Chapter XXXV (2)

And indeed "flutter-budget" was not amiss as a descriptive word for her who sang oftener than she spoke, because it was her nature to, and who danced more naturally than she walked, because God had made her so.

It was rather ridiculous to think of her painting pictures. One could scarcely imagine her doing anything that required a moment's repose, and therefore was not unnatural the remark whispered by the monochromatic Miss Grey into the ear of the water-colored Miss Bray as the newcomer floated to her seat: "_She_ paint! Mmnph! I wouldn't trust her to paint a yellow dog!"

Miss Grey, by the by, didn't paint: she only taught Art in five lessons at seventy-five cents a lesson.

But the monochromatic maiden was right. Annie Deane would have made a queer mess of painting a yellow dog. But if one chose to give her an order for a flower-piece, then would be seen how she rivalled the pearly finish of Nature--how she gathered the rare tints, the marvellous transparencies and shadows, the breath-broken dewiness, almost even the fragrance of field and garden favorites, upon her paper. Thus in time even the yellow-dog sceptic was brought to realize that there are artistic triumphs even for one who quails and cowers before the ochreous canine.

"Shall I help you to some more of the greens?" were his first words to her, seeing her indigo mandarins loom up dimly from her nearly empty plate.

"No, thank you, but I will trouble you for the vinegar," were her first words to him.

There was nothing novel or suggestive in this, was there? Is there often anything novel or suggestive in the first greetings we exchange as we float upon the sea of life with those who hereafter will cause our wreck or share it?

These two people, He and She, became great friends that summer. Her fresh, blithe nature was pleasant to him, although, it may be confessed, its manifestations were sometimes confusing. He was of rather elephantine temperament, as he was also heroic of stature and handsome. He was so unswift of speech and motion that she could dance around him a dozen times before he could say "Jack Robinson;" which, by the way, he never did say. She often got sadly in the way of his slow, conscientious sketching from Nature, but he did not complain, for she was pleasant, he thought, to look upon, even though his palette dried and the cloud-shadow on hill and sea floated miles away while he did so.

It was not a sentimental relation that grew up between them. How could it be when everybody said there was "no sentiment in Ben Shaw, or even in his pictures"? They were never known to raise any clamor concerning their "kinship of souls" and all the usual sentimental etcetera. They liked each other, and took "solid comfort" in the companionship that made that summer's sketching so much pleasanter than had sketching ever been for either of them before. That was all.

It was not very long before he very naturally took the place of teacher and she of pupil, for it was an open secret that she aspired to higher art than still life, while he, although not six months her senior, had been longer a student than she. Simpletons that they both were, they grappled audaciously with the purple, gold-filtered, ever-elusive and brooding mystery of the distant hills, and struggled with the infinite suggestiveness of the great, awful sea. They came home every night from both grapple and struggle with canvases as expressive of the mighty influences they had labored with as a child's fairy-tale hints at the divine splendor of mystery of the book of Revelation, and sat down to their supper of cold beef and doughnuts believing they feasted on ambrosia and nectar, and lived as divinely as were those not Massachusetts but Thessalian hills. How insolent is youth, and how foolish, to us who have outlived it!

Unsymmetrical as this friendship was--that is, so dwarfed on the sentimental side--there was one of those two silly mortals who thus fooled themselves with the fancy that this was Olympus and their green apple-sauce honey of Hymettus who would not have changed places with the divinest divinity of all the immortal host.

As one moon after another waxed baby-faced and then pined away to a wan shadow the friends became more inseparable than ever. And, behold! seeing these things, all the masculine boarders and the "girls" of the manor-house looked at each other obliquely with an expression that consorts best with paganism and pig-tails, while the lady-boarders smiled with that exasperating significance which when given to one's own affairs makes one yearn for the smiler's scalp. But in spite of these oblique glances and significant smiles, in spite of everything indicative of the contrary, they were not an atom in love with each other.

Unless they both of them fibbed! Which young people in their circumstances were never known to do.

Nevertheless, one day Annie Deane was sitting in an embrasured window writing, school-girl fashion, upon an atlas in her lap. She wore a blue gingham dress in the style of a loose blouse. The skirt was short, and had no scruples about revealing two nicely-booted feet crossed one over the other, the toe of one pointing to the zenith, the other toward the coast of Europe. This was her sketching-costume, and she had not found time to change it for the more conventional one in which she usually took tea, as she was hurrying to finish a letter in time for the butcher, who would soon pass by on his return from Mansfield, to take to the post-office at Baysville.

The room was spacious, and tried its best to be gloomy. The canopied bed against the wall was hung with funereal drapery, and reminded one somehow of a _Cinque-cento_ tomb. When an occupant was extended there the resemblance could not but be dolorously striking. A tremendous old chest of drawers opposite, mighty among furniture as Goliath among men, hung its brass rings massively downward; and I was forcibly reminded of that chest of drawers the other day when I saw how the sainted dead of imperial Rome were packed away in the Catacombs of St. Calixtus. Imagine a chest of drawers which gives an impression that upon pulling its brass rings one will see, not dainty garments frothy with lace and ruffles, but a spectacle of rich animal mould and white holy bones! There were one or two dignified old chairs--judicial, majestic chairs, which evidently imagined that they impressed the vulgar radicals of this New World with the idea that in their own country they had been thrones or something of that sort. It was a most dignified and impressive room in spite of its rag carpet, its cane-seated rockers, camp-stools, books, the sketches pinned upon the walls, flowers, and all the odds and ends of feminine finery that betrayed the levity of its modern habit. That is, perhaps one might better say it would have been dignified and impressive had one ever been able to see it otherwise than as merely an architectural background, like the chairs behind Giovanni Bellini's gracious Madonnas, to the pretty picture of youth and content writing there by the seaward window. Everybody always spoke of Annie Deane as "little," although she was five feet four in her stockings. Everybody always ran away with the impression--and treated her accordingly--that she was very young, although she had seen every day of twenty-five years. "I was born young, and have never learned much of anything since," she would laughingly say when somebody had called her "child" and advised her about her manners.

