O
CHAFDOS:
crossed the room lightly and swiftly, and laid his hands
on the musician's shoulders, with a kind and almost
caressing gesture.
"Ah, Lulli! you are awake and employed before I
have yet been in bed. You shame me here with your
flood of sunlight. No! do not rise; do not leave off; go
on with the Tantum Ergo while I listen. It is a grand
hymn to the day."
Lulli looked at him still with that loving, reverent,
grateful look of a dog's deathless fidelity.
" Monseigneur, the sound of your voice to me is like
the sound of water to the thirsty in a desert place," he
said, simply, in sweet, soft, Southern French, giving, in
earnest veneration to his host and master, the title that
Trevenna often gave in jest.
Chandos smiled on hima sunlit, generous smile,
gentle as a woman's.
" And so is your music to me: so there is no debt on
either side.   Go on."
" My life is one long debt to you. God will pay it to
yon: I never can."
The words were heartfelt, and his eyes, looking up-
ward, still uttered them with still more eloquence.
Contrast more forcible than these, as they were now
together, could scarcely have been found in the width
of the world. The attenuated and enfeebled cripple,
with his useless limbs, his bowed shoulders, and his life
worn with physical suffering that bound him like a cap-
tive and robbed him of all the power and the joy of ex-
istence, beside the splendid grace of the man who stood
above him. in a strength too perfect for dissipation to
ieave the slightest trace of weariness upon it, and with
a beauty dazzling as a woman's, fresh from every pleas
ure of the sight or sense, and full of all the proudest
ambitions, the richest enjoyments, and the most care-
less insouciance of a superb manhood and a cloudless
fortune. A contrast more startling nor, for one, more
bitter could not have been placed side by side. But
there was no envy here. The loyal gratitude of Lulli
had no jealous taint upon it that could have made him,
even for one moment, see anything save gladness and
gentleness in the gracious presence of the man to
whom he owed more than existence. He could no
more have felt envy to his benefactor than he could
have taken up a knife and stabbed him.
Six years before, travelling through southern Spain,
an accident to his carriage had detained Chandos at a
wayside inn in the very heart of the Vega. Whiling
away the tedium of such detention by sketching an old
Moorish bridge that spanned a torrent, high in air, he
heard some music that fixed his attentionthe music
of a violin played with an exquisite pathos. He in-
quired for the musician. A handsome gitana, with a
basket of melons on her head, gladly answered his
inquiries. The violinist was a youth dying, as she
thought, in a chalet near. He was alone, very poor,
and a stranger. The words were sufficient to arrest
Chandos: he sought out the chalet and found the mu-
sician, lying on a straw pallet, and dying, as tho girl
had said, rather from hunger than any other illness,
but with his large burning eyes fixeu on the sun that
was setting beyond the screen of tangled vine-leaves
early careless whisper, soft, idle, and painless, of love
in its first momentslove that is but a mere moment-
ary, passionate impulse, and may never ripen to more.
The lull of early morning, the measure of the music
passing onward witlrout pause into the masses of Mo-
zart and Mendelssohn, fell gently and mellowly on him
after the crowded hours of the past night and day. As
the chords thrilled through the silence of the breaking
day, joining the clear notes of the awakening birds be-
neath amidst the leaves, his thoughts wandered away,
dreamy and disconnected, ranging over the cloudless
years of a successful life, in which all the memories
were painted as with an Elizabethan pencil, without
shadow. In them he had never known one gray touch
of disappointment, far less still one dark taint of
calamity; in them woman's lips had never betrayed
him, nor man's hand been raised against him. For-
tune had favored and the world had loved him. No
regret lay on him, and no unfulfilled desire left its
trail.   There was nothing  in  his career he wished
the fidelity and gratitude that were rivalled in him by
his art alone.
" I should be little worthy all I owe to you, if I could
find one want unsatisfied."
"Owe! You owe me nothing. Whowould giveim>
such music as you can give? It is not every one who is=
fortunate enough to have a Mozart in his house. X
wish I could serve you better in the search that is
nearest your heart. We have done all we could,
Guido,"
His voice was very gsntle, and had a certain hesita-
tion. He appoaehed a subject that had a bitterness
both of grief and of shame to his listener; and Chandos,
carelessly disdainful of a prince's wishes, was careful
of the slightest jar that could wound the sensitiveness
of the man who was dependent on him.
