CHAKDOS.
25
Siabitual sobriety had given way, and that some hot
wines heated his fancies.
"My dear fellow," he said with a touch of stronger
impatience, " you must really pardon me, but if you
only keep out of bed to propose me astronomical rid-
dles, I must with all courtesy, bid you good-night."
"Monseigneur, have a little patience.   I come  on
grave matters, and you must hear them," said Tre-
venna, quietly.   "You lock annoyances out with dou-
ble doors in this chamber; but I fear, do what you will,
they will ferret   through and   follow you at last.   I
asked you, before you went to your fancy-ball, if you
knew at what rate you have lived and are living; I ask
you, now you have come back from it, the same thing."
"And I give you the same answer; I do not know."
" Shall I tell you?"
"If you please."
" I will, then, but wait one moment. Y'ou are per-
fectly happy, Chandos?"
Chandos looked at him again, in an astonishment
not unmixed with amusement.
"I? Perfectly 1 I don't think I would live a day
longer, if I were not."
Trevenna watched him as he spoke, leaning against
the marble, with the deep glow of color, the strewn
treasures of art and wealth, the white grace of the
tatues, and the intense hues of the painted ceiling
around and above. In the court costume, with the
diamonds flashing through the lace and gold embroid-
eries, the strong resemblance he bore to the last mar-
uis was as great as though the dead man lived again.
Trevenna watched him, recompensed at last for a long
decade of patient tact, for a lifetime of bitter envy, of
gnawing mortification, of impotent hate, of festering
jealousywatched him as the jungle-cheetah watches
his prey before the final spring. He went leisurely
about his work; the treasured preparation of sueh long
and thirsty toil was not to be devoured in an instant, but
tasted slowly in its wicked sweetness, drop by drop.
He changed his own position slightly nearer; his fea-
tures wore a'gravity such as became the matters he ap-
proached, but a quicker or a more suspicious observer
than the man who trusted him so freely might have no-
ticed that in the glisten of his clear bold eyes there was
a look of eager expectation, and about the firm hu-
morous lines of his lips there was a lurking triumph, a
cynical, malicious relish.
"You would not live a day, if your fortunes altered?
I am sorry to hear that; for the world, then, may lose
you soon.   We must take those pretty ivory-handled
Fistols out of sight; for, though you are so happy now,
fear you will not be so happy in tlie future."
Chandos rose from the easy indolence of his resting
attitude, and looked at him, with a new light rising in
his eyesa light of anger and of impatience very sel-
dom there.
"Jesters are priviledged proverbially," he said,
coldly; "but there are limits to their allowance when
their jests have no wit and much insolence. If you
have anything to say, say it plainly, and make an end. "
Trevenna's words had angered and astonished him,
but they had in no sense alarmed him. In his careless
peace and his total ignorance of calamity, their mean-
ing could not possibly suggest itself ever so dimly.
"Trs-cher," replied Trevenna, with an irresistible
lapse into his habitual mannerfor, though the man
was a foul traitor and an unblushing liar, it was against
the cynical candor of his nature to be a hypocrite,
though he could be one with great effect and success if
it were absolutely needed" that confounded hauteur
of you thorough-breds is deuced provoking; it is, in-
deed; and people won't put up with it, perhaps, quite
so patiently in the future. As for saying plainly what
I have to say, I suppose you will not believe me if I tell
you that your expenditure is, and has been for many
years, about quadruple what your income is?"
Chandos started, some faint perception of the de-
struction that must follow such a course arresting even
his careless indifference and ignorance on all things
financial. The next moment he smiled contemptuously
at the thought.
" My expenditure? Impossible !"
"Only too possible, unhappily. Even a Chandos of
Clarencieux cannot live like an emperor with impunity.
Royalties come expensive, mon prince; and who wears
the purples must pay for them. Your fortune was fine,
but not large enough to bear such a strain as you have
put upon it. You have no notion, you say, of all that
you have spent. What comes of a man's not knowing
the rate at which he lives? Why, that, sooner or later,
the last rope-strand gives way, and he isruined."
The word fell strangely on the silence of that tranquil
chamber, bringing, like the stroke of death, desolation
where all was peace.
Yet still the word passed by him whom it should
have warned; his confidence was too secure, his care-
lessness too entire, his possession of all that was highest
and richest and brightest of too long custom, for the
first presage of the storm to have power to force its
meaning on him.
A flush of amazed anger passed over his face; he
stood erect upon his hearth in a haughty and intolerant
annoyance.                                                          ,
" Have you drunk too much, or are you mad? This
sort of fooling passes all license. If you indeed know
what you are saying, I must beg you to leave my pres-
ence."