She _was_ a child spiritually, and it certainly seemed as if she would never be spiritually grown up. Her father had died at sixty, so springy of step, so airy of movement, so jaunty, so natty, so nice in his No. 3 gaiters and his nobby hats, that to see him ten paces off one would have sworn he had not twenty years upon his canary-bird head. Annie was like him, and her head swung and swayed, fluttered and tiptilted on its graceful neck, as much as his had done as a young canary-bird's ways are like an old one's.

"Ef the air of that girl ain't enough to make a hoss larf!" said, with edifying perseverance, the youngest and burnt-umberest of the burnt-umber maidens with whom they boarded.

Miss Roberta Editha was sentimental and thirty-five. She pressed a vision of beauty to her virginal breast. Years before she had cut from some illustrated paper a very pretty picture representing some strolling actor who played Hamlet and Claude Melnotte upon the boards of rural theatres. It had miraculously large eyes, a small mouth with downward curves, and flat rings of hair upon its pallid brow. Its air was generally cankered and worm-eaten, but Miss Roberta ("Old Bob," some of the graceless artists called her behind her back) interpreted that air as expressive of a soul which found this life of too rank and coarse a flavor for its daily food. She had cut out this woodcut, and had worn it for years in a massive heirloom locket around her long, brown neck.

It was the Ideal of her Yearning Soul. "Never till I meet a Being like this will I give my heart," she had said, now these many years. Once she thought she had met that Being: it was the natty clerk who sold her calico and clothes-pins at Mansfield. But when that mercenary Hylas married a Baysville widow with money she wept a while, and then saw clearly through her tears that the deceiver looked not in the least like a Being, but only like a very commonplace man. Once again it was an artist who had boarded with them a summer, and whose red hair fell over his rosy brow in a manner that indicated a possible Being. But it turned out that this artist was married and the father of a thriving family; whereupon he too faded out of Roberta Editha's ideal world into the prosaic region where are not Beings, but only men and women. After that it was several artists, all of whom in turn had died, under some blight, out from the thoughts of the burnt-umber maiden. Latterly she had been bending soulful eyes upon Ben Shaw, sure that at last in his lineaments she could trace the adored image. Ben's eyes were neither miraculously large nor superlatively dark: neither had he a small mouth with downward curves. He was blond and robust, inclined to be rather high-colored, especially after dinner, which proved his digestion defective or that appetite outran it; but, setting such little discrepancies aside, she was sure her Ideal was there.

But while Roberta Editha described Annie Deane's airy manners in such unflattering terms, it is more than probable that Ben Shaw would be saying to the latter at that very moment, "Never lose your youthful nature, and always preserve your young ways, Annie: they are your greatest charm." For this was a habit with Ben Shaw.

She was smiling and bridling now as she wrote by the seaward window, although she must have known that nothing could see her save that turquoise crescent of sea, the blue arch of the sky and the swaying rose-globes and leaves that shadowed her paper. She could not even dip her pen into the ink like anybody else, but must needs poise over it for a breezy instant, just as a humming-bird flutters over honeyed flowers.

She had just written these words: "Truly, mamma dear, he has never said a word of love to me, and yet, strange as it may seem, I am as sure that he loves me as--"

A voice called up from the southern-wood thicket under her window, where somebody, rubicund with stooping, was picking burdock-burrs from off his trousers' legs, "Miss Deane, will you go with me to see the sunset from Castle Rock? We can be home in time for supper."

When the butcher rattled by in company with a staring calf's head and quivering pig's liver, nobody hailed him from the Tudor mansion. Roberta Editha was kneading bread on top of a flour-barrel in the buttery; Ethelberta was picking over currants on the back doorstep; and Miss Bray stood a little way off toward the lichen-grown stone wall blocking in her Antignone wailing over Polynices. Miss Bray had chosen the elder and more commonplace Ethelberta for her suggestion of a position, rather than the younger and more poetic Roberta Editha, for the simple reason that the former's attitude over her currants was more suggestive of an heroic corpse on her knees and less of a chastised infant than Roberta's would be under any circumstances.

Rowena, the eldest of the "girls," was busy at that moment, if the truth must be told, in looking to see if any of the boarders had carelessly left bureau-drawers or writing-desks unlocked. The boarders were all absent upon hill or shore, the invalid father slept in his chair, the mother in Baysville cemetery, and the Tudor mansion was still.

On a monster rock a mile or more away two figures made silhouettes against the jewelled sunset.

"Annie," said one of the figures, "I did not wish to make a sensation by telling it first at the supper-table, and I want _your_ congratulations before any others. I have sold my _Esmeralda_. I go to Boston to-morrow, and shall sail for Europe next week."

