But the patient Saranac sawed the logs, and carried away their dust

and refuse, and took all the little fretted brooks and rivers into its

bosom, and soothed their murmurs there. And both did God’s will, and

both were good.

Half hidden by the steep slope of the hill, as one stood in Mrs.

Ferrier’s porch, was the church of S. John the Evangelist. Only the

unfinished tower of it was visible, and a long line of slated roof seen

in glimpses between spires and chimneys.

“I really believe, Lawrence, that Crichton is the pleasantest place in

the world,” remarked Miss Pembroke, after a short silence.

A servant had taken away their flowers to keep fresh for the evening,

and Miss Ferrier had gone in to change her dress. The mother being

away, there was no need the other two should enter, when the lovely

evening invited them to remain outside.

Receiving no reply, the lady glanced inquiringly at her companion, and

saw that his silence was a dissenting one. He had thrown himself into a

chair, tossed his hat aside, and was looking off into the distance with

fixed and gloomy eyes. The tumbled locks of hair fell over half his

forehead, his attitude expressed discontent and depression, and there

was a look about the mouth that showed his silence might proceed only

from the suppression of a reply too bitter or too rude to utter.

Seeing that her glance might force him to speak, she anticipated him,

and continued, in a gentle, soothing tone: “If one loves religion, here

is a beautiful church, and the best of priests; if one is intellectual,

here is every advantage—books, lectures, and a cultivated society; if

one is a lover of nature, where can be found a more beautiful country?

Oh! it is not Switzerland nor Italy, I know; but it is delightful, for

all that.”

She had spoken carefully, like one feeling her way, and here she

hesitated just for a breath, as though not sure whether she had better

go on, but went on nevertheless. “Here every one is known, and his

position secure. He need not suffer in public esteem from adverse

circumstances, if they do not affect his character. There never was a

place, I think, where a truly courageous and manly act would be more

heartily applauded.”

“Ah! yes,” the young man said, with hasty scorn; “they applaud while

the thing is new, and then forget all about it. They like novelty. I

don’t doubt that all the people would clap their hands if I should take

to sweeping the streets, and that for a week the young ladies would tie

bouquets to the end of the broomstick. But after the week was over,

what then? They would find me a dusty fellow whose acquaintance they

would gradually drop. Besides, their applause is not all. I might not

enjoy street-sweeping, even though I and my broomstick were crowned

with flowers as long as we lasted.”

Miss Pembroke had blushed slightly at this sudden and violent

interpretation of her hidden meaning; but she answered quietly: “No:

their applause is not all—the applause of the world is never all, but

it helps sometimes; and, if they give it to us for one moment when we

start on the right path, it is all that we ought to expect. Life is not

a theatre with a few actors and a great circle of spectators: we all

have our part to play, and cannot stop long to admire others.”

“Especially when that other is only the scene-shifter,” laughed the

young man, throwing the hair back from his face.

“I know well that ordinary, inelegant work would come very hard to you,

Lawrence,” she said kindly; “and, if it were to be continued to the end

of your life, I might think it too hard. But there must be ways, for

other men have found them, of beginning at the lower end of the ladder,

even very low down, even in the dust, and climbing steadily to a height

that would satisfy the climber’s ambition. It needs only a strong will

and perseverance; and I firmly believe, Lawrence, that, to a strong

will, almost anything is possible.”

“A strong will is a special gift,” he replied stubbornly.

“Yes; and one for which we may ask,” she said; then, seeing that he

frowned, added: “And for you I like Crichton, as I said. One is known

here, and motives and circumstances are understood. A thousand little

helps might be given which in a strange city you would not have. All

would be seen and understood here.”

“All would be seen, yes!” he exclaimed, with a shrug and a frown. “That

is the trouble. One would rather hide something.”

She would not be repelled. “There is, of course, sometimes a

disadvantage in living where everything is known,” she admitted. “But

there must be disadvantages everywhere in the world. Look at the bright

side of it. If you were in a great city, where all sorts of crimes

hide, where men the most abandoned in reality can for a long time

maintain a fair reputation before the world, how your difficulties

would be increased! You would not then know whom to trust. Here, on the

contrary, no wrong can remain long hidden.”

He had not looked at her before, but at these words his eyes flashed

into her face a startled glance. Her eyes were looking thoughtfully

over the town.

Feeling his gaze, she turned towards him with a quick change of

expression and manner. A friendly and coaxing, almost caressing,

raillery took the place of her seriousness: “Come! drive away your

blues, Lawrence, and take courage. Study out some course for yourself

where you can see far ahead, and then start and follow it, though you

should find obstacles grow up in the way. Bore through them, or climb

over them. There must be a way. There is something in you for honor,

something better than complaining. Cheer up!”

She extended her hand to him impulsively.

“What motive have I?” he asked. But his face had softened, and a faint

smile showed that the cloud had a silver lining.

“For your mother’s sake,” she said. “How happy she would be!”

“I can make my mother happy by kissing her, and telling her she is an

angel,” he answered.

It was but too true.

“For poor Annette, then. There is a good deal in her, and she is

devoted to you.”

He shrugged his shoulders, and lifted his eyebrows: “She loves me as

I am, and would love me if I were ten times as worthless, poor silly

girl!”

Miss Pembroke withdrew her hand, and retired a step from him. Again he

had spoken the truth, this spoiled favorite of women!

“For God’s sake, then.”

He did not dare give another shrug, for his mentor’s face was losing

its kindness. “You know I am not at all pious, Honora,” he said,

dropping his eyes.

She still retained her patience: “Can you find no motive in yourself,

Lawrence? Do you feel no necessity for action, for courageous trial of

what life may hold for you?”

His pale face grew bright with an eager light. “If life but held for me

one boon! O Honora....”

She made a quick, silencing gesture, and a glance, inconceivably

haughty and scornful, shot from her eyes.

“Are you two people quarrelling?” Miss Ferrier inquired, behind them.

“If you are, I am in good time. Tea is ready, and I suppose the sooner

we are off, the better.”

“I sent the flowers to the church,” she continued, as they went in

through the gorgeous hall, “and directed John to tell Mother Chevreuse

that we should come down in about an hour. But he brings me word that

she is out with some sick woman, and may not come home till quite late.

So we are but three.”

Mother Chevreuse was the priest’s mother. It had grown to be a custom

to give her that title, partly out of love for both mother and son,

partly because Father Chevreuse himself sometimes called her so.

“It will require one person to carry your train, Annette,” Mr. Gerald

said, looking at the length of rustling brown silk over which he had

twice stumbled. “And that takes two out; for, of course, you can do

nothing in that dress. Honora will have the pleasure of decorating the

altar, while we look on.”

Only the faintest shade of mortification passed momentarily over the

girl’s face, and vanished. She knew well the power her wealth had with

this man, and that she could not make it too evident. Miss Ferrier was

frivolous and extravagant, but she was not without discernment.

“Did you ever know me to fail when I attempted anything?” she asked,

with a little mingling of defiance and triumph in her air. “Honora goes

calmly and steadily to work; but when I begin....”

She stopped, embarrassed, for a rude speech had been at her lips.

“You do twice as much as I,” Miss Pembroke finished, with sweet

cordiality. “It is true, Annette, though you did not like to say it.

You have great energy.”

She put her hand out, and touched caressingly the shoulder of her young

hostess in passing. “You are just what Lawrence needs.”

Tears of pleasure filled Annette’s eyes. For all her wealth and the

flatteries it had brought her, she had seldom heard a word of earnest

commendation.

To be praised by Honora was sweet; but to be praised before Lawrence

was sweetest of all.

They hurried through their tea, and went to the church. Mother

Chevreuse had not returned home, and the priest also was away. The

pleasant task of adorning the altar of Our Lady was left to them.

The stars were beginning to show faintly in the sky when they commenced

their work, and all the church was full of that clear yellow twilight.

The pillars and walls, snowy white, with only delicate bands of

gilding, reflected the softened beams, and seemed to grow transparent

in them. But around the side-altar burned a ring of brilliant gas-jets;

and through the open door of the sacristy was visible, ruddily lighted,

a long passage and stairway leading to the basement.

The light of heaven and the light of earth were thus brought face to

face—the one pure, tender, and pervading, the other flaring, thick,

and partial. But as daylight faded away, that inner light brought out

strange effects. There was no longer anything white in the church:

it was all turned to rose-color and deep shadow. Carven faces looked

down with seeing eyes from arch, capital, and cornice; the pillars,

standing up and down in long rows, appeared to lean together, to move,

and change places with each other; there was a tremor in the dimly-seen

organ-pipes, as though the strong breath of music were passing through

them, and would presently break out in loud accord. A picture of S.

