Chapter IV (1)

“Here you are, you naughty little maiden, gadding about the country when I want you to be at home to talk to me!” exclaimed Sir Simon, as Franceline burst into the cottage full of her little adventure. “Where have you been all this time?”

“Only to see Miss Merrywig, and then I came home by the fields.”

“And was any poor mortal lucky enough to meet you coming through the rye?” inquired Sir Simon facetiously.

Franceline didn’t see the point a bit; but she blushed as if she did, and Sir Simon was not the man to let her off.

“Oh! so that’s it, is it? Come, now, and tell me all about it,” he said, drawing her to a low seat beside his arm-chair, the only one in the establishment, and which his host always insisted on his taking. “You must let me into the secret; it’s very shabby of you to have got one without consulting me. Who is he, and where did you meet him?”

“One is Mr. Charlton,” replied Franceline naïvely; “but I don’t know who the other is. I never saw him before. Tell me who he is, monsieur?”

“Tell you! Well, upon my word, you are a pretty flirt! You don’t even know his name! A very nice young lady!”

“Is he a Frenchman, monsieur? I think he must be from the way he bowed. Is he a friend of yours? Nobody else knows Frenchmen here but you. Do tell me who he is.”

“He’s not a Frenchman,” said Sir Simon, “and he’ll never forgive you for mistaking him for one, I can tell you. If you were a man, he would run you through the body for it just as soon as he’d look at you!”

“Mon Dieu!” cried Franceline, opening her eyes wide with wonder, “then I don’t care to know any more about him. I hope I shall never see him again.”

“Yes, but you shall, though, and I’ll take care to tell him,” declared Sir Simon.

“What is it? What is it?” called out M. de la Bourbonais, looking up from a letter that he was writing against time to catch the post. “What are you both quarrelling about again?”

“Petit père, monsieur is so unkind and so disagreeable!”

“And Mlle. Franceline is so cruel and so inquisitive!”

“He won’t tell me who that strange gentleman is, petit père. Canst thou tell me?”

“Oh! ho! I thought we didn’t care to know!” laughed Sir Simon with a mischievous look.

“Tell me, petit père!” said Franceline, ignoring her tormentor’s taunt; and going up to her father, she laid her head coaxingly against his.

He looked at her for a moment with a strange expression, and then said, half speaking to himself, while he stroked her hair, “What can it matter to thee? What is one strange face more or less to thee or me?” Then turning to Sir Simon, who was enjoying the sight of the young girl’s innocent curiosity, and perhaps revolving possible eventualities in his buoyant mind, the count said, “Who is it, Harness?”

“How do I know?” retorted his friend. “A strange gentleman that bows like a Frenchman is not a very lucid indication.”

“I met him coming out of your gate, walking with Mr. Charlton,” explained Franceline. “He’s taller than Mr. Charlton--as tall as you, monsieur--and he wore a moustache like a Frenchman. I never saw any one like him in England.”

Franceline’s recollections of France were mostly rather dim, but, like the memories of childhood, those that survived were very vivid.

“If he must be a Frenchman, I can make nothing out of it,” said Sir Simon.

“Voyons, Harness,” laughed the count, “don’t be too unmerciful! Curiosity in a woman once led to terrible consequences.”

“Well, I’ll tell you who he is In fact, I came here to-day on purpose to tell you, and to ask when I could bring him to see you. He’s the nephew of my old school-chum, De Winton, a very nice fellow, but not the least like a Frenchman, whatever his bow and his moustache may say to the contrary.”

“Do you mean Clide De Winton, the poor young fellow who …?”

“Precisely,” replied Sir Simon; “he’s been a rover on the face of the earth for the last eight or nine years. This is the first time I’ve seen him since I said good-by to him on the steamer at Marseilles, and met you on my way back. He’s been all over the world since then, I believe. You’ll find he has plenty to say for himself, and his French is number one.”

“And the admiral--is he with him?” inquired Raymond.

“I’m expecting him down to-morrow. How long is it since you saw him?”

“Hé!… let us not count the years, mon cher! We were all young then.”

“We’re all young now,” protested the hearty baronet. “Men of our time of life never grow old; it’s only these young ones that can afford that sort of thing,” nodding toward Franceline, who, since she found her Frenchman was no Frenchman, appeared to have lost all interest in him, and was busily tidying her father’s table. “As to the admiral, he’s younger than ever he was. By the way, I don’t intend to let him cut me out with a certain young lady; so let me see no flirtation in that quarter. I’ll not stand it. Do you hear me, Miss Franceline?”

“Yes,” was the laconic rejoinder, and she went on fixing some loose papers in a letter-press.

* * * * *

“Yes, Monsieur le Comte is at home; but, as monsieur knows, he never likes to be disturbed at this hour,” replied Angélique, who was knitting the family stockings in the wee summer-house at the end of the garden.