Her sight was darkened, her heart stood still. Life seemed to die out of her with one horrible pang. Nevertheless, in an instant her head tiptilted, and she twittered her congratulations as airily as if the whole universe had burst into a sudden marvel of bloom and beauty and she were the first humming-bird born into it.

"Always keep your young nature and preserve your young ways, Annie," he said admiringly: "they are your greatest charm."

Then they turned and walked supperward together.

* * * * *

The Neapolitan steamer was greasy and smelled of garlic and bitumen. The red-shirted sailors were singing "Santa Lucia" from high and low, and a stalwart contadina was accompanying them with her tambourine down in the third-class place. Very few passengers were scattered about the deck, and the general speech was of the Blue Grotto. Evidently, of the first-class passengers only two were making more than an excursion from Naples, the excursionists intending to return with the steamer after a peep into the famous cave.

One of these two persons was rather a remarkable-looking lady. She wore a jaunty hat many years too young for the face: it did _not_ shade. Her coquettish jacket and short skirt made her from a distance--a very long one--seem like a girl of eighteen. She wore her hair in a girlish braid--alas, woefully faded! She was airy of motion and coquettish of gesture, evidently one of those sad women who, burying their heads from the sight of the passing years, fancy that Time forgets to touch them.

The other person was a handsome gentleman of more than forty. The Hyperion curls had been thicker on his brow than now, and his shadow more slender, but it by no means follows that he was as bald as Cæsar or as bulky as the Belvidere Torso. He was dressed in elegant travelling costume, and, as well-dressed men must be, with coat evidently of London make and trousers Parisian.

As he dropped a handsome travelling-satchel on the coal-flecked seat beside the lady's color-box he chanced to meet her eye. It was a curious meeting of eyes that had last met so differently. He had only time to commune with his secret soul, "What a larky old girl!" when a look of half-startled recognition came into his face.

It was reflected in hers, and a humming-bird tremor passed over her.

"Was this not formerly Miss Deane?" he asked.

"It _is_ Miss Deane, Mr. Shaw," twittered the lady, with head tiptilted like a frosted flower.

Alas! what a tyrant is that power which makes and moulds us like potter's clay to her own patterns, whether of glory or shame, and whom we call Nature!--a tyrant which forms us into that which we would cry and pray not to be were there any ear to be moved by our beseeching. Alas, poor Annie! It was not her fault that Nature took a canary-bird for her model. And it is the fault of none of us that the graces of our youth become grotesquenesses with our forties.

"Who would ever have dreamed of our meeting here? And to think you are still Miss Deane!" he exclaimed with obtuseness pre-eminently masculine. "But you are very pale: does the motion of the steamer make you ill?"

Nearer and nearer came the opalescent isle, drawn like a jewelled chariot by thousands of blue coursers with foaming mouths.

After fifteen minutes or so of vague reminiscences and comparisons of experiences of travel the gentleman seemed to fall into a brown study and to become almost rudely oblivious of his companion's presence. His eyes were riveted upon the island with a strange intensity. Could the airy little old maid by his side have heard the beating of the heart in that broad bachelor bosom, she would have been astonished, as would almost anybody else, to hear its sentimental music. "At last, after all these cruel years!" was its refrain.

Cruelty was evidently a discipline that did not impoverish his physical system.

Upon the beach was a scene of uproar and confusion. Brown-faced peasant-girls, with dark eyes like wild sylvan creatures, thrust wilted flowers into the travellers' hands and clamored for _soldi_. Fisher-boys, almost as naked as bronze cupids, yelled offers to guide anybody and everybody up the heights to the village. Bright-shirted and bare-legged boatmen, with Indian locks and huge gold crescents in their ears, bellowed to each other, while weatherbeaten crones screamed till they were hoarse that here were the saddled donkeys on which _i signori_ could ride.

Mr. Shaw assisted Miss Deane--whom, until he saw her nearly pulled in pieces between two donkey-women, he had quite forgotten--upon one of the most docile-looking of the animals.

She mounted with such thistledown sprightliness that she nearly went over the saddle and down on the other side. He looked astonished as she fluttered above his hat, and then--forgot her.

If any one find this portly bachelor discourteous and basely recreant to certain of the best memories of his manhood, let that one stop a moment and think. This frisky lady, who always seemed carrying on a most desperate flirtation with some invisible adorer, was certainly not the Annie of his summer in the Tudor mansion. She was spiritually not a day older than Annie, but her face was very much older; and what, after all, is the same soul to us if the casket is strange? What is a young face grown old to us who knew its youth and have not seen its changing? Moreover, that perennial youth of hers, touching and sad as it may possibly seem when thought about, would have been the object of your ridicule could you have seen it face to face.

Much as we may prate of natures ever young, there is no more melancholy sight in the world than soul and body that miss step with each other in this heavy and forced march called Life. Why should we seek to keep our hearts young, we who must die? For unto youth or youthfulness what is death but darkness and night at noonday?

Then another thing to excuse Mr. Shaw's apparent neglect: he was approaching a crisis of his own life, and what are the convulsions of a universe compared to those quicker heart-beats which we call Crises in our little lives?

After assisting Miss Deane he mounted another donkey, and rode, not exactly like paladin of old, but like a portly and absent-minded modern tourist, silently by her side up the steep path, whither their luggage followed them upon the heads of women.

