Chapter XIX. The Breaking Luck of "Edenhall."

So long as the opulence of "Lady Clifford" sufficed to maintain him in a drifting and libidinous life, the glossy affections of "Sir Roger" provided a garden of Eden for her idle fancies at Edenhall. Now that the crisis of the cotton-balloon had tumbled her down with legions of others in the débris of its ruinous collapse, the flowery perfumes of the new Elysium were no more tangible than the subjective memories of the past.

Abandoned by the man who had entangled her in the meshes of his perfidious villainy for a period of six months, the keen-eyed acolyte Simon, who had such a liking for mixing himself up in the affairs of the bird of Paradise, discovered the degraded life which her meretricious husband was living in the slums of the city, in a notorious house situated near the wharf, and the full-tide of the demagnetised Marvel's self-torture and remorse over-whelmed her in unspeakable prostration. She had abandoned the substance for the shadow and discarded the man for the werwolf. Fancy had forestalled reason; she had sold a loving and faithful mate for a mess of pottage², and now there was nothing to disturb the mill-pond inertia of her existence, and she was bankrupt in more ways than one. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first deprive of reason.

The memory of the abjured self-denying and long-suffering Eugene weighed her down like an ever-present nightmare. She bitterly repented over the sorry business of the renunciation of Eugene. Sitting week after week alone, unless when at the end of the week the children had returned from school, the hollow and monotonous existence which she was leading began to tell its grave tale upon the phases of her mind, and at times it grieved her relatives to see her brooding over the hallucinations of melancholia. Edenhall became at night nothing more than an illuminated hermitage, resounding with the music of the solitary, displumed and dispirited Marvel on the harpsichord, like Penelope at the spinning-wheel³, and her singing all alone the madrigal—

"Other arms may press thee,
Dearer friends caress thee,
All the joys that bless thee
Sweeter far may be;
But when friends are nearest
And when joys are dearest,
Oh! then remember me!"⁴

Forsaken, now that she was comparatively poor, by the friends who had page 493worshipped in scores at the shrine of the golden calf, for hours together she would mope en pénitence at Edenhall, where at last she realised that all her whirligig and razzle-dazzle pleasures were, like most other subjective possessions, nothing in the end but hollow joys and smouldering ashes. She had asked the judiciary for bread and they had given her a stone.⁵

Hard as Marvel tried to disenchant the reminiscences of Eugene, the spectre of the slandered, cruelly-treated man tormented her in her strolls through the side-walks, avenues and shrubberies of the garden and in her waking dreams, until ultimately the burthen of her life at Edenhall became well-nigh intolerable. The summer lightning of her coal-black lustrous eyes in the early stage of her mental breakdown made them appear as if starting from their sockets, but anon they sank into moody, morbid, lurid spheres. Purple lunules⁶ around her eyelids pourtrayed the disturbance within, while her face was rapidly losing its wonted gipsy bloom. Sleep began to desert her, or when it came, it rendered her distraite with its concomitant dreams and hallucinations. Following upon the insomnia came all the prodromal symptoms of acute mania. Her pulses quickened into an abnormal celerity; her face had the absorbed, far-away expression of disturbing mental forebodings. Her gait became faltering and vacillating, and twitchings of the muscles of her limbs developed themselves into frantic convulsions. She lost her appetite for food; her language became incoherent and unintelligible, and the god of Nemesis hurled her headlong into the whirlpool of madness, which for a short season after the visits of the children or her mother would subside into a lucid interval of placidity, again alas! only to assume the phases symptomatic of folie circulaire, or cyclical phrenzy.