Lulli's head sank, and a dark shadow passed over
his facea flush of shame and of anger, as heavy and
as passionate as could arise in a temperament so
visionary and tender to feminine softness, mingled, too.
undone;  there were no memories in it that it would   with a sorrow far deeper than wrath can reach,
have been pain to open ; there were no pages of it that
were not bright with soft, rich, living color. He had
passed through life having escaped singularly all the
shadows that lie on it for most men: and he had, far
more than most, what may be termed the faculty for
happiness, a gift, in any temperament, whose wisdom
and whose beauty the world too little recognizes.
His thoughts, floating on with the melodious chords
that swelled in wave on wave of sound through the
quiet of the morning, drifted back by some unfollowed
chain of association to the remembrance of the hot
autumn sunset at Clarencieux, when, as a child, he had
dreamt his chivalric fancies over the story of Arthur,
and had told his father what his future should be.
" Have I kept my word?" he mused, as he leaned his
arms on the embrasure of the window, while the early
light fell on the gold and the jewels of his Plantagenet
masquerade dress.
The lofty, idealic, impossible dreams, so glorious in
their impracticability, so fair in their sublime folly, in
which boyhood had aspired to a soilless fame and an
heroic sovereignty such as this earth has never seen
and never can see, recurred to him with something that
was almost, for the moment, a passing sadnessthe
same sadness which, in the words of Jean Paul, lies in
music, " because it speaks to us of things that in all our
life we find not, and never shall find."
"Have I kept my word?" he thought. "I rule the
world of pleasure; but I meant then a wider world than
that. They follow me because I lead the fashion; be-
cause I amuse them better than any other; because
they gain some distinction by cutting their coats and
wearing their wrist-bands like mine ; but that is not the
fame either he or I meant in those years. They talk of
me; they imitate me; they obey me; they quote me;
they adore my works, and they court my approbation.
But am I very much more, after all, than a mere idler?"
The genius latent in him, which in his present life
only found careless expression in glittering bagatelles
and poems, half Lucrefian, half Catullan, stirred in
him now with that restlessness for higher goals, that
that hung over the hut-door, and his hands still draw- I refusal to be satisfied with actual and present"achie've-
ing from the chords, m wild and mournful strains, the ' <>"<- -.-r,rr. ~t,..,.f.,..;---------<.,~ t- ..n <*.. s........   .,   .
-nusic for which life alone lingered in him. He was a
mere lad of twenty years, and was a cripple. Chandos
only saw to vescue them. Food, hope, and the sound
of a voice that spoke gently and pityingly to him, fused
fresh existence into the dying boy: he lived, and his
Ufe from that moment was sheltered by the man who
had found him perishing on the Spanish hills.,
Ghido Lulli had lived in Chandos' household, now in
town, now at Clarencieux, never treated as a depen-
dant, but surrounded by all that could alleviate or
make him forget his calamity, out of the world by his
own choice as utterly as though hewereina monastery,
spending his days and nights over his organ and his
music-score, and never having harder task than to
organize the music of those concerts and operas in the
private theatre at Clarencieux for which his patron's
entertainments were noted.
Guido Lulli's was far from the only life that Chandos,
the pleasure-seeker and the voluptuary, had redeemed,
defended and saved.
Obedient to his wish, the melody of the Catholic
chant rolled through the stillness orthe earlymorning,
succeeding strangely to the wit, the laughter, the
revelry, and the hazard of a few moments previous.
It was precisely such a succession of contrasts of which
his life was made up, and which gave it its vivid and
unfading color: closely interwoven, and never trenching
one upon another, the meditative charm of art and of
thought succeeded with him to the pleasures of the
world. He would pass from all the intoxication and
indulgence of an Alcibiades to all tlie thoughtful soli-
tude of an Augustine ; and it was this change, so com-
plete and so perpetually variable, which, while it was
produced by the mutability of his temperament, made
In a large degree the utter absence iii his life of all
knowledge of satiety, all touch of weariness.
He listened now, leaning his arm on the sill of the
open window that looked out upon the gardens below
fresh, even in town, with the breath of the spring on
their limes and acacias, and the waking song ofthe
nest-birci''. greeting the day. The rolling notes of the
organ pe;Ued out in all their solemnity, the cathedral
rhythm svr filing out upon the silence of the dawn, that
had been heard by him so often in the splendor of St.
Petals.at Easter-time, in the hush of Notre Dame at
midiirgl!W*aass, and in the stillness of Benedictine and
Cistercian capels in the chestnut woods of Tuscany
and the lonefy mountain-sides of hill-locked Australian
lakes. A thobsand memories of foreign air were in
the deep-dra\n and melodious chords; a thousand
echoes of the dead glories of medival Rome rose with
the
Tantum eigo Sacramentum
Venerernur cernui.
