no more patience with her daughter.

For Clive's sympathies were no longer to be trusted. She was not the Sweet Clive of a month ago, but a sadder and more sedate young woman, who had a way of defending the absent foe, and of sighing in dark corners, that was more than provoking. Duty demanded that she should be an ocean, into which her father and mother might pour the streams of their indignation and meet with a sympathising flood-tide. And lo! this unfeeling girl declined to make herself useful in that way, and instead sent forth a "bore" of light jesting that made little of the enemy's enormities and a trifle of his outrages. More, she showed herself for the first time disobedient; she refused to promise not to speak to King Pepin if opportunity served, and, clever girl as she was, laughed her father out of insisting upon it, and kissed her mother into a not unwilling ally. A wise woman was her mother and clear-sighted; she saw that Clive had a spirit, but no longer a heart of her own. Yet at such a time as this, when her husband was wringing his hands, Clive's insensibility to the family grievance tried Mrs. Dean sorely. It was hard that the Canon's sleepless night, the Praecentor's peevishness, the singing man's influenza, and all the countless counts of the indictment against Mr. Swainson should fail to awaken in the young lady's mind a tithe of the indignation felt by every other person at the Deanery, from the Dean himself to the scullery-maid. But then, love is blind, for which most of us may thank Heaven.

Day after day went by and the hoarding still reared its gaunt height, and the unclean beast of the Hebrews still made night hideous, and the day a time for the expression of strong feelings. At length the Dean met his lawyer in the Close, within a few feet of the obnoxious erection. He kept his back to it with ridiculous care, while they talked.

"We have come to something like a settlement at last," the lawyer said briskly. "Con-fusion take the dog! I can hardly hear myself speak. We are to meet at the Chapter House at five, Mr. Dean, if that will suit you; Mr. Swainson, the Bishop, Canon Rowcliffe, and myself. I think he is inclined to be reasonable at last."

The Dean shook his head gloomily.

"You will see it turn out better than you expect," the lawyer assured him. "Let me whisper something to you. There is an action begun against him for shutting up a road across one of his farms at Middleton and it will be stoutly fought. One suit at a time will satisfy even Mr. Swainson."

"You don't say so? This is good news!" the Dean cried, with unmistakable pleasure. "Certainly, I will be there."

"And--I am sure I need not doubt it--you will be ready to meet Mr. Swainson halfway?"

The Dean looked gloomy again. But at this moment a long howl, more frenzied, more fiendish than any which had preceded it, seemed to proclaim that the dog knew that his reign was menaced, and, like Sardanapalus, was determined to go out right royally. It was more than the Dean could stand. With an involuntary movement of his hands to his ears, he nodded and fled in haste to a place less exposed, where he could in a seemly and decanal manner relieve his feelings.

The best-laid plans even of lawyers will go astray, and when they do so, the havoc is generally of a singularly wide-spread description. The meeting in the Chapter-house proved stormy from the first. Whether it was that the writ in the right-of-way case had not yet reached Mr. Swainson, so that he clung to his only split-straw, or that the Dean was soured by want of sleep, or that the Bishop was not thorough enough--whatever was the cause, the spirit of compromise was absent; and the discussion across the Chapter-house table threatened to make matters worse and not better. Whether the Dean first called Mr. Swainson's enclosure the "toadstool of a night," or Mr. Swainson took the initiative by styling the Dean the "mushroom of a day" (the Dean was not of old family), was a question afterwards much and hotly debated in Bicester circles. Be that as it may, the high powers rose from the table in dudgeon and much confusion.

There was behind the Dean at the end of the Chapter-house a large window. It looked immediately-upon what he, in the course of the discussion, had termed "The Profanation," and since the eventful day of Mr. Swainson's match at croquet it had been, by the Dean's order, kept shuttered, that he might not, when occupied in the Chapter-house, have the Profanation directly before his eyes. At the meeting the shutter remained closed; it may be that this phenomenon had weakened Mr. Swainson's doubtful inclination towards peace.

The Dean was a choleric man. As the party rose, he stepped to this shutter and flung it back. He turned to the others and cried with indignation--

"Look, sir; look, my lord! Is that a sight becoming the threshold of a cathedral? Is that a thing to be endured on consecrated ground?"

