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"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

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"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

oh

How many times the word 'oh' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

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How many times the word 'left' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

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"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

failed

How many times the word 'failed' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

because

How many times the word 'because' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

demanded

How many times the word 'demanded' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

loved

How many times the word 'loved' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

imagination

How many times the word 'imagination' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

advice

How many times the word 'advice' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

horrible

How many times the word 'horrible' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

die

How many times the word 'die' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

only

How many times the word 'only' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

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How many times the word 'developed' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

unfortunate

How many times the word 'unfortunate' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

responded,--"not

How many times the word 'responded,--"not' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

friends

How many times the word 'friends' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

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"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

lurcher

How many times the word 'lurcher' appears in the text?

"But if--" I began. "I want no more of your hellish 'ifs,'" cried the girl in sudden fury. "If John were to--to look at that Scottish mongrel as I looked at Leicester, I would--I would kill the royal wanton. I would kill her if it cost my life. Now, for God's sake, leave me. You see the state into which you have wrought me." I left Madge with Dorothy and walked out upon Bowling Green to ponder on the events that were passing before me. From the time we learned that John had gone to fetch the Scottish queen I had fears lest Dorothy's inflammable jealousy might cause trouble, and now those fears were rapidly transforming themselves into a feeling of certainty. There is nothing in life so sweet and so dangerous as the love of a hot-blooded woman. I soon saw Dorothy again. "Tell me," said I, in conciliation, "tell me, please, what is your reason for acting as you do toward Leicester, and why should you look differently upon similar conduct on John's part?" "I will not tell you my plans," she responded,--"not now, at least. Perhaps I shall do so when I have recovered from my ill-temper. It is hard for me to give my reasons for feeling differently about like conduct on John's part. Perhaps I feel as I do because--because--It is this way: While I might do little things--mere nothings--such as I have done--it would be impossible for me to do any act of unfaithfulness to John. Oh, it could not be. But with him, he--he--well, he is a man and--and--oh, don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! You are driving me mad. Out of my sight! Out of my room! Holy Virgin! I shall die before I have him; I know I shall." There it was again. The thought of Mary Stuart drove her wild. Dorothy threw herself on her face upon the bed, and Madge went over and sat by her side to soothe her. I, with a feeling of guilt, so adroit had been Dorothy's defence, left the girls and went to my room in the tower to unravel, by the help of my pipe, the tangled web of woman's incomprehensibility. I failed, as many another man had failed before me, and as men will continue to fail to the end of time. CHAPTER XIV MARY STUART And now I come to an event in this history which I find difficult to place before you in its true light. For Dorothy's sake I wish I might omit it altogether. But in true justice to her and for the purpose of making you see clearly the enormity of her fault and the palliating excuses therefor, if any there were, I shall pause briefly to show the condition of affairs at the time of which I am about to write--a time when Dorothy's madness brought us to the most terrible straits and plunged us into deepest tribulations. Although I have been unable to show you as much of John as I have wished you to see, you nevertheless must know that he, whose nature was not like the shallow brook but was rather of the quality of a deep, slow-moving river, had caught from Dorothy an infection of love from which he would never recover. His soul was steeped in the delicious essence of the girl. I would also call your attention to the conditions under which his passion for Dorothy had arisen. It is true he received the shaft when first he saw her at the Royal Arms in Derby-town, but the shaft had come from Dorothy's eyes. Afterward she certainly had done her full part in the wooing. It was for her sake, after she had drawn him on to love her, that he became a servant in Haddon Hall. For her sake he faced death at the hands of her father. And it was through her mad fault that the evil came upon him of which I shall now tell you. That she paid for her fault in suffering does not excuse her, since pain is but the latter half of evil. During the term of Elizabeth's residence in Haddon Hall John returned to Rutland with Queen Mary Stuart, whose escape from Lochleven had excited all England. The country was full of rumors that Mary was coming to England not so much for sanctuary as to be on the ground ready to accept the English crown when her opportunity to do so should occur. The Catholics, a large and powerful party, flushed with their triumphs under the "Bloody Queen," were believed to sympathize with Mary's cause. Although Elizabeth said little on the subject, she felt deeply, and she feared trouble should the Scottish queen enter her dominion. Another cause of annoyance to Elizabeth was the memory that Leicester had once been deeply impressed with Mary's charms, and had sought her hand in marriage. Elizabeth's prohibition alone had prevented the match. That thought rankled in Elizabeth's heart, and she hated Mary, although her hatred, as in all other cases, was tempered with justice and mercy. This great queen had the brain of a man with its motives, and the heart of a woman with its emotions. When news of Mary's escape reached London, Cecil came in great haste to Haddon. During a consultation with Elizabeth he advised her to seize Mary, should she enter England, and to check the plots made in Mary's behalf by executing the principal friends of the Scottish queen. He insistently demanded that Elizabeth should keep Mary under lock and key, should she be so fortunate as to obtain possession of her person, and that the men who were instrumental in bringing her into England should be arraigned for high treason. John certainly had been instrumental in bringing her into England, and if Cecil's advice were taken by the queen, John's head would pay the forfeit for his chivalric help to Mary. Elizabeth was loath to act on this advice, but Cecil worked upon her fears and jealousies until her mind and her heart were in accord, and she gave secret orders that his advice should be carried out. Troops were sent to the Scottish border to watch for the coming of the fugitive queen. But Mary was already ensconced, safely, as she thought, in Rutland Castle under the assumed name of Lady Blanche. Her presence at Rutland was, of course, guarded as a great secret. Dorothy's mind dwelt frequently upon the fact that John and the beautiful young Scottish queen lived under the same roof, for John had written to Dorothy immediately after his return. Nothing so propagates itself as jealousy. There were in Haddon Hall two hearts in which this self-propagating process was rapidly progressing--Elizabeth's and Dorothy's. Each had for the cause of her jealousy the same woman. One night, soon after Cecil had obtained from Elizabeth the order for Mary's arrest, Dorothy, on retiring to her room at a late hour found Jennie Faxton waiting for her with a precious letter from John. Dorothy drank in the tenderness of John's letter as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain; but her joy was neutralized by frequent references to the woman who she feared might become her rival. One-half of what she feared, she was sure had been accomplished: that is, Mary's half. She knew in her heart that the young queen would certainly grow fond of John. That was a foregone conclusion. No woman could be with him and escape that fate, thought Dorothy. Her hope as to the other half--John's part--rested solely upon her faith in John, which was really great, and her confidence in her own charms and in her own power to hold him, which in truth, and with good reason, was not small, Dorothy went to bed, and Jennie, following her usual custom, when at Haddon, lay upon the floor in the same room. John's letter, with all its tenderness, had thrown Dorothy into an inquisitive frame of mind. After an hour or two of restless tossing upon the bed she fell asleep, but soon after midnight she awakened, and in her drowsy condition the devil himself played upon the strings of her dream-charged imagination. After a time she sprang from the bed, lighted a candle at the rush light, and read John's letter in a tremor of dream-wrought fear. Then she aroused Jennie Faxton and asked:-- "When were you at Rutland?" "I spent yesterday and to-day there, mistress," answered Jennie. "Did you see a strange lady?