“Oh! I’ll answer for it he won’t mind being disturbed this time,” said Sir Simon. “Tell him it’s his old friend, the admiral, who wants to see him.”

Before Angélique had got her needles under way and risen, a cry of jubilant welcome sounded from the closed shutters of the little room where the count was hard at work in the dark. “Mon cher De Vinton! how it rejoices me to embrace you.” And the Frenchman was in his friend’s arms in a minute. “My good Angélique, this is one of our eldest friends! Where is mademoiselle? Fetch her on the instant! Mon cher De Vinton.”

The four gentlemen--for Clide was there--went laughing and shaking hands into the house, and groped their way as best they could into Raymond’s study. He had the sensible foreign habit of keeping the shutters closed to exclude the heat, and the admiral nearly fell over a stool in scrambling for a chair.

“My dear Bourbonais, we’re none of us bats, and darkness isn’t a help to the flow of soul,” said Sir Simon; “so, by your leave, I’ll throw a little light on the subject.” And he pushed back the shutter.

Before their eyes had recovered the blinding shock of the light coming suddenly on the darkness, a light foot was pattering down the stairs, and Franceline glided into the room. The effect was very much as if a lily had sprouted up from the carpet. An involuntary “God bless my soul!” broke from the admiral, and Clide started to his feet. “My daughter, messieurs,” said M. de la Bourbonais, with a sudden touch of the courtier in his manner, as he took her by the hand, and presented her to them both. Franceline bowed to the young man, and held out her hand to the elder one. The admiral, with an unwonted impulse of gallantry, raised it to his lips, and then held it in both his own, looking steadily into her face with an open stare of fatherly admiration. He had seen many lovely women in his day, and, if report spoke true, the brave sailor had been a very fair judge of the charms of the gentler sex; but he had never seen anything the least like this. Perhaps it was the unexpected contrast of the picture with the frame that took him so much by surprise and heightened the effect; but, whatever it was, he was completely taken aback, and stood looking at it speechless and bewildered.

“Do you mean to tell me that this wild rose belongs to _him_?” he said at last, addressing himself to Sir Simon, and with an aggressive nod at Raymond, as if he suspected him of having pilfered the article in question, and were prepared to do battle for the rightful owner.

“He says so,” averred the baronet cautiously.

“He may say what he likes,” declared the admiral, “my belief is that he purloined it out of some fairy’s garden.”

“And my belief is that you purloined that!” snubbed Sir Simon. “You never had as much poetry in you as would inspire a fly; had he, Clide?”

Raymond rubbed his spectacles, and put them on again--his usual way of disposing of an awkward situation, and which just now helped to conceal the twinkle of innocent paternal vanity that was dancing in his gray eyes.

“No, you usedn’t to be much of a poet when I knew you, De Vinton,” he said.

“No more he is now,” asserted the baronet. “What do you say, Clide?”

“The most prosaic of us may become poets under a certain pressure of inspiration,” replied the young man, with an imperceptible movement of his head in the direction of Franceline, who blushed under the speech just enough to justify the admiral’s wild-rose simile. She drew her hand laughingly away from his, and then, when everybody had found a seat, she pushed her favorite low stool close to her father’s chair, and sat down by his knee.

The friends had a great deal to say to each other, although the presence of Clide and Sir Simon prevented their touching on certain episodes of the past that were brought vividly to Raymond’s mind by the presence of one whom he had not seen since they had taken place. This kept all painful subjects in the background; and in spite of a wistful look in Raymond’s eyes, as if the sailor’s weather-beaten face were calling up the ghost of by-gone days--joys that had lived their span and died, and sorrow that was not dead, but sleeping--he kept up the flow of conversation with great animation. Meanwhile, the two young people were pushed rather outside the circle. Clide, instead of entering on a _tête-à-tête_, as it was clearly his right and his duty to do, kept holding on by the fringe of his uncle’s talk, feigning to be deeply interested in it, while all the time he was thinking of something else, longing to go and sit by Franceline, and talk to her. It was not shyness that kept him back. That infirmity of early youth had left him, with other outward signs of boyhood. The features had lost their boyish expression, and matured into that of the man of the world, who had seen life and observed things by the road with shrewd eyes and a mind that had learned to think. Clide had ripened prematurely within the last eight years, as men do who are put to school to a great sorrow. He and his monitress had not parted company, but they had grown used to each other. Sometimes he reproached himself for this with a certain bitterness. It seemed like treason to have forgotten; to have put his grief aside, railed it off, as it were, from his life, like a grave to be visited at stated times, and kept trimmed with flowers that were no longer watered with tears. He accused himself of being too weak to hold his sorrow, of having let it go from want of strength to keep it. Enduring grief, like enduring love, must have a strong, rich soil to feed upon. The thing we mourn, like the thing we love, may contain in itself all good and beauty and endless claims upon our constancy; but we may fail in power to answer them. The demand may be too great for the scanty measure of our supply. It is harder to be faithful in sorrow than in love. Clide had realized this, and he could never think of it without a pang. Yet he was not to blame. What he had loved and mourned was only a mirage, a will-o’-the-wisp the ideal creation of his own trusting heart and generous imagination. He was angry with himself because the thunderbolt that had fallen in his Garden of Eden, and burnt up the leaves of his tree of life, had not torn it up by the roots and killed it. Our lives have deeper roots than we know. Even when they are torn quite up we sometimes plant them again, and they grow afresh, striking their fibres deeper than before, and bringing forth richer fruit. But we refuse to believe this until we have tasted of the fruit. Clide sat apparently listening to the cheery, affectionate talk of his uncle and Raymond; but he was all the while listening to his own thoughts. What was there in the sight of this ivory-browed, mystic-looking maiden to call up so vividly another face so utterly different from it? Why did he hear the sea booming its dirge like a reproach to him from that lonely grave at St. Valery, as if he were wronging or wounding the dead by resting his eyes on Franceline? Yet, in spite of the reproach, he could not keep them averted. Her father sometimes called her _Clair de lune_. It was not an inappropriate name; there was something of the cold, pure light of the moon in her transparent pallor, and in the shadows of her eyes under the long, black lashes that lent them such a soft fascination. Clide thought so, as he watched her; cold as the face might be, it was stirring his pulse and making his heart beat as he never thought to feel them stir and beat again.