Trevenna, in answer, stood in a firmer, sturdier atti-
tude, with his feet apart, and his arms folded like the
Napoleonic statuettes.
'fI am neither mad nor drunk, and I am not fooling.
I wish, for your sake, I could discover it were a night-
mare after two dozen oysters; but I can't. I digest
everything, and I don't dream! Briefly, Chandos, I
must tell you what I have staved off perhaps too long:
but I shrank from the task. I let time pass. I thought
you might marry some rich or even royal bride, whose
alliance would change the whole aspect; but your bid-
ding me arrange the settlements for Lady Valencia
compels me to withhold the truth no longer from you.
There is nothing to settle on her!"
"Nothing to settle on her? What can you mean?"
Still, no doubt, no prescience of the truth, came to
him. He looked at Trevenna with a wonder in which
some disgust and more pity were mingled ; he thought
that the strangeness of his sudden mania rose from
some unusual indulgence in drink, that filled his brain
with these singular, distorted fantasies.
" I mean what I say, monseigneur. There is not a
sou's worthnot even those diamonds that glitter so
bravely on your dainty dressthat is free to^o to her
pie fact suggest? You must be financier enough to his studied craft, for all his fondly-nursed revenge for
know that! Hang it, Chandos! I am not a deep-feel- ; all his unrelinquished hatredrepaid to the uttermost
ing man-I don't go in for all that, as you know; but I coin by every gasped breath that he counted, by every
wish from my soul that I could spare you. or that fome shiver of the voiceless anguish that he watched,
other could better break to you the news you must I He did not heed the prayer for silence but took up
hear to-night "                                                                  I the broken thread of his discourse, and played with it
Chandos listened; a gray, deadly pallor came on his   as though loving it in every shape and on every side
face, his lips grew white, his heart almost ceased to      "Your property you see was fine, no doubt; but fine
beat; the first shadow of this dim horror stole on him. ! properties are not Monte-Chnsto caverns of exhaust.ess
A glimpse of its meanings was forced at length upon   wealth     Dipped  into    they will waste,     you  nave
him ; he had heard of such fates for other men.              i eclipsed princes, and starred through all Eui ope   you
He drew his breath with a gasping effort. "If you pay now for the pre-eminence. You.have hadL women s
speak truth, speak out," he said, in that strange and love-no toy so cost y ! you have had the great world s
deadly calmness which falls upon the mind and senses   worship-no chentela so expensive! you have beena
Un^rt<,      *!./,      T.lftUrtl.'-        y*     y.y-~*-.   S.       .,-..,...+      ....!.,   tVllllf                 A        f*3 lTst:
before the visitation of some great calamity.   A faint,
vague sense of this evil approaching him was all he
felt; it was not possible that it could come to him yet
more fixedly or fully.
'' I speak the sad and sober truth," returned Treven-
dilettante, a lion, a leader of fashion, a man of endless
pleasuresno pursuits take so much gold ! You have
lived in such a style that you would have run through
millions, had you had them ; and you had not one mil-
lion, though you had a noble inheritance.   Of course
na. far more quietly than he had ever spoken, his eyes   you possess such quantities of pcturea' ^?*"*
still resting on the Daphne opposite, as though to guard   and all that kind of thing and your estate itself is such
against a tell-tale flash from them of that lustful exul-   an untouched mine, that there can be no feai of your
tltion  that  he  knew was in their glance.    "I can't   personal  liberty ever being   endangered,   but,1 am
speak to  you  as  coyly and  as delicately as your   grievously afraid, I am indeed, that you^wilbe obhged
p'atrician friends and relatives would do. I'm a plain,
frank man, Chandos, and I've the very devil's own
mischief-making to tell you of now; but, believe me
once for all, it costs me almost as much to tell as it can
do you to hear. There is no good in beating about the
bushno good in being discursive over a thing so hor-
rible as this ; you must know the worst at once, and it
is better, perhaps, told without varnish or veil ; a short
shrift and a quick death. That is truer mercy, after
all, than all the endless preparation your fellow-aristo-
crats might give you.   Listen !-----' '
He paused a moment, as though that which he had to
bring bore even him down in its bitter burden ; but his
eyes glanced swiftly and longingly at the man he tor-
tured: he loved this protracted torment. Like a cat,
he played with his victim's misery before he killed
him, and if without suspicion he could have prolonged
it through hours of ignorance and dread, he would
have done so with all the endless patience of hate.