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, mistress, I did see her three or four times," answered Jennie. "Lady Blanche is her name, and she be a cousin of Sir John's. She do come, they say, from France, and do speak only in the tongue of that country." "I--I suppose that this--this Lady Blanche and--and Sir John are very good friends? Did you--did you--often see them together?" asked Dorothy. She felt guilty in questioning Jennie for the purpose of spying upon her lover. She knew that John would not pry into her conduct. "Indeed, yes, mistress," returned Jennie, who admired John greatly from her lowly sphere, and who for her own sake as well as Dorothy's was jealous of Queen Mary. "They do walk together a great deal on the ramparts, and the white snaky lady do look up into Sir John's face like this"--here Jennie assumed a lovelorn expression. "And--and once, mistress, I thought--I thought--" "Yes, yes, Jesu!" hissed Dorothy, clutching Jennie by the arm, "you thought, you thought. Tell me! Tell me! What in hell's name did you think? Speak quickly, wench." "I be not sure, mistress, but I thought I saw his arm about her waist one evening on the ramparts. It was dark, and for sure I could not tell, but--" "God's curse upon the white huzzy!" screamed Dorothy. "God's curse upon her! She is stealing him from me, and I am helpless." She clasped her hands over the top of her head and ran to and fro across the room uttering inarticulate cries of agony. Then she sat upon the bedside and threw herself into Madge's arms, crying under her breath: "My God! My God! Think of it, Madge. I have given him my heart, my soul, O merciful God, my love--all that I have worth giving, and now comes this white wretch, and because she is a queen and was sired in hell she tries to steal him from me and coaxes him to put his arm around her waist." "Don't feel that way about it, Dorothy," said Madge, soothingly. "I know Sir John can explain it all to you when you see him. He is true to you, I am sure." "True to me, Madge! How can he be true to me if she coaxes him to woo her and if he puts his arm--I am losing him; I know it. I--I--O God, Madge, I am smothering; I am strangling! Holy Virgin! I believe I am about to die." She threw herself upon the bed by Madge's side, clutching her throat and breast, and her grand woman's form tossed and struggled as if she were in convulsions. "Holy mother!" she cried, "take this frightful agony from my breast. Snatch this terrible love from my heart. God! If you have pity, give it now. Help me! Help me! Ah, how deeply I love. I never loved him so much as I do at this awful moment. Save me from doing that which is in my heart. If I could have him for only one little portion of a minute. But that is denied me whose right it is, and is given to her who has no right. Ah, God is not just. If he were he would strike her dead. I hate her and I hate--hate him." She arose to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed and held out her arms toward Madge. "Madge," she continued, frenzied by the thought, "his arm was around her waist. That was early in the evening. Holy Virgin! What may be happening now?" Dorothy sprang from the bed and staggered about the room with her hands upon her throbbing temples. "I cannot bear this agony. God give me strength." Soon she began to gasp for breath. "I can--see--them now--together, together. I hate her; I hate him. My love has turned bitter. What can I do? What can I do? I will do it. I will. I will disturb their sweet rest. If I cannot have him, she shall not. I'll tell the queen, I'll tell the queen." Dorothy acted on her resolution the moment it was taken, and at once began to unbolt the door. "Stay, Dorothy, stay!" cried Madge. "Think on what you are about to do. It will cost John his life. Come to me for one moment, Dorothy, I pray you." Madge arose from the bed and began groping her way toward Dorothy, who was unbolting the door. Madge could have calmed the tempest-tossed sea as easily as she could have induced Dorothy to pause in her mad frenzy. Jennie Faxton, almost paralyzed by fear of the storm she had raised, stood in the corner of the room trembling and speechless. Dorothy was out of the room before poor blind Madge could reach her. The frenzied girl was dressed only in her night robes and her glorious hair hung dishevelled down to her waist. She ran through the rooms of Lady Crawford and those occupied by her father and the retainers. Then she sped down the long gallery and up the steps to Elizabeth's apartment. She knocked violently at the queen's door. "Who comes?" demanded one of her Majesty's ladies. "I, Dorothy," was the response. "I wish to speak to her Majesty at once upon a matter of great importance to her." Elizabeth ordered her ladies to admit Dorothy, and the girl ran to the queen, who had half arisen in her bed. "You must have affairs of great moment, indeed," cried Elizabeth, testily, "if they induce you to disturb me in this manner." "Of great moment, indeed, your Majesty," replied Dorothy, endeavoring to be calm, "of moment to you and to me. Mary Stuart is in England at this instant trying to steal your crown and my lover. She is now sleeping within five leagues of this place. God only knows what she is doing. Let us waste no time, your Majesty." The girl was growing wilder every second. "Let us go--you and I--and seize this wanton creature. You to save your crown; I to save my lover and--my life." "Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, sharply. "Cease prattling about your lover. She would steal both my lover and my crown if she could. Where is she?" "She is at Rutland Castle, your Majesty," answered Dorothy. "Ah, the Duke of Rutland and his son John," said Elizabeth. "I have been warned of them. Send for my Lord Cecil and Sir William St. Loe." Sir William was in command of the yeoman guards. "Is Sir John Manners your lover?" asked Elizabeth, turning to Dorothy. "Yes," answered the girl. "You may soon seek another," replied the queen, significantly. Her Majesty's words seemed to awaken Dorothy from her stupor of frenzy, and she foresaw the result of her act. Then came upon her a reaction worse than death. "You may depart," said the queen to Dorothy, and the girl went back to her room hardly conscious that she was moving. At times we cannot help feeling that love came to the human breast through a drop of venom shot from the serpent's tongue into the heart of Eve. Again we believe it to be a spark from God's own soul. Who will solve me this riddle? Soon the hard, cold ringing of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may soon seek another." Elizabeth plainly meant that John was a traitor, and that John would die for his treason. The clanking words, "John will die, John will die," bore upon the girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded mentality, she could see that a lie would surely fail. She determined to beg the queen to spare John's life. She did not know exactly what she would do, but she hoped by the time she should reach the queen's room to hit upon some plan that would save him. When she knocked at Elizabeth's door it was locked against her. Her Majesty was in consultation with Cecil, Sir William St. Loe, and a few other gentlemen, among whom was Sir George Vernon. Dorothy well knew there was no help for John if her father were of the queen's council. She insisted upon seeing the queen, but was rudely repulsed. By the time she again reached her room full consciousness had returned, and agony such as she had never before dreamed of overwhelmed her soul. Many of us have felt the same sort of pain when awakened suddenly to the fact that words we have spoken easily may not, by our utmost efforts, be recalled, though we would gladly give our life itself to have them back. If suffering can atone for sin, Dorothy bought her indulgence within one hour after sinning. But suffering cannot atone for sin; it is only a part of it--the result. "Arise, Madge, and dress," said Dorothy, gently. "I have made a terrible mistake. I have committed a frightful crime. I have betrayed John to death. Ah, help me, Madge, if you can. Pray God to help me. He will listen to you. I fear to pray to Him. He would turn my prayers to curses. I am lost." She fell for a moment upon the bed and placed her head on Madge's breast murmuring, "If I could but die." "All may turn out better than it now appears," said Madge. "Quiet yourself and let us consider what may be done to arrest the evil of your--your act." "Nothing can be done, nothing," wailed Dorothy, as she arose from the bed and began to dress. "Please arise, Madge, and dress yourself. Here are your garments and your gown." They hastily dressed without speaking, and Dorothy began again to pace the floor. "He will die hating me," said Dorothy. "If he could live I willingly would give him