John beside the grand altar showed nothing but the face, and the face

was as glowing as if it had just been lifted from the bosom of the Lord

to look into the Lord’s eyes.

One might fancy that this fair temple in which God had taken up his

dwelling only waited for those three to go away, that it might break

into joy and adoration over its divine Guest.

On a pedestal at the gospel side of the altar stood the statue of Our

Lady, lovely eyelids downcast, as she gazed on those below, loving

hands and arms outstretched, inviting all the world to her motherly

embrace. An arch of white lilies had already been put up against a

larger arch of green that was to be set with candles and a crown of

light. They were now engaged in putting under the lilies a third and

smaller arch of Mayflowers, that the whole might be like the Lady it

was meant to honor—radiant with glory, mantled in purity, and full of

tender sweetness.

Annette had redeemed her promise of usefulness. Her long train was

pinned about her, leaving a white skirt with the hem close to her

ankles, and the flowing drapery of her sleeves was bound above the

elbow, her arms being quite free. Mounted on the topmost step of an

unsteady ladder, she fastened the higher flowers; lower down, at either

side, Lawrence Gerald and Honora tied the lower ones. Not much was

said, the few necessary words were lowly spoken; but they smiled now

and then in each other’s lighted faces.

It was ten o’clock when they went out through the basement, leaving

a man to extinguish the gas and lock the door. On their way to the

street, they passed the priest’s house. Only one light was visible in

it, and that shone in a wide-open stairway window. The light, with a

shadow beside it, was approaching the window, and presently a man’s

head and shoulders appeared above the high sill. Father Chevreuse had

returned home, and was going up to his chamber. He stopped, holding a

candle, and put out his right hand to close the window, but paused,

hearing a step outside. “Who’s there?” he asked authoritatively,

peering out, but seeing nothing in the darkness.

“Three friends who are just going home,” answered a voice.

“And who are the other two, Honora Pembroke?” demanded the priest.

“Annette and Lawrence. We have been arranging flowers for Our Lady.”

“That’s well. Good-night!”

He pulled the sash down with a bang; but Honora, smiling in the dark,

still held her companions beneath the window. It opened again with

another bang.

“Children!” he called out.

“Yes, father!”

“God bless you! Good-night!”

Again the sash came down, more gently this time, and the light and the

kind heart went on climbing up the stairway.

“He wouldn’t have slept well to-night if he had not said ‘God bless

you!’ to us,” said Miss Pembroke. “And I believe we shall sleep better

for it, too, God bless him!”

They walked up the steep hillside from the lower part of the town

toward South Avenue. Half-way up the hill, on a cross-street that led

out toward the country, was the cottage in which Lawrence Gerald lived

with his mother, his aunt, and Honora Pembroke. As they approached this

road, Annette Ferrier’s heart fluttered. Lawrence had been very amiable

that evening. He had praised her, had twice smiled very kindly, and had

put her shawl over her shoulders before they came out, as though he

were really afraid she might take cold. Perhaps he would leave Honora

at home first, and then go up with her.

What great good this would do her she could not have explained; for

seldom had she heard from him a word too tender to be spoken before

witnesses. Still, she wished it. He might say something kind, or listen

willingly to some word of affection from her. At any rate, she would be

a little longer in his company.

Miss Pembroke anticipated her wish, or had some other reason for

making the proposal. “Just go as far as the gate with me, and then you

can escort Annette,” she said. “You will not mind a few extra steps,

Annette?”

“Oh! come up with us,” the young man interposed hastily. “It is a

beautiful night for walking, and I know you are not tired yet. You can

bear twice the walking that Annette can.”

She hesitated a moment, then went on with them. His request displeased

her on more than one account: she did not like his indifference to the

company of his promised wife, and she did not like his preference for

being with herself. But his mother would be anxiously watching for him;

and it would be something if he could be lured in at an early hour

after a quiet evening.

Down in the black heart of the town, among the offices, was a certain

back room where the windows were not so closely curtained but those who

watched outside could see a thread of light burning all night long. To

this room men went sometimes in the hope of mending their fortunes,

or, after the demon of gambling had caught them fast, to taste of that

fiery excitement which had now become to them a necessity. Honora more

than suspected that Lawrence Gerald’s steps had sometimes turned in

there. A year or two before, in one of his good moods, he had confessed

it to her, with an almost boyish contrition, and had promised never

to go again. It was his last confession of the sort, but, she feared,

not his last sin. Of what worth were the promises of a weak, tempted

man who never sought earnestly the help of God to strengthen his

resolution? Of no more value than an anchor without a cable. Lawrence

needed to be watched and cared for; so she went on with them.

“I am so sorry to trouble you both,” Miss Ferrier exclaimed, in a voice

trembling with anger and disappointment. “I could have had John come

for me, if I had thought.” She snatched her hand from the arm of her

escort, and pulled her shawl about her with nervous twitches.

“It would have been better to have had John,” Honora said; “for he

could have gone home with me. I am the troublesome third, as it is. But

then,” speaking lightly, “if I am the last, Lawrence will be obliged to

go in early.”

With another twitch of her shawl, Annette took her escort’s arm again

as abruptly as she had left it, and, held it closely.

Careless as the last words had sounded, she knew their meaning, for

there had been something said on this subject before. She chose to take

it defiantly now, and it comforted her to do so. Others might blame

and doubt him, but she would not. He seemed nearer to her in the light

of her superior devotedness than to any one else. She would never fail

him; and by-and-by he would know her worth. The glow of this fervent

hope warmed the girl’s chilled heart, and gave her a sort of happiness.

And so they reached the house, and, after a quiet good-night, separated.

The walk back was passed in silence; and Miss Pembroke did not choose

to lean on her companion’s arm; she wished to hold her dress out of the

dust.

The street they went through was one of those delightful old ones which

a city sometimes leaves untouched for a long time. Over-arching elms

grew thickly on either side, and the houses were all detached.

Midway up this street stood the cottage of the Geralds, with a garden

in front and at the back, and a narrow green at right and left. Three

long windows in front, lighting the parlor, reached almost to the

ground. The steep roof slanted to a veranda at each side, leaving but

one upper window over the three—a wide window with casements swinging

back from the middle. The cottage was in the shape of a cross, and at

one arm of it a lighted window shone out on the veranda.

At sound of the gate-latch, the curtain was drawn aside a little, and a

woman looked out an instant, then hastened to open the door.

“Are we late, Mrs. Gerald?” Honora asked, and stepped forward into the

sitting-room.

“Oh! no, dear; I did not expect you any sooner.”

Mrs. Gerald lingered in the doorway, looking back at her son as he

stopped to leave his hat and overcoat in the entry, and only entered

the sitting-room when she had caught a glimpse of his face as he came

toward her. He was looking pleasant, she saw, and was contented with

that.

“Well, mother!” he said, and sank indolently into the arm-chair she

pushed before the open fire for him. It was the only arm-chair in the

room.

She drew another chair forward, and seated herself beside him. Honora,

sitting on a low stool in the corner, with the firelight shining over

her, told what they had been doing that afternoon and evening. The son

listened, his eyes fixed on the fire; the mother listened, her eyes

fixed on her son.

Mrs. Gerald was an Irish lady of good descent, well educated, and well

mannered, and had seen better days. We do not call them better days

because in her girlhood and early married life this lady had been

wealthy, but because she had been the happy daughter of excellent

parents, and the happy wife of a good man. All were gone now but this

son; the husband dead for many a year, the daughters married and far

away, the wealth melted from her like sunset gold from a cloud; but

Lawrence was left, and he filled her heart.

One could read this in her face as she watched him. It revealed the

pride of the mother in that beautiful manhood which she had given to

the world, and which was hers by an inalienable right that no one could

usurp; and it revealed, too, the entire self-forgetfulness of the woman

who lives only in the life so dear to her. The face showed more yet;

for, hovering over this love and devotion as the mist of the coming

storm surrounds the full moon, and rings its softened brightness with a

tremulous halo, one could detect even in the mother’s smile the mist of

a foreboding sadness.

How ineffable and without hope is that sadness which is ever the

companion of a too exclusive affection!