" Listen," he said, more softly; " as 1 bave said, you
lave'long livedindeed, I think since your majority
at the rate of four times your income. You have kept
two households in England nearly such as princes keep;
you have had your Paris hotel, your Turkish palace;
you have lavished money on art, like another Bt-ck-
ford; you have spent God knows what on women; you
have given entertainments that cost you (though you
never asked the cost) a couple of thousand a night;
you have played the patron to every starving genius
you met : in a word, you have lived like a king, my
dear Ernest, and not being a king, but only an English
gentleman, your royalty has broken down, and will, I
fear, end in a very unavoidable abdication. In a word,
you are Sn debt to an extent I hardly dare compute to
you. To sell everything you possess will hardly satisfy
your claimants; bill-discounters and money-lenders
have your signature in their hands, and will call for
payment without mercy. Briefly, you have sold your
birthright for ten years' enjoyment, and you now are,
beyond all hope of ransom, irrevocably and most
utterlyruin ed. "
The word cut down again upon the stillness with a
shrill, sharp, pitiless echo, as a sword cuts down
through the air before it falls on the bowed neck of the
doomed.                                                         '        .
Its utterance repaid its speaker for all he had fore-
gone, for all he had forborne, for every slight endured
in silence from the world he hated, for every benefit
taken with an inward curse from the man he hunted
down. He loved that word so well, he could have
dinned it on the silence in incessant repetition, hurling
down with it the brilliant and gracious life he had so
long envied from the thrones of pleasure and of power
into the nethermost darkness of a hopeless desolation.
"Ruined?   It"
Chandos echoed the word hoarsely, faintly, scarcely
with any comprehension of it, as a man suddenly
wakened from a deep, sweet sleep to learn some unut-
terable shame or misery that has befallen him repeats
the phrase that tells it, mechanically and without
sense. The agony of horror that gathered, white and
bewildered, on the gallant beauty of his face, was m as
ghastly a contrast with the glittering splendor of his
dress as though the face of a corpse gazed out from the
laces and jewels of a gay masquerade.
" Yes; even you, my brilliant Lord of Clarencieux!
answered the friend who stood upon his hearth; and
with the words went an irrepressible snarl and sneer of
triumph and of mockery that passed him unnoted in
that moment of breathless, burning, inconceivable
anguish. ",)!. you ! Details you will learn for your-
self hereafter; for to-night the broad, brief facts
enough. I would have warned you long ago, if you
would only have listened; but you know as well as I do
you would never hear of business, never think of
money. Besides, in truth, I scarcely thought it was so
very, so hopelessly bad as it seems now to be. I sup-
pose your marriage with a bride who has no dower
has set the fellows on: they are hounding for their
money now like mad. 1 have had hard work to keep
them even from arresting you; I have, upon my honor!
To-night, when you went out to your princess's ball
with all those thousands of pounds' worth of rose-dia-
monds about you, it was a wonder, on my life, that
some one of your hungry creditors didn't stop those
dainty jewels. You shall see to-morrow that I tell you
but the plain, unvarnished truth. You are so deeply
involved now, Chandos, that I doubt if there is a single
little cabinet picture on these walls, or a single rood of
land at your beloved Clarencieux, that in a month s
time you will call y our own-----"
" Stop!oh, my God! have some mercy!"
The words broke out like the last cry wrung from
one driven to the extremity of physical endurance-
wrung from him in the abandonment of human mis-
ery against all strength of manhood and all power of
will He could bear no more; he was stunned and
blinded like a man struck from behind him a murder-
ous blow upon the brain which blasts his sight to dark
Rtiin!it had no meaning for him; it came to him
like some dim, shapeless, devil-begotten thing that had
no form or substance, a hideous lemur of a night s
delirious dream.               .......
Trevenna stood by and watched him; his hour had
come at last, the hour which paid him back the can-
kerous evil, the relentless toil, the unremitting chase,
This moment
to give up almost everythinggive up even Claren-
dower   "canTou nr^unaersFand me 'when f e you   of such long, wakeful, hungjy years
that you have lived at the rate of four times the amount   had been hoardedup.by him_ ai a. J^r hoards bis
ot your annual income?  What history does that sun-  gold, and now, in its full seizure, he ws
cieux!"
The words, so deftly strung together to goad and
taunt and add misery to misery, wound their pitiless
speech, unchecked, with all the fiendish ingenuity of
hatred that could not sate itself enough in the vastneas
of this wreck it wrought.