to the--the Scottish woman. Then I could die and my suffering would cease. I must have been mad when I went to the queen. He trusted me with his honor and his life, and I, traitress that I am, have betrayed both. Ah, well, when he dies I also shall die. There is comfort at least in that thought. How helpless I am." She could not weep. It seemed as if there were not a tear in her. All was hard, dry, burning agony. She again fell upon the bed and moaned piteously for a little time, wringing her hands and uttering frantic ejaculatory prayers for help. "My mind seems to have forsaken me," she said hoarsely to Madge. "I cannot think. What noise is that?" She paused and listened for a moment. Then she went to the north window and opened the casement. "The yeoman guards from Bakewell are coming," she said. "I recognize them by the light of their flambeaux. They are entering the gate at the dove-cote." A part of the queen's guard had been quartered in the village of Bakewell. Dorothy stood at the window for a moment and said: "The other guards are here under our window and are ready to march to Rutland. There is Lord Cecil, and Sir William St. Loe, and Malcolm, and there is my father. Now they are off to meet the other yeomen at the dove-cote. The stable boys are lighting their torches and flambeaux. They are going to murder John, and I have sent them." Dorothy covered her face with her hands and slowly walked to and fro across the room. "Call Malcolm," said Madge. "Perhaps he can help us. Lead me to the window, Dorothy, and I will call him." Dorothy led Madge to the window, and above the din of arms I heard her soft voice calling, "Malcolm, Malcolm." The order to march had been given before Madge called, but I sought Sir William and told him I would return to the Hall to get another sword and would soon overtake him on the road to Rutland. I then hastened to Dorothy's room. I was ignorant of the means whereby Elizabeth had learned of Mary's presence at Rutland. The queen had told no one how the information reached her. The fact that Mary was in England was all sufficient for Cecil, and he proceeded to execute the order Elizabeth had given for Mary's arrest, without asking or desiring any explanation. I, of course, was in great distress for John's sake, since I knew that he would be attainted of treason. I had sought in vain some plan whereby I might help him, but found none. I, myself, being a Scottish refugee, occupied no safe position, and my slightest act toward helping John or Mary would be construed against me. When I entered Dorothy's room, she ran to me and said: "Can you help me, Malcolm? Can you help me save him from this terrible evil which I have brought upon him?" "How did you bring the evil upon him?" I asked, in astonishment. "It was not your fault that he brought Mary Stuart to--" "No, no," she answered; "but I told the queen she was at Rutland." "You told the queen?" I exclaimed, unwilling to believe my ears. "You told--How--why--why did you tell her?" "I do not know why I told her," she replied. "I was mad with--with jealousy. You warned me against it, but I did not heed you. Jennie Faxton told me that she saw John and--but all that does not matter now. I will tell you hereafter if I live. What we must now do is to save him--to save him if we can. Try to devise some plan. Think--think, Malcolm." My first thought was to ride to Rutland Castle and give the alarm. Sir George would lead the yeomen thither by the shortest route--the road by way of Rowsley. There was another route leading up the Lathkil through the dale, and thence by a road turning southward to Rutland. That road was longer by a league than the one Sir George would take, but I could put my horse to his greatest speed, and I might be able to reach the castle in time to enable John and Mary to escape. I considered the question a moment. My own life certainly would pay the forfeit in case of failure; but my love for John and, I confess it with shame, the memory of my old tenderness for Mary impelled me to take the risk. I explained the plan upon which I was thinking, and told them of my determination. When I did so, Madge grasped me by the arm to detain me, and Dorothy fell upon her knees and kissed my hand. I said, "I must start at once; for, ride as I may, I fear the yeomen will reach Rutland gates before I can get there." "But If the guards should be at the gates when you arrive, or if you should be missed by Cecil, you, a Scottish refugee and a friend of Queen Mary, would be suspected of treason, and you would lose your life," said Madge, who was filled with alarm for my sake. "That is true," I replied; "but I can think of no other way whereby John can possibly be saved." Dorothy stood for a moment in deep thought, and said:-- "I will ride to Rutland by way of Lathkil Dale--I will ride in place of you, Malcolm. It is my duty and my privilege to do this if I can." I saw the truth of her words, and felt that since Dorothy had wrought the evil, it was clearly her duty to remedy it if she could. If she should fail, no evil consequences would fall upon her. If I should fail, it would cost me my life; and while I desired to save John, still I wished to save myself. Though my conduct may not have been chivalric, still I was willing that Dorothy should go in my place, and I told her so. I offered to ride with her as far as a certain cross-road a league distant from Rutland Castle. There I would leave her, and go across the country to meet the yeomen on the road they had taken. I could join them before they reached Rutland, and my absence during the earlier portion of the march would not be remarked, or if noticed it could easily be explained. This plan was agreed upon, and after the guards had passed out at Dove-cote Gate and were well down toward Rowsley, I rode out from the Hall, and waited for Dorothy at an appointed spot near Overhaddon. Immediately after my departure Dolcy was saddled, and soon Dorothy rode furiously up to me. Away we sped, Dorothy and I, by Yulegrave church, down into the dale, and up the river. Never shall I forget that mad ride. Heavy rains had recently fallen, and the road in places was almost impassable. The rivers were in flood, but when Dorothy and I reached the ford, the girl did not stop to consider the danger ahead of her. I heard her whisper, "On, Dolcy, on," and I heard the sharp "whisp" of the whip as she struck the trembling, fearful mare, and urged her into the dark flood. Dolcy hesitated, but Dorothy struck her again and again with the whip and softly cried, "On, Dolcy, on." Then mare and rider plunged into the swollen river, and I, of course, followed them. The water was so deep that our horses were compelled to swim, and when we reached the opposite side of the river we had drifted with the current a distance of at least three hundred yards below the road. We climbed the cliff by a sheep path. How Dorothy did it I do not know; and how I succeeded in following her I know even less. When we reached the top of the cliff, Dorothy started off at full gallop, leading the way, and again I followed. The sheep path leading up the river to the road followed close the edge of the cliff, where a false step by the horse would mean death to both horse and rider. But Dorothy feared not, or knew not, the danger, and I caught her ever whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, on." Ashamed to fall behind, yet fearing to ride at such a pace on such a path, I urged my horse forward. He was a fine, strong, mettlesome brute, and I succeeded in keeping the girl's dim form in sight. The moon, which was rapidly sinking westward, still gave us light through rifts in the black bank of floating clouds, else that ride over the sheep path by the cliff would have been our last journey in the flesh. Soon we reached the main road turning southward. It was a series of rough rocks and mudholes, and Dorothy and Dolcy shot forward upon it with the speed of the tempest, to undo, if possible, the evil which a dozen words, untimely spoken, had wrought. I urged my horse until his head was close by Dolcy's tail, and ever and anon could I hear the whispered cry,--"On, Dolcy, on; on, Dolcy, sweet Dolcy, good Dolcy; on, my pet, on." No word was spoken between Dorothy and me; but I could hear Dolcy panting with her mighty effort, and amid the noise of splashing water and the thud, thud, thud of our horses' hoofs came always back to me from Dorothy's lips the sad, sad cry, full of agony and longing,--"On, Dolcy, on; on Dolcy, on." The road we took led us over steep hills and down through dark, shadow-crowded ravines; but up hill, down hill, and on the level the terrible girl before me plunged forward with unabated headlong fury until I thought surely the flesh of horse, man, and woman could endure the strain not one moment longer. But the horses, the woman, and--though I say it who should not--the man were of God's best handiwork, and the cords of our lives did not snap. One thought, and only one, held possession of the girl, and the matter of her own life or death had no place in her mind. When we reached the cross-road where I was to leave her, we halted while I instructed Dorothy concerning the road she should follow from that point to Rutland, and directed her how to proceed when she should arrive at the castle gate. She eagerly listened for a moment or two, then grew impatient, and told me to hasten