It soon became apparent to her mother that the derelict life which Marvel was now leading in the hungry Edenhall was seriously impairing her mental faculties. The faithful old mother persuaded her to leave the place and reside in the old home of the mushroom Goulds, which shortly after the death of the great and mighty coal-king had been christened with the name of "Grievedene"⁷—a very bad name, since Grievedene instead of being situated in a "deep vale" was embosomed on the breast of a hill. The opportunity was not allowed to escape the notice of the lynx-eyed and ubiquitous, the flaccid and emasculated, Simon Ernest, whose virility had been sapped by close attendance in the performance of his lying-in duties, and his services as dry-nurse. He purchased on the scale of the depreciated rates of property the mansion which had cost Marvel in all, as it now stood, some sixteen thousand dollars for the paltry sum of twelve hundred, and in the following year he left Sabinnia, and by means of parliamentary back-stairs influence he took, with the swarthy, sallow, elephantine and gravid Sukey and the spawn of vandal, scorbutic picaninnies, possession of the Saracenic palace; where jasper and agate formed the new architrave⁸, and on the keystone of the arch was chiselled a mitred escutcheon sacred to the cult of Clifford, while two page 494magnificent lions couchants guarded the keep of Edenhall. Like Jonathan Scatter, Simon Ernest was highly impregnated with commercialism, and he was never behindhand in the struggle for a good foothold in the world, even if it came from robbing his own brother. Thus ended the sojourns of Marvel in the gorgeous paradise of her own making—the palatial residence which had been her chief attraction for years and the principal cause of her prolonged absences from the proper homes provided by Eugene. Edenhall was uninhabited for nearly a year, and the whole place was buried in gloom. The seeds of insanity sown in the brain of the man whose grave old Adam Quain had rifled, and inherited by Sukey Bubtitt, remained in abeyance all Sukey's life. In Marvel the strain of folie circulaire inherited by Marvel from generations back were fast appearing from beneath the surface of the rife soil of Edenhall, and Lillie Delaiae, who had perfectly and permanently recovered from the effects of the atropia, was avenged to the bitter end.

Had it not been for her timely removal from her dangerous habitude, they would have quickly blossomed and borne fruit. As it was, several times she was found prostrate before a portrait of Eugene—her bowed head, her dishevelled hair neglected like the tangles of Neaera⁹, and the wringing of her hands making her the verisimilitude of a Magdalen.

Fortunately for Pearly and Valentine, and indeed in many ways for Marvel herself, the application made by Warne, Costall and Davitt for a defeasance of part of the will and a disponing of it on behalf of the children, proved in the hour of need a boon, insomuch it was impossible for Marvel to be inveigled by her destroyer into drawing promissory notes against that fund, circumvented and inhibited by the court, and segregated from the main body of her legacy. She was thwarted by the judge's order from all power of anticipation regarding the children's money. It was almost all that was left of her munificent dowry. Thus virtually the fund for the children supported their mother as well as themselves.

In the codicils of the will of the coal-king provision had been made enabling and entitling the executors to prosecute the work of the collieries. Lacking the practical application of the knowledge of the country possessed in full by their departed owner, the returns from the mines began from the outset of the new regime to slowly diminish. Ultimately they dwindled down to nothing. On the other hand, the wool-merchant, who was heavily interested in coal-mining industries and always courted the good graces of the heads of the iron and brass foundries and the vendors of machinery and coal-mining appurtenances, had no compunction in drawing upon the residuary estate for the matériel to enable him to continue the work. Of this golden steam to machinery he was indiscriminately lavish.

The eldest son, Reginald Gould, was out of the States altogether, searching for carbuncles at Santiago in South America; but it is very questionable if his knowledge of mining, unavailable as it was, could have been productive of any better results. It, indeed, seemed that the carbon-page 495iferous seams in the wombs of the Cyclops and Agamemnon mines had become exhausted.

Augustus, "the blundering old booby," was of no use, even if he could have been induced to take an interest in the development of the collieries. His ruling passion was the poultry farm and the dividends of a gold-mining company in California.