“Are ces messieurs going to stay for supper?” said Angélique, putting her nut-brown face in at the door. “Because, if they are, I must know in time to get ready.”

“Why, Angélique, I never knew you want more than five minutes to prepare the best _omelette soufflée_ I ever get anywhere out of the Palais Royal!” said Sir Simon.

“Ah! monsieur mocks me,” said Angélique, who was so elated by this public recognition of her omelet talent that, if Sir Simon was not embraced by the nut-brown face on the spot, it was one of those hair-breadth escapes that our lives are full of, and we never give thanks for because we never know of them. “Persuade De Vinton and our young friend here to stop and test it, then!” exclaimed M. de la Bourbonais, holding out both hands to the admiral in his genial, impulsive way. “The garden is our _salle-à-manger_ in this hot weather, so there is plenty of room.” There was something irresistible in the simplicity and cordiality of the offer, and the admiral was about to say he would be delighted, when Sir Simon put in his veto: “No, no, not this evening. You must come and dine with us, Bourbonais; I want you up at the house this evening. But the invitation will keep. We’ll not let Angélique off her _omelette soufflée_; we’ll come and attack it to-morrow, if these rovers don’t bolt, as they threaten to do.”

And so the conference was broken up, and Raymond accompanied his guests to the garden-gate, promising to follow them in half an hour.