They stepped towards the window, a wide low-browed Tudor casement, and looked out. The Dean himself stood aside, grasping the shutter with a hand which shook with passion. His eyes were on the others' faces. He expected little show of shame or contrition on that of Mr. Swainson, but he did wish to bring this hideous thing home to the Bishop, who had not been as thorough in the matter as he should have been. Yet surely, as a bishop, he could not see that thing in its horrid reality and be unmoved!

No, he certainly could not. Slowly, and as if reluctantly, his lordship's face changed; it broke into a smile that broadened and rippled wider and wider, second by second as he looked. His colour deepened, until he became almost purple! And Mr. Swainson? His face was the picture of horror; there could not be a doubt of that. Confusion and astonishment were stamped on every feature. The Dean could not believe his eyes. He turned in perplexity to the lawyer, who was peeping between the others' heads. His shoulders were shaking, and his face was puckered with laughter.

The Bishop stepped back. "Really, gentlemen, I think it is hardly fair of us to--to use this window. This is no place for us." He was a kindly man; there never was a more popular bishop in Bicester, and never will be.

At this the Canon and the lawyer lost all control over themselves, and their laughter, if not loud, was deep. The Dean was puzzled--confused, perplexed, wholly angry. He did at last what he should have done at first, instead of striking that attitude with the shutter in his hand. He looked through the window. It was dusty, and he was somewhat nearsighted, but at length he saw; and this was what he saw.

In the further comer of the enclosure, a couple of lovers billing and cooing; about and round them Mr. Swainson's big dog cutting a hundred uncouth gambols. Bad enough this; but it was not all. The ingenuous couple were Frank Swainson and--the Dean's daughter. Frank's arm was around her, and as the Dean looked, he stooped and kissed her, and Clive, raising her face, returned his gaze with eyes full of love, and scarcely blushed.

When the Dean turned he was alone.

Was it very wrong of them? There was nowhere else, since this miserable fracas had begun, where freed from others' eyes, they could steal a kiss. But into Mr. Swainson's plot no window, save a shuttered one, could look; the door, too, was close to one of the side doors of the cathedral, and they could pop in and out again unseen, and as for the big dog, Frank and Tiger were great friends. So if it was very wrong, it was very easy and very sweet and--_facilis descensus Averni_.

For one hour the Dean remained shut up in his study. At the end of that time he put on his hat and walked across the Close. He knocked at Mr. Swainson's door, and, upon its being opened, went in, and did not come out again for an hour and five minutes by Mrs. Canon Rowcliffe's watch. I have not the slightest idea of what passed between them. More than two score different and distinct accounts of the interview were current next day in Bicester, but no one, and I have examined them all with care, seems to me to account for the undoubted results. First the disappearance next day from Mr. Swainson's plot of the famous hoarding, which was not replaced even by the old iron railing. Secondly, the marriage six weeks later of King Pepin and Sweet Clive.

FAMILY PORTRAITS.

FAMILY PORTRAITS.

On a certain morning in last June I was stooping to fasten a shoe-lace, having taken advantage for that purpose of the step of a corner house in St. James's Square, when a man passing behind me stopped.

"Well!" said he, after a short pause during which I wondered--I could not see him--what he was doing, "the meanness of these rich folk is disgusting! Not a coat of paint for a twelvemonth! I should be ashamed to own a house and leave it like that!"

The man was a stranger to me, and his words seemed as uncalled for as they were ill-natured. But being thus challenged I looked at the house. It was a great stone mansion with a balustrade atop, with many windows and a long stretch of area railings. And certainly it was shabby. I turned from it to the critic. He was shabby too--a little red-nosed man wearing a bad hat. "It is just possible," I suggested, "that the owner may be a poor man and unable to keep it in order."

"Ugh! What has that to do with it?" my new friend answered contemptuously. "He ought to think of the public."

"And your hat?" I asked with winning politeness. "It strikes me, an unprejudiced observer, as a bad hat. Why do you not get a new one?"

"Cannot afford it!" he snapped out, his dull eyes sparkling with rage.

"Cannot afford it? But my good man, you ought to think of the public."

"You tom-cat! What have you to do with my hat? Smother you!" was his kindly answer; and he went on his way muttering things uncomplimentary.

I was about to go mine, but was first falling back to gain a better view of the house in question, when a chuckle close to me betrayed the presence of a listener; a thin, grey-haired man, who, hidden by a pillar of the porch, must have heard our discussion. His hands were engaged with a white tablecloth, from which he had been shaking the crumbs. He had the air of an upper servant of the best class. As our eyes met he spoke.