Honora Pembroke looked at the two, and pain and indignation, and the

necessity for restraining any expression of either, swelled in her

heart, painted her cheeks a deep red, and lifted her lids with a fuller

and more scornful gaze than those soft eyes were wont to give. Where

was the courtesy which any man, not rudely insensible, should show

to a lady? Where the grateful tenderness that any child, not cruelly

ungrateful, pays to a mother? This man could be gallant when he wished

to make a favorable impression; and she had heard him make very pretty,

if very senseless, speeches about chivalry and ideal characters, as

if he knew what they were. He had even, in the early days of their

acquaintance, maintained for a long time an irreproachable demeanor in

her presence. She was learning a doubt and distrust of men, judging

them by this one, of whom she knew most. Were they often as selfish

and insensible as he was? Were they incapable of being affected by any

enchantment except that which is lent by a delusive distance? Here

beside him was an ideal affection, and he accepted it as he accepted

air and sunshine—it was a matter of course. The mother was in person

one who might satisfy even such a fastidious taste as his; for though

the face was thin and faded, and the hands marred by household labor,

there were still the remains of what had once been a striking beauty.

Mrs. Gerald carried her tall form with undiminished stateliness, her

coal-black hair had not a single thread of white among its thick

tresses, and her deep-blue eyes had gained in tenderness what they

had lost in fire. To use one of Miss Pembroke’s favorite expressions,

it was not fitting that the son, after having passed a day without

fatigue, should lounge at ease among cushions, while the mother, to

whom every evening brought weariness, should sit beside him in a chair

of penitential hardness.

But even while she criticised him, he looked up from the fire, his face

brightening with a sudden pleasant recollection.

“O mother! I had almost forgotten,” he said, and began searching in his

pockets for something. “Neither you nor Honora mentioned it; but I keep

count, and I know that to-day your ladyship is five times ten years

old.”

He smiled with a boyish pleasure more beautiful than his beauty,

and the little touch of self-satisfaction he betrayed was as far as

possible from being disagreeable. He could not help knowing that he

was about to give delight, and cover himself with honor in the eyes of

these two women.

“Now, mother,” opening a tiny morocco case, “this is the first ring

I ever gave any woman. The one I gave Annette was only a diamond of

yours reset, and so no gift of mine. But this your good-for-nothing son

actually earned, and had made on purpose for you.”

He drew from the case a broad gold ring that sparkled in the firelight

as if set with diamonds, and, taking the trembling hand his mother had

extended caressingly at his first words, slipped the circlet onto her

finger.

“I had no stone put in it, because I want you to wear it all the time,”

he said. “Doesn’t it fit nicely?”

“My dear boy!” Mrs. Gerald exclaimed, and could say no more; for tears

that she wished to restrain were choking her.

A fiftieth birthday is not a joyful anniversary when there is no

one but one’s self to remember that it has come. Just as the mother

had given up hope, and was making to herself excuses for his not

remembering it, her son showed that it had been long in his thought.

The joy was as unexpected as it was sweet.

When she said her prayers that night, Mrs. Gerald’s clasped hands

pressed the dear gift close to her cheek; and no maiden saying her

first prayer over her betrothal-ring ever felt a tenderer happiness or

more impassioned gratitude.

“Dear Lawrence! it was so nice of you!” whispered Honora, and gave him

her hand as she wished him good-night.

He threw himself back in the arm-chair again when he was left alone,

and for a few minutes had a very pleasant sense of being happy and the

cause of happiness. “Who would think that so much fun could be got out

of a quiet evening spent in tying Mayflowers round a pole, and giving

a gold birthday ring to one’s mother?” he mused. “After all, the good

people have the best of it, and we scape-graces are the ones to be

pitied. If I were rich, I should be all right. If I had even half a

chance, I would ask no more. But the poverty!” He glanced about the

room, then looked gloomily into the fire again.

Yes; poverty was there—that depressing poverty which speaks of decayed

fortunes. The carpet, from which the brilliant velvet pile was worn

nearly off, the faded and mended covers of the carved chair-frames, the

few old-fashioned ornaments which had been retained when all that would

sell well had gone to the auction-room, each showed by the scrupulous

care with which it had been preserved a poverty that clung to the rags

of prosperity in the past because it saw no near hope of prosperity in

the future. Miles of unbroken forest could be seen from the cupolas of

Crichton; yet in this room the very stick of wood that burned slowly

on the andirons was an extravagance which Mrs. Gerald would not have

allowed herself.

“Yes; the good ones have the best of it,” the young man repeated,

rousing himself.

He drew the andirons out, and let the unconsumed stick down into the

ashes, lighted a candle, and turned the gas off. Then, candle in hand,

he stood musing a moment longer, the clear light shining over his face,

and showing an almost childlike smile coming sweetly to his lips.

“After all,” he said softly, “I haven’t been a bad fellow to-night,”

and with that pleased smile still lingering on his face, went slowly

out of the room.

And so the stillness of night descended, and deep sleep brooded over

the town as the lights went out.

Crichton was a well-governed city: no rude broils disturbed its hours

of darkness. Decency was in power there, and made itself obeyed. You

might see a doctor’s buggy whirl by, like a ghost of a carriage, its

light wheels faintly crunching the gravel; for only the business

streets were paved. Now and then, on still nights, might be heard the

grating of ropes, as some vessel sailed up to the wharf after a long

ocean voyage. Perhaps a woman in one of the houses on the hill above

would hear that sound through her dream, and start up to listen,

fancying that, in the word of command the soft breeze bore to her

casement, she could detect a familiar voice long unheard and anxiously

waited for. Perhaps the sailor, whose swift keel had shot like an arrow

past the heavy junk of Chinese waters, and scattered, as it approached

the shore, clear reflections of tufted palms and dusky natives—perhaps

he looked eagerly up the hill to that spot which his eyes could find

without aid of chart or compass, and saw suddenly twinkle out the lamp

in the window of his home.

But except for such soft sounds and shadowy idyls, Crichton was at

night as still as sleep itself.

The Crichtonians had a pleasant saying that their city was built by a

woman, and the best compliment we can pay them is that they made this

saying proudly, and kept in honored remembrance the hand of the gentle

architect. But not so much in brick and stone was it acknowledged,

though they owed to her their first ideas of correct and symmetrical

building: in their society, high and low, in many of their pretty

customs, in their tastes, in their freedom from bigotry of opinions,

even in their government, they felt her influence.

While the city lies sleeping under the stars, strong, adult, and

beautiful, full of ambitious dreams, full, too, of kind and generous

feeling, let us go back to the time when, an infant town, it began to

use its powers, and stammer brokenly the alphabet of civilization.

Hush, fair city, all thy many thousands, while the angels watch above

thee! and, sweeter marvel yet! while the dear Lord waits unsleeping

in thy midst, where that solitary taper burns. Sleep in peace, “poor

exiled children of Eve,” and be grateful at least in dreams.

Not very long ago, this place was a wild forest, with a rude little

settlement hewn out of it on the river’s banks. It was shut in from the

world, though the world was not far distant. But the river was broad

and deep, the ocean only ten miles away, and within a few miles were

large and growing cities. Soon the sound of the axe and the saw were

heard, and little craft, sloops and schooners, floated down the Saranac

laden with lumber till the water rippled close to the rails. The story

of her growth in this regard is the story of a thousand other towns.

The vessels grew larger, their voyages longer, more houses were built,

some men became comparatively wealthy and gave employment to others,

while the majority kept the level of the employed. Social distinctions

began to show themselves, detestable ones for the most part, since

there was no social cultivation. Indeed, this poor settlement was in

a fair way to become the most odious of towns. The two meeting-houses

began to be called churches by the aspiring; the leading woman of the

town ventured to call her help a servant (on which the indignant “help”

immediately deserted her); and the first piano appeared. But let us

mention this piano with respect, for it was the pioneer of harmony.

When Crichton had about fifteen hundred inhabitants, a stranger came

there one day, as a passenger on board a bark returning from a distant

city. This bark was the chief vessel, and was owned by the three chief

men of Crichton. It had gone away laden with laths, and it brought back

tea, coffee, sugar, and other foreign groceries; and, more than all, it

brought Mr. Seth Carpenter. He was not, apparently, a very remarkable

man in any way, except as all strangers were remarkable in this young

town. He was plain-looking, rather freckled, and had a pair of small

and very bright eyes which he almost closed, in a near-sighted way,

when he wished to see well. Behind those eyes was a good deal of will

and wit, and the will to put the wit into immediate practice. Moreover,

he knew how to hold his tongue very cleverly, and baffle the curious

without offending them. Nothing but his name transpired. He might be a

mountebank, a detective, a king’s son—how were these people to know?

In fact, he was nothing more mysterious than a respectable young man

twenty-five years of age, who, having his fortune to make, had thought

best to leave his prim, sober, native town, where nothing was being

done, and where the people were mummies, and seek what, in modern

parlance, is called a “live” place. In his pockets he had nothing but

his hands; in his valise was a single change of linen.

