JtfDOB.
19
and a fellow is almost sooner pardoned for bemg a
bore than for being brilliant. They think there is
something so intensely respectable about mediocrity.
But still he has so many qualities that might get his
cleverness forgiven him, even there. He is a marvel-
lously good man of business, a financier, I will warrant,
such as has not sat on the Treasury Board, and he has
an acumen that cannot be over-rated. I will certainly
get him into St. Stephen's: once in, he will make his
own name."
" Chandos," said the Duke of Crowndiamonds, in the
stable-yard, two mornings later, when his Grace, with
the rest of Chandos' London set, had come down to
Clarencieux, " did you hear what that fellow of yours
your factor, your protg, what is it?has been do-
ing while you were away?"                             
" I have no protgs, my dear Crown," said Chandos.
wilfully failing to apprehend him. "I abhor the
word."                            , .                             _      ,
"Well you have the thing, at any rate. ou know
whom I meanthat witty rascal, Trevenna. Do you
know what he's been about?"
"No. Spending his time to some purpose, I dare
say, which may be more than can be said of us."
The young duke laughed.
" Doing an abominably impudent thing, to my mind.
Been down somewhere by Darshampton (democratic
something or other out-and-
" in the papers!"
said Chandos, with a little
hour. Few houses can boast so much. According to
the seasons, they rode, drove, smoked, played baccarat
or billiards, had drives of deer in the forest, and
cures by torchlight, French vaudevilles and Italian
operettas in the private theatre, spent the day each
after his own fashion, free as air, met at dinner to
have some novel amusement every evening, and were
from pain; and it was a keener pang stillthe grief of
one who strives for what incessantly escapes him.
" Wait," said Chandos, gently. " Are we sure that
nothing lives of the music you mourn? It may lfve on
the lips of the people, in those Old-World songs whose
cause we cannot trace, yet which come sweet and fresh
transmitted to every generation.     How often we hear
nat.  uinr; liuvei  _t,muc:iitcitL   ccj  t..vn.iJ6, "  ........     -. ...,........*. -~   ~-,   o-----,        ,               .. m'^Qi   +1...
the envy and marvel of the county, the county being   some nameless melody echo down a country-sicie. tne
place, you know), talking somethin_
out radical.   Why. it was all in the papers 1
" Never read the papers, "
shrug of his shoulders.
" Addressing the masses, you know, as they call it;
coming out no end at an Institute, or a what d'ye call
'em. Tell him, Jimmy," said Crowndiamonds, wearily,
appealing to a certain fashionable hanger-on of his,
who played the part in society of the duke's mnmo-
nique.
" Workingmen's place at Darshamptonall working-
men there," supplemented Jimmy, obediently. "Fel-
lows that look awfully smutty, you know, and throw
things they call clogs at you, if they cut up rough;
though why they use women's clogs, /don't know.
Trevenna been down there; asked to lecture; did lec-
ture ! Talked out-and-out liberalismail-but Socialism,
by Jove! Town wondered; thought it deuced odd;
knew you couldn't like it; couldn't think what was his
game." With which Jimmy, having performed his
office of encyclopdia, turned to the more congenial
one of examining a beautiful little mare of the Godol-
phin strain, which had won the Oaks the year before.
Chandos listened, surprised.
" Trevenna at Darshampton !" he repeated mus-
ingly.
" Ah, I knew you couldn't be aware of it," resumed
Crowndiamonds.    "Told them all so ; knew yon'd have
Interfered, if you had."
"Interfered!    How so?"
" Why, forbidden it, you know, and all that, of
course."                                              .   ,,, _
" Why? I have no more right to forbid Trevenna's
actions than I have to forbid yours."
" Oh, hang it, Ernest, you don't mean that. The
fellow belongs to you,one of your people, quite;
can't have any title to go dead against your political
opinions.''
" Never had a political opinion," said Chandos, with
a shade of weariness at the mere idea; " wouldn't keep
such a thing for worlds. There is nothing more annoy-
ing to your acquaintance, or more destructive to your
own nervous system."
"Then, the deuce, Chandos! you don't mean that
you'd let that fellow go on talking radicalism all over
the country without checking him, or calling him to
order?" chorused the duke, M. de Neuilly, Prince Paul,
and the others in the stables, all of them strict mon-
archists, conservatives, and aristocrats.
Chairdos laughed, but with a touch of impatience.
" You talk as if Trevenna were my slave, instead of my
friend! Call him to order 1 What do you mean? I
may think what I like of his actions; but I have no
shadow of right to interfere with them."
"What! not if you saw him joining a party that
threatened the very preservation of your own property,
the very existence of your own class?"