It was a rare event for M. de la Bourbonais to dine at Dullerton Court; he disliked accepting its grand-seignior hospitality, and whenever he consented it was understood there should be nobody to meet him. “I have grown as unsocial as a bear from long habit, mon cher,” he would be sure to say every time Sir Simon bore down on him with an invitation. “I shall turn into a mollusk by-and-by. How completely we are the creatures of habit!” To which Sir Simon would invariably reply with his Johnsonian maxim: “You should struggle against that sort of thing, Bourbonais, and overcome it”; and Raymond would smile, and agree with him. He was too gentle and too thoroughbred to taunt his friend with not following it himself, which he might have done with bitter truth. Sir Simon was the slave of habits and of weaknesses that it was far more necessary to struggle against than Raymond’s harmless little foibles. There are some men who spend one-half of their lives in cheating others, and the other half in trying to cheat themselves. Sir Simon Harness was one of these. Cheating is perhaps a hard word to apply to his efforts to keep up a delusion which had grown so entirely his master that he could scarcely see where the substance ended and where the shadow began. Yet his whole life at present was a cheat. He had the reputation of being the largest land-owner and the wealthiest man in that end of the county, and he was, in reality, one of the poorest. The grand aim of his existence was to live up to this false appearance, and prevent the truth from coming out. It would be a difficult and useless undertaking to examine how far he was originally to blame for the state of active falsehood into which he and his circumstances had fallen. There is no doubt that his father was to blame in the first instance. He had been a very splendid old gentleman, Sir Alexander Harness, and had lived splendidly and died heavily in debt, leaving the estate considerably mortgaged. He had not been more than twenty years dead at the time I speak of, so that his son, in coming into possession, found himself saddled with the paternal debts, and with the confirmed extravagant habits of a lifetime. This made the sacrifices which the payment of those debts necessitated seem a matter of simple impossibility to him. The only thing to be done was to let the Court for a term of years, send away the troops of misnamed servants that encumbered the place, sell off the stud, and betake himself to the Continent and economize. Thus he would have paid off his encumbrances, and come back independent and easy in his mind. But, unluckily, strong measures of this sort did not lie at all in Sir Simon’s way. He talked about going abroad, and had some indefinite notion of “pulling in.” He did run off to Paris and other continental places very frequently; but as he travelled with a courier and a valet, and with all the expenses inseparable from those adjuncts, the excursions did not contribute much towards the desired result. Things went on at the Court in the old way; the same staff of servants was kept up; the same number of parasites who, under pretence of payment for some small debt, had lived in the Court for years, until they came to consider they had a vested life-interest in the property, were allowed to hang on. The new master of Dullerton was loath to do such a shabby thing as to turn them out; and they were sure to die off after a while. Then there was the stud, which Sir Alexander had been so proud of. It had been a terrible expense to set it up, but, being up, it was a pity to let it down; when things were going, they had a way of keeping themselves going. There had always been open house at the Court from time immemorial. In the shooting season people had come down, as a matter of course, and enjoyed the jovial hospitalities of the old squire ever since Dullerton had belonged to him. While his son was there he could not possibly break through these old habits; they were as sacred as the family traditions. By-and-by, when he saw his way to shutting up the place and going abroad, it might be managed. Meanwhile, the old debts were accumulating, and new ones were growing, and Sir Simon was beginning less than ever to see his way to setting things right. If that tough old Lady Rebecca Harness, his step-mother, would but take herself to a better world, and leave him that fifty thousand pounds that reverted to him at her demise, it would be a great mercy. But Lady Rebecca evidently was in no hurry to try whether there was any pleasanter place than this best of all possible worlds, and, in spite of her seventy years, was as hale as a woman of forty. This was a trying state of things to the light-tempered, open-handed baronet; but the greatest trial to him was the fear in which he lived of being found out. He was at heart an upright man, and it was his pride that men looked up to him as one whose character and principles were, like Cæsar’s wife, above suspicion. He had lived up to this reputation so far; but he was conscious of a growing fear that with the increase of difficulties there was stealing on him a lessening of the fine moral sense that had hitherto supported him under many temptations. His embarrassments were creating a sort of mental fog around him; he was beginning to wonder whether his theories about honesty were quite where they used to be, and whether he was not getting on the other side of the border-line between conscience and expediency. Outside it was still all fair; he was the most popular man in the county, a capital landlord--in fact, everybody’s friend but his own. The only person, except the family lawyer, who was allowed to look at the other side of the picture, was M. de la Bourbonais. Sir Simon was too sympathetic himself not to feel the need of sympathy. He must occasionally complain of his hard fate to some one, so he complained to Raymond. But Raymond, while he gave him his sincerest sympathy, was very far from realizing the extent of the troubles that called it forth. The baronet bemoaned himself in a vague manner, denouncing people and things in a general sweep every now and then; but between times he was as gay and contented as a man could be, and Raymond knew far too little of the ways of the world and of human nature to reconcile these conflicting evidences, and deduce from them the facts they represented. He could not apprehend the anomaly of a sane man, and a man of honor, behaving like a lunatic and a swindler; spending treble his income in vanity and superfluity, and for no better purpose than an empty bubble of popularity and vexation of spirit. Of late, however, he had once or twice gained a glimpse into the mystery, and it had given him a sharp pang, which Sir Simon no sooner perceived than he hastened to dispel by treating his lamentations as mere irritability of temper, assuring Raymond they meant nothing. But there was still an uneasy feeling in the latter’s mind. It was chiefly painful to him for Sir Simon’s sake, but it made him a little uncomfortable on his own account. With Raymond’s punctilious notions of integrity, the man who connived at wrong-doing, or in the remotest way participated in it, was only a degree less culpable than the actual wrong-doer; and if Sir Simon had come to the point of being hard up for a fifty-pound note to meet a pressing bill, it was very unprincipled of him to be giving dinners with Johannisberg and Tokay at twenty shillings a bottle, and very wrong of his friends to aid and abet him in such extravagance. One day Sir Simon came in with a clouded brow to unburden himself about a fellow who had the insolence to write for the seventh time, demanding the payment of his “little bill,” and, after a vehement tirade, wound up by asking Raymond to go back and dine with him. “We’ll have up a bottle of your favorite Château Margaux, and drink confusion to the duns and the speedy extermination of the race,” said the baronet. “Come and cheer a fellow up, old boy; nothing clears away the blue devils like discussing one’s worries over a good glass of claret.” Raymond fought off, first on the old plea that he hated going out, etc.; but, finding this would not do, he confessed the truth. He hinted delicately that he did not feel justified in allowing his friend to go to any expense on his account. The innocence and infantine simplicity of this avowal sent Sir Simon into such a hearty fit of laughter that Raymond felt rather ashamed of himself, and began to apologize profusely for being so stupid and having misunderstood, etc., and declared he would go and drink the bottle of Château Margaux all to himself. But after this Sir Simon was more reticent about his embarrassments; and as things went on at the Court in the old, smooth, magnificent way, M. de la Bourbonais began to think it was all right, and that his friend’s want of money must have been a mere temporary inconvenience. In fact, he began to doubt this evening whether it was not all a dream of his that Sir Simon had ever talked of being “hard up.” When he entered the noble dining-room and looked around him, it was difficult to believe otherwise. Massive silver and costly crystal sparkled and flashed under a shower of light from the antique branching chandelier; wax-lights clustered on the walls amidst solemn Rembrandt heads, and fascinating Reynoldses, and wild Salvator Rosas, and tender Claudes, and sunny Canalettos. It was not in nature that the owner of all this wealth and splendor should know what it was to be in want of money. Sir Simon, moreover, was in his element; and it would have puzzled a spectator more versed than Raymond in the complex mechanism of the human heart to believe that the brilliant host who was doing the honors of his house so delightfully had a canker gnawing at his vitals. He rattled away with the buoyant spirits of five-and-twenty; he was brimful of anecdote, and bright with repartee. He drew every one else out. This was what made him so irresistibly charming in society; it was not only that he shone himself, but he had a knack of making other people shine. He made the admiral tell stories of his seafaring life, he drew out Clide about Afghanistan, and spirited M. de la Bourbonais into a quarrel with him about the dates of the Pyramids; never flagging for a moment, never prosing, but vaulting lightly from one subject to another, and all the while leaving his guests under the impression that they were entertaining him rather than he them, and that he was admiring them a vast deal more than he admired himself. A most delightful host Sir Simon was.