The very morning of his arrival at Crichton, Mr. Seth Carpenter went

to the highest hill-top, and from it viewed the town, the river, and

the receding forests. He then strolled down to the river, and looked

through the mills, and from there sauntered to the ship-yard, where

he found a ship on the stocks, almost ready to be launched. He walked

round the yard, whistling softly, with an air of critical indifference.

He paused near two other men who were viewing the ship, and, since

their conference was not private, listened to it.

One of these men, a sailor, rather thought he might make up his mind to

buy that ship. Did his companion know what was likely to be asked for

it? The other reckoned, and calculated, and guessed, and expected, and

finally owned that he did not know.

Mr. Carpenter, his eyes winking fast with the sparks that came into

them, and his fingers working nervously, walked out of the yard, and

found the owner of the ship, and, still with nothing in his pockets but

his hands, made his bargain with all the coolness of a millionaire.

Before sunset, the ship was nominally his; and, before sunrise, it had

changed owners again, and the young adventurer had made five hundred

dollars by the bargain.

“I will yet rule the town!” he said exultingly, when he found himself

alone; and he kept his word. Everything prospered with him, and in a

short time even rivalry ceased. Men who had been proud to add dollar

to dollar shrank and bowed before this man who added thousand to unit.

Half the men in town, after ten years, were in his employment, and

business prospered as he prospered. In another ten years, Crichton was

a city, with all barriers down between her and the great world; but

a raw, unkempt city; jealous, superficially educated, quarrelsome,

pretentious, and rapidly crystallizing into that mould. Only a

person of supreme position and character could now change it. Mr.

Carpenter had the position, but not the character. He thought only

of money-making, and of the excitement of enterprise and power; the

rest he viewed with a pleasant indifference not without contempt. At

forty-five he was still a bachelor.

We have mentioned the first piano with respect, because others followed

in its train, rendering a music-teacher necessary; so that, after a

succession of tyros, Miss Agnes Weston came, bringing the very spirit

of harmony with her into the town she was to conquer.

She did not come as a conqueror, however; nor probably did she

anticipate the part she was to play any more than the Crichtonians

did. She came to earn her bread, and, while doing so, was anything but

popular. Nothing but her brilliant musical abilities, and the fact that

she had been educated at Leipsic, saved her from utter failure. People

did not fancy this self-possessed, unpretending young person, who could

sometimes show such a haughty front to the presuming, and who was,

moreover, so frightfully dark and sallow. They did not understand her,

and preferred to leave her very much to herself.

One person only found her not a puzzle. To Mr. Carpenter she was simply

a refined woman among uncongenial associates; becoming discontented

and unhappy there, too, before many months had passed. He did not

choose that she should go away. He had become pleasantly accustomed to

seeing her, had sometimes met her on her long walks out of town; and

once, when he had politely offered to drive her home—an offer which

any other lady in Crichton would have accepted beamingly, without the

preliminary of an introduction—had been refreshed by receiving a cold

refusal, and a surprised stare from a pair of large black eyes. The

great man, surfeited with smiles and flatteries, was immensely pleased

by this superciliousness.

But though strangely disturbed at the prospect of Miss Weston’s

leaving, he hesitated to speak the word which might detain her. A

bachelor of forty-five does not readily determine on making a sensible

marriage; it usually needs some great folly to spur him on to a change

so long deferred. He had, moreover, two other reasons for delaying: he

wanted a charming wife, and was in doubt whether even his power could

transform this lady into his ideal: the other reason had blue eyes, and

a dimple in its chin, and was a very silly reason.

But no one who knew this gentleman would expect him to remain long in

doubt on any subject. Within a month from the day he first entertained

the thought of running such a risk, Crichton was electrified by the

announcement that Mr. Carpenter was soon to be married to Miss Weston;

and, before they had recovered from their first astonishment, the

marriage had taken place, and the quiet, dark-faced music-teacher was

established as mistress of an imposing mansion on North Avenue.

It was now Mr. Carpenter’s turn to be astonished, and he was enchanted

as well. Never had he pictured to himself a woman so charming as

this grub, now become a butterfly, proved herself; and never had he

imagined that even his wife could obtain so beautiful a supremacy as

she gradually established and never lost. She was born to rule, and

seldom had such power been placed in any woman’s hands. Mr. Carpenter

was the first of her vassals. With a refined and noble arrogance, she

esteemed him as the first man in the world, because he had been the

first to appreciate and exalt her. For this she gave him a faithful,

if condescending, affection, and quoted his wishes and opinions so

constantly that one might have thought they were her only guides. So

thorough was her tact and her courtesy toward her husband he scarcely

guessed his own inferiority, and never dreamed that she was aware of it.

She grew beautiful, too, as well as amiable. Now that the drudgery of

toil was lifted from her, and her cramped talents had room for full

and exhilarating play, the swarthy skin cleared, showing a peach-like

bloom, the fine teeth lit a frequent smile, and the deep voice lost its

dull cadence, and took a musical, ringing sound.

Mrs. Carpenter used her power well. Crichton was as clay in her hands,

and she moulded it after a noble model. What arrogance could never

have done was accomplished by tact and sweetness. Her forming touch

was strong and steady, but it was smooth, and nothing escaped it.

Thoroughly womanly, speaking by her husband’s mouth when she deemed it

not fitting that her proper voice should be heard, she could influence

in matters where women do not usually care to interfere. She thought

nothing out of her province which concerned the prosperity of the town

she honored with her presence, and she inspired others with her own

enthusiasm. That streets should be wide and well kept, that public

buildings should be architecturally symmetrical, that neat cottages for

the poor, replacing their miserable huts, should start up sudden as

daisies along some quiet road—these objects all interested her, though

she worked for them indirectly.

But in social life she ruled openly; and there her good sense and good

heart, her gentle gaiety and entire uprightness, became the mould of

form. Ill-nature went out of fashion, and, in the absence of charity,

self-control became a necessity. When people of opposite creeds met at

her house, their feuds had to be laid aside for the time; and, once two

foes have smiled in each other’s faces, the frown is not so easy to

recall.

Gradually the change which had been imposed outwardly became a real

one; and, when Mrs. Carpenter died, full of years and of honors, her

spirit continued to animate the place, in its opinions and actions, at

least, if some fairer grace of heart and principle were wanting. She

died as she had lived, out of the church; though the church had ever

found her a friend, bountiful and tenderly protecting. Of its doctrines

and authority she seemed never to have thought; but the copy of the

Sistine Madonna in her drawing-room had always a vase of fresh flowers

before it.

She left no children. A niece whom she had adopted married in

Crichton, and had one descendant, a grand-daughter, living there. This

grand-daughter was Honora Pembroke.

Wake again, Crichton, for morning is come. Long rays of golden light

are shooting out of the east; and down the hillside, in the church of

S. John, Father Chevreuse is saying, _Sursum Corda_!

TO BE CONTINUED.

FONTAINEBLEAU.

CONCLUDED.

CHARLES had a dangerous enemy in the person of the Duchesse d’Estampes.

She was furious at his being allowed to enter France at all, and still

more at his leaving it without paying such a ransom as his host might

easily have enforced; but to all her arguments and blandishments

Francis was nobly inexorable; he remained true, in this instance at

least, to the instincts of his better nature and the promptings of

knightly honor. He could not, however, resist saying to Charles, when

presenting the duchess to him: “Here is a lady who advises me to undo

at Paris the work done at Madrid.” To which the emperor replied coldly:

“If the advice be good, you ought to follow it.” The story goes—a

most improbable one, considering the position occupied by the Duchesse

d’Estampes, whose jewels were worthy of a queen of France—that at

supper that same evening, when, according to the complimentary custom

of the times, she presented Charles with the urn of perfumed water

to rinse his hands, he dropped a diamond ring at her feet, and, on

her picking it up and handing it to him, replied: “Keep it, madame;

it could not be in fitter hands.” Whether Charles bribed the _belle

savante_ with a diamond or any other device, it is certain that, before

he left, they had become very good friends, and she had quite adopted

the king’s more generous view of the case.

At the close of 1546, Francis fell ill, and was supposed to be dying.

The courtiers, true to the traditions of their race, immediately fled

from Fontainebleau to greet the Dauphin, who was at Amboise. Francis

was conscious enough to notice their disappearance, and to divine

the cause of it. It stung him to the quick, and roused him to make a

desperate effort to disappoint them. He rallied, and announced his

intention of following the procession of _Corpus Christi_ next day.

The doctors remonstrated, but in vain; nothing could shake the king’s

determination. He dressed himself in his robes of state, had his pale

cheeks brightened with rouge, and thus, under a mask of returning

health, appeared in the midst of his astonished court, and held the

canopy during the procession. But the ceremony was no sooner over than

he fell exhausted into the arms of his attendants, and was carried

back to bed. He remained for some time unconscious; on recovering his

senses, his first exclamation was, “Well, at any rate, I will give them

one more fright!” Four months after this childish piece of bravado, he

died at the Château of Rambouillet.