The old mate and quondam manager, the blasé Vernon Jay, had gone down life's ladder. He kept a little pie-shop in New York, and was given to low living and the wasting of his substance in the alcoholic mazes of the city, from which he seldom emerged on a visit to Maconville; or if he did, coal-mining was now beyond the pale of the pie-man. A meeting between him and Simon Bubtitt was never suggested. Vernon Jay held himself aloof from all the kindred of his deceased employer ever since he had been sent to the right-about by old Jean for asking her to marry him after worshipping the old girl or her money for some years. Jean did not forget that there was a proviso among the "trivial fond records" of the departed Julian rendering nugatory her fortune if she married anybody. The executor too had warned him away from the collieries on account of suspicions which he entertained of his wastefulness, and the knowledge that it was through his owlishness that the old coal-king had been implicated in the frauds of the Great Leviathan Antediluvian Diamantino Tin-Mine.

Altogether then, the collieries were worked entirely by strangers, not one member of the family having any finger in the pie at all. These strangers having no immediate interest in the output of coal, and reaping no benefits in proportion to the yields, worked the mines to suit their own direct advantages on a sort of Government stroke. For years after the great man's death the wages of the miners were doled out by dribs and drabs, and poor returns had been the order of the day, and still, in a most paradoxical manner, additional hands were engaged, so that in eight years from the date of his death the outlay on the mines was enormous, and there was not a vestige of coal to be found in the upheavals. The immense residuary estate invested in Mexican Rails thawed away like a mountain of snow and threatened to disappear altogether long before a redistribution of the prizes had been willed to take place.

The fair prospects of Pearly and Valentine darkened as the years rolled away. One thing certain they had ever in prospective—a name bought for them by their mother and partly with their own money—a name of ravenous life-long reproach; a name blackened by the actions of their mother in procuring a dissolution of her wedlock with their father by dint of lying and treachery, actions which did not enrich herself, but which left little Pearly and Valentine poor indeed; and a name diametrically opposed to that into which they were born—a birthright and unbartered heritage which all the coal in the country could not procure.

Brilliant, intellectual, handsome, strong and healthy, they floated on the tide of nonage into their youth—on, on, on, pressing forward for the rich guerdons awaiting them in Treasure Island; to find when the day of page 496reckoning came that their fortunes had gone down the black throats of the Cyclops and Agamemnon, or to make fodder for Mexican railways—the sins of their parents visited upon them, and the hereditaments of their matchless fortune—the priceless, heirloom of a character unspotted by the world—filched from them by the selfism of their mother. In the preparation for the great campaigns of life they had been in their infancy deceived and disarmed of the stoutest shield which they could have carried by the vainglory and the narrow and mean greed of their mother. Marvel took no thought for their future when she besmirched herself, her husband, and her children with belligerent gasconading¹⁰ buffoonery and the sycophantic slime of double-dealing hoydens, strampets, bravoes, and lickspittles, coming down like hail upon the ripening corn, and then shuffled all the acquisitive blame upon her innocent husband: nothing but the detestable watchfulness of her own immediate interests. To gratify her overweening vanity, to eke out an incongruous and unwarranted revenge, and to free her cowardly self from the briars and thorns indigenous to true wifehood, in which state with Eugene she had always shown nothing but tergiversation¹¹; to adapt herself better for the tinsel and butterfly life at Edenhall, she tarnished and spoilt the shining buckler and escutcheon of little Pearly and Vallie. Remorse she felt, when it was too late, for the bitter wrong she had done their guiltless and loving father in her attempts to secure their reddition¹²; it was all the more spurious coming as it did at a time after she had fatuously allowed her only deceiver and destroyer to demolish her fortune, and at a time when she felt the need of a protector and the helplessness of herself.

The change from Edenhall to the old home of her mother had an immediate and beneficial effect upon Marvel. It re-incarnadined the damask of her cheeks, and her complexion resumed its natural gipsy odour; the lustre returned to her jet-black eyes; the dark lunettes faded away on the cessation of the insomnia, and for months she was again Marvel—the once worshipped bird of Paradise cap-à-pie.