“Nothing cheers a man up like the sight of an old friend! Eh, De Winton?” he exclaimed, falling back in his chair, with a thumb thrust into each waistcoat pocket, and his feet stretched out to their full length under the mahogany, the picture of luxury, hospitality, and content.

“Much you know about it!” grunted the admiral, filling his glass--“a man that never wanted to be cheered up in his life!”

Sir Simon threw back his head and laughed. It was wine to him to be rated such a good fellow by his old college chum.

They kept it up till eleven o’clock, puffing their cigars on the terrace, where the soft summer moon was shining beautifully on the fawns playing under the silver spray of the fountain.

“I’ll walk home with you, Raymond,” said Sir Simon when the chime of the stable-clock reminded the count that it was time for him to go.

It was about ten minutes’ walk to The Lilies through the park; but as the night was so lovely, the baronet proposed they should take the longer way by the road, and see the river by moonlight. They walked on for a while without speaking. Raymond was enjoying the beauty of the scene, the gold of the fields and the green of the meadows, all shining alike in silver, the identity of the trees and flowers merged in uniform radiancy; he fancied his companion was admiring it too, until the latter broke the spell by an unexpected exclamation: “What an infernal bore money is, my dear fellow! I mean the want of it.”

“Mon Dieu!” was the count’s astonished comment. And as Sir Simon said nothing more, he looked up at him uneasily: “I thought things had come all right again, mon cher?”

“They never were right; that’s the deuce of it. If I’d found them right, I wouldn’t have been such an ass as to put them wrong. A man needn’t be a saint or a philosopher to keep within an income of ten thousand pounds a year; the difficulty is to live up to the name of it when you haven’t got more than the fifth in reality. A man’s life isn’t worth a year’s purchase with the worry these rascally fellows give one--a set of low scoundrels that would suck your vitals with all the pleasure in life, just because you happen to be a gentleman. Here’s that architect fellow that ran up those stables last year, blustering and blowing about his miserable twelve hundred pounds as if it was the price of a cathedral! I told the fellow he’d have to wait for his money, and of course he was all readiness and civility, anything to secure the job; and it’s no sooner done than he’s down on me with a hue-and-cry. He must have his money, forsooth, or else he’ll be driven to the painful necessity of applying through his man of business. A fellow of his kind threatening me with his man of business! The impertinence of his having a man of business at all! But I dare say it’s a piece of braggadocio; he thinks he’ll frighten the money out of me by giving himself airs and talking big. I’ll see the scoundrel further! There’s no standing the impudence of that class nowadays. Something must be done to check it. It’s a disgrace to the country to see the way they’re taking the upper hand and riding rough-shod over us. And mark my words if the country doesn’t live to regret it! We landed proprietors are the bulwark of the state; and if they let us be sent to the wall, they had better look to their own moorings. Mark my words, Bourbonais!”

Bourbonais was marking his words, but he was too bewildered to make any sense out of them. “I agree with you, mon cher, the lower orders are becoming the upper ones in many ways; but what does that prove?”

“Prove! It proves there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark!” retorted Sir Simon.

“But how does that affect the case in question? I mean what has it to do with this architect’s bill?”

“It has this to do with it: that if this fellow’s father had attempted the same impertinence with my father, he’d have been sent to the right-about; whereas he may insult me, not only with impunity, but with effect! That’s what it has to do with it. Public opinion has changed sides since my father lived like a gentleman, and snapped his fingers at these parasites that live by sucking our blood.”