A helpless and fragile cripple in the world, no stronger
than a reed, and ignorant oi all things save his art,
once before his organ, once in the moment of his inspi-
ration, Guido Lulli had the grandeur of a master, the
force and the omnipotence of a king. In his realm he
reigned supreme, and Chandos not seldom left his
titled associates and his careless pleasures to come and
listen to these melodies in his protege's still, monas-
tical chamber, as he heard jhem now.
He leaned against the embrasure, looking out into
the tangled mass of leaves beneath, and letting his
thoughts float dreamily down the stream of sound,
blent with the lustre of the smiling eyes and the gleam
of the imperial beauty that had newly csught his mem-
ory and his fancy. Entangled with the imaginations
of his own Byatntine poem, she haunted him with that
ment, which characterize genius in all its formsthat
unceasing and irrepressible "striving towards the
light" which pursued Goethe throughout life and was
upon his lips in death. Dissatisfaction in no shape ever
touched Chandos; his years were too cloudless, and too
full of fairest flavor, for discontent ever to be known in
them. Itwas but rarely, now and then, when in the
pauses of his pleasures and his fame, the remembrance
of his childhood's grand, visionary, impalpable ambi-
tions came back to him, that the thought swept across
him of having insufficiently realized them, of having
been in some sort untrue to them, of losing in a dazzling
celebrity the loftier purity of those early and impossible
dreams.
It was not wholly true, nor wholly just towards him-
self. Egotism had little place in his life ; full though it
was of a Greek-like softness and Greek-like idolatry of
beauty and of pleasure, of an Epicureanism that
shunned all pain and abhorred all roughness and all
harshness, the cahftnities of others were widely suc-
cored by him, and the bead-roll was long of those
who owed him the most generous gifts that man can
owe to man. He enjoyed, but he never forgot that
others suffered. He loved the ease, the beauty, and the
serenity of existence: but he also did his uttermost that
others should know them too.
"1 enjoy," he thought now, as he leaned out into the
morning sunshine. " It is the supreme wisdom of life,
and the best gift of the gods is to know it ! The Greeks
were right, and in this age men remember it too little
Old Guy Patin was a million times wiser than all the
Frondeurs, sitting under the summer-shade of his
Cormeille cherry-trees with Lucretius and Lucilius and
Antoninus, while his friends killed each other with fret
and fume. Bonaparte said, ' I have conquered Cairo,
Milan, and Paris in less than two years, and yet if I
died to-morrow I should only get half a page in any
biographical dictionary;' but to geta line, orevenonly
to get an obituary notice and oblivion, men toil a life
away and consume their years in thankless, grinding,
ceaseless labor. The benighted opticism of vanity!
The succession of the nations is but as a torch-race.'
What is it to feed the flame of one of the torches for a
passing seconda spark that flares and dies? The
Greek ideal of Dionysus, with the ivy on his brow and
the thyrsus in his hand, bringing joy wherever he
moved, while the wine flowed and nature bloomed
wherever the god's foot fell, is the ideal of the really
happy hfe, the life that knows howto enjoy."
The thoughts drifted through his mind lightly
dreamily, as the swell of the organ-notes poured on. It
*2fLtr??' h? eIWed. and his temper, like the temper
of the Greeks, asked only this of life.
Chandos was not only famous, not only gifted, not
only steeped to the lips in delicate and sensuous de-
light; he was much more than all these: he was
happy.
How many lives can saythat?
The music paused suddenly, dropping down in its
gorgeous festival of sound as a lark suddenly drops to
the grass in the midst of its flood of song. Chandos
turned as it ceased, and broke his idle thread of musing
shoulder       he laid his hand gently on the musician'!
"Dear Lulli, while one hears your music, one is in
Avilhon You make me dream of the old serene and
sacred npara y<mj. Tell me, have you everything
you wish?   Is there nothing that can bring you more
Guido Lulli shook his head, lifting up his lustrous
Southern, antelope eyes-the eyes of Provence-with
" It is enough," he said simply, his Words hushed,
low, and bitter in his throat. " We are certain of her
shame."
"Not certain," said Chandos, compassionately, while
his hand still lay lightly on the musician's shoulder.
" Where there is doubt there is always hope; and judg-
ment should never be passed till everything is known.
Do not be harsh to her, even in thought."
"Harsh?   Am I harsh?"
Lulli's head drooped till it rested on his hands, while-
in the accent of the words there was a grief beyond all.
words, and a self-reproach piteous in its contrition.