It was but the lurid glimmer of a candle before it spluttered itself out into a cinder—the rallying spasmodic brightness of life before the demolition of its fibre. Again she retrograded into states of glamour and despondency. At varying intervals the strain of the folie circulaire threaded its way among the convolutions of her brain, where it eventually established itself and abided in active or dormant conditions as long as she lived.

Then arose from earth to sky the loud farewells to Gaiety and Wealth, and the frantic shrieks over the lost Eugene, thrown away as so much surplusage by the irreparable breach of a wild, purblind blunder.

In her phases of hallucination she would call out for Eugene, and depicture him to her guardian mother—now her only friend—as a transformed man since she saw him on that ever-remorseful never-to-be-forgotten day—a man in the prime of his life and the full meridian of his fame: youthful still in appearance, robust and vigorous, while, at the page 497time, in the trackless virgin forests, on mountain peaks, over caverns, chasms and gorges, he moved with the gallant black mustang, lithsome as a chamois on the hills, through the fairyland of his dreams of the children.

The loves of the mother of Marvel, if she had any, seemed to have been soured by her experiences of the old rover—long since roving among the angels—and did not manifest themselves in any kindnesses, but rather antipathies, towards the children. Hard as had been their portion when their brutal stepfather domineered in his tyrannical reign over them, it was equally coarse usage when they stayed at the old house of Jean Gould. From Friday night till Monday morning they were buffetted about by their unfeeling grandmother on every trivial pretext. It was a happy release when, by the increased efforts of their father acting from so far away, they were sent as permanent boarders to superior boarding-schools in the city, and, though Marvel tried very hard to arrest the mandate, she never won again since the great pitched battle, and was finally beaten to her knees. Pearly became an inmate of the Girton College¹³ of New Orleans, and Valentine an alumnus of the best academy in the State of Louisiana. It was compulsory on the part of their mother to make some pretence of spending their maintenance and education fund upon them; and, as the fees at these institutions amounted to one-half of the allowance, the other half it was to be presumed was spent on the purchase of their outfits, although there was a strong ground for suspecting that some of it was annexed by their mother and the old skinflint Jean Gould, who charged against their pittance money for their board at Grievedene.

"The weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea,"¹⁴ and in harmony with the moral law concerning the culminating triumph of Truth and Virtue, after many an uphill struggle through years of lingering penury, the fair Guinevere, who had fought to save her husband and who had been censured by those who had never seen her and knew personally nothing of her for her platonic friendship with Eugene, obtained by her meritorious career at the Girton College during her girlhood days and prior to her entrance to the alma mater of the university surcease from sorrow in the appointment of vice-principal of the college some time before Marvel's mental luxation. To have been educated there gave a girl brevet rank in the world, so that no wonder there was always a full complement of pupils at Rosemary Point. Again the wheel of Fortune brought Pearly and Guinevere together, and Guinevere desired no greater guerdon for her goodness. The very division in the school where Pearly, blushing like a rich red rose, was placed on the first day of her appearance, had been for some months in charge of Guinevere. In pleasant surprise she saw the rubicund Pearly ushered into the schoolroom by the lady proprietress. Her eyes filled with the miniature wells of joy as she covered the blushing Pearly's face with impassioned kisses and dwelt on the memories of the past. It was a red-letter day for Guinevere; the vernal day when the sunbeams glinted into page 498the schoolroom through the Venetian shutters, when the whistling call of the yellowhammer came from the battlements of the great building, and the big grown nut-brown maid, with the ruddy cheeks and straight as a dart, came once again under her tenderest care, to find in the sweetness of the charms of Guinevere a well-spring of happiness and a haven of rest after the hardships at Maconville.