" Still less then. Self-interest is the last motive that
could excuse an aggression on personal liberty."
"Good gracious!" ejaculated the duke, as though
foreseeing the deluge. " Then, if you put him into the
Commons, as you intend, you will let him choose his
own party, go his own ways, run as dead against all
your interests and all your opinions, just as he
pleases?"                                                             . .    .
"Certainly. Do you suppose I only sell my friend-
ship to secure partisanship?"
"God knows what you do do 1" cried Crowndiamonds,
hopelessly. "All I do know is, that I should as soon
have thought of seeing Clarencieux turned into a hos-
pital as of hearing you defend radicalism!"
" My dear Crown," laughed Chandos, " I am not
defending radicalism; I am defending the right of per-
sonal liberty. I may deeply regret the way Trevenna
takes in the House; but I shall certainly have no busi-
ness to control him there because superiorities of
1roperty might enable me to do so. You say, 'You
have bought him, therefore you have a right to coerce
him;' I say, 'I have aided him, therefore I am bound
never to make that accident a shackle to him.'
The man who puts chains on another's limbs is only
one shade worse ttan he who puts fetters on another's
free thoughts and on another s free conscience. But,
for mercy's sake, drop the subject, we are talking like
moral essayists, and growing polemical and dull ac-
cordingly!"                                                .   ,     ,
And Chandos turned to give some Paris bonbons to
his favorite Circassian stallion, who was rubbing his
sleek steel-gray head caressingly against his hand for
the sweet-meats, leaving Crown diamonds in the con-
viction that the constitution was coming to an end, and
the Legitimist due and the Tuscan prince strongly of
Lady Chesterton's persuasion, that when a man was
also a poet Clarencieux might be his inheritance, but
Colney Hatch would be his destination.
Clarencieux was filled with guests on the carefully-
chosen invitations of which Trevenna had spoken. He
had the very social tactics that enabled him unerringly
to mark out harmonizing tints and effective contrasts
so as to make a charming whole. His plan was bold
and daring, but it never failed ; he always asked special
enemies together, that they might sparkle the more
for being ground against each other's faces, lik two
diamonds on a lapidary's revolting wheel ; and under
bis directions the visitors that met at Chandos' house
ever were wearied, or wearied their host, for a single
little wanted in, and generally shut out from, the ex-
clusive gatherings of Clarencieux.
Yet, well amused as his guests kept him in the Easter
recess, which fell very late in spring that year, Chan-
dos had a certain restlessness he could not conquer, a
certain dissatisfaction utterly unlike his nature: he
could not forget the Queen of Lilies. Never before
had a love touched him that was unwelcome to him,
never one that he had attempted to resist; love had
been the most facile of all his pleasures, the most
poetic but also the most changeful amusement of his
life. For the first time he had to resist its passion, and
the very effort riveted its influence. He had always
forgotton easily and at will; now he could not so well
command forgetfulness.
Now and then all the variety of entertainments that
chased one on another failed to interest him, all the
brilliance of his companions to suffice for him: the
wit and beauty of the young ladies who adorned the
drawing-rooms of Cheveley almost tired him ; he was
conscious of wanting what was absent. It was a phase
of feeling very new to him, nor with the nonchalance
and contentment of his temperament and the gayety
of his life could it have the rule over him always. But
it was there, a diss "itisfied passion, from which there
was no chance of wholly escaping.
Moreover, recalling the soft glance of the Lily Queen,
he wondered, with a touch of self-reproach, if she had
really loved him. He knew many who had ; nor was
his, conscience wholly free from self-accusation on their
score and on hers.
The Countess de la Vivarol, radiant at Clarencieux,
played in Figarotohis Almaviva, riding a little Spanish
mare that would have thrown any other woman, always
enchanting, whether she talked of Faence-ware or
European imbroglio, lapdors or protocols, fashions or
mesmerisms, flattered herself that her rival the Eng-
lish Lily was wholly forgotten and deserted; but the
keen little politician flattered herself in vain.
Trevenna, with his habitual sagacity, made no such
mistake, but pronounced unerringly, in his own reflec-
tions, on the cause of his host's needing so much more
care to rivet his attention and so much more novelty
to amuse him than usual. He guessed why the Prin-
cesse Vallera, the Marchesa de Lavoltra, the Comtesse
Lucille, de Meran, and other fair queens of society,
reigning through this recess at Clarencieux, failed in
charming or winning their entertainer. " If he meet
her again, shall I let it go on?" thought that astute
comptroller. " Yes: may as well. It will be another
complication, as the diplomatists say. Nothing like
fine scenic arrangements for a tragedy 1"
So the Queen of Lilies would apparently have no foe
in John Trevenna, although he had put the pin through
the butterflies under the cedars.