" Not in your heart ever, I know," said Chandos, with
that almost caressing tenderness of pity which always
came upon him for this childlike and unworldly vision-
ary, who felt so passionately yet could only act so
feebly.
"Not to her, not to hernoi" murmured the Proven-
al, while his face was still sunk on his hands; "but
to Mm. Not even to know his name; not even to know-
where he harbors; not to tell where she is, that when
she is deserted and wretched she might be saved from
lower depths still!"
A terrible pain shook and stifled his voice, and Chan-
dos was silent. The musician's sorrow was one to-
which no consolation could be offered and no hope sug-
I have had all done to trace her that is possible,"
he said, at last; " but two years have passed, and there
seems no chance of ever succeeding; all clue appears
lost. Do you think that she may have gone by another
name at the time that her lover, whoever he may be,
first saw her?"
"It is possible, monseigneur; I cannot tell," said
Lulli, slowly, with a pathos of weariness more touching
than all complaint and lament. "Be it as it will, she
is dead tome; butbutif we could know him, help-
less cripple as I am, I would find strength enough to
avenge my wrong and hers."
He raised himself as he said it, his slight, bent form
quivering and instinct with sudden force, his pale and
hollow cheek flushed, his eyes kindling. It was like
electric vitality flashing for one brief moment into a
dead man's limbs.
Chandos looked at him with a profound pity. To
him, a man of the world, a courtier, a lover of pleasure,
the untutored, chivalrous simplicity of this idealist
roused infinite compassion. He saw brought home to
Guido Lulli, as a terrible and heart-burning anguish,
those amours which in his own world and his own life
were but the caprice and amusement of idle hours, mo
subject of a gay, indifferent jest. He had never before*
reflected how much these careless toys may chance to
cost in their recoil to others.
He leaned his hand with a warmer pressure on tne
musician's shoulder.
"I wish I could aid you more, Guido; but there is
nothing that I know of that has been left untried.
Strive to forget both: neither is worth enough to give-
you pain. Y'ou believe at least that I have had every
eflort used for you, although it has been in vain?"
Lulli looked at him with a slight smilea smile that
passed over the suffering and the momentary passion
on bis face like an irradiation of light. It was so full
of sublime and entire faith.
" Believe you, monseigneur? Yes, as I believe in
God."
It was the simple truth, and paid back to Chandos
his own love for men, and faith in them, in his own
coin.   He was touched by the naif words.
" I thank you. I am your debtor, then, Lulli," he
said, gently. " I must leave you now, or I shall have
no sleep before the day is fairly up; but I will see you
again some time during the morning. If you think of
anything that has not been done, or might be done
again, with any hope to find Valeria, tell me, and I will
give directions for it.   Adieu!"
He left the chamber, the flash of his diamonds and
the imperial blue of his dress glancing bright iu the
beams of the young day. Lulli turned his head, and
followed him with the wistful gaze that seemed to come
from so far a distancefollowed him as the eyes of a
dog follow the shadow of its master.
"So generous, so pitiful, so gentle, so noble! If I
could only live to repay him!" he murmured, half
aloud, as the door closed upon the kingly grace and
splendid manhood of his savior and his solitary friend.
Vast as was the contrast, hopelessly wide as was the
disparity between them, there was not one pang of
jealousy in the loyal heart of the crippled musician.
Then, with the last echo of his patron's step, hishead
drooped again, and the listless, lifeless passiveness, the
weary and suffering indifference, which always lay so
heavily upon him, save at such times when hio affec-
tions or his art struck new vitality through him re-
turned once more, while his fingers lay motionless
upon the ivory keys. Although happy (as far as hap-
piness could be in common with his shattered and
stricken life) in the artistic seclusion in which he was
allowed to dwell, and in the unbroken pursuit of his
art which Chandos enabled him to enjoy, there was one
sorrow on him weightier than any of his personal
afflictions.
The only thing that had ever loved him was a child,
several years younger than himself, his cousin or-
phaned ana penniless like himself, a bright, caressing
child, to keep whom m some poor shape of comfort in
their old home of Aries Lulli had beggared his own
poverty tillsending to her every coin that he tos-
sei!seXlh31,ad,be?Ii near his gra-ve from sheer famine
when Chandos had found him among the hills of the
For some time he had never mentioned the-
Verra.
,,.,,___n-,   ,     .     ,    ---------"** *o,c   luttuki. .itru  Liter
name of Valeria to his patron. hv*. <*- snrirrKing anrf