The forest of Fontainebleau was infested during his reign with a

quantity of noxious vermin—serpents eighteen feet in length, which

did great damage, and filled the inhabitants with terror. One of these

snakes, by his depredations on man and beast, earned the reputation

for himself of a sort of mythological dragon. Some bold men had

undertaken to combat him, but all had perished in the attempt. Francis

declared at last that he would fight and kill the dragon himself. He

equipped himself accordingly in a suit of armor covered all over with

long blades as sharp as razors, and, thus armed, sallied forth to the

perilous duel. The serpent coiled itself round the glistening blades,

and, in clasping his victim, cut himself to pieces. This fantastic

exploit of Francis was magnified by the adulation of his courtiers into

a deed of supernatural prowess.

The death of Francis was the signal for the downfall of the Duchesse

d’Estampes, who retreated like a dethroned sovereign before the now

transcendent star of Diana of Poitiers. Diana’s frailty was unredeemed

by the intellectual gifts and native kindliness that distinguished

her rival. There is no counterpart even in French history to the

sway exercised by this Dalila over Henri II. Madame Du Barry’s is

the nearest approach to it, but even that falls far short of the

precedent. Diana not only ruled the king and the kingdom, but openly

usurped the honors, prerogatives, and official state of a legitimate

queen. Her cipher, interlaced with Henri’s, was carved and emblazoned

on all the public monuments; not a door or gallery of Fontainebleau,

aptly nicknamed by the people “the Temple of Diana,” that was not

surmounted by the monogram H. D. It was to be seen in the stained glass

windows of the chapel, as well as on the plate served on the royal

table under the eyes of Catherine de Medicis. Diana appropriated the

crown jewels, and appeared at all the public ceremonies decked in the

hitherto sacred regalia of the queens of France. Catherine looked on

and was silent—she could wait; her hour would come. It came sooner

than either she or Diana anticipated. The king fell mortally wounded

in a tournament given to celebrate the nuptials of his daughter, the

Princesse Elizabeth, with the King of Spain (1559). He was carried to

the nearest shelter; Catherine flew to his side, and gave orders that

no one should be allowed to approach him; at this crisis, at least, the

wife should be supreme. Diana soon presented herself at the door, but

the guard refused her admittance; the queen had forbidden it. “And who

dares to give me orders?” demanded Diana, with flashing eyes; “if the

king breathes, I have no master yet.” Soon he had ceased to breathe,

and Diana, without further protest, bowed to the queen’s command, which

bade her “restore the crown jewels, and retire forthwith to her Château

d’Anet.”

Her beauty was marvellous, and lasted in all its bloom long after

the meridian of life was past. Brantôme describes her at the age of

sixty-five as “still beautiful as a girl.” The death of Henri II.

was the signal for Catherine de Medicis’ real queenhood. Her reign

lasted over thirty years, and may be justly styled, in the most

comprehensive sense of the word, a reign of terror for the nation. Her

first business was to create discord in the family as a prelude to

civil war in the state. She imported into France, with the enlightened

love of the arts imbibed at the court of the Medicis, their crafty

Italian policy; a system of cabal and intrigue which worked well

enough in the narrow compass of petty states, but was fruitful of

the most disastrous results in a large kingdom where government can

only be carried on successfully by well-organized institutions and

strong and wise laws justly administered. Catherine was born with a

genius for intrigue; her love for conspiracy amounted to a mania. The

faculty of dissembling, with which nature had so pre-eminently endowed

her, did her good service in the first years of her residence at

Fontainebleau. It required all the tact of an accomplished dissembler

to steer between the rival powers of the Duchesse d’Estampes and Diana

of Poitiers—a feat which the wily pupil of the Medicis achieved

with singular success. To the last day of their reign and her own

thraldom, she contrived to remain friendly with both. Catherine’s

ambition was unbounded, and drove her to excesses of wickedness that

have few parallels in modern history. She systematically labored to

corrupt the minds and hearts of her children, and to sow dissensions

amongst them, so as to draw the power that should have been theirs

into her own hands. Jealousy of one son, Francis II., drove her to

espouse the cause of the Huguenots for a time; and, when his death

placed the sceptre in the hands of his brother Charles IX., she veered

round, and persecuted her quondam _protégés_ with cold cynicism and

ferocity. Five civil wars can be traced home to the dark intrigues of

this unnatural mother—a woman who never took a straight road when she

could find a crooked one, who regarded human beings as an apparatus

composed of an infinite variety of tools to be used one set against

another as the special nature of her work demanded. The massacre of

S. Bartholomew was but another manifestation of the same spirit which

had led her to stir up the Huguenots to revolt when she thought their

rebellion would serve her aims. This sanguinary despot had most of

the foibles of a woman, combined with the fiercer passions of a man.

Her frivolity and extravagance knew no bounds; and when her ministers

ventured to hint to her that the lavish prodigality of her expenditure

was exasperating the people, and might lead to trouble, she shrugged

her shoulders, and replied, with serene simplicity: “Good heavens!

one must live.” The sweet, pathetic face of Marie Stuart appears for

a moment at Fontainebleau in the earlier days of Catherine’s rule—a

bright meteor flashing on a troubled sky; poor Marie, whose sky was

gathering up the storm that was to break at no distant day over her

young life, and beat it some twenty years with a fury that was only to

be silenced by the great tranquillizer—death. Fierce and long-raging

were the storms that swept over Fontainebleau through the same

darkling years. Henri de Navarre bears down on it like a whirlwind,

and forces the queen, with her son Charles IX., to fly before him and

his Huguenots to Melun. They have not taken breath at Melun when the

Duc de Guise meets them like a contrary wind, and blows them back to

Paris. Soon follows the night of S. Bartholomew, that blackest of

black nights, under whose pall, as it has been pithily put by a modern

Frenchman, “a few scoundrels killed a few scoundrels.” Its gloom was

still hanging over the city when Catherine and the king were bowling

along the road to Fontainebleau—he shuddering, a Macbeth terrified at

his share in the ghastly deed; she triumphant, unappalled by ghost or

conscience, her sharp, elastic mind busy on the next step to be taken.

How was she to undo the one awkward consequence of her triumph—the

remorse and mistrust of this faint-hearted son? A hundred and fifty

maids, miscalled of honor, were recruited from the beauty of France,

and brought to Fontainebleau to aid in the task of soothing the king’s

scruples and mending the queen’s nets. But her hold upon Charles

was loosened, and not all the charms of all the houris of Mahomet’s

paradise would lure it to her grasp again. Catherine, however, could

accommodate herself to the decrees of fortune, and turn even her own

blunders to account. Charles, obdurately sullen, refused to revoke the

edict of the pacification of Amboise, thus quenching for once, instead

of lighting, the smouldering flames of civil war. Catherine smiled

bland approval on her blighted schemes, and was full of satisfaction,

as if, instead of chaining the war-dogs, she had been allowed to let

them loose. She received the ambassadors in regal state, and laid

herself out to captivate all men by her smiles and honeyed courtesies;

feuds and jealousies were lulled to sleep with soft music of delight;

all the heads of all the factions, civil and religious, turned in the

dance till they were giddy, carousing, and embracing, and pledging one

another in loving cups, while their followers were cutting each other’s

throats hard by; fireworks sent rockets blazing to the sky—merry

rockets, red, white, and green; and Fontainebleau was once more a

palace of Armida, an Arabian night’s dream, where men came and drank,

and were inebriated. A dark and agitated scene is that which France

presents at the close of Catherine’s reign. We turn from it with relief

to see Henri de Navarre enter his “good city” of Paris. After the

peace of Vervins, which put an end to religious wars in France, and

allowed Europe to breathe once more, the gay Béarnais came to enjoy his

well-won conquest at Fontainebleau. Sully, the true and trusty friend,

goes with him, supreme, though not alone, in his influence with the

soft-hearted monarch. Gabrielle d’Estrée contests the field with him;

but, to Henri’s honor be it said, she is defeated. Gabrielle had, in a

weak moment, extracted from the king a promise that he would make her

Queen of France—a promise which, as a matter of course, he immediately

confided to Sully. The minister burst out into indignant protest, and

outswore the Béarnese himself in the vehemence of his indignation. They

parted, as usual, in a rage, and, as usual, Henri soon calmed down, and

declared that Sully was right. When Gabrielle recurred to the promise,

he told her the result of his conversation with “my friend Rosny.”

The lady flew into a tantrum, called Rosny hard names, and wound up

by insisting that “that valet” should be dismissed from the court.