Between their donkeys strode a bare-legged woman in a ragged petticoat. She was bronzed and wrinkled, with straggling hair thrust through with a silver arrow, and coarse brown chemise falling widely open over an unlovely neck and breast. She uttered many a strident yell, accentuated by heavy thwacks of her club upon her donkeys' flanks. She was dirty, wild-eyed and hideous. It were as difficult to imagine her comely and young as to believe this little dried-up old girl had not been a flirting old maid from her cradle.

Ah, but Nature is cruel to woman! Freshness and beauty of flesh are hers, not that she may rejoice in her own beauty and freshness, but that she may become the mother of men. Bearing children, in the bearing dies one beauty and charm after another, just as trees die, leaf by leaf, which have enriched the world by their allotted harvests. Childless, her beauty and freshness die of her unfruitfulness, while Nature's pet offspring, man, waxes strong and proud years after all her leaves have fallen.

Look at these three people: the handsome and robust bachelor was the oldest of them all.

"What a capital model she would make for an Erinnys hunting Orestes to his fate!" thought Miss Deane.

She was bumping up and down in her saddle like a rubber ball. Nevertheless, in the pauses of those bumps she had time enough to grow very angry at something she saw. She turned a regular Spitzenberg red as she detected the searching, passionate gaze her companion bent upon every pretty islander they met. She saw the black-eyed girl with a huge bundle of fagots on her head, the brown-eyed one with immense building-timbers pressing down her curly locks, the blue-eyed one with copper water-jar gleaming goldenly over her dagger-thrust braids, smile significantly after coquettishly returning his gaze.

They are not so guileless as one might think, those picturesque, brown-skinned island-girls. Too many foreign artists have come this way, and too many strong-limbed, full-chested girls have become first their models, then mothers of their children, and then their wedded wives, not now-a-days to look upon every gazing _forestiere_ as a possible husband, or at least lover.

Yet is it true that not one of them dreamed of the feeling beneath that immaculately-laundried shirt-bosom as the wearer turned away from them, one girl after another. Why should they, forsooth? Had not even Ben Shaw's own friends always declared there was no sentiment in him, or even in his pictures?

At one of her donkeys' stumbles over the lava-stones the driver yelled so horribly in Miss Deane's ears that that lady's discomfort puckered her face up like a frozen apple.

Mr. Shaw saw it. "By Jove!" he remarked to his donkey, who laid back its ears and pretended to understand English, "I must have been very veally ever to find that face pretty! But there's one thing sure: she has taken on a thousand girlish airs and graces with every year she has lived since then."

Poor Annie! Not an air or a grace had she more than fifteen years before. And how was she to know that she was too old for a girl's ways, she who had never ceased to be a girl to become wife and mother?

Quoth Mr. Shaw to the driver, "My good woman, if you will drive these beasts with less noise it will be better for your _buona mancia_."

The "good woman" stared. She had done a good deal of staring since they left the beach far down below. Her eyes in this moment looked out fiercer than ever from the bed of wrinkles folded about them by many a tropical sun and scorching sirocco. "Has the signor ever been upon the island before?" she asked a moment later.

"Si, madre mia: I was here one summer several years ago. I lived in yonder palm-shaded house facing toward Sicily. I painted pictures here. Afterward I went away to my own country." Then he added, with melancholy intonation, half under his breath, "I ought to have returned long ago: I have come only to-day."

Miss Deane was looking over the tops of lava-walls that narrowed in their climbing way. She saw pale-green vineyards changing color and trembling in the sea air like a maiden under her lover's first kiss. Gloomy stone-pines guarded the hills like eternal sentinels. Through dim gray-green olive-thickets houses that seemed of alabaster shimmered and shone in the sunshine.

They had now climbed so high up the orange- and lemon-flecked sides of the island that Vesuvius yonder seemed to sink low and slumberously upon the bosom of the radiant bay, while Naples across the little stretch of sea showed vaguely white in the golden distance, scarcely more real than a city sculptured in snow beneath an August sun. Up from vineyard and thicket, down from the village and the cactus-pencilled heights beyond, came the long-drawn, melancholy wail which is the islander's song at his labor, but which is weird and mournful enough to be the swan-song of a parting soul to its mate.

She was aroused from her artistic dreaminess by the croaking of a voice broken by years of vociferous yellings: "Dio mio! si: you painted Antonia Pisano. Yes, yes, I remember. You painted her over on yonder cliff, from whence she watched the barca of her lover Giuseppe gone fishing for coral over on the African coast. You called the picture _Good-bye, Sweetheart_. Si, I remember. You were handsomer than you are now, and your shoulders were not so broad. There were patches all over your velveteen blouse, and you remained here after all the other foreign artists were gone, because the money came not with which you must pay Giaccomo for the macaroni you had eaten for months, and the barber Angelo in the piazza for the canvases and colors you had used in painting Antonia all the months of that summer. Si, si, I remember."

The handsome bachelor looked distressed at the coarsely-vivid realism with which the woman pictured that most idyllic summer of his life.

Miss Deane considerately pretended not to have heard, and kept her blue eyes vaguely set in the direction of the dread volcano dreaming in the arms of the bay. But she had mistaken the cause of her countryman's embarrassment. And who would not have done so, believing as all the world does that romance and robustness mate not together?