"Reading some unintelligible score of your ances-
tors, Lulli ?" asked Chandos, as, having wandered out
alone one morning, taking the freedom himself that
he left his guests, he came upon the musician lying in
the sun beside the river that wound through the deer-
park. The woodlands were in their first fresh leaf; the
primroses, violets, anemones, and hyacinths made the
moss a world of blossom ; nothing was stirring except
when a hare darted through the grasses, or a wild
pigeon stooped down from a bough to drink or to bathe
its pretty rosy feet among the dew. It was peaceful
and lovely here in the heart of the vast deer-forest,
with a gleam of the sea in the dim distance at the end
of a long avenue of chestnut-trees. " How crabbed a
scroll!" he went on, throwing himself down a moment
on the thyme and grass. " The characters must baffle
even you; the years that have yellowed the vellum
have altered the fashion.   Whose is it?"
" An old Elizabethan musician's," answered Lulli, as
he looked up.  " Yes; the years take allour youth,
our work, our life, even our graves."
Something in his Provenal cadence gave a rhythm
to his simplest speech; the words fell sadly on his
listener's ear, though on the sensuous luxuriance of
his own existence no shadow ever rested, no skeleton
ever crouched.
"Yes; the years take all," he said with a certain
sadness on him. " How many unperfected resolves,
unachieved careers, unaccomplished ambitions, unma-
tured discoveries, perish under the rapidity of time, as
unripe fruits fall before their season ! Bieht died at
thirty-oneif he had lived, his name would have out-
shone Aristotle's."
" We live too little time to do anything even for the
art we give our life to," murmured Lulli, withhisdeep-
brown Southern eyes dreamily wandering down the
green-and-golden vista of the sun-lighted avenue.
"When we die, our work dies with us: our better self
must perish with our bodies; the first change of fashion
will sweep it into oblivion."
" Yet something may last of it," suggested Chandos,
while his hand wandered among the blue bells of the
curling hyacinths. " Because few save scholars read
the ' Defensio Populi ' now, the work it did for free
thought cannot die. None the less does the cathedral
enrich Cologne because the name ofthe man who begot
its beauty has passed unrecorded. None the less is the
world aided by the effort of every true and daring mind
because the thinker himself has been crushed down in
the rush of unthinking crowds."
" No, if it could live !" murmured Lulli, softly, with a
musing pain in the broken words. " But look ! the
scroll was as dear to its writer as his score to Beethoven
the child of his love, cradled ill his thoughts night and
day, cherished as never mother cherished her first-born,
beloved as wife or mistress, son or daughter, never
were. Perhaps he denied himself much to give his
time more to his labor; and when he died, lonely and
in want because he had pursued that for which men
called him a dreamer, his latest thought was of the
work which never could speak to others as it spoke to
him, which he must die and leave, in anguish that none
ever felt to sever from a human thing. Yet what re-
mains of bis love and his toil? It is gone, as a laugh or
a sob dies off the ear, leaving no echo behind. His
name signed here tells nothing to the men for whom
he labored, adds nothing to the art for which he lived.
As it is with him. so it will be with me."
His voice, that had risen in sudden and untutored
eloquence, sank suddenly into the sadness and the
weariness of the man whose highest joy is but relief
singers cannot tell you whence it came; they only know
their mothers sang it by their cradles, and they will
sing it by their childrens'. But in the past the song had
its birth in genius."
Guido Lulli bent his head.
"True; such an immortality were all-sufficient; we
could well afford to have our names forgotten-----"
" Our names will be, infallibly forgotten unless we
attach them to a great sauce or to a great battle ; noth-
ing the world difies so much as the men Who feed it
and the men who kill it. Paradox in appearance, but
fact in reality!" cried a sharp, clear, metallic voice
the voice to ring over a noisy assembly, but in no way
the voice to suit a forest solitudeas Trevenna dashed
through the brushwood with a couple of terriers bark-
ing right and left at hares and pigeons. The musician
shrank back instantly and irrepressibly, as a sensitive
plant or a dianthus shrinks at a touch. "Halloo, mon
prince!" pursued Trevenna, cheerily. "You mea dis-
ciple of the dolce, and no mistake : Easist lounging- _
chair in-doors and wild thyme out; luxurious idleness
really is a science in your hands. If ever you do die
which 1 think highly doubtful, you are such a pet of
Fortune?the order of your disease will surely be to
' die of a rose in aromatic pain.' Nothing harsher
could possibly suit you."                ;        .