battles

How many times the word 'battles' appears in the text?

"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

cap

How many times the word 'cap' appears in the text?

"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

temporary

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

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"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

then

How many times the word 'then' appears in the text?

"Four and three," cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, "that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!" "Mon Dieu!" he growled, "I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt." Then suddenly glancing up, "Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes." He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. "Hast come to stop?" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. "Shall not get away from us again!" "I wish no better," said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting. "Well said, lad!" cried big John. "We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken." "I have in good sooth," Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose. "What then?" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin. "I am back for Minstead, lad." "And why, in the name of sense?" "To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!" "Nenny, nenny!" cried Alleyne, laughing. "There was no scath done. Come back, friend"--and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart. "But you," said Alleyne, "there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap--and why so warlike, John?" "It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me." "And I found him an over-apt pupil," grumbled the bowman. "He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices." "Take them back, man, and never heed the pay," said John. "I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come." "Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!" cried Aylward, "He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes." "Red upon white," said Alleyne, shading his eyes; "but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!" "Aye, it is the steel head-piece of the watchman," remarked the archer. "But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that Sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown." So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle. It chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two war-horses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy--deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel--snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel. Sir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady. And, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame. "I tell you, my fair lord," she was saying, "that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth--that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?" "True, my sweet bird, true," answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. "The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time." "Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord." "Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex." "The hussy!" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. "I would I had been at the side of her!" "And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side." "Now woe worth me but I feared it!" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. "I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?" "My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won." "Ah, my dear lord," quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. "I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it." "And whose fault that, my sweet bird?" said he. "No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?" "Dirt and dross!" cried he. "What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water." Lady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady. "Your pardon, fair sir," said he, "but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places." "Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed." "There was talk of it in Bordeaux," answered the archer, "and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady," he added after a pause, "I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame." This little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself. "You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?" "Ah, sir, you speak of dogs," cried Aylward; "but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!" "Pardieu!" said Sir Nigel, "if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?" "Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester." "And this giant behind you?" "He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company." "A proper figure of a man at-arms," said the little knight. "Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight." He pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy. "Good lack!" cried Sir Nigel, and "Good lack!" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers. "I have felt his arms round my ribs," said the bowman, "and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead." "Young man," quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, "if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine." "Nay, fair sir," cried Aylward hastily, "I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands." "And are you, too, of the White Company?" asked Sir Nigel. "Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing." "I would fain to France with my friends here," Alleyne answered; "but I am a man of peace--a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk." "That need not hinder," quoth Sir Nigel. "No, fair sir," cried the bowman joyously. "Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the fore-front of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!" "It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop," said Sir Nigel. "By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish." "The night air strikes chill," said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt. "What ails the man?" asked Aylward in surprise. "I have been cozened and bejaped," quoth he gruffly. "By whom, Sir Samson the strong?" "By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet." "By my hilt!" cried the archer, "though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?" "Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle." "Is that where the shoe galls?" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. "I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that----" Aylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and wide-spread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. "Fly, my lady, fly!" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together--the man and the beast--the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. "Ah, saucy! saucy," quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bear-ward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit. A scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side. As they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind. "I must crave your pardon, comrade," said he, bluntly. "I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow." CHAPTER XI. HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK. Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man. Erected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of

life

How many times the word 'life' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

flannel

How many times the word 'flannel' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

toss

How many times the word 'toss' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

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"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

limits

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"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

edge

How many times the word 'edge' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

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"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

after

How many times the word 'after' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

mushroom

How many times the word 'mushroom' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

home

How many times the word 'home' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

applied

How many times the word 'applied' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

shoes--

How many times the word 'shoes--' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

always

How many times the word 'always' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

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"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

cooked

How many times the word 'cooked' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

china

How many times the word 'china' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

sanctified

How many times the word 'sanctified' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

remembrances

How many times the word 'remembrances' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

over

How many times the word 'over' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

married

How many times the word 'married' appears in the text?