"Yes, I was very poor in those days. Many and many a dinner did I go without, that I might buy a new kerchief for Antonia or send to Naples for another string of beads for her neck. Those patches betrayed only half my poverty, for nobody knew that I put them there myself to save the few soldi a seamstress would demand, that I might give Antonia another festa and worship her wild grace as she danced the tarantella and rattled her castanets upon the moonlighted roof of some fisher-friend's house."

He seemed to address Miss Deane, for he spoke in English. She, in common politeness, could not do less than say, "Indeed! And who was Antonia?"

"She is the loveliest creature on the island, and as good as she is beautiful. She came as straight from the heart of Nature as a flower or a bird's song. Neither poetry nor painting could ever grasp the freshness of her wild sweetness: one must see her to know the abject poverty of their highest efforts."

To hear such adolescent rubbish from middle-aged lips what sensible mortal would not have giggled in his sleeve?

Strangely enough, it was the donkey-woman who proved her good sense and surprised them both not only by laughing discordantly aloud, but by speaking in very broken but intelligible English: "Si, si, I remember. And why have you come back to the island, signor?"

Actually, the bachelor blushed. "To marry Antonia," he said as bashfully as if he weighed one hundred instead of two hundred and twenty pounds, "and to remain on this savagely-beautiful isle all the rest of my life."

This he had said in Italian. But he continued, half musingly, in his mother tongue: "I could not take her away with me _then_, even though I loved her with all my heart and she was willing to share my poverty. I had not the heart to see her pine and pale in narrow city streets. I knew that she was a wild flower that would lose fragrance and beauty, would die, if transplanted from its native soil. I went away to earn money enough that I might come back and live with my darling where only she could live at her best. I have worked hard for her in all these years. I know I ought to have come sooner, but it insensibly grew a habit with me each year to wait yet one year more, that I might come to her a little richer. But I have come at last. I have sent her letters and presents each year, and she has written me often through some amanuensis, for she cannot write herself; and I am come to her able to say truly that she is the only woman I ever loved, or ever imagined myself to have loved, in all my life."

How little that man dreamed who heard him say this--that one heard him who for fifteen long years had guarded in the purest crystal of her memory the belief, "though all things fade and die, and even he forget me, yet _once_ he loved me"! This to her, the faded, slight little old maid, thumping up and down on her donkey like a Neapolitan girl's fist on her tambourine, whose crystal-guarded treasure turned to dust before her eyes, and who knew thus for the first time that it was but a spurious treasure she had guarded since that summer by the sea!

She seemed somehow much smaller and paler, more faded and wrinkled, than before, when the donkey-woman laughed again. That unlovely creature said, with witch-like laughter, "You told Antonia that you loved her better than Giuseppe ever could--that you would marry her and make her a signora who should wear a gold ring and have shoes for every day. You went away saying that you would come back when you had sold your pictures. You have not come back until to-day, and you come back to laugh at poor Antonia for being such a fool as to believe a foreign signor would tell the truth to an island-girl."

She gave a thundering thwack upon the donkeys' flanks as the party rushed across the tiny lava-paved piazza where all the island was gathered to see the new arrivals pass on through a dusky-arched street to the albergo-door.

The cook, chambermaid, landlord, facchino and landlady rushed to bid the travellers welcome in island fashion. The landlord was barefooted; the landlady was the fruitful bough from which hung an apple-shaped infant; the cook, chambermaid and facchino were each armed with the insignia of their different professions--stewpan, broom and blacking-brush.

Returning their salutations, the gentleman and lady descended from their steeds. Mr. Shaw turned to pay the donkey-woman for her services.

And, behold! she lifted up once more that hoarse, broken voice to croak with frightful glee, "Make it a good buona mancia, Signor Ben, for the sake of old times. It was Giuseppe who answered your letters: I am Antonia his wife, mother of his ten children. It should be a good, a brave buona mancia that I did not wait for you--not thirteen years, not even six months, only till Giuseppe came home from his coral-fishing."

Till her dying day the little old maid will never forget the look that settled upon his face after the first paralyzed moment in which he realized the woman's meaning. It was such a look that she hastily averted her eyes and tremblingly followed the chambermaid up the wide stone stairs.

She never saw him afterward, for he left the island that same evening. But she heard of him only last summer. He has married a sprightly girl of eighteen, and has some renown in his own country--that of being the heaviest eater, sleeper, talker and _sitter_ of the Lotus Club.

As his friends always said, he has no sentiment, even in his pictures.

As for Miss Deane, she is no older now than then. The volatile drops in her blood effervesce as of old, and her flirtation is as desperate with that invisible adorer as if she were twenty instead of--more.

But it is true that sometimes, at long intervals, she takes a bit of yellow paper from a secret place, and her spectacles grow dim (she wears them only in private) as she reads, in a feminine hand that seems to skip and chipper all over the page, "Truly, mamma dear, he has never said a word of love to me, and yet, strange as it may seem, I am as sure that he loves me as--" Then she usually giggles, in queer, mirthless fashion, as she chirrups, "What a ridiculous little goosie I was!" before she folds the paper away for another long repose, readjusts her coquettish but scanty frizzes, and goes down stairs again to her invisible adorer and her perpetual flirtation.

And nobody hears the wail in her foolish old-young heart as she goes: "Ah, why might it not have been?"

Alas! why not?

For then she might have been less lively, and he less dead, both grown side by side into richer, fuller, sweeter ripeness for the great harvester whom we call Death.