"You antithesis of repose!" cried Chandos. You
will scare all my breeding-game, frighten all my song-
birds, and drive me to a new retreat.'
Trevenna laughed as he dashed himself down on a
bed of hyacinths fit for Titania's wedding-couch, that
sent out their delicious fragrance, bowing their delicate
bells under his weight: Trevenna weighed a good deal,
though a small man.   Chandos glanced at them.
"Wanton waste, Trevenna! You are the genius of
destruction."                                           .       ,    ,     ,   ,
" Well, destruction's very pleasantof anybody else s
property.   Everybody thinks so, though nobody says
b The man had a natural candor in him, with all his
artifice of action. He hated hypocrisy with an oddly
genuine hatred, seeing that he was as cool a liar as ever
was born. It seemed as if, like Madame du Deffand,
he wished to render virtue by his words the honor he
robbed her of by his actions; for he talked truths
sharply, and as often hit himself with them as other
PexBut why can you want to kill all those poor flowers
for nothing?" asked Chandos, tossing him his cigar-
case.                                           .....*         -,.         u
" For nothing ! Sac  papier!is it for nothing when
I lie at my ease? To be comfortable is your first re-
quisite of life. Csar killed men by millions to he at
hit ease on purples; why mayn't I kill flowers by mil-
lions to lie at mine on hyacinths? Flowers, too ! A lot
of weeds."                                        .  , -,      ,       ,
" Oh, Peter Bell the Seconal" cried Chandos, shrug-
ging his shoulders.                                   ,
" A m imrose on the liver's brim
A yellow primrose was to Mm,
And it was nothing more."
quoted Trevenna.   "Now, what the deuce more should
it be ?   How that unhappy fellow has been abused for
not being able to see a thing as it wasn't-always the
thing for which poets howl at sane men?   Why are he
and I required to rhapsodize our hyacinths and prim-
roses'nice little flowers, one blue, t'other yellow,with
a pleasant smell, but certainly nothing remarkable.
What is  this miraculous  tongue that  talks to  you
artists in a scrubby little bit of moss or a beggarly
bunch of violets?"                                          ,,         
"Grimm asked Diderot the same question. You
would have wondered, like Grimm, what there could
be to listen to from an ear of wheat and a little corn-
flower."                                     ,.,                        ,
Certainly: Grimm was very like mea regular gos-
sip," responded Trevenna, pulling a handful of hya-
cinths and tossing them up in the air. "My dear
weeds you must die if I choose. Ah!it's fun to have
power over anything, great or small. Fouquier-Tin-
ville enjoyed cutting off necks by a nod of his own; I
understand that; yon don't understand it, monseigneur.
If we'd been in the Terror, you'd have gone to the guil-
lotine with the point ruffles over your hands, and a mot
on your lips, and a superb smile of disdainful pity for
the mob; and I should have tossed up my red cap and
spun round in the " a ira,' and cheered the Sansons,
and gone safe through it all. But good-bye ; I'm going
to your outlying farms. Did you know I was a first-
rate agriculturalist? Of course you don't; what do you
know about any Bucolics, except the Virgihan? With
which Trevenna, much too mercurial to sit still five
minutes, went on his way switching the grasses right
and left, and with his two little terriers barking in
furious chorus.
Lulli looked after him; Chandos himself, even, was
glad he was gone.   He enjoyed the merry society of his
fidus Achates in a club or over a claret; but there were
times when, cordial as was his good will to him, Tre-
venna irritated rather his tastes than his temper, and
his incessant banter grew wearisome.
" You trust that gentleman?" asked Lulli, suddenly.
"Entirely," answered Chandos, surprised.
"I would not," said the Provenal, softly, under his
breath.
"Indeed! Andwhy?"
Over Lulli's face came the troubled, bewildered look
which made those who noticed him cursorily think his
brain was unsettled. He felt, but he could not define.
To a mind only used to desultory dreamy thoughts, It
was impossible to trace out its workings by logic.
" I cannot tell," he said, wearily: "but I would not
trust him. The eyes are bright and clear, the face looks
honest; yet there i craft somewhere. The dogs all
slink from him; and the birds, that come, tous, h, -rom
him.   He is your friend ; but I do not think he bear
yHe ceased, looking down, still with that bewildered
pain upon the clear brown river rushing, swollen and
melodious, at his feet. Like a woman, he had intuition,
but no power of argument. Chandos looked at him,
astonished more at the words than he had been at the
secluded dreamer's distaste towards the busy and tren-
chant man of the world.
"I hope you are wrong, Lulli," he said, gentby. /
do not doubt you are.   You and that gentleman Jan