The insolent appellation, coming from such a quarter, roused the king

to a sense of his own disgraceful weakness. “Ventre S. Gris, madame,”

he cried, “if I must needs dismiss either, it shall be you a thousand

times rather than my faithful Rosny—my friend without whom I could

not live!” Gabrielle saw that she had overstepped the mark; for Henri,

if he had the faults of a man, was no emasculated puppet, like so many

of his predecessors, to be bound hand and foot by a Dalila; he had

still the spirit of a king. Gabrielle fell at his feet, and begged his

pardon, and Sully’s too. Shortly after this incident, Sully’s fears on

her account were put an end to by her death. Henri’s grief for a time

was so violent as almost to deprive him of his reason. But his fickle

heart soon found consolation in a new allegiance. Mlle. d’Entragnes was

the next to captivate it. For this fair siren, Henri went so far as to

draw out a written promise of marriage. Before, however, giving the

document into the hands of the fair lady, he, of course, showed it to

Sully, the dauntless Sully, who was the most discreet of confidants,

but the most unmanageable of accomplices. This time he was too deeply

moved for anger; he did not bully the king, but coolly read the paper

twice over, and then, tearing it deliberately into four fragments, he

flung it into the fire. “_Parbleu_, Rosny, you are mad!” cried the

king. “Would to God, sire, I were the only madman in France!” replied

Rosny. Henri turned on his heel, and there was no more said about

that marriage. He married finally Marie de Medicis. She gave birth to

the Dauphin Louis XIII. at Fontainebleau. Henri’s joy was unbounded.

He made his wife a present on the occasion of the Château of Monceau

with its beautiful park and grounds, which had formerly been a gift to

Gabrielle d’Estrée. Marie de Medicis was blest with wonderfully robust

health—a fact which her husband comments upon rather quaintly in a

letter to Sully ten days after the birth of the Dauphin. “My wife,”

he says, “dresses her own hair, and talks already of getting up; my

friend, she has a terribly robust constitution!” Sad pity that anything

should spoil the attractive beauty of Henri IV.’s portrait as it hangs

before us in the long gallery of royal sitters at Fontainebleau; but,

alas! there it is, the black blot on the bright disk, the treacherous

breach of hospitality perpetrated in his name toward an old companion

and brother-in-arms. There is abundant proof that the arrest of

Maréchal de Biron and his death were repugnant and painful to the king,

and that for some days he combated both by every means in his power,

stooping to tears and passionate entreaty with Biron, and pleading

eloquently in his behalf with his own ministers; and that it was only

after all his efforts had failed to convince the latter, or to wring

from Biron’s stubborn pride the confession which could have saved him,

that Henri’s signature was obtained for the death-warrant. This no

doubt absolves him from the odium of a cold-blooded, premeditated act

of vengeance; but it is a poor apology to say that he only consented

to invite his old brother-in-arms to Fontainebleau, and let him be

arrested in a dark corridor at nightfall, and taken to prison, and

eventually put to death, because he was overruled and circumvented by

the iron will of his wife Marie with the “terribly robust constitution.”

The gardens of Fontainebleau are full of delicate and poetic memories

of Henri de Navarre in which Rosny plays a prominent part. The

courtiers looked on at the familiar, schoolboy friendship between the

king and his minister with envious eyes, and set to work with malignant

diligence to loosen the bond. They succeeded in getting up such a

plausible story against Rosny that the king, who had been some time

without seeing him, was staggered; he examined the deed of accusation,

and admitted that the circumstances looked badly. The minister was

in Paris working away for his master as hard as any galley-slave at

the arsenal. Henri sent for him. When he arrived, the king was on

the terrace surrounded by the court; he greeted his friend with a

gracious formality foreign to the habitual free and easy manner of

their intercourse. Sully was pained and mystified. But the restraint

was equally intolerable to both. Henri called him aside presently,

and they walked up and down an alley in sight of the terrace, but out

of ear-shot. The king pulled out the deed of accusation, and handed

it to his friend. Rosny cast his eye contemptuously over the paper,

and in a few words scattered all its contents to the winds. Henri saw

that he had been the dupe of a base, designing jealousy, and broke

out into bitter self-reproach at having been led to doubt even for a

moment the fidelity of his tried and faithful servant. He held out his

hand; Sully, overcome with emotion, was about to fall on his knees to

kiss it; but, quick as lightning, the king caught him in his arms,

exclaiming: “Take care, Rosny! Those fellows yonder will fancy I am

forgiving you.”

The visit of the Spanish ambassador to Fontainebleau led to the

construction of the large and handsome Chapel of the Trinity. After

going all over the interminable galleries and halls of the vast

edifice, they came to the chapel. It was very pretty, but quite out

of keeping with the space and splendor of the rest of the building.

Don Pedro’s minister was scandalized at the irreverence implied in

the contrast, and, with the impulse of a Spaniard, exclaimed, looking

round at the narrow walls of the little sanctuary: “Your house would

be perfect, sire, if God were as well lodged in it as the king.” Henri

was pleased with the outspoken rebuke, and at once set about building a

temple worthier of the divine worship.

His ungovernable passion for the chase was a frequent cause of

altercation between himself and Sully, who shared his master’s love for

the sport, but, unlike him, knew where to stop in the indulgence of it.

The title of _Grand Veneur_,[127] attached to the office of master of

the royal hounds, dates from Henri’s time, and takes its rise from a

phantom which made its appearance in the forest in the shape of a man

larger than life, dressed in black, and surrounded by a pack of hounds,

and who vanished as soon as the spectator tried to approach him. Sully

had long laughed at the story of this spectre, but, once coming to meet

the king, he came face to face himself with the _grand veneur_; he

owned to the fact, but was still sceptical, though unable in any way to

explain away the mysterious apparition, which he took great pains to do.

Louis XIII. resided much at Fontainebleau, and continued the work of

embellishment, which needed little now to make it perfect. Anne of

Austria enriched the new chapel with many valuable paintings. For a

period, Richelieu is the presiding genius of the grand old palace. Then

he passes away, and makes room for Mazarin, who received here Henrietta

of England with a splendor becoming her double majesty of misfortune

and royalty.

The first time that Louis XIV. honored the palace with his presence was

on the occasion of signing the marriage contract between Ladislas of

Poland and Marie de Gonzagne (1645); the marriage itself was celebrated

at the Palais Royal.

Christina of Sweden furnishes one of the most thrilling chapters in

the history of Fontainebleau. This eccentric woman, whose ambition it

was to entwine the laurels of Sappho with the jewels of her crown,

gave up the throne of Sweden to wander about the world like an Arab.

That sort of eccentricity being rarer in those days than in our own,

it passed for genius, wisdom, anything the owner chose to call it.

Christina gained the reputation of possessing extraordinary erudition,

and a mind gifted with the powers of a man, as well as adorned with

the graces of an accomplished woman. Anne of Austria was filled with

admiration for the queen who cast away a crown to go in pursuit of

science and philosophy; and, when Christina announced her intention

of visiting France, the regent made preparations to receive her which

surpassed anything that Fontainebleau had witnessed since the reception

of Charles V. by Francis I. Christina made her entry on horseback,

surrounded by a guard of honor composed of the highest nobles of the

kingdom, all magnificently attired, and followed by a _cortége_ of

noble dames, some riding on horses caparisoned in housings of cloth

of gold and silver, others drawn in chariots of state. The _fêtes_

given for the royal Sappho’s entertainment were on a scale equal

to the splendor of this reception. She showed her sense of Anne of

Austria’s appreciation of her superior merits by making herself very

agreeable to her; but she earned the dislike of the young king by

ridiculing openly his boyish love for Marie Mancini, and pointing

an epigram at the fair Italian. Lo, when, on her return from Italy,

she intimated her intention of again coming to France, Louis sent

word that he placed the Palace of Fontainebleau at her disposal, but

begged she would not show herself in Paris. During this second visit,

Christina committed the crime which has so irretrievably damned her

memory. Monaldeschi, who had been her pampered favorite for years,

rightly or wrongly incurred her displeasure. Christina determined that

he should die, and did not pause to consider that it was adding a

darker hue to her crime to perpetrate it under the roof of a brother

king. The hour suited her vengeance—that was enough. The whole thing

was planned with a business-like coolness worthy of Louis XI. in his

best days. The queen ordered her victim to be taken to the _galerie

des cerfs_, and herself gave the most minute instructions as to how

he was to be killed, and by whom: he was not to be despatched by one

or even a few successive blows, but struck a great many times and at

short intervals, in hopes of extracting certain avowals from him.