MARGARET BERTHA WRIGHT.

LIMOGES, AND ITS PORCELAIN.

The traveller who, leaving Paris by express at 10 A.M., reaches the Orleans dépôt at Limoges at six in the evening, will see spacious boulevards, imposing buildings and a general air of stateliness and pretension, recalling the metropolis he left behind him in the morning. His omnibus will whisk him through streets crowded with promenaders, a picturesque panorama of well-dressed people, with a generous sprinkling of the light-blue jackets of the chasseurs, the gleaming helmets of the dragoons, the red kepis of the infantry, the broad-brimmed hats and sable mantles of the priesthood and the red-and-orange head-kerchiefs of the working-women. If it be late in the season and the days are short, he will see at every turn cafés ablaze with light, and the wide sidewalks before them lined with tables at which, cool as it may be, crowds of loungers are seated sipping bier, absinthe or eau sucrée. But, looking up the dingy side-streets, here and there he may detect, by the lines of flickering, straggling gas-lights, glimpses of another Limoges--glimpses of steep streets ending in stairways; of narrow and darkened passages where the opposite buildings nod to each other from across the street until they all but touch; of courts where curious little enshrined images of the Madonna and the saints look down from niches in the corners, and where heads are peeping out from every window to catch a whiff of evening air; and of sombre alleys, each lighted by a single lamp suspended midway, under the uncertain rays of which swarms of children and dogs are vying to awaken the loudest echoes.

A great conflagration devastated Limoges in 1865, but it proved to that city what our political economists would have us believe the national debt has been to the United States--a blessing in disguise. Incident to the rebuilding of the burnt quarter a spirit of general renovation seems to have crept over the minds of the city fathers, and from that time to the present the work of tearing down old buildings and widening or straightening narrow or crooked streets has been pushed forward to such a degree that were some Limousin Rip Van Winkle, after a twenty years' slumber in the adjacent mountains, to happen in suddenly upon the haunts of his childhood, he would open his eyes as wide as did his Knickerbocker namesake. But there are some things that no amount of outlay or engineering can accomplish; and though many costly improvements have been made in modernizing Limoges and bringing it up to a realizing sense of its dignity as the great porcelain-manufacturing city of Europe, there are yet within its walls some streets so crooked that nothing short of total demolition will ever straighten them, and others so steep and rocky that enough nitro-glycerine to shake down a hundred neighboring houses would have to be employed to level them. So it has come to be acknowledged that, with all the goodwill in the world for putting on modern airs, there are tumble-down, straggling, rickety relics of the past in Limoges which no amount of municipal resolutions or appropriations--nothing, in fact, but an earthquake--can ever remove. Every lover of the antique and quaint will fervently pray that no such disaster may ever come to efface the curious reminders of a time gone by.

For they are the pages upon which successive centuries have left their imprints. Here, for instance, is a street called the Rue du Consulat. By a happy coincidence, the United States consular office fronts upon it, but let not the patriotic American flatter himself that the street thence derives its name. Here lived one of the Roman proconsuls, and here stood the building in which the governors of the city, formerly known as "consuls," held their sessions. In this simple fact we discover a suggestion of the impress left by the domination of the Romans. But on their heels, in turn, came the Visigoths; then Clovis, who made Limoges one of his first conquests; and then the Saracens, who barely set foot on the soil ere Charles Martel's victory at Poitiers compelled them to leave. Some fragmentary bands, however, remained in the province, and one of them founded the neighboring city of Eymontiers, where buildings of Arabic architecture are still standing.

The Moors, surging northward from Spain, have left their impress in these fertile valleys that border the Vienne--an impress everywhere visible in the olive complexions and the costumes of the people, and audible in their language. The ethnologist is astonished at discovering so far to the North all the characteristics of a Spanish population. On fair-days, when the peasantry from a wide circuit are gathered on the Champ de Foires, one hears spoken a dialect incomprehensible to ordinary Frenchmen. It is a patois, a rolling, mellifluous brogue, much resembling the Gascon or the tongue spoken in the Basque provinces among the Pyrenees. Nor are the country-people the sole monopolists of this singular accent: the talk of most of the town-people is more or less tinctured with it. It is to the pure French what a good sweet Irish brogue is to the pure English. It is "Gascon"--and, after all, that is the only word that describes it--and you hear it spoken at every corner in Limoges, just as you meet everywhere swarthy faces, lustrous black eyes, raven hair and a marked dominance of the Southern type.

Limoges has had many masters. Charlemagne made a present of it to his son, Louis le Débonnaire. On another occasion, though the place is nearly two hundred miles inland, the Norman pirates came marching in and sacked it utterly. Louis the Stammerer, Carloman and Eudes were each in turn here crowned king of Aquitaine, and the last in 876 established the line of viscounts of Limoges, the last of whom, Henry of Navarre, reunited the domain to the crown of France. These viscounts inhabited from the thirteenth century the castle of Chalusset, about ten miles distant from the city. Its ruins are still interesting, and are a favorite resort for pleasure-parties. But still more frequently visited are the ruins of the castle of Chalus or Chabrol, where Richard C[oe]ur de Lion fell in 1199. A railway-ride of an hour to Bussière-Galand, and another hour by stage, bring the visitor there. The very spot on which Richard fell is pointed out, and even at this late day it is proposed to erect there a monument bearing this inscription:

ANNO DOMINI 1199,
HIC
TELUM LEMOGIÆ OCCIDIT LEONEM
ANGLIÆ.