"Neatly put, sir, if I may take the liberty of saying so," he observed, with a quiet dignity it was a pleasure to witness, "and we are very much obliged to you. The man was a snob, sir."

"I am afraid he was," I answered; "and a fool too."

"And a fool, sir. Answer a fool after his folly. You did that, and he was nowhere; nowhere at all, except in the swearing line. Now, might I ask," he continued, "if you are an American, sir?"

"No, I am not," I answered; "but I have spent some time in the States."

I could have fancied that he sighed.

"I thought--but never mind, sir," he began. "I was wrong. It is curious how much alike gentlemen, that are real gentlemen, speak. Now I dare swear, sir, that you have a taste for pictures."

I was inclined to humour the old fellow's mood. "I like a good picture, I admit," I said.

"Then perhaps you would not be offended," he suggested timidly, "if I asked you to step inside and look at one or two. I would not take the liberty, sir, but there are some Van Dycks and a Rubens in the dining-room that cost a mint of money in their day, I have heard; and there is no one in the house but my wife and myself."

It was a strange invitation, strangely brought about. But I saw no reason why I should not accept it, and I followed him into the hall. It was spacious, but sparely furnished. The matted floor had a cold look, and so had the gaunt stand which seemed to be a fixture, and boasted but one umbrella, one sunshade, and one dog-whip. As I passed a half-open door I caught a glimpse of a small room well furnished with prints and water-colours on the walls. But these were of a common order. A dozen replicas of each and all might be seen in a walk through Bond Street. So that even this oasis of taste and comfort told the same story as had the bare hall and dreary exterior; and laid, as it were, a finger on one's heart. I trod softly as I followed my guide along the strip of matting towards the rear of the house.

He opened a door at the inner end of the hall, and led me into a large and lofty room, built out at the back, as a state dining-room or ball-room. At present it resembled the latter, for it was without furniture. "Now," said the old man, turning and respectfully touching my sleeve to gain my attention, "now you will not consider your labour lost in coming to see that, sir. It is a portrait of the second Lord Wetherby by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, and is judged to be one of the finest specimens of his style in existence."

I was lost in astonishment; amazed, almost appalled! My companion stood by my side, his face wearing a placid smile of satisfaction, his hand pointing slightly upwards to the blank wall before us. The blank wall! Of any picture, there or elsewhere in the room, there was no sign. I turned to him and then from him, and I felt very sick at heart. The poor old fellow was--must be--mad. I gazed blankly at the blank wall. "By Van Dyck?" I repeated mechanically.

"Yes, sir, by Van Dyck," he replied, in the most matter-of-fact tone imaginable. "So, too, is this one;" he moved as he spoke a few feet to his left. "The second peer's first wife in the costume of a lady-in-waiting. This portrait and the last are in as good a state of preservation as on the day they were painted."

Oh, certainly mad! And yet so graphic was his manner, so crisp and realistic were his words, that I rubbed my eyes; and looked and looked again, and almost fancied that Walter, Lord Wetherby, and Anne, his wife, grew into shape before me on the wall. Almost, but not quite; and it was with a heart full of wonder and pity that I accompanied the old man, in whose manner there was no trace of wildness or excitement, round the walls; visiting in turn the Cuyp which my lord bought in Holland, the Rubens, the four Lawrences, and the Philips--a very Barmecide feast of art. I could not doubt that the old man saw the pictures; but I saw only bare walls.

"Now I think you have seen them, family portraits and all," he concluded, as we came to the doorway again; stating the fact, which was no fact, with complacent pride. "They are fine pictures, sir. They, at least, are left, though the house is not what it was."

"Very fine pictures," I remarked. I was minded to learn if he were sane on other points. "Lord Wetherby," I said, "I suppose that he is not in London?"

"I do not know, sir, one way or the other," the servant answered with a new air of reserve. "This is not his lordship's house. Mrs. Wigram, my late lord's daughter-in-law, lives here."

"But this is the Wetherby's town house," I persisted. I knew so much.

"It was my late lord's house. At his son's marriage it was settled upon Mrs. Wigram; and little enough besides, God knows!" he exclaimed querulously. "It was Mr. Alfred's wish that some land should be settled upon his wife, but there was none out of the entail, and my lord, who did not like the match, though he lived to be fond enough of the mistress afterwards, said, 'Settle the house in town!' in a bitter kind of joke like. So the house was settled, and five hundred pounds a year. Mr. Alfred died abroad, as you may know, sir, and my lord was not long in following him."