Raymond knew that when Sir Simon got on the subject of the “lower” orders and their iniquities, there was nothing for it but to give him his head, and wait patiently till he pulled up of his own accord. When at last the baronet drew breath, and was willing to listen, he brought him back to the point, and asked what he meant to do about the twelve-hundred-pound bill. Did he see his way to paying it? Sir Simon did not. It was a curious fact that he never saw his way to paying a bill until he had contracted it, and until his vision had been sharpened by some disagreeable process like the present, which forced him to face the alternative of paying or doing worse. These new stables had been a necessary expense, it is true, and he was very forcible in reiterating the fact to Raymond; but the latter had a provoking way of reverting to first principles, as he called it, and, after hearing his friend’s logical demonstration as to the absolute necessity which had compelled him to build--the valuable horses that were being damaged by the damp of the old stables; the impossibility of keeping up a hunting stud without proper accommodations for horses and men; the economy that the outlay was sure to be in the long run, the saving of doctor’s bills, etc.; the “vet.” was never out of the house while the horses were lodged in the old stables--M. de la Bourbonais said: “But, mon cher, why need you keep a hunting stud, why keep horses at all, if you can’t afford it?”

This was a question that never crossed Sir Simon’s mind, or, if it did, it was dismissed with such a peremptory snub that it never presented itself again. It was peculiarly irritating to have it thrust on him now, at a moment when he wanted some soothing advice to cheer him up. The idea, put into words and spoken aloud by another, was, however, not as easily ignored as when it passed silently through his own mind; it must be answered, if only by shutting the door in its face.

“My dear Raymond,” said the baronet in his affectionate, patronizing way, “you don’t quite understand the matter; you look at it too much from a Frenchman’s point of view. You don’t make allowance for the different conditions of society in this country. There are certain things, you see, that a man must do in England; society exacts it of him. A gentleman must live like a gentleman, or else he can’t hold his own. It isn’t a matter of choice.”

“It seems to me it is, though,” returned Raymond. “He may choose between his duty to his conscience and his duty to society.”

“You can’t separate them, my dear fellow; it’s not to be done in this country. But that’s shifting the question too wide of the mark,” observed Sir Simon, who began to feel it was being driven rather too close. “The thing is, how am I to raise the wind to quiet this architect? It is too late to discuss the wisdom of building the stables; they are built, and they must be paid for.”

“Sell those two hunters that you paid five hundred pounds apiece for; that will go a long way towards it,” suggested the count.

The proposition was self-evident, but that did not make it the more palatable to Sir Simon. He muttered something about not seeing his way to a purchaser just then. Raymond, however, pressed the matter warmly, and urged him to set about finding one without delay. He brought forward a variety of arguments to back up this advice, and to prove to his friend that not only common sense and justice demanded that he should follow it, but that, from a selfish point of view, it was the best thing he could do. “Trust me,” he cried, “the peace of mind it will bring you will largely compensate for the sacrifice.” Sacrifice! It sounded like a mockery on Raymond de la Bourbonais’ lips to apply the word to the sale of a couple of animals for the payment of a foolish debt; but Raymond, whatever Sir Simon might say to the contrary, made large allowance for their relative positions, and was very far from any thought of irony when he called it a sacrifice.

“You’re right; you’re always right, Raymond,” said the baronet, leaning his arm heavily on the count’s shoulder, and imperceptibly guiding him closer to the river, that was flowing on like a message of peace in the solemn, star-lit silence. “I’d be a happier man if I could take life as you do, if I were more like you.”

“And had to black your own boots?” Raymond laughed gently.

“I shouldn’t mind a rap blacking my boots, if nobody saw me.”

“Ah! that’s just it! But when people are reduced to black their own boots, they’re sure to be seen. The thing is to do it, and not care who sees us.”

“That’s the rub,” said Sir Simon; and then they walked on without speaking for a while, listening to a nightingale that woke up in a willow-tree and broke the silence with a short, bright cadence, ending in a trill that made the very shadows vibrate on the water. There is a strange unworldliness in moonlight. The cold stars, tingling silently in the deep blue peace so far above us, have a voice that rebukes the strife of our petty passions more forcibly than the wisest sermon. The cares and anxieties of our lives pale into the flimsy shadows that they are, when we look at them in the glory of illuminated midnight heavens. What sheer folly it all was, this terror of what the world would say of him if he sold his hunters! Sir Simon felt he could laugh at the world’s surprise, ay, or at its contempt, if it had met him there and then by the river’s side, while the stars were shining down upon him.

“Simon,” said M. de la Bourbonais, stopping as they came within a few steps of The Lilies, “I am going to ask you for a proof of friendship.” He scarcely ever called the baronet by his name, and Sir Simon felt that, whatever the proof in question was, it was stirring Raymond’s heart very deeply to ask it.

