26
CHANDOS.
of those calm, tearless eyes, from whose depths there
looked so wide a world of unuttered reproach, of un-
uttered agony.
"Chandos, Chandos, there will be no need for me to
tell the town ; it will be whispered soon enough I Would
you give the task to your debtor, your guest, your
friend? No ! There are too many who will take it fast
enough. Leave it to the men you have outrivalled and
the woman you have forsaken: those are the glib
tongues for such a theme ! As for mercy in the telling,
what mercy can the man show who has to bring his
death-warrant to another? I would have warned you
long ago, and you would not be warned. Is it my fault
that you have wasted your princely substance and are
a beggar now? Oh, my friend, there is no error in this
thing save your own."
He toyed too long with the theme that was so sweet
to him; he counted too surely on the endurance of the
man he lashed and stung and stretched upon the rack
of his subtle mockery of pity and of sympathy ; there
was a latent force he had not known, a latent passion
he had not divined, in the pleasure-steeped softness of
his victim's nature.
Chandos gave a forward gesture, like a maddened
animal rising to its spring; he did not- reel, or stagger,
or let escape one sign of the anguish within him, but he
stood there upon his desolated hearth erect, brought
to bay as the deer by the sleuth-hounds, livid to the
lips, with only the blood burning like Are across his
brow, his golden hair dashed back disordered, his eyes
proud and fearless even in their misery. It was no
longer Alcibiades amidst the gay levity, the dreamy
languor, the fragrant rose-crowns, and the laurel-
wreathed amphorae of the revels of his youth ; it was
Alcibiades, grander in his fall than in his reign, facing
alone the dead cold of the winter's night and the un-
sheathed circle of his assassins' steel, until they cowed
and fell asunder and pierced him with dastard surety
from afar off with the arrows of the Bactrian bows.
He raised his right hand and pointed to the door.
"If you are man, not devil, let me be! Go! I com-
mand you!   Go!"
Bold though they were, his torturer's eyes could not
neet his; victorious though he was, Trevenna dared
not dispute that bidding; insatiate though his greed for
this exhaustless triumph would still have been for hour
upon hour, he was forced to obey that gesture of com-
mand. Mastiff-like both in courage and ferocity, he
was still driven out as a murderous animal is driven
out by the will it reads in a human gaze. He longed to /
linger there the whole night through, and ring every
change upon that note of ruin, and watch every spasm
of the overburdened life, and turn every screw And
But he dared not; he felt that he must leave bis work
to bear its fruit and harvest of misery unwatched; he
knew it as the murderers of Alcibiades knew that none
could come near, with life, to the menaced danger and
1 the mighty woe that looked unquailing on them from
the flaming eyes of the roused Sybarite, the dis-
crowned idol, the awakened Epicurian, called out in
the dead of night to stand face to face with his de-
struction. The hirelings of Pbarnabazus slew the
Greek; Trevenna, less merciful, jett the living man to
Buffer.
The velvet swept down behind him, the door closed,
and he drew it softly after him; then he paused in the
stillness of the breaking down that was rising on all
the sleeping world without, and listened with an ex-
pectancy upon his face.
On the silence he heard a heavy crashing fall, like
the fall of a stricken tree: then all was still with the
stillness of the grave.
He smiled, and passed onward through the second
door, and down the corridor and staircase of the house
that had been opened to him, night and day, with a
hospitality that no claims could weary and no exactions
chill, and went out through the lighted hall, with its
bloom of exotic color and its richness of jasper and
porphyry. As he passed the statue of the great minis-
ter standing there, white and majestic, amidst the
foliage of American plants and the glow of Eastern
flowers, he looked upward to the sculptured face with
a glance of triumph, of achievement, of satisfied re-
venge, that in the intensity of its evil and its cruelty
was almost grand by the sheer force of strength and
purpose.
"Monseigneur, monseigneur," he murmured, in that
thirsty exultation, flinging his victory and his mockery
in the face of tbe lifeless marble, " how is it with your
beloved one now t "
CHAPTER II.
The morning sun straying fitfully in through the
thick leafy shades and trellised creepers of the winter
garden beyond, as the day rose high and bright over a
usy waking world, found the ruined man lying where
he had fallen, struck down by the blow that had beg-
fared him of all, as a cedar is struck by the lightning.
Ie lay there insensible to all except his agony, his
hands clenched upon the leopard-skins that strewed his
hearth, his brain heavy with the pent blood that seemed
on fire.