Simultaneously with the reunion of Guinevere and Pearly at Rosemary Point, from the little music-room through the colonnades of Girton College came the sound of a Great Amen and the song about that night in June upon the Sabine River; for her "fingers were wandering idly over the noisy keys," and Carrie Cosgrove, the little daily governess of Augusta, was the teacher of singing, and the quirkish lady of social aplomb, who found it necessary to shift for herself since the old bone-miller had run away, was employed practising the old saltations, gyrations and salutations among the Girton girls learning the figures of the cotillon and the steps of the pas de deux; while the lady of the contralto voice and the scales sat marking time on the piano. Old Hemlock was taking care of a little crib in New Orleans for Madame, and like the giraffe, which is able to utter no sound whatsoever, the attenuated old monitor of Eugene, so sparing of words before, had lost the run of the only ejaculation she possessed, and now was absolutely dumb. The jovial old Moderator bad taken up his quarters with the talkative Titania, chattering and jabbering away for ever about fashions in social etiquette and two forms of letters which he had always ready for publication—one, "To a young gentleman, repulsing his advances"; another, "To the same, according him a meeting." They had both become deaf, so that there were two deaf and one mute celebrities living together.

In the first blush of her girlhood, the buxom, blithe and débonnaire Pearly enlisted the hearts of all in her favour. Her flowing golden hair lying in waving clusters upon her forehead, and felling in hyacinthine curves upon her ample shoulders, ornamented her sweetly pretty face, forming an exquisite adornment to the expressive violet eyes, whose love-light illumined all her companions at school. Not a blemish in its classical chiselled contour, intellect shone in every expression and amidst prettily wreathing smiles pensive dreams intermingled with sadness.

It was apparent to all who saw Pearly for the first time that the quiet and thoughtful girl had a historiette of her own, and soon she was lauded as a heroine. This distinction her mother had endeavoured to acquire for herself, but it sat badly on Marvel—it became a dirty stain.

The spontaneity of the love in Pearly for her father, springing from her own reminiscenses of Summer Hill and Myamyn, had quelled the venomous dogmas of her mother. It triumphed over the work of years and the strenuous exertions of Marvel to embitter and turn the children from him by her false vilifications. It asserted itself as repellent of the nefarious efforts to undermine and alienate her natural allegiance. Chief among her page 499malicious incitations was the instillation of an idea that if the children approached him in any way, or failed to disclaim him altogether and look upon him as some ghost, they would forfeit their hereditaments by their grandfather's will—then lying in the titles' office of the law courts, whereas their mother had no more to do with the legacies of the children than had their father, and that was nothing.

Emancipated from the thraldom of her life with the crabbed age of the austere Jean Gould and the poltroon who had usurped her father's place, gladly Pearly again entered the sphere of the benign influence of Guinevere and a whole-hearted love brighter than day, and waited for the day when her father should return. The letters which he sent her from the Cape of Good Hope would reach her in safety at last. When he returned he would tell her of how many he had written before, and she would know that her mother had maliciously destroyed her letters and presents year after year.

Hidden amongst a multitude of copper-beeches and pines, the Norfolk Island pine, the Canary Island Pine, and the pinus insignis, whose purple glamour was relieved by orangeries and magnolia trees and the pale gold of the flowering gorse and the mimosas beyond, lay the finest scholastic establishment in New Orleans Sombre it looked with its square-topped turrets and its minarets, its broad parapets and classic loggias amongst the dark green foliage, but it was a place for the work in which there is no royal road—it was not a pleasure-ground that college, it was the work-house of Athene, and she ploughed very deep.

Punctually as the big clock in the belfry struck nine, the work of Minerva was begun. Its masters were culled from the honour-lists of the universities, and with the exception of the universities themselves no better staff of teachers could be found in the whole of the United States. There boys advanced from the juvenile schools perfected their preliminary qualifications for the universities. They left direct from the college when their matriculation had been passed for one of the schools affiliated to the universities, chief among which was University College, Philadelphia.