After Richard's death Limoges kept on changing masters as before. In 1355, Edward the Black Prince unfurled the British flag from its battlements, but Bishop Jean de Crose, in whose charge he had left it, delivered it over to the king of France. Edward returned in wrath, recaptured it and put many of the inhabitants to the sword. Under Charles VII. Limoges became permanently a French city, retaining its peculiar form of local government by twelve consuls, which constituted it a sort of independent republic. As Jeanne d'Albret, mother of Henry of Navarre, was viscountess of Limoges, it was impossible that the surrounding province should escape being drawn into the wars of religion. At Roche l'Abeille, a few miles south of the city, is the battle-field where Admiral Coligny's Protestant army met and defeated the royal forces under the duke of Anjou. But with the accession of Henry IV. came a new order of things, and the visit of that monarch in 1605 opened an era of industry, prosperity and peace.

To this day the butchers of Limoges have good cause to remember Henry's visit. That chivalrous but improvident ruler was always pecuniarily embarrassed, and never, it appears, more so than on that October day when, preceded by the flower of the military, magistracy and ecclesiastical dignitaries of the province, he rode in through the gorgeous gateway surmounted by a colossal figure of the giant Limovex, the traditional founder of the city, which held a silver key in the right hand and a heart in the left, by way of tendering to His Majesty the submission and affections of the city. The butchers' guild was at that period notoriously prosperous and wealthy. A happy conceit entered the royal mind. For and in consideration of a handsome sum of money and so many horses he offered to accord them in perpetuity the right of heading the escort whenever thereafter royalty should enter the city. The butchers took up the offer, paid the cash, produced the required number of horses, and in return received a charter and privileges which they have jealously guarded to this day. In 1810, when the duc de Berri, and in 1844, when the duc de Montpensier, visited Limoges, the butchers, with their white flag bearing a green cross, led the van in the processions that escorted them. The butchers form a little community, living all to themselves in the heart of the city, and intermarrying to such a degree that only five or six surnames are to be found among the eighty-odd families composing them. In the crooked, narrow little street, only two blocks long, which they inhabit--it is called the Rue des Boucheries--there are none but meat-shops, and the names "Cibeau," "Malvolin" and one or two others predominate on the signs over the doorways. In this babel of patronymics nicknames become necessary to distinguish one from another, and accordingly we find one man known as "_alias_ Louis XVIII.," another as "_alias_ the Captain," and so on through a variety of amusing sobriquets. These butchers are richer to-day, if anything, than they were in Henry's time, and there is no impecunious monarch to levy on them now. They have their own place of worship too, a little chapel dedicated to St. Aurelien, and standing modestly aside in a court at the foot of their narrow street. It is scarcely larger than the vestibule of an ordinary church, and its exterior is as plain as that of any country barn. But step quietly in, and as soon as your eyes are accustomed to the gloom look about you. What a surprise! Frescoes, stained glass, paintings, statuary, tapestries and vessels of gold and silver are crowded together with lavish profuseness in that little sanctuary. A monolith cross dating from the fifteenth century stands just outside the portal, bearing exquisitely-carved representations of Christ, the Virgin and the apostles--a gem of sculpture rearing itself unexpectedly in the midst of a muddy and squalid neighborhood.

The history of Limoges, like that of most European cities, is closely interwoven with that of its churches. St. Michael of the Lions, familiarly known as the Church of the Boule d'Or from a large gilded ball which adorns its tapering spire, stands upon one of the highest points in the city. About its base, in the niches between its projecting abutments, cobblers and dealers in old clothes and bric-à-brac have, with the sanction of time, reared unopposed their rickety shanties, so that the church-walls, with their ancient carvings and quaint designs, seem to spring up incongruously out of a medley of combustible rubbish. On the steps at the main doorway, in careless disorder, are to be seen the three life-size stone lions which gave the church its name. They date from the twelfth century, and are so worn by time that only the outlines of their features are still discernible. St. Michael's spire, which is one hundred and sixty-five feet high and ascended by an iron ladder on the exterior, was completed in 1383. The interior of the church is richly adorned, though somewhat defaced during the Revolutionary days of '93, when it was reared into a temple of Reason and witnessed many a saturnalian orgy, during one of which one of its finest windows was broken to fragments.

But it is at the cathedral that the Revolution has left most plainly visible to future generations the marks of its iconoclastic hammers and chisels. To reach it from St. Michael's we must thread our way across the town from the heights to the plateau overlooking the river, where, in the heart of the ancient quarter known as "the Cité," stands the grand old cathedral of St. Étienne. Its cornerstone was laid June 1, 1273, though two other churches and a Roman temple to Jupiter had previously stood on the same site. Successive bishops have pushed it toward completion, but it was only in 1847 that a complete restoration of the edifice was begun. Monsigneur Duquesnay, the present bishop, has raised a subscription of half a million of francs for that purpose. The tower, one hundred and eighty-six feet high, when viewed from any point in the environs looms up a conspicuous object in the picture. Within, the church is remarkable for the boldness of its vaults and arches and the elegance of its workmanship. Numerous works of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance--among which are six bas-reliefs representing the Labors of Hercules--adorn the walls. These classical works the Revolutionists spared: it was only upon the ecclesiastical sculptures that they sought to wreak their hate. In the chancel the remains of three bishops--Raynard de la Porte (1325), Bernard Brun (1349) and Jean de Langeac (1541) repose beneath stone mausoleums, the last of which contains fourteen bas-reliefs of the Visions of the Apocalypse. These mausoleums too are sadly defaced: the full-length stone figures of the deceased prelates which lie recumbent on top of their respective tombs are minus noses and hands.