The shock had fallen on his life as suddenly as, in
tropic latitudes, the black tempestuous night falls down
upon the shadowless day. Yesterday he had been rich
in every earthly treasure; to-day he was beggared,
shamed, dishonored. Ruin!it was upon him like the
vague, confused horror of a nightmare whose bonds he
could not break; he could not realize its despair nor
measure its desolation; he felt like one drugged with
opiate poisons that bring a thousand loathsome shapes
thronging between their dreamer and the light of day
and the world of men. He had been a stranger to the
mere pain of transient human sorrow; he was stunned
to unconsciousness by the world-wide misery that
felled him down at a stroke as the iron mace fells an
-ox. Hours passed; he knew nothing of their flight:
the gas burned in the chandeliers above him, still shed-
ding its flood of light that looked garish and yellow be-
ride the brightness of morning that stre.- .med in from
the garden beyond. There was profound silence round
him, broken by nothing save the monotonous murmur
of the fountains falling yonder; the faint noise of the
streets could not penetrate here, and the sounds of the
moving household were shut out in a deathly stillness.
He was left to the solitude which was all the mercy
that life now could give him. The dog alone was with
him, and crouched patient and watchful, moaning now
and then with sympathetic pain for the misery it could
not comprehend, and gathered close against him where
he lay.
As Hie sun grew brighter in the palm and flower isles
beyond, Hie retriever tried to rouse him, as on a battle
ters; it thrust its muzzle against his hands, and laid its
broad head against the disordered richness of his hair,
moaning with piteous entreaty and fond, dumb caress.
At last the patient efforts moved him; he looked up in
the dog's eyes with a blind, bewildered gaze, and rose
slowly and'staggeringiy to his feet, like a man feeble
from protracted illness. He had no clear memory of
what had passed; he could have recalled nothing, save
that one word in which all was told" ruin!"
He looked mechanically round the familiar beauty of
the chamber; th hues of the pictures, the grace of the
sculpture, the lavish luxury of every detail, the peace
and fairness of the charmed tranquillity, seemed so
many mockeries of his woe. In the midst of wealth
he stood a beggared man; with the world at his feet
yesterday, he stood now dispossessed of every earthly
thing.
He had sold his birthright for ten years' delight!
And not of the world, not of his wealth, not of the
fame of his name and the worship of men, not even of
the woman whom [he loved, did lie think in that first
moment of awaking to this mighty desolation that had
fallen on him: it. was of the trust of his fathers that he
had forfeited, of the home of his race that he had lost.
Esau-like, he had bartered his kingly heritance for
the sensuous pleasures of an hour; and the sole mem-
ory that lived through the stupor of his brain were
those brief, brutal words that devils seemed to hiss for-
ever in his ear"You have lost all !"
A convulsion shook his limbs; a great voiceless sob
rose in his throat; his head drooped upon his arms,
veiling his face as the Romans Veiled theirs before out-
rage and calamity. " O my God I my God !" he prayed,
in his agony, " Give me deathnot this !"
The only mercy life had left himthe privilege to
suffer in solitude-could be his but a brief space. After
the bitterness of the night followed the worse bitter-
ness of the risen day, when its witnesses must come
about him, when its wretched tale must be rung on his
ear in all its changes; when the world must flood in to
wonder, to smile, to sigh, to censure, and, yet worse, to
pity; when Che condemned must go out to the cross, to
be stretched and nailed and lifted up in crucifixion
within light of the gathered crowds. When he remem-
bered, all these things, it seemed to him more than life
could bear to go through them; when he slowly roused
to che real meaning of this beggary that had suddenly
seized him in the midst of his joyous and magnificent
existence, he recoiled from its endurance with a sick-
ening shudder, as the bravest man will recoil from the
approach of a drawn-out and excruciating death.
Once the thought passed himWhy meet it?   Why
wheel in that rack on which he stretched his /Mend.  await this living giave which yawned for him, when
the rest of the dead might be takenthe blank, blest
silence of the tomb be his, instead of the world's pil-
lory and the exile's wretchedness?
Close at his hand lay the pistols to which his torturer
had referred with a jest that might be his tempting;
they were loaded to the muzzle, as they had been care-
lessly laid down the morning previous, after an hour's
gistol-shooting in his gardens below with a gay party,
[is grasp mechanically closed on one of them. Over
and over again, in his serene security of happiness, he
had smiled and said he would not live to brook a single
hour of pain ; the jest had become a terrible reality.