Nine ponderous strokes of the big bell in the belfry! The first of the quarter of the new year then beginning, the boys who attended as day scholars from the city and the boys who had been sent as permanent boarders from all parts of the States flocked into the general hall. The muster-roll was taken from the repertory where last year it had been relegated for the Christmas holidays; new names were added, and in alphabetical order the pupillary lists were gone through by the vice-principal.

Alone, on his own resources, as his father had been before him, not one loving hand to guide him in his early steps in the cloistered prison. Vallie felt like a newly-caught bird, looking this way and that way, up at the ceiling and down at the floor, for the touch of the vanished hand of Pearly page 500or the sight of some familiar face, but no familiar face was there: two of Cosgrove the architect's boys, but they were unknown to Vallie.

Coming up from behind he saw another contingent of some day-scholars, who walked every morning to school from the city with satchels. Out from the batch of fresh attendants came the grown boy whom Vallie knew at a glance. Towards him he inclined with all the eagerness of a new schoolboy, and his forlorn boyish heart rejoiced when it beat beside Cyril's once more.

"Valentine Gordon Whitworth!" called out the vice-principal.

No answer came to the call. He, Valentine Gordon Whitworth, knew not what to do, as Latin was all Greek to Vallie.

"Sing out Adsum," whispered Cyril, and "Hadsum," shouted Vallie at the top of his voice, standing with the air of one who had been reared on Parnassus and had rambled through its groves cooeeing to the dryads and the wood-nymphs all his life.

The reading of the roll having been accomplished, the multitude of pupils formed into multiplex sections, which found their ways into different rooms, where they were drafted into classes according to their respective stages of advancement. Fortunately for the lonesome Valentine he was classified with Cyril, notwithstanding the fact that he was four years younger and had so little prior education: Cyril had often been ill withal; and on that account he had suffered many gaps in his early training; but his intellect had been sharpened on the whetstone of sickness. Vallie's only regret was that when the school was over for the day Cyril left for home, but he had to stay himself inside the gates. In the public school he very soon discovered how he had deceived himself with the notion of knocking the other boys over "iv that illie finger," but in the tactics of Frederick he could easily hold his own, which many another boy knew to his cost. To the arduous work of study he soon assimilated, and indeed; the nascent scholar took to the school like a duck to the water. Invita Minerva! The laborious years which his father had spent in colleges and universities had modelled his nature and transmitted its potency to the juvenile days of his son. Soon he began to feel quite at home in the work, and quickly he overtook many who had been dawdling there for years. Cyril was a heaven-sent messenger to Valentine. He brought him all the tidings from his mother about Pearly, As the two schoolboys walked together over the fields with their arms lovingly around one another's neck Cyril enfolded before him the thrilling tale that his mother had seen a newspaper from the Cape of Good Hope containing a notice that Vallie's father was shortly to leave South Africa and return home to the United States. The news was hailed with salvoes of joy and a figurative flourish of hautboys, although the band was—oh! where was that band-box and that bit of rope, those castanets and that raucous bassoon? The hopes of soon seeing his long-lost father revived the recollections of his childhood days at the rose-scented vine-clad Sabinnia, Summer Hill, and Myamyn. Involun-page 501tarily hummed into his mind the verse of Lalla Rookh which he had learnt from his father at Myamyn—

"That bower and its music I never forget.
But oft, when alone in the bloom of the year,
I think—Is the nightingale singing there yet?
Are the roses still bright by the calm Bendemeer?"¹⁵

and they spirited his attention away from the work of the school with the music of the silver bells of memory.

Perhaps, he thought, his father would take him out of the college dormitories, and that he would revel in rose-bowers again with Pearly in another flowery home; but vague notions of lawyers and strangers interfering hindered his sanguine but fanciful indulgences, and he contented himself with abiding in suspense and waiting till his father should return.