"Here's (hic) luck to _him_," said Mr. Voules. "Luck to him!" said everyone, and Mr. Polly, standing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst enthusiasm. "He may say what he likes," said Mrs. Larkins, "he's _got_ luck. That girl's a treasure of treasures, and always has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, being but three at the time, and fell the full flight of stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 'as even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying and busy. A treasure, I must say, and a treasure I will say, giving no more than her due...." She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the bottle again. "The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "fill up, please. The Mother of the bride. I--er.... Uoo.... Ere!... Ladies and gem, 'Ere's Luck to 'er!..." VII The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat--for presently they had to start off to the station together--sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him and whispered cheeringly: "Soon be together now." Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their hats and hair and the folds of their garments. Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the fourth time in the interests of the Best Man.... All feasts come to an end at last, and the breakup of things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a whispered consultation, and since he had got into the corner between the fireplace and the cupboard, that meant everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took the opportunity to say, "Well--so long," to anyone who might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found himself smoking a cigarette and walking up and down outside in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for departure, and the womenkind of the party crowded upstairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentstemon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and disconnectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old men will. "They do say," said Uncle Pentstemon, "one funeral makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it's all very much of a muchness," said Uncle Pentstemon.... "'Am _do_ get in my teeth nowadays," said Uncle Pentstemon, "I can't understand it. 'Tisn't like there was nubbicks or strings or such in 'am. It's a plain food. "That's better," he said at last. "You _got_ to get married," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Some has. Some hain't. I done it long before I was your age. It hain't for me to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marrying sort any more than me. It's nat'ral-like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. You can't 'elp it and there you are! As for the good of it, there ain't no particular good in it as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all gets tired of it sooner or later.... I hain't no grounds to complain. Two I've 'ad and berried, and might '_ave_ '_ad_ a third, and never no worrit with kids--never.... "You done well not to '_ave_ the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as--ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. _I_ laughed 'er off, I did. Dratted lumpin baggage!..." For a while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out place in his tooth. "Wimmin's a toss up," said Uncle Pentstemon. "Prize packets they are, and you can't tell what's in 'em till you took 'em 'ome and undone 'em. Never was a bachelor married yet that didn't buy a pig in a poke. Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 'em through and through. You can't tell what they won't turn into--nohow. "I seen the nicest girls go wrong," said Uncle Pentstemon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, "Not that I mean _you_ got one of that sort." He sent another crumb on to its long home with a sucking, encouraging noise. "The _wust_ sort's the grizzler," Uncle Pentstemon resumed. "If ever I'd 'ad a grizzler I'd up and 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer '_ave_ a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... "A man's got to tackle 'em, whatever they be," said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. "Good or bad," said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, "a man's got to tackle 'em." VIII At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo _en route_ for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being now beyond any question unwell. "Off!" The train moved out of the station. Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He had followed them along the platform waving the equestrian grey hat and kissing his hand to the bride. They subsided into their seats. "Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow," said Mrs. Polly after a pause. Silence for a moment. "The rice 'e must '_ave_ bought. Pounds and pounds!" Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. "Ain't you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we're alone together?" He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression of avidity becoming to the occasion. "Never!" he said. "Ever!" and feigned to be selecting a place to kiss with great discrimination. "Come here," he said, and drew her to him. "Be careful of my 'at," said Mrs. Polly, yielding awkwardly. Chapter the Seventh The Little Shop at Fishbourne I For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: "Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!" And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye. Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop. It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson's choice and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and picking _marguerites_ and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn't run to muffins at tea. And she didn't think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on Sundays. It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. "There's too many stairs," she said, "and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work." "Didn't think of that," said Mr. Polly, following her round. "It'll be a hard house to keep clean," said Miriam. "White paint's all very well in its way," said Miriam, "but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better '_ave_ '_ad_ it nicely grained." "There's a kind of place here," said Mr. Polly, "where we might have some flowers in pots." "Not me," said Miriam. "I've 'ad trouble enough with Minnie and 'er musk...." They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows pursuing some ideal of "'aving everything right." Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about them. Things began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour. "Zealacious commerciality," whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view.... II Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her. The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam. There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the _Abb s_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!... The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business. Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. III I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_ _pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls "social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely through that. "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste.... "Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound...." I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. IV I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world's history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold. "Ello!" said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about. "Can't we have some other point of view?" said Mr. Polly. "I'm tired of the end elevation." "Eh?" said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. "Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O' Man. Well,--why invert it?" Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. "Don't like so much Arreary Pensy." Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. "In fact, I'm sick of your turning your back on me, see?" A great light shone on Rumbold. "That's what you're talking about!" he said. "That's it," said Polly. Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. "Way the wind blows, I expect," he said. "But what's the fuss?" "No fuss!" said Mr. Polly. "Passing Remark. I don't like it, O' Man, that's all." "Can't help it, if the wind blows my stror," said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it.... "It isn't ordinary civility," said Mr. Polly. "Got to unpack 'ow it suits me. Can't unpack with the stror blowing into one's eyes." "Needn't unpack like a

might

How many times the word 'might' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

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"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

velocity

How many times the word 'velocity' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

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"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

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How many times the word 'small' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

glaring

How many times the word 'glaring' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

latest

How many times the word 'latest' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

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"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

sunburnt

How many times the word 'sunburnt' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

struck

How many times the word 'struck' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

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"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

wife

How many times the word 'wife' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

sheriff

How many times the word 'sheriff' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

good

How many times the word 'good' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

honor

How many times the word 'honor' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

smile

How many times the word 'smile' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

stood

How many times the word 'stood' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

cell

How many times the word 'cell' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

through

How many times the word 'through' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

penny

How many times the word 'penny' appears in the text?