One touch, one moment's blindnessthen oblivion; the
world and his own ruin would be as naught, powerless
to sting or harm. Were it not better than to live on to
face all that must come to him with the rising day?
The old weary wonder of Hamlet, that pursues every
mind through every age, rose in him now; the old,
eternal, never-answered question came to him as it
comes to so manyWhy live, when every breath of
life is pain?
For a moment his worst foe was nigh the fulfilment
of his worst wish ; for a moment, in the devastation of
every hope and every possession, death and its escape
allured him with a horrible force. All that made life
worth the living was dead in him ; the body only was
left to perish: why leave breath in it, when to breathe
was only to prolong and to intensify an anguish with-
out hope? For a moment he lifted the weapon up, and
pressed the cold ring of its steel tube against his brow;
its chill touch was the only kiss left to him now, the
only caress of pity he could know. His head sunk
down against it, leaning on its mouth as it had used to
lean on the softly-beating hearts of women who loved
him. A moment, and his dead limbs would have been
stretched there on his hearth in such a close to the
history of his life as would have sated even the lust of
his unrelenting foe.
A ray of the sun, straying in across the yellow heat
of the chandelier-lights, fell across the white features of
a bust that stood at the far end of the chamberthe
same features and the same sculpture as the statue to
which Trevenna had murmured his valediction. The
light illumined the marble, giving to the mouth almost
breath, to the eyes almost life, with its sweet spring-
day warmth. Chandos saw it as his eyes stared
vacantly and without sense into the empty space.
His arm dropped; his hand unloosed its hold; he
laid the weapon down unused.
He had treasured his father's memory, he had vene-
rated his father's fame, with a great love that no time
weakened. He remembered how his father once had
bidden him make "the people honor him for his own
sake;" and he was about to die a dog's death by his
own act, lacking the courage to rise and meet the fate
that his own madness brought him !
With that memory the temptation passed. Philip
Chandos had died, like Chatham, in his nation's cause;
the last marquis had died upon the scaffold to save his
honor from forfeit, and those who had trusted him
from betrayal; he would not put beside those deaths
the history of a suicide's fall.
Such as his doom was, he accepted it.
He rose and walked toward the window, with the
uncertain, tremulous gait of a man dead drank. He
drew the heavy curtains aside and looked out with
aching, scorching eyes. The hum of the streets in the
distance rolled in on the morning air; the faint busy
noises of life came across the stillness of the gardens;
a clock was striking twelve. Each sound, each mur-
mur, every echo of the existence stirring round him,
every shiver of the linden-leaves near him, throbbed
through his brain as though they were the clanging,
jangling iron strokes of deafening bells; every sense
and pulse of living things came to him with an excru-
ciating pain, like the touch of a knife on a bared nerve.
The day was at its height: solitude could be no longer
possible. Even now the woman whom he loved watched
for his coming; in a few hours his world awaited him
.^a,^jvfflessa^waken ^
the land was bidden to his house ; even that very night,
the fame and the fashion of his name were to give suc-
cess to the crippled artist's best-beloved creation. The
world looked for him ; to be alone was too rich a luxury,
too merciful a sentence. He must go out and endure-
this thing which had come to him in the broadness of
daylightin the sight of all men.
As memory rushed on him of all that must be borne,,
of all that had been lost, he bent his head as though
under the weight of some insupportable bodily burden ;:
a sickness of horror was upon him; he strove to realize
all that was ended for him, and he could not. Only-
yesterday his hands had been flllel with every fairest,
gift of life; he could not bring himself to know tha
they were now stricken as empty as the outstretched-
hands of any beggar sitting at his gate.
The paralysis of an absolute despair fell on him,
mute, tearless, unmovedthe rigidity that falls on mind
and brain and heart under the pressure of some im,
measurable adversity.
He had to hear the worst; with the rising day camtr
all the day's course must unfold. He could not havrj
the partial peace of loneliness; he could not have sucl}
comparative mercy as those have who, bereaved oi
what they love, know their doom at once and can seek
solitude to bear it. Step by step, letter by letter, hq
must pass through every detail of his desolation ; and,
soon or late, publicity must proclaim it to all -who
should choose to listen. He could have no rest, no
pause, no reprieve; his misery had hunted him down,
and must be met and faced.