Christina then retired to an adjoining room, and remained in animated

conversation with her _entourage_ while the horrible tragedy was going

on close by. Occasionally she sent in to ask if Monaldeschi were dead;

when the answer again and again came back that he was still struggling,

she expressed first surprise, and then impatience, and at last, unable

to brook the delay, she rose and opened the door of the gallery;

Monaldeschi, on beholding her, stretched out his arms in an attitude

of supplication, but the queen exclaimed sharply, “What! thou art not

yet dead?” and, walking up to where he lay writhing on the ground,

she slapped him on the face “with that hand,” says Voltaire, “which

had loaded him with benefits.” Monaldeschi had cried out for a priest

to help him to die, and this last grace had been granted. Christina

stood by till her victim was dead, and then quietly paid the assassins,

and went back to her conversation. The news of the abominable deed of

blood travelled quickly to Paris; as soon as Mazarin heard it, he sent

her a peremptory order to leave Fontainebleau and France forthwith,

adding that the King of France harbored no assassins as his guests; to

which Christina returned the contemptuous reply that “she was queen

wherever she was, and took no orders from the King of France, and

was accountable for her acts neither to him nor any one else.” It is

curious to observe how little horror seems to have been produced in the

public mind by this execrable murder, committed under circumstances

which rendered it tenfold more revolting; the ladies and courtiers of

the time make no more than a passing mention of it in their letters,

and, in speaking of Christina, reserve their sharpest criticism for

her style of dressing her hair and her manner of dancing, which they

condemn as “fantastic and awkward.” Two years after this event, we find

Christina abjectly begging for an invitation to the carnival ballet

in which Louis XIV. was to dance! The fact of the invitation being

granted is perhaps as significant as that of its being asked for. It

was accompanied, however, with the condition that the Queen of Sweden

should only remain in Paris the three days that the ballet lasted; this

she agreed to, and Mazarin’s apartments at the Louvre were placed at

her disposal.

Louis XIV. restored Catherine de Medicis’ pavilion at Fontainebleau,

called the _Pavillon des Poêles_,[128] for Mary of Modena, and fitted

it up in a style of elegance and splendor befitting rather a royal

bride of France than an exiled queen. But all his graceful gallantry to

the beautiful exile, and professions of brotherly love to her husband,

did not prevent Louis from signing in 1698 the treaty whereby he

pledged himself to recognize the Prince of Orange, and not to disturb

him in the possession of his kingdom.

Louis XV. was married in the chapel at Fontainebleau to Marie Leczinska

(1725). He never cared for the palace as a residence, and merely used

it as a hunting-lodge. His first-born son died there. Shortly before

his death, the young prince, leaning over a balcony from one of the

upper rooms of the palace which looked towards Paris, was heard saying

to himself with a deep-drawn sigh: “What delight the sovereign must

feel who makes the happiness of so many men!” A great deal has been

built on this exclamation—regrets for the blighted promise which

the feeling that prompted it held out to France. But twenty years

before, Louis XV. had said as much, and felt it, very likely, just as

sincerely. Fontainebleau was spared the shame of the saturnalian orgies

that profaned Versailles and Trianon under the reign of Du Barry. The

grim towers that had sheltered Francis, and the Medicis, and Henry

de Navarre had many tales to tell that were better left untold, but

at their worst they showed white beside the vulgar blackness of the

Pompadour and Du Barry chronicles.

Louis XVI., who seldom visited Fontainebleau, has left no mark

of his passages there. Under the Revolution, it was used as the

military school which has since been transferred to St. Cyr. Napoleon

compensated the royal old château for the neglect of his predecessors;

he preferred it, next to St. Cloud, to all the other palaces of which

France had given him temporary possession, and repaired it with

elaborate magnificence, adhering rigidly to the original style in

every detail. He also added a stirring chapter to its history. When,

by his orders, General Radet scaled the walls of the Quirinal at three

o’clock in the morning, and, attended by a band of soldiers, brutally

dragged Pius VII. from his bed, it was to Fontainebleau that the

venerable pontiff was conveyed; here he was kept in close confinement,

and fed upon the bread of insult, with which it was Napoleon’s wont to

nourish his captives; but Pius VII., disarmed, isolated from friends

and counsellors, surrounded by spies paid to interpret his every word

and gesture according to the interests and wishes of their paymaster,

broken in bodily health, his mind bending under the accumulated weight

of every torture that ingenious cruelty could devise, was still a

greater conqueror, in the noblest sense of the word, than Napoleon ever

was on the field of battle. Moreover, a day of reckoning was at hand.

Fontainebleau, which had been the theatre of so many of Napoleon’s

most gorgeous pageants of the melodramatic and sentimental kind—for

he could be sentimental, this great butcher of men and despoiler of

crowns; he could, “with delicate forethought, and at vast expense,

cause a multitude of pine-trees to be planted” amidst the elms and the

oaks of the sombre Medicean forest, in order that his young Austrian

bride might find some reminiscence of home when she walked out for

her evening stroll—Fontainebleau was to witness the going down of

his sun. Fortune, exasperated at last by the excesses of her spoilt

child, plucked the brilliant meteor from the sky, and cast it out

into the darkness. Once, in an interview with Pius VII. during his

captivity, Napoleon, after lavishing all his art of flattery on the

pope, stooping to tender caresses and the most winning attitude of

supplication to wrest from his captive the coveted concession of the

Concordat, presently paused to see the effect of the experiment. Pius

VII. was silent awhile, then, looking up at the emperor with a smile of

withering scorn, he answered: _Commediante!_[129] Like lightning the

tactics were changed; curses rained where kisses had been showered;

threats and gestures fierce as blows succeeded to bland entreaties;

the actor struck his forehead with clenched fists, stamped, grew red

and white in turn, and swore that a thunderbolt should be hurled by

the Tuileries at the Vatican which should crush her defiant pride, and

bury all Christendom under its ruins. Again he “paused for a reply.”

Pius raised his eyes, and, looking fixedly at Napoleon, murmured,

this time with no smile: _Tragediante!_[130] The whole life and

character of the man are summed up in those two epithets: _commediante,

tragediante_. But if Bonaparte played comedy well, tragedy was his

forte, and his last appearance at Fontainebleau was a splendid

farewell representation. It is a little past mid-day. A bright April

sun pours down from a cloudless sky upon the courtyard of the palace;

the horse-shoe staircase, bathed in the unmitigated sunshine, gleams

white and majestic—a stage of the antique fashion well suited for

the closing act about to be played upon it. The audience are already

gathered to the place; thousands of the inhabitants have flocked in

from the town and neighborhood, but the inner circle, the reserved

seats, are filled by the grenadiers of the guard, the Old Guard of a

hundred battles and as many victories, and by the marines of the young

guard. The time seems long, for every heart is beating in sympathetic

emotion with the coming crisis. At last the curtain rises. The doors

opening on the horse-shoe staircase are thrown back, and Napoleon comes

forward. A cry goes up to him from the depths of those many thousand

hearts. But hush! He waves his hand for silence. He is going to speak.

The crowd sways to and fro, a human wave ebbing at the base of an

adamantine rock, whence its idol of twenty years looks down upon it.

“Officers, non-commissioned officers of the Old Guard, I bid you

farewell!... For twenty years you have given me satisfaction. Be

faithful to the new sovereign whom France has chosen. Grieve not for

my fate; I might have died, nothing would have been easier to me—but,

no; I shall to the last tread the path of honor. I will write what

we have done together....” Sobs, such as break the stout hearts of

warlike men, interrupt him. He waits for a moment, and then resumes:

“I cannot embrace you all, but I will embrace your general. Approach,

General Petit.” The general advances, and Napoleon clasps him in a long

embrace. “Bring me the eagle!”

They bring it. He gathers the colors to his heart, and kisses the

symbol passionately.

“Dear eagle! May these kisses find an echo in the hearts of every brave

man!... My children, farewell.” The voice that had electrified them on

a thousand battle-fields ceased to speak; it has stirred those brave

hearts to their depths; the veterans sob like women. Napoleon descends

the monumental steps of the horse-shoe, and passes through the midst

of them in silence. Bertrand is waiting for him at the gate. He gets

into his carriage, and drives away. Thus the unrivalled actor took

his leave of the world-stage on which he had figured so long and so

brilliantly. The colors which he clasped in that last touching embrace

were henceforth treasured as a sacred thing; half a century later, they

were laid on his tomb at the Invalides.