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat." "But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife." "Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?" "Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him." "Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges. Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library. It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors. She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears. A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose. Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips. She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms, and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant dark eyes, and small, weak mouth. On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it. It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the surrounding portraits. She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent fingers. "They say I am like her," she whispered to herself. Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old book of Annette's. How crude and ludicrous the awkward boy looked beside the elegant figures on the walls about her! She leaned nearer the fire to get the light on the face, then she smiled with a sudden rush of tenderness. The photographer had done his worst for the figure, but even an unskilled hand and a poor camera had not wholly obliterated the fineness of the face. Spirit, honor, and strength were all there. The eyes that met hers were as fine and fearless as her own, and the honest smile that hovered on his lips seemed to be in frank amusement at his own sorry self. Ruth turned to see that the door was closed, then she put the picture to her cheek, which was crimson in the firelight, and with hesitating shyness gradually drew it to her lips and held it there. A noise of wheels in the avenue brought her to her feet with a little start of joy. He had come, and she was possessed of a sudden desire to run away. But she waited, with glad little tremors thrilling her and her heart beating high. She was sure she heard wheels. She went to the window, and, shading her eyes, looked out. A buggy was standing at the gate, but no one got out. A sudden apprehension seized her, and she hurried into the hail and opened the front door. "Carter," she called softly out into the night--"Carter, is it you?" There was no answer, and she came back into the hall and closed the door. On each side of the door was a panel of leaded glass, and she pressed her face to one of the little square panes, and peered anxiously out. The light from the newel-post behind her emphasized the darkness, so that she could distinguish only the dim outline of the buggy. Twice she touched the knob before she turned it again; then she resolutely gathered her long white dress in her hand, and passed down the broad stone steps. The wind blew sharply against her, and the pavement was cold to her slippered feet. "Carter," she called again and again--"Carter, is it you?" At the gate her scant supply of courage failed. Some one was in the buggy, half lying, half sitting, with his face turned from her. She looked back to the light in the cabin, where the servants would hear if she called. Then the thought of any one else seeing Carter as she had seen him before drove the fear back, and she resolutely opened the gate and went forward. At her first touch Carter started up wildly and pushed her from him. "You said you wouldn't give me up; you promised," he said. "I know it, Carter. I'll help you, dear. Don't be so afraid! Nobody shall see you. Put your arm on my shoulder--there! Step down a little farther!" With all her slight strength she supported and helped him, the keen wind blowing her long, thin dress about them both, and the lace falling back from her arms, leaving them bare to the elbow. Half-way up the walk he broke away from her and cried out: "I'll have to go away. It's dangerous for me to stay here an hour." "Yes, Carter dear, I know. The doctor says it's the climate. We are going early in the morning. Everything's packed. See how cold I am getting out here! You'll come in with me now, won't you?" Coaxing and helping him, she at last succeeded in getting him to bed. The blood on his handkerchief told its own story. She straightened the room, drew a screen between him and the fire, and then went to the bed, where he had already fallen into a deep sleep. Sinking on her knees beside him, she broke into heavy, silent sobs. The one grief of her girlhood had been the waywardness of her only brother. From childhood she had stood between him and blame, shielding him, helping him, loving him. She had fought valiantly against his weakness, but her meager strength had been pitted against the accumulated intemperance of generations. She chafed his thin wrists, which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, motherly gesture. "Take him soon, God!" she prayed. "He is too weak to try any more." At midnight she slipped away to her own room and took off the dainty gown she had put on for Sandy's coming. For long hours she lay in her great canopied bed with wide-open eyes. The night was a noisy one, for there was a continual passing on the road, and occasional shouts came faintly to her. With heavy heart she lay listening for some sound from Carter's room. She was glad he was home. It was worse to sit up in bed and listen for the wheels to turn in at the gate, to start at every sound on the road, and to wait and wait through the long night. She could scarcely remember the time when she had not waited for Carter at night. Once, long ago, she had confided her secret to one of her uncles, and he had laughed and told her that boys would be boys. After that she had kept things to herself. There was but one other person in the world to whom she had spoken, and that was Sandy Kilday. As she looked back it seemed to her there was nothing she had withheld from Sandy Kilday. Nothing? Sandy's face, as she had last seen it, despairing, reckless, hopeless, rose before her. But she had asked him to come back, she was ready to surrender, she could make him understand if she could only see him. Why had he not come? The question multiplied itself into numerous forms and hedged her in. Was he too angry to forgive her? Had her seeming indifference at last killed his love? Why had he not sent her a note or a message? He knew that she was to leave on the early train, that there would be no chance to speak with her alone in the morning. A faint streak of misty light shone through the window. She watched it deepen to rose. By and by Rachel came in to make the fire. She tiptoed to the bed and peeped through the curtains. "You 'wake, Miss Rufe? Dey's been terrible goings on in town last night! Didn't you hear de posse goin' by?" "What was it? What's the matter?" cried Ruth, sitting up in bed. "Dat jail-bird Wilson done shot Jedge Hollis. 'Mos' ebery man in town went out to ketch him. Dey been gone all night." "Sandy went with them," thought Ruth, in sudden relief; then she thought of the judge. "Oh, Rachel, is he dangerously hurt? Will he die?" "De las' accounts was mighty bad. Dey say de big doctors is a-comin' up from de city to prode fer de bullet." "What made him shoot him? How could he be so cruel, when the dear old judge is so good and kind to everybody?" "Jes pore white trash, dat Wilson," said Rachel, contemptuously, as she coaxed the kindling into a blaze. Ruth got up and dressed. Beneath the deep concern which she felt was the flutter of returning hope. Sandy's first duty was to his benefactor. She knew how he loved the old judge and with what prompt action he would avenge his wrong. She could trust him to follow honor every time. "Some ob 'em 's comin' back now!" cried Rachel from the window. "I's gwine down to de road an' ax 'em if dey ketched him." "Rachel, wait! I'm coming, too. Give me my traveling-coat--there on the trunk. What can I put on my head? My hat is in auntie's room." Rachel, rummaging in the closet, brought forth an old white tam-o'-shanter. "That will do!" cried Ruth. "Now, don't make any noise, but come." They tiptoed through the house and out into the early morning. It was still half dark, and the big-eyed poplars watched them suspiciously as they hurried down to the road. Every branch and twig was covered with ice, and the snow crackled under their feet. "I 'spec' it's gwine be summer-time where you gwine at, Miss Rufe," said Rachel. "I don't care," cried Ruth. "I don't want to be anywhere in the world except right here." "Dey're comin'," announced Rachel. "I hear de hosses." Ruth leaned across the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. On came the riders, three abreast. "Dat's him in de middle," whispered Rachel, excitedly; "next to de sheriff. I's s'prised dey didn't swing him up--I shorely is. He's hangin' down his head lak he's mighty 'shamed." Ruth bent forward to get a glimpse of the prisoner's face, and as she did so he lifted his head. It was Sandy Kilday, his clothes disheveled, his brows lowered, and his lips compressed info a straight, determined line. Ruth's startled gaze swept over the riders, then came back to him. She did not know what was the matter; she only knew that he was in trouble, and that she was siding with him against the rest. In the one moment their eyes met she sent him her full assurance of compassion and sympathy. It was the same message a little girl had sent years ago over a ship's railing to a wretched stowaway on the deck below. The men rode on, and she stood holding to the gate and looking after them. "Here comes Mr. Sid Gray," said Rachel. The approaching rider drew rein when he saw Ruth and dismounted. "Tell me what's happened!" she cried. He hitched his horse and opened the gate. He, too, showed signs of a hard night. "May I come in a moment to the fire?" he asked. She led the way to the dining-room and ordered coffee. "Now tell me," she demanded breathlessly. "It's a mixed-up business," said Gray, holding his numb hands to the blaze. "We left here early in the night and worked on a wrong trail till midnight. Then a train-man out at the Junction gave us a clue, and we got a couple of bloodhounds and traced Wilson as far as Ellersberg." "Go on!" said Ruth, shuddering. "You see, a rumor got out that the judge had died. We didn't say anything before the sheriff, but it was understood that Ricks wouldn't be brought back to town alive. We located him in an old barn. We surrounded it, and were just about to fire it when Kilday came tearing up on horseback." "Yes?" cried Ruth. "Well," he went on, "he hadn't started with us, and he had been riding like mad all night to overtake the crowd. His horse dropped under him before he could dismount. Kilday jumped out in the crowd and began to talk like a crazy man. He said we mustn't harm Ricks Wilson; that Ricks hadn't shot the judge, for he was sure he had seen him out the Junction road about half-past five. We all saw it was a put-up job; he was Ricks Wilson's old pal, you know." "But Sandy Kilday wouldn't lie!" cried Ruth. "Well, that's what he did, and worse. When we tried to close in on Wilson, Kilday fought like a tiger. You never saw anything like the mix-up, and in the general skirmish Wilson escaped." "And--and Sandy?" Ruth was leaning forward, with her hands clasped and her lips apart. "Well, he showed what he was, all right. He took sides with that good-for-nothing scoundrel who had shot a man that was almost his father. Why, I never saw such a case of ingratitude in my life!" "Where are they taking him?" she almost whispered. "To jail for resisting an officer." "Miss Rufe, de man's come fer de trunks. Is dey ready?" asked Rachel from the hall. Ruth rose and put her hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. "Yes; yes, they are ready," she said with an effort. "And, Rachel, tell the man to go as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter must not be disturbed until it is time to start." CHAPTER XXIII "THE SHADOW ON THE HEART" Just off Main street, under the left wing of the court-house, lay the little county jail. It frowned down from behind its fierce mask of bars and spikes, and boldly tried to make the town forget the number of prisoners that had escaped its walls. In a small front cell, beside a narrow grated window, Ricks Wilson had sat and successfully planned his way to freedom. The prisoner who now occupied the cell spent no time on thoughts of escape. He paced restlessly up and down the narrow chamber, or lay on the