“I thought we had got beyond _asking_ each other anything of that sort; if I wanted a service from you, I should simply tell you so,” replied the baronet.

“You are right. That is just what I feel about it. Well, what I want to say is this: I have a hundred pounds laid by. I don’t want it at present; there is no knowing when I may want it, so I will draw it to-morrow and take it to you.” Raymond made his little announcement very simply, but there was a tremor in his voice. Sir Simon hardly knew what to say. It was impossible to accept, and impossible to refuse.

“It’s rather a good joke, my offering to lend you money!” said Raymond, laughing and walking on as if he noticed nothing. “But you know the story of the lion and the mouse.”

“Raymond, you’re a richer man than I am,” said Sir Simon; “a far happier one,” he added in his own mind.

“Then you’ll take the hundred pounds?”

“Yes; that is to say, no. I can’t say positively at this moment; we’ll talk it over to-morrow. You’ll come up early, and we’ll talk it over. You see, I may not want it after all. If I get the full value of Nero and Rosebud, I shouldn’t want it.”

“But you may not find a purchaser at once, and a hundred pounds would keep this man quiet till you do,” suggested Raymond.

“My dear old boy!” said the baronet, grasping his hand--they were at the gate now--“I ought to be ashamed to own it; but the fact is, Roxham--you know Lord Roxham in the next county?--offered me a thousand pounds for Rosebud only two days ago. I’ll write to him to-morrow and accept it. I dare say he’d be glad to take the two.”

“Oh! how you unload my heart! Good-night, mon cher ami. A demain!” said Raymond.

On his way home Sir Simon looked stern realities in the face, and came to the determination that a change must be made; that it was not possible to get on as he was, keeping up a huge establishment, and entertaining like a man of ten thousand a year, and getting deeper and deeper into debt every day. Raymond was right. Common sense and justice were the best advisers, and it was better to obey their counsels voluntarily while there was yet time than wait till it was too late, and he was driven to extremities. This architect’s bill was a mere drop in the ocean; but it is a drop that every now and then makes the flood run over, and compels us to do something to stem the torrent. As Sir Simon turned it all in his mind in the presence of the stars, he felt very brave about the necessary measures of reform. After all, what did it signify what the world said of him? Would the world that criticised him, perhaps voted him a fool for selling his hunters, help him when the day of reckoning came? What was it all but emptiness and vanity of vanities? He realized this truth, as he sauntered home through the park, and stood looking down over the landscape sleeping under the deep blue dome. Where might he and his amusements and perplexities be to-morrow--that dim to-morrow, that lies so near to each of us, poor shadows that we are, our life a speck between two eternities? Sir Simon let himself in by a door on the terrace, and then, instead of going straight to his room, went into the library, and wrote a short note to Lord Roxham. It was safer to do it now than wait till morning. The morning was a dangerous time with Sir Simon for resolves like the present. It was ever to him a mystery of hope, the awakening of the world, the setting right and cheering up of all things by the natural law of resurrection.

The admiral and Clide had planned to leave next day; but the weather was so glorious and the host was so genial that it required no great pressing to make them alter their plans and consent to remain a few days longer.

“You know we are due at Bourbonais’ this evening,” said Sir Simon. “The old lady will never forgive me if I disappoint her of cooking that omelet for you.”

So it was agreed that they would sup at The Lilies, and M. de la Bourbonais was requested to convey the message to Angélique when, according to appointment, he came up early to the Court. He had no opportunity of talking it over with Sir Simon; the admiral and Clide were there, and other visitors dropped in and engaged his attention. The baronet, however, contrived to set him quite at rest; the grasp of his hand, and the smile with which he greeted his friend, said plainer than words: “Cheer up, we’re all right again!” He was in high spirits, welcoming everybody, and looking as cheerful as if he did not know what a dun meant. He fully intended to whisper to Raymond that he had written about the horses to Lord Roxham; but he was not able to do it, owing to their being so surrounded.

“Do you ride much, Monsieur le Comte?” said Clide, coming to sit by Raymond, who, he observed, stood rather aloof from the people who were chatting together on common topics.

“No,” said Raymond; “I prefer walking, which is fortunate, as I don’t possess a horse.”

“If you cared for it, that wouldn’t be an impediment, I fancy” said the young man. “Sir Simon would be only too grateful to you for exercising one of his. He has a capital stud. I’ve been looking at it this morning. He’s a first-rate judge of horse-flesh.”

“That is the basis of an Englishman’s education, is it not?” said the count playfully.

“Which accounts, perhaps, for the defects of the superstructure,” replied Clide, laughing. “It is rather a hard hit at us, Monsieur le Comte; but I’m afraid we deserve it. You have a good deal to put up with from us one way or another, I dare say, to say nothing of our climate.”