The following morning at the Girton College, Rosemary Point, there arrived from the Cape of Good Hope a letter for Pearly and at the same time another for Vallie at the academy. Eugene had heard of the new ukase that his children were to attend these institutions as permanent boarders that year from his old friend the lawyer, who had thrown himself heart and soul into the work of rescuing the children from the fate assigned them by the inefficient polemic synopsis of the case and the warped judgments of Obadiah Slocum and the other bright particular stars on the jury. Single-handed he had opposed the cabal and confraternity of the paradisal lawyers, and often at his Own expense he had filed affidavits in the office of the prothonotary subversive of the scheme drawn up by the State-sheriff, who was compelled to write several minatory letters to the possessory Marvel. Like Eugene himself, Wilmington was a man of very warm affections, whose friendship, once made, lasted for a life-time.

Taking advantage of the opportunity of communicating with them direct, Eugene wrote to them as soon as he received the welcome tidings of the change. It was the first news which they had heard from their father since he wished them godspeed in the divorce court. Theretofore wondering year after year why he did not write letters to them, they discovered at last how they had been deceived by their mother, who all along had left no stone unturned to poison their beings unduly against him by false representations, and to blot out from their unformed minds the memory of him as something unworthy to be there.

Her base attempts to embitter their hearts against him, to remodel their impressionable minds and ultimately to make them hostile; to cajole them into discountenancing and disowning him in favour of the precious bird of Paradise alone, began to recoil upon her own seditious head, when, in absolute independence of the woman who had robbed them to aggrandise herself, they felt elated at the bright prospect of seeing their father once again. They would enter into communion with him concerning the bye-gone days when they had followed him whithersoever be wandered and basked fat the crystal alabaster baths and disported their little forms through the curling, purling, murmuring waves on the sunny Sunday mornings, and page 502gathered cowrie shells on the lily-white shores of Mobile, frolicking with Prince around the flower-crowned wigwam-summerhouse and sleeping among the wild flowers and the prairie grasses at Myamyn; dancing with Vallie in Jack Tar costume and Pearly in silk sabots and pink accordeon pleats to the music and the click of the castanets and parading to the music of "Marching through Georgia," with the drum, the bassoon, the triangle and the martial music of Brosie in the long gala nights at Summer Hill; the flowery seminary at Galveston; the old mare, on whose back Vallie loved to sit all day long in the stable; the merriment over Brosie crawling about the Colorado Ranges like a crocodile and jumping about like a big electric frog with a gun after herons, widgeons and squirrels, and the memories of their poor old grandfather feeding Rosie with pies, and Miriam singing requiem hymns with them over little Percy's grave.

While the children were spending their first week at the new colleges and Marvel was living under the grim sheltering shadow of her mother at Grievedene, the remaining money of the residuary estate of the great and mighty coal-king was found to be insufficient to prosecute any deeper the work of the mines. For years after his death the returns had been on the decline, and latterly so fast had the ebb-tide flowed that the venture was a compound of lavish and reckless outlay with an absolute absence of production.

In the beginning of the following month the collieries were shut down for good. Hundreds of miners were thrown out of employment. It mattered not one jot to the wool-merchant. He had his percentage as executor of the estate and other perquisites accruing from his position as comptroller to the collieries. If any good result had been obtained, Theophilus of course would have been highly gratified; but he had drawn all he could from the well of the estate and now that it had run dry he was not going to steam away any of his own money. Besides, he was now dissociated from the other coal mines of which he had been a director, and had no longer any immediate interest in the orders of new machinery from the foundries; so that after putting off the men with aching hearts, and some of them suffering from mine-fever, to look out for other employment for themselves as lugubriously and graciously as he could, he reserved his emotional powers for the stages of the city of New Orleans, and for the remainder of his time he rolled about in a carriage.