cot, with his hands under his head, and stared at the grimy ceiling. The one question which he continually put to the jailer was concerning the latest news of Judge Hollis. Sandy had been given an examining trial on the charge of resisting an officer and assisting a prisoner to escape. Refusing to tell what he knew, and no bail being offered, he was held to answer to the grand jury. For two weeks he had seen the light of day only through the deep, narrow opening of one small window. At first he had had visitors--indignant, excited visitors who came in hotly to remonstrate, to threaten, to abuse. Dr. Fenton had charged in upon him with a whole battery of reproaches. In stentorian tones he rehearsed the judge's kindness in befriending him, he pointed out his generosity, and laid stress on Sandy's heinous ingratitude. Mr. Moseley had arrived with arguments and reasons and platitudes, all expressed in a polysyllabic monotone. Mr. Meech had come many times with prayers and petitions and gentle rebuke. To them all Sandy gave patient, silent audience, wincing under the blame, but making no effort to defend himself. All he would say was that Ricks Wilson had not done the shooting, and that he could say no more. A wave of indignation swept the town. Almost the only friend who was not turned foe was Aunt Melvy. Her large philosophy of life held that all human beings were "chillun," and "chillun was bound to act bad sometimes." She left others to struggle with Sandy's moral welfare and devoted herself to his physical comfort. With a clear conscience she carried to her home flour, sugar, and lard from the Hollises' store-room, and sat up nights in her little cabin at "Who'd 'a' Thought It" to bake dumplings, rolls, and pies for her "po' white chile." Sandy felt some misgivings about the delicacies which she brought, and one day asked her where she made them. "I makes 'em out home," she declared stoutly. "I wouldn't cook nuffin' fer you on Miss Sue's stove while she's talkin' 'bout you lak she is. She 'lows she don't never want to set eyes on you ag'in as long as she lives." "Has the judge asked for me?" said Sandy. "Yas, sir; but de doctor he up and lied. He tol' him you'd went back to de umerversity. De doctor 'lowed ef he tole him de trufe it might throw him into a political stroke." Sandy leaned his head on his hand. "You're the only one that's stood by me, Aunt Melvy; the rest of them think me a bad lot." "Dat's right," assented Aunt Melvy, cheerfully. "You jes orter hear de way dey slanders you! I don't 'spec' you got a friend in town 'ceptin' me." Then, as if reminded of something, she produced a card covered with black dots. "Honey, I's gittin' up a little collection fer de church. You gib me a nickel and I punch a pin th'u' one ob dem dots to sorter certify it." "Have you got religion yet?" he asked as he handed her some small change. Her expression changed, and her eyes fell. "Not yit," she acknowledged reluctantly; "but I's countin' on comin' th'u' before long. I's done j'ined de Juba Choir and de White Doves." "The White Doves?" repeated Sandy. "Yas, sir; de White Doves ob Perfection. We wears purple calicoes and sets up wid de sick." "Have you seen Miss Annette?" "Lor', honey! ain't I tol' you 'bout dat? De very night de jedge was shot, dat chile wrote her paw de sassiest letter, sayin' she gwine run off and git married wif dat sick boy, Carter Nelson. De doctor headed 'em off some ways, and de very nex' day what you think he done? He put dat gal in a Cafolic nunnery convent! Dey say she cut up scan'lous at fust, den she sorter quiet down, an' 'gin to count her necklace, an' make signs on de waist ob her dress, an' say she lak it so much she gwine be a Cafolic nunnery sister herself. Now de doctor's jes tearin' his shirt to git her out, he's so skeered she'll do what she says." Sandy laughed in spite of himself, and Aunt Melvy wagged her head knowingly. "He needn't pester hisseif 'bout dat. Now Mr. Carter's 'bout to die, an' you's shut up in jail, she's done turnin' her 'tention on Mr. Sid Gray. Dey ain't no blinds in de world big enough to keep dat gal from shinin' her eyes at de boys!" "Is Carter about to die?" Sandy had become suddenly grave. "Yas, sir; so dey say. He's got somepin' that sounds lak tuberoses. Him and Mrs. Nelson and Miss Rufe never did git to Californy. Dey stopped off in Mobile or Injiany, I can't ricollec' which. He took de fever de day dey lef', an' he ain't knowed nothin' since." After Aunt Melvy left, Sandy went to the window and leaned against the bars. Below him flowed the life of the little town, the men going home from work, the girls chattering and laughing through the dusk on their way from the post-office. Every figure that passed, black or white, was familiar to him. Jimmy Reed's little Skye terrier dashed down the street, and a whistle sprang to his lips. How he loved every living creature in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had been afraid to be alone. "I'll have to go away," he thought wistfully. "They'll not be wanting me here after this." It grew darker and darker in the gloomy room. The mournful voice of a negro singing in the next cell came to him faintly: "We'll hunt no moah fo' de possum and de coon, On de medder, de hill, an' de shoah. We'll sing no moah by de glimmer ob de moon, On de bench by de old cabin doah. "De days go by like de shadow on do heart, Wid sorrer, wha' all wuz so bright; De time am come when do darkies hab to part-- Den, my ole Kaintucky home, good night." Sandy's arm was against the grating and his head was bowed upon it. Through all the hours of trial one image had sustained him. It was of Ruth, as he had seen her last, leaning toward him out of the half-light, her brown hair blowing from under her white cap and her great eyes full of wondering compassion. But to-night the darkness obscured even that image. The judge's life still hung in the balance, and the man who had shot him lay in a distant city, unconscious, waiting for death. Sandy felt that by his sacrifice he had put the final barrier between himself and Ruth. With a childish gesture of despair, he flung out his arms and burst into a passion of tears. The intense emotional impulse of his race swept him along like a feather in a gale. His grief, like his joy, was elemental. When the lull came at last, he pressed his hot head against the cold iron grating, and his thoughts returned again and again to Ruth. He thought of her tender ministries in the sick room, of her intense love and loyalty for her brother. His whole soul rose up to bless her, and the thought of what she had been spared brought him peace. Through days of struggle and nights of pain he fought back all thoughts of the future and of self. These times were ever afterward a twilight-place in his soul, hallowed and sanctified by the great revelation they brought him, blending the blackness of despair with the white light of perfect love. Here his thoughts would often turn even in the stress and strain of the daily life, as a devotee stops on his busy round and steps within the dim cathedral to gain strength and inspiration on his way. The next time Aunt Melvy came he asked for some of his law-books, and from that on there was no more idling or dreaming. Among the volumes she brought was the old note-book in which the judge had made him jot down suggestions during those long evening readings in the past. It was full of homely advice, the result of forty years' experience, and Sandy found comfort in following it to the letter. For the first time in his life he learned the power of concentration. Seven hours' study a day, without diversion or interruption, brought splendid results. He knew the outline of the course at the university, and he forged ahead with feverish energy. Meanwhile the judge's condition was slowly improving. One afternoon Sandy sat at his table, deep in his work. He heard the key turn in its lock and the door open, but he did not look up. Suddenly he was aware of the soft rustle of skirts, and, lifting his eyes, he saw Ruth. For a moment he did not move, thinking she must be but the substance of his dream. Then her black dress caught his attention, and he started to his feet. "Carter?" he cried--"is he--" Ruth nodded; her face was white and drawn, and purple shadows lay about her eyes. "He's dead," she whispered, with a catch in her voice; then she went on in breathless explanation: "but he told me first. He said, 'Hurry back, Ruth, and make it right. They can come for me as soon as I can travel. Tell Kilday I wasn't worth it.' Oh, Sandy! I don't know whether it was right or wrong,--what you did,--but it was merciful: if you could have seen him that last week, crying all the time like a little child, afraid of the shadows on the wall, afraid to be alone, afraid to live, afraid to die--" Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hands. Sandy started forward, then he paused and gripped the chair-back until his fingers were white. "Ruth," he said impatiently, "you'd best be going quick. It'll break the heart of me to see you standing there suffering, unless I can take you in me arms and comfort you. I've sworn never to speak the word; but, by the saints--" "You may!" sobbed Ruth, and with a quick, timid little gesture she laid her hands in his. For a moment he held her away from him. "It's not pity," he cried, searching her face, "nor gratitude!" She lifted her eyes, as honest and clear as her soul. "It's been love, Sandy," she whispered, "ever since the first." [Illustration: "'It's been love, Sandy, ... ever since the first'"] Two hours later, when the permit came, Sandy walked out of the jail into the court-house square. A crowd had collected, for Ruth had told her story and the news had spread; public favor was rapidly turning in his direction. He looked about vaguely, as a man who has gazed too long at the sun and is blinded to everything else. "I've got my buggy," cried Jimmy Reed, touching him on the arm. "Where do you want to go?" Sandy hesitated, and a dozen invitations were shouted in one breath. He stood irresolute, with his foot on the step of the buggy; then he pulled himself up. "To Judge Hollis," he said. CHAPTER XXIV THE PRIMROSE WAY Spring and winter, and spring again, and flying rumors fluttered tantalizing wings over Clayton. Just when it was definitely announced that Willowvale was to be sold, Ruth Nelson returned, after a year's absence, and opened the old home. Mrs. Nelson did not come with her. That excellent lady had concluded to bestow her talents upon a worthier object. In her place came Miss Merritt, a quiet little sister of Ruth's mother, who proved to be to the curious public a pump without a handle. About this time Sandy Kilday returned from his last term at the university, and gossip was busy over the burden of honors under which he staggered, and the brilliance of the position he had accepted in the city. In prompt contradiction of this came the shining new sign, "Hollis & Kilday," which appeared over the judge's dingy little office. Nobody but Ruth knew what that sign had cost Sandy. He had come home, fresh from his triumphs, and burning with ambition to make his way in the world,--to make a name for her to share, and a record for her to be proud of. The opportunity that had been offered him was one in a lifetime. It had taken all his courage and strength and loyalty to refuse it, but Ruth had helped him. "We must think of the judge first, Sandy," she said. "While he lives we must stay here; there'll be time enough for the big world after a while." So Sandy gave up his dream for the present and tacked the new sign over the office door with his own hand. The old judge watched him from the pavement. "That's right," he said, rubbing his hands together with childish satisfaction; "that's just about the best-looking sign I ever saw!" "If you ever turn me down in court I'll stand it on its head and make my own name come first," threatened Sandy; and the judge repeated the joke to every one he saw that day. It was not long until the flying rumors settled down into positive facts, and Clayton was thrilled to its willow-fringed circumference. There was to be a wedding! Not a Nelson wedding of the olden times, when a special car brought grand folk down from the city, and the townspeople stayed apart and eyed their fine clothes and gay behavior with ill-concealed disfavor. This was to be a Clayton wedding for high and low, rich and poor. There was probably not a shutter opened in the town, on the morning of the great day,