Chandos heard them, yet only dimly as men hear in
whose ears the noise of great sea-waves is surging.
He raised himself erect, rigid in an unnatural calm.
Years of age and wretchedness could not have changed
his face as this brief moment had changed it; its radi-
ance and its splendor had died out as though the
breath of death had passed on it; its ashen white
looked ghastlier beside the ball-room gayety of his
dress, and in the stillness that followed the loud, slow,
labored breathings of his heart were audibleeach
throb a pang.
"You swear that this is truth?"
His voice was broken and strained, like the voice Of
a man just arisen from a bed of lengthened sickness;
and his hot lips had parted twice before words came
to them.
" To the uttermost letter."
Chandos' head drooped as though he had been sud-
denly stabbed; all the vigor and grace and perfection
of his frame seemed to wither and grow old; a shud-
der such as the limbs shiver with involuntarily under
some unendurable bodily torment of the flames or of
the knife, shook him from head to foot.
"Clarencieux lost!   OGod!"
The words died in his throatthe stifled cry of a vain
agony for his lost birthright. This alone, through all
the blindness and the stuper of misery that had fallen
on him, rose out clear before him in its burning tor-
turethe passionate yearning of his heart towards
his home.                                         ,                ..       ,
As the flare of a torch suddenly shows the abyss
that yawns beneath the traveller's feet, so the glare and
the shame of the sentence he heard showed him the
bottomless desolation over which he stood. He was
wakened from his dreamful ease to be flung face to
face with an absolute despair ! For the moment strength
gave way, manhood was shattered down, consciousness
itself could keep no hold on life; the lights of the
chamber reeled in giddy gyrations round him, a sound
like rushing waters beat in on his brain, a darkness
like the darkness of death fell upon him. He swayed
forward like a drunken man, against the broad marble
ledge above the hearth ; his hands instinctively clenched
on the stone as the hands of those sinking to their grave
down the glassy slope of an Alpine mountain clench on
the ice-ridge that they meet; his head sunk on his
arms, the suffocated labor of each breath panted out
on the silence like a death-spasm:at one stroke he
was bereaved of all !                                  .
His torturer looked on. Never in the cells of the In-
quisition could Franciscan or Dominican have watched
flie gradual wrenching of the rack, the winding-out of
the strained limbs till they broke, the wringing and
bruising and slaying of the quivering nerves till they
could bear no more, as Trevenna watched this moral
torment, this assassination of joy and honor, peace and
love and fame, and every fair thing of a gracious world,
laid desert and desolate at his word. He looked on, as
in the legends of the early Church devils looked on at
the impotent despair of those whose souls they had
lured and tempted and meshed in their net and made
their own.   He looked on and was repaid.
" Chandos," he said, gravely, almost softly, pQunng
the last drop of burning oil into the fresh wound his
stab had dealt" Chandos, believe mefrom my soul
I pity you!"                                     ,                    ...
He had studied long the nature of the man now in hi*
power, and he knew the keenest sting to give. Yet for
once his greed erred in its mark; the last bolt shortened
the hour of his rich, insatiate enjoyment.
It roused Chandos as the bay of the pack rouses the
dving stag from its mortal throes to stagger up and
drag its bleeding limbs to solitude, where it can die
alone. It pierced his stupefaction; it told him more
widely than all other words could tell, how mighty was
his fall, how utter his desolation.
This man pitied him ! He raised himself with sudden
force; the pride of his race was not dead in him, and
the same courage inthe teeth of calamity .which had
sent the last marquis with a smile to the Tower scaf-
ford, was in him now under the lash of his dependant s
mockery of compassion. His face was strangely and
terribly calm, but a premature age seemed to have
withered all life from it; his lips were colorless, and on
his forehead alone the dark congested blood flushed
heavily, red and burning as in the heat of fever.
"If tiiis be the truth," he said, hoarsely, while hi*
throat was parched and almost voiceless,    you have
had little mercy in the telling 1    Go; take the town ;
your story; it will startle them.   Spare more of it to
'"'The words were spoken with a tranquillity more hor-
rible than the fiercest outbreaks of delirium or the
most hopeless abandonment of we. He stood as, m
the days of Philip the Fair, one of his race had stood
to be bound to the Templars' pyre; his hand was
clenched on the marble ledge, and every now and then
a quick shudder ran through all his limbs, shaking him
as with the shudder of an icy cold; but his eyes were
dry and fronted his tormentor with a look under which
the'other shrank, and no sign or sigh of pain escaped
Trevenna moved slightly ; he could not SMet the gacd