The sun shining in through the gas-light, that burned
dull and lustpeless in the noonday, shone on the dia-
monds glittering on his dress; his eyes fell on them as,.
in the extremity of wretchedness, the mind will'
strangely play with some trifle of which it has no con-
sciousness. He looked at them dreamily, and won-
dered why he wore them: a blank had fallen between
him and every memory; it seemed a lifetime since the-
night just passed ; it seemed as though the life that was
parted from him by a few hours only had been de-
stroyed for an eternity. Yet with the sight of them
came one remembrance; he heard, as if it stole on his
ear now, the low whisper of the lips he loved, as they
had murmured, " Come to me to-morrow "murmured
it with the softness of a good-night blush, with the-
lingering light of sweet eyes of farewell !
The morrow was now to-day. How had it dawned for
each!
He had to hear the worst. In this thing there could
be no delay; under this sentence there could be no
waiting-point of preparation or of hope. He must meet
the gaze of other men, and listen while their voices-
coldly told the story of his ruin.
He bade them come and tell him allto the furthest
letter of his doom. Despair is often bitterly calm ; it
was so now with him. In solitude, nature had givea-
way, and sunk prostrated; before another's eyes, pride
supplied the place of strength, and lent him its ficti-
tious force. He met his fate as the last marquis had
met his; and in the sight of men the enervated Epi-
curean showed the steel-like endurance of the Spartan.
With the noon Trevenna returned, as a hound returns
to the slot of his quarry, when once loosed from the
coursing-slip that has held it back perforce. He re-
entered the chamber as soon as permission came to-
him. He was the holder of all papers, the comptroller
of all finance, the director of all affairs, connected with
the Clarencieux properties; with him, even more than-
with the lawyers, lay the knowledge of all their mimi-
tiaa; through him, more than through any, must come
the unfolding of the million things that went to make
up the one vast sum of destruction. He could not be
driven out from the scene of his work; for by him alone
could the thousand meshes of the net, which, unseen
and unsuspected, he had woven, be traced and moved.
He had secured more than his victory and his ven-
geance; he had secured the imperative necessity that
he should behold the fruits of both.
Yet even he, evil as was the brute greed in him, piti-
less as was the envious hatred which-'scarcely success
could slake, started, as he entered again the room he
had changed from its dreamful peace into a torture-
chamber as terrible as any that the will of Torque-
mada ever shut in with iron-clamped walls and filled,
with human miserystarted at sight of the wreck that
he had wrought. Last night he had looked upon Chan-
dos in the full brilliance of his youth, of his splendor,
of his fashion, of his shadowless content; he saw him
now broken, exhausted, aged, altered as the flight of
twenty peaceful years could never have changed him.
He was still in the court-dress of the ball he had quit-
ted when his fate fell on him: its richness was disor-
dered, its lace crushed and soiled, its ribbon-knots and
broideries tangled; but its jewelled elegance set im
deadlier contrast the haggard whiteness of his face,
the shattered look of his whole form; it marked in:
ghastlier contrast what he had been and what he was..
But "calamity is man's true touchstone," as Beau-
mont and Fletcher wrote. Met by misfortune, he who
had shunned every shadow and every weariness with-
all the indolence and fastidiousness of the voluptuary
faced it with a proud serenity from which no confes-
sion of suffering was wrung.
The gas was still burning in all the crystal globes and1
silver branches as Trevenna entered. Chandos had no
sense of the things that were about him, of the dress
he wore, of the passage of the noonday hours; and hi
household, who felt that some great adversity had sud-
denly befallen him, dared not venture nigh unsum-
moned. He stood against the hearth as his guest
advanced ; his eyes were bloodshot, his hair disordered
and damp with the dew of his forehead; his face was
bloodless: beyond these, he "gave no sign."
Trevenna stretched out his hand in their old friend-
ship and familiarity of greeting. Chandos did not
give his own: he looked at Trevenna with a tranquil,
lingering gaze; if there were reproach in it, the re-
proach remained otherwise unspoken.
"Tell me all," he said, briefly; and his voice, faint
though it was, did not falter.
For one instant his traitor was silent, baffled and
wonder-struck.
Fine as was his intuition and insight into character,
he had made an error common with men of his mold;
he had undervalued a nature it was impossible he could
comprehend. Studying the weakness of his patron's
temper, he had not perceived that they were rather on
the surface than ingrained; he had disdained the
facility that had lent Chandos so willing a tool into his
hands, the gentleness, the frankness, the generosity,
the unsuspecting pliability of temper; he had lootaed
with contempt on the imaginative, idealic mind and this
effeminate softness of the man he hated,  H bafy,