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"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

wayfarer

How many times the word 'wayfarer' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

talk

How many times the word 'talk' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

dusky

How many times the word 'dusky' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

handsome

How many times the word 'handsome' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

hint

How many times the word 'hint' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

went

How many times the word 'went' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

hesitating

How many times the word 'hesitating' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

have

How many times the word 'have' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

showed

How many times the word 'showed' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

lamb

How many times the word 'lamb' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

motives

How many times the word 'motives' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

deep

How many times the word 'deep' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

necessity

How many times the word 'necessity' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

whatsoever

How many times the word 'whatsoever' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

fellows

How many times the word 'fellows' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

worth

How many times the word 'worth' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

three

How many times the word 'three' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

absent

How many times the word 'absent' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

brazilian

How many times the word 'brazilian' appears in the text?

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes comes in late." "Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber." Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident in the regret with which he gazed at her. Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past, as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that necessity suggests to borrowers. Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all domestic difficulties to herself. "You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her money." "Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret." They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together, and remained standing in a window-bay. "What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your father, I dare wager." "Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we better tell my mother?" "No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this evening." "Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner is choking me!" Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears. "I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." "Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense. "What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand." "Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm of guilelessness. "No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to. With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must pay in interest. We must close this pit." "If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense bitterly. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else; and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over." What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for what he was. "But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete than it is." "Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything from her--let us be cheerful." "Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it this evening; I will leave early on purpose." Victorin went into the bedroom. "And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to Hortense, "what can you do?" "Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is, and you will advise me." While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate, must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all. Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned soldier recruited by the Baron, announced: "Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos." Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming: "My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered: "You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire. "I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years." "How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a millionaire. Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers, spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front. His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest, and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a jaguar. This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way. This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel, a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris, unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie. "This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I must know where I stand." "You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked." "I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a fool of. I will know how they are related." That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it. "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you." "Lower, Henri, I implore you----" "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I suppose?" Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said: "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal." "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?" "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again." "Pray, why?" "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me----" "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!" "What violence!" "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment. She began to laugh. "Henri! what bad taste!" said she. She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them. With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade. Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action _a la_ Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin. This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty; this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband. "Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said Crevel to Hulot. "Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are." He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face, astonished to find only the two men. "And the tea?" said he. "Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage. "My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly." "And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?" "Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the matter." "And _her_ cousin?" "He is gone." "Do you really believe that?" said the Baron. "I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous smirk. The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between husband and wife. "What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe, finding himself alone with Crevel. "When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain. He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play. Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel. Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden. "Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he, scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea. "How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died." "You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to the Baron, "and that would be a shame----" "Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?" And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had been withdrawn. "Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look of misprized tenderness and devotedness. "But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently. This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid with the greatest astonishment. "You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand." "I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?" "On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!" "Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner at all. There was not even bread in your house this day. "Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart; and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I thought I was dying--" "You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To crime--domestic crime!" "Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the reward of her blind devotion." "An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an examining judge gazes at the accused. "My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost! No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me in return!" "Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?" "I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery, Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it seems to me infamous----" "Go on, go on," said Valerie. "It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody." "Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe. "There may be more!" retorted the Baron. "If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot." She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's infidelity. "My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--" "Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state." Hulot slowly turned away. "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow." "You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe, smiling. The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question. The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything. "Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears. It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve. "But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?" asked the Brazilian. This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist. "Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----" "How much more will your husband get then?" "A thousand crowns." "I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will leave Paris and go----" "Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's brain." For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. "Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require." "Well, then, to-night----" "But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?" "Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of passion. And he knelt at her feet. "Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth, my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at the end of my year's widowhood." "I swear it." "That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a Catholic!" Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she should have fallen into the foulest social slough. The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred and twenty days. "Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will come and tell you

bridegroom

How many times the word 'bridegroom' appears in the text?