“That is a subject that I never venture to touch on,” said Raymond, with affected solemnity. “I found out long ago that his climate was a very sore point with an Englishman, and that he takes any disrespect to it as a personal offence.”

“A part of our general conceit,” observed Clide good-humoredly. “I’ve been so long out of it that I almost forget its vices, and only remember its virtues.”

“What are they?” inquired Raymond.

“Well, I count it a virtue in a wet day to hold out the hope to you of seeing it clear up at any moment; whereas, in countries that are blessed with a good climate, once the day sets in wet, you know your doom; there’s nothing to hope for till to-morrow.”

“There is something in that, I grant you,” replied Raymond thoughtfully; “but the argument works both ways. If the day sets in fine here, you never know what it may do before an hour. In fact, it proves, what I have long ago made up my mind to, that there is no climate in England--only weather. Just now it is redeeming itself; I never saw a lovelier day in France. Shall we come out of doors and enjoy it?”

They stepped out on to the terrace, and turned from the flowery parterre, with its fountain flashing in the sunlight, into a shady avenue of lime-trees.

Clide felt very little interest in Raymond’s private opinion of the climate. He wanted to make him talk of himself, as a preliminary to talk of his daughter; and, as usual when we want to lead up to a subject, he could hit on nothing but the most irrelevant commonplaces. Chance finally came to his rescue in the shape of a stunted palm-tree that was obtruding its parched leaves through the broken window of a neglected orangery. Sir Simon had had a hobby about growing oranges at the Court, and had given it up, like so many other hobbies, after a while, and the orangery, that had cost so much money for a time, was standing forlorn and half-empty near the flower-garden, a trophy of its owner’s fickle purpose and extravagance.

“Poor little abortion!” exclaimed the count, pointing to the starved palm-tree, “it did not take kindly to its exile.”

“Exile is a barren soil to most of us,” said Clide. “We generally prove a failure in it.”

“I suppose because we are a failure when we come to it,” replied Raymond. “We seldom try exile until life has failed to us at home.” He looked up with a quick smile as he said this, and Clide answered him with a glance of intelligent and respectful sympathy. As the two men looked into each other’s face, it was as if some intangible barrier were melting away, and confidence were suddenly being established in its place.

Clide had never pronounced his wife’s name since the day he had let his head drop on the admiral’s breast, and abandoned himself to the passion of his boyish grief. It was as if the recollection of his marriage and its miserable ending had died and been buried with Isabel. The admiral had often wondered how one so young could be so self-contained, wrapping himself in such an impenetrable reserve. The old sailor was not given to speculating on mental phenomena as a rule; but he had given this particular one many a five minutes’ cogitation, and the conclusion he arrived at was that either Clide had taken the matter less to heart than he imagined, and so felt no need of the solace of talking over his loss, or that the sense of humiliation which attached to the memory of Isabel was so painful to him, as a man and a De Winton, that he was unwilling to recur to it. There may have been something of this latter feeling mixed up with the other impalpable causes that kept him mute; but to-day, as he paced up and down under the fragrant shade of the lime-trees with M. de la Bourbonais, a sudden desire sprang up in him to speak of the past, and evoke the sympathy of this man, who had suffered, perhaps, more deeply than himself. They were silent for a few minutes, but a subtle, magnetic sympathy was at work between them.

“I too have had my little glimpse of paradise, only to be turned out, like so many others, to finish my pilgrimage alone,” said Raymond abruptly.

“No, not alone,” retorted Clide; “you have a daughter, who must be a great delight to you.”

“Ah! you are right. I was ungrateful to say alone; but you can understand that that other solitude can never be filled up. That is to say,” he added, looking up with a brightening expression in his keen eyes, that sparkled under projecting brows, made more prominent by bushy black eyebrows, “not at my age; at yours it is different. When sorrow comes to a man at the close of his half-century, it is too late to plant again; he cannot begin life anew. There is no future for him but courage and resignation. But at your age everything is a beginning. While we are young, no matter how dark the sky is, the future looks bright; to-morrow is always full of hope and glad surprises when we are young.”

“I don’t feel as if I were young,” said Clide; “it seems to me as if I had outlived my youth. You know there are experiences that do the work of years quite as well as time; that make us old prematurely?”

“I know it, I can believe it,” replied Raymond; “but nevertheless the spring of youth remains. It only wants the help of time to heal its wounds and restore its power of working and enjoying.”

The young man shook his head incredulously.

“You don’t believe it yet; but you will find it out by-and-by,” insisted Raymond; “that is, if you wish it and strive for it. We are most of us asleep until sorrow wakes us up and stings us into activity; then we begin to live really, and to work.”

“Then I’m afraid I have been awakened to no purpose,” remarked Clide rather bitterly. “I certainly have not begun to work.”

“Perhaps unawares you have all this time been preparing yourself for work--for some appointed task that you would never have been fitted for without the experiences of the last years.”