In the old house of the coal-king, dubbed now with the brand of Grievedene painted on a piece of tin and laced by the owner herself around the fretwork of the verandah with lapping wire, remained old Jean Gould with her divorced and abandoned daughter. The house, furniture, plate, linen and pictures bequeathed to the widow in the voluminous will occupied most of her attention. From her youth through long years of hard work, during which her nose was always kept at the grindstone by the king, she had taken a great pride in keeping her abode in perfect apple-pie order. Although she was a well-jointured widow with three thousand dollars a year and a freehold residence, she disdained the life of otium cum dignitate¹⁶, page 503and worked away with the dustbroom, the flatirons and the frying-pan, sometimes wiping away a driblet of a tear from her eye and guarding like a griffin and whipping up the spirits of the bird of Paradise in the kitchen. None visited her—for she never was liked by the people of the town of her adoption—excepting the old and infirm auntie and Augustus from Sunnyside, who accorded her a visit once in six months. Regularly she went to pray every Sabbath and sit in a state of lassitude for an hour under the jargon of the rabid and raving Nonconformist minister. She was never accompanied there by the derelict Marvel, whose solace was the balmy view of the chancel and the blaze of glory in All Saints Chapel, before whose holy shrine the once wayward and froward girl, now changed into a fallen and doomed woman, piously joined in the psalmody and worshipped in penitence and painful atonement for the violation of her vows with a burning and contrite, and pietistic heart the Lord, who in His infinite love had forgiven the sins of the woman of Samaria¹⁷. Furtive tears would steal into her eyes; she would dry them away and they would come again. The giddy and malcontent bird of Paradise became quite a rellgieuse, and there was joy among the angels over the purgation of one repentant sinner. At evening too in the village chapel sat the converted Marvel in a state of religious exaltation alone before the organ, picturesque amidst the dissheveiled wealth of her Spanish hair end the long lashes of her antelope-like eyes touching her cheeks, and entranced by the swelling strains of her own enthralling harmony and singing in loud hozannas appassionato the anthem.—"The Lord thundered in the Heavens and gave His voice; hailstones and coals of fire: He sent out His arrows and scattered them; He shot out lightnings and discomfited them. More to be desired are the judgments of the Highest than gold, yea than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb." There every Sunday morning and evening she would sit, her memory crowded with wrongs visited upon Eugene, near the chancel before which she was made his wedded wife. In their vivid clearness she could hear the echoes of the full grand tones of the chapel organ as on the day of her nuptials it resounded with the march of Mendelssohn, and on other evenings she played in the church alone. Before her wandering intellect again and again would come the luminous vision of the stalwart form of her father, and jarring in her ears the words which he often used when he advised her to follow Eugene end keep to him alone—"Birdie, don't go to extremes."

Living among the muffled drums of flooding fancies and lurid memories of the past her life over again, the pleasure which she experienced in participating in the divine ritual of All Saints engendered a feverish form of true religion. Now that the die had been cast and she had crossed the Rubicon of her life, she depictured autogenetic mental illusions and fanciful dreams of what her life might then have been; when her truest lover was coming back from his wanderings and when instead of subsiding under the crushing blow which she herself and her harpies had delivered, he rose like a page 504phœnix from the ashes of her accusations and stepped from his dead self into competence and prosperity.

If she could only—she would meditate when the spirit of devotion hovered over her and permeated her thoughts,—if she could only feel again the touch of his vanished hand; again listen to the music of his voice as it sounded in her ears on the night of her espousal beneath the canary-pine and the ascendant silver moon; if she could only meet him again at the altar, to wander away again with him through the scented fields over the blue seas and beneath the sunny skies! No such blessing in store for Marvel! No bye-gone wave on the ocean of life can return with the same form as that washing past. She had tasted the bouquet of the wine, and she had wantonly thrown away the chalice, undiscoverable, irretrievable for ever. She had surrendered her youth to the sounding of brass and the tinkling of cymbals¹⁸ and the pleasures of herself and her train-bearing votaries, and now the vase of Chloris was broken and the roses had ceased to bloom.¹⁹