But to the antiquarian the most interesting feature of the cathedral is that portion of its foundation which formed a part of the Roman basilica that stood on this site. It was transformed from a temple of Jupiter to a Christian church by St. Martial, a contemporary of the apostles, sent hither from Rome to preach the gospel to the Gentile Lemovices. St. Martial is honored to this day as the patron saint of Limoges. When he died some pious priests formed a brotherhood to preserve his tomb, and at that tomb have since knelt Popes Urban II. and Clement V., Edward of England, Blanche of Castile, Henry IV., Louis VII., XI. and XIII. of France, and many great lords and princes, who, it must be remembered, had to journey hither in days when no palace-coaches and lightning mail-trains were at their disposal. Railroads have put a heavy discount on the ancient pilgrimage business.

In the tenth century a terrible plague, known as the _mal des ardents_, swept off forty thousand Limousins in a few weeks. The survivors, hopeless save of divine intervention, prayed that St. Martial's remains might be brought from the tomb where they had been reposing for nearly a thousand years and exposed to public view. All the relics of other saints that could be collected in the neighborhood were brought into Limoges, as if to form a cortége of honor to the remains of the patron saint of Aquitaine. Upon a hill in the environs, now known as the Mont de la Joie, the sacred fossils of the departed just were held up that all might gaze upon them and be healed. By what particular process the manifestation of these osseous fragments of defunct ecclesiastics resulted in a banishment of the pestilence one finds it difficult to explain, save on general principles of faith and Professor Tyndall's prayer-test. Nevertheless, history records that the plague was stayed. A chapel was erected upon the hilltop, which is now tunnelled by a railroad, and from that day the public display of these saintly relics, at intervals of every seven years, has become an established ceremonial known as the Festival of the Ostension. It is celebrated on Thursday of Mid-Lent by a procession conducted with great pomp and ceremony. The flag of the brotherhood of St. Martial, an immense white banner with a red cross, is first blessed by the bishop, after which, followed by a numerous cortége, it is borne through the city to the sound of music and an incessant fusillade of musketry. It is then hoisted to the summit of the spire of St. Michael, which forms the repository of St. Martial's remains.

The procession itself is a curious and motley spectacle. So great is the emulation in the preparation of costumes that many families are accustomed to buy the materials and begin the work two years in advance. In the ranks are to be seen represented all the saints both of the Old and New Testament, the seven Maccabei, and the entire Passion, including our Saviour, the Virgin Mary and the apostles. Twenty-four angels carry the instruments of the Passion. "We participated in this festival in 1820," writes the late Abbé Tesier, "and can recall the tears, and even indignation, of the multitude when the personage representing Our Lord fell under the weight of an immense cross." On the same occasion four thousand pupils of the College of St. Mary marched in line, representing the prophets, martyrs, confessors and virgins. After them came long lines of soldiers fantastically clad in the military costumes of the Middle Ages, and equipped with crossbows, matchlock arquebuses and all varieties of ancient weapons, which had been handed down in families from generation to generation to be used on these occasions. There were in line, too, all the rulers and magistrates of the province, and scores of religious orders and brotherhoods to which successive centuries of Romanism had given birth. Chief among these latter are the Penitents, a curious fraternity which merits more than a passing mention.

Though dating from the thirteenth century in France, it was not until 1598 that the order made its appearance in Limoges. It gained ground there so rapidly, however, that in 1789 but one other city, Marseilles, contained a greater number of lodges. Each lodge, to obtain its charter, had to bind itself to rebuild some ruined church, name some special mission of good it was to accomplish and choose some special color for its costume. Thus at Limoges we find Black, Blue, Gray, White, Purple, Violet and Dead-Leaf Penitents, each charged with some special benevolent function, such as settling disputes between alienated members of one family, escorting the condemned to the scaffold and holding the crucifix to their lips, relieving imprisoned debtors, and so on. People of all ages and conditions flocked to their ranks. A unanimous election was required to obtain admission. The order grew so wealthy and powerful that at times it even dared to oppose the authority of the Church itself. The annual procession on Holy Thursday called out the entire population. It took place at nightfall, the brethren marching disguised and barefoot through the streets, holding lighted tapers and lanterns suspended from long poles, carrying a cross covered with crape at their head, and chanting a dirge as they went. But by and by trouble arose, and the Penitents found themselves in hot water. In 1742 a malefactor whom they escorted to the scaffold managed to escape, through the aid, it was believed, of the throng of disguised Penitents about him. Henceforward their interference in executions was forbidden. The Revolution dealt what was practically a deathblow to the order, for, though revived in 1804, it provoked ridicule as out of keeping with modern ideas. The Ostension procession of 1862 saw the six surviving lodges parade together for the last time. The events of 1870-71 finished the work of disorganization, and to-day the costumes and ornaments of the Penitents Noirs--who, it seems, had survived all the others--remain as curiosities in the possession of the last treasurer of the lodge.