He was closing the shutters of one window after another as he spoke. The room had sunk into deep gloom. I could imagine now that the pictures were really where he fancied them. "And Lord Wetherby, the late peer?" I asked after a pause, "did he leave his daughter-in-law nothing?"

"My lord died suddenly, leaving no will," he replied sadly. "That is how it is. And the present peer, who was only a second cousin--well, I say nothing about him." A reticence which was calculated to consign his lordship to the lowest deep.

"He did not help?" I asked.

"Devil a bit, begging your pardon, sir. But there, it is not my place to talk of these things. I doubt I have wearied you with talk about the family. It is not my way," he added, as if wondering at himself, "only something in what you said seemed to touch a chord like."

By this time we were outside the room, standing at the inner end of the hall, while he fumbled with the lock of the door. Short passages ending in swing doors ran out right and left from this point, and through one of these a tidy, middle-aged woman wearing an apron suddenly emerged. At sight of me she looked much astonished. "I have been showing the gentleman the pictures," said my guide, who was still occupied with the door.

A flash of pain altered and hardened the woman's face. "I have been very much interested, madam," I said softly.

Her gaze left me to dwell upon the old man with infinite affection. "John had no right to bring you in, sir," she said primly. "I have never known him do such a thing before, and--Lord a mercy! there is the mistress's knock. Go, John, and let her in; and this gentleman," with an inquisitive look at me, "will not mind stepping a bit aside, while her ladyship goes upstairs."

"Certainly not," I answered. I hastened to retire into one of the side passages, into the darkest corner of it, and there stood leaning against the cool panels, my hat in my hand.

In the short pause which ensued before John opened the door she whispered to me, "You have not told him, sir?"

"About the pictures?"

"Yes, sir. He is blind, you see."

"Blind?" I exclaimed.

"Yes, sir, this year and more; and when the pictures were taken away--by the present earl--that he had known all his life, and been so proud to show to people just the same as if they had been his own, why it seemed a shame to tell him. I have never had the heart to do it, and he thinks they are there to this day."

Blind! I had never thought of that; and while I was grasping the idea, and fitting it to the facts, a light footstep sounded in the hall and a woman's voice on the stairs; such a voice and such a footstep, that, it seemed to me, a man, if nothing else were left, might find home in them. "Your mistress," I said presently, when the sounds had died away upon the floor above, "has a sweet voice; but has not something annoyed her?"

"Well, I never should have thought that you would have noticed that!" exclaimed the housekeeper; who was, I daresay, many other things besides housekeeper. "You have a sharp ear, sir; that I will say. Yes, there is a something has gone wrong; but to think that an American gentleman should notice it!"

"I am not American," I said, perhaps testily.

"Oh, indeed, sir. I beg your pardon, I am sure. It was just your way of speaking made me think it," she replied. And then there came a second louder rap at the door, as John, who had gone upstairs with his mistress, came down in a leisurely fashion.

"That is Lord Wetherby, drat him!" he said, on his wife calling to him in a low voice; he was ignorant, I think, of my presence. "He is to be shown into the library, and the mistress will see him in five minutes; and you are to go to her room. Oh, rap away!" he added, turning towards the door, and shaking his fist at it. "There is many a better man than you has waited longer at that door."

"Hush, John. Do you not see the gentleman?" his wife interposed, with the simplicity of habit. "He will show you out," she added rapidly to me, "as soon as his lordship has gone in, if you do not mind waiting another minute."

"Not at all," I said, drawing back into the corner as they went on their errands. But though I said, "Not at all," mine was an odd position. The way in which I had come into the house, and my present situation in a kind of hiding, would have made most men only anxious to extricate themselves. But I, while I listened to John parleying with some one at the door, conceived a strange desire, or a desire which would have been strange in another man, to see this thing to the end--conceived it and acted upon it.

The library? That was the room on the right of the hall, opposite to Mrs. Wigrams's sitting-room. Probably, nay I was certain, it had another door opening on the passage in which I stood. It would cost me but a step to confirm my opinion. When John ushered in the visitor by one door I had already, by way of the other, ensconced myself behind a screen, which I seemed to know would mask it. I was going to listen. Perhaps I had my reasons. Perhaps--but there, what matter? As a fact, I listened.