The gallery of Diana, which had been left unfinished by Napoleon,

was completed after the restoration of the Bourbon. Louis XVIII. has

commemorated the achievements on a slab bearing in golden letters

the date of the completion of the gallery—“_in the 20th year of my

reign!_” And on the table on which Napoleon signed his abdication he

caused the following to be engraved: “The 5th of April, 1814, Napoleon

Bonaparte signed his abdication on this table in the king’s cabinet,

the second after the bedroom, at Fontainebleau.” With the singular

mixture of obstinacy and simplicity which characterized his Bourbon

mind, he systematically ignored in conversation and in all official

deeds the reign of Napoleon altogether, and continued to the last to

date as if that stormy meteor had never broken in upon the dull horizon

of his sovereignty. Those inscriptions are the only two traces of Louis

XVIII.’s passage which are to be found at Fontainebleau.

Charles X. never resided there, and seldom even visited the palace. It

fell into sad neglect, but was entirely restored by Louis Philippe, not

only the edifice, but the pictures and costly works of art with which a

long line of sovereigns had so magnificently endowed it.

Under the Empire, Fontainebleau came in for the share of imperial favor

which was so impartially divided amongst the still habitable castles of

France. Every autumn it was the scene of brilliant hunting-parties and

varied hospitalities.

We will close this fragmentary record of the past of Fontainebleau by

an incident, which, though not yet within the range of history, may one

day take its place there, and be quoted with interest as an indication

of the character of one destined, for aught we know, to play his part

in the annals of the coming age.

The Prince Imperial, then a mere child, was playing one day in the

_galerie des cerfs_ with a little friend of his, the son of an officer

of the household. Suddenly, in the midst of their game, the latter

rather irrelevantly remarked: “This is where Queen Hortense killed a

man.” “Queen Hortense was my grandmother,” retorted the young prince

indignantly; “she never killed anybody!” “Oh! but she did, though,”

persisted his companion; “she killed one somewhere hereabouts; I’ve

read it in a book.”

This was too formidable an argument to be met by mere words; the

descendant of the injured Hortense clenched his little fist, and laid

on vigorously to the traducer of his grandmother. The noise of the

battle soon drew the attention of some ladies who were at the other end

of the gallery; they ran to separate the combatants, and inquire the

cause of the row; but the young prince, crimson with rage, and with the

big tears rolling down his cheeks, broke away from them, and rushed to

his mother, who was somewhere in the neighborhood.

“He says that my grandmother killed a man,” cried the child out loud,

“and I say it is a lie!” Then, throwing his arms round the empress’

neck, he whispered: “It’s not true, is it, that she ever killed

anybody?”

LAUGHING DICK CRANSTONE.

IT was not that soft, white, feathery stuff that flutters to the ground

pleasantly and lighter than the fall of a rose-leaf; that, dancing and

darting around and about everywhere with gleaming whiteness and varied

and graceful motion, makes the empty air seem a living thing smiling

at its own frolic. No; the snow was not of that character at all. It

was a sharp, fierce storm that made at you in a determined manner, as

though it had a sort of spite against you and the whole human race

generally for bringing it down out of its bed somewhere up there among

the clouds; that, as it was compelled to make the journey, made up its

mind to let you and everybody else have the full benefit of it. So

down it came fiercely in bitter lines so regular that a William Tell

might shoot an arrow through them without touching a single flake. It

rushed at you, it beat you in the face, it snarled around your legs, it

powdered your hair, and made for the small of your back; it peeped up

your sleeves, and made acquaintance with the inside as well as outside

of your boots, as though it thought of getting a pair itself, and

wished to examine your shoemaker’s handiwork. It laughed at umbrellas,

and made such a savage assault on your overcoat and waterproof that it

was plainly as enraged as it could be at being foiled, and in revenge

settled down on them, till it made you look from top to toe as though

you had been just rolled in feathers, _minus_ the tar.

Ah! it was a dreary day—a day that made one shiver and think of the

poor, and shiver again. It spoiled the play of the children, and little

Bessy would sit “anyhow,” as her nurse termed it, in her chair, with

one hand mechanically endeavoring to pull the cane at the back of it

to pieces, while her big round blue eyes would look out in silent

wonder at the ugly day; and little Benny would flatten his already flat

nose in desperation against the window-pane, creating quite a little

atmosphere of fog around him; while Harry, the big brother, ten years

old last birthday, would make a false attempt to keep up his spirits by

riding that imaginary horse round and round the room, making him curvet

and caper, and shy at that corner, and evince a particular dislike to

the nurse, and kick so furiously at the door-key, till a crack of the

whip suddenly brought the restive animal to his senses, and Harry would

be still a moment, and gaze silently with the rest of the world out at

the cheerless snow.

Was it the snow that Cranstone of Cranstone Hall was gazing at so

fixedly out of the library window? Was it the snow that made those

cheeks so deadly white, save for the two little purple spots on each

of them? Was it the snow that made him clench his hands till the nails

almost tore the flesh? What was he looking at so fixedly out there in

the Park? What did he see out in the blinding snow, driving down on

his own meadow-lands, and draping the strong forms of his ancestral

oaks in mystic drapery, while from the bottom where the river ran,

stole up a snaky mist in curling ashy-gray folds? He saw no snow, no

mist, no oaks: he looked through them, beyond them, straight out at a

tall form striding along, its back to Cranstone Hall, and its face to

the wide, wide, bitter, cold world—striding on, and on, and on, and

never looking back to the home where he fell one day like one of these

little snowflakes out of heaven, and grew up straight, and tall, and

honest, and true, and manly, with a head, and a handsome head too, on

his shoulders, and such a heart in his bosom!—the pride of all the

country-side, and the heir of Cranstone Hall. It was Dick Cranstone

whose figure his father was gazing at so fixedly, though that figure

had been gone three hours, and was far out of sight—Dick Cranstone,

his father’s only son, the only relic of his dead mother, the boy on

whom all the father’s strong heart was now set, who was striding along

through the snow and the mist out into the bleak world on that winter

morning, cast out from his father’s hearth and heart, driven away with

a bitter curse.

What had Dick Cranstone done to bring down this curse and chastisement

on his handsome young head? Dick and his father had been companions

as well as father and son, for Ralph Cranstone was still a youngish

man, and bore such years as he had well. His heart and his hopes were

centred in this boy, whose mother had been snatched away so early; and

when he saw the bright-eyed, laughing lad ripen into a great, handsome,

clever young fellow, who rode with him, and played cricket with him,

and scoured over the country neck and neck with him—for there was a

dare-devil drop in the Cranstones—it would be hard to find a happier

man in this world than Ralph, or a more loving son than Dick; in fact,

“Oh! they’re as fond of each other as the Cranstones” had grown into

a proverb in all the country-side. What, then, was Dick’s great crime

that left him in a day fatherless, and his father childless, and rent

asunder with a fierce wrench two hearts which all their lives had run

together?

The Cranstones were an old family, older than Elizabeth, though it

was at her time that Cranstone Hall first came into their possession.

That was a good reign for people blessed with an elastic conscience.

The Elizabethan Cranstone was a Catholic. He had the choice of running

his neck in a noose and dying a martyr for his faith, or renouncing

the religion he believed in, and taking instead the goodly Abbey of

Cranstone, with its river, meads, and all its appurtenances. He did not

hesitate long. Like most of his countrymen, he threw up his religion,

and took to the abbey, turned out the monks, became a bitter persecutor

of the church, changed the name of the place to Cranstone Hall, lived

to a good old age, and the rich man died and was buried—in Cranstone

churchyard. The old country folk round about tell you that this

particular old Cranstone, whom they look upon as the first of the race,

“died a-yellin’ for holy water like hell-foire”; but then, such people

are always foolish. However, to come back to the story, the Cranstones

remained from that day out a flourishing, wealthy family, strongly

devoted to church and state, fierce persecutors of the Catholics whilst

persecution was the fashion; when not so, what Catholics call bigoted

Protestants.

Ralph was no exception to the rule. He honored the queen, and hated the

pope and Papistry as genuinely as the old Elizabethan Cranstone had

professed to do. He thought the country was going to ruin when he found

Papists throwing up their heads, and walking about on English ground,

just as though they had as much right there as anybody else. And when

his old friend and neighbor Harry Clifford, who had been at Eton and

Oxford with him, and whom Ralph had pronounced over and over again “the

best fellow going,” turned Catholic one fine day, as soon as Ralph

heard of it, and met Harry by chance at a friend’s, he turned on his

heel, and walked out of the house, leaving the latter standing there

with the old friendly hand outstretched towards him. From that day out,

all intercourse ceased between the Cliffords and Cranstones, and the

old friends were as dead to each other as though they had never met.

In good time, Dick went off to Oxford, with an Eton fame as a good bat

and all-round cricketer, a handy man at the oar, the best runner and

jumper in the school, added to the lesser reputation of being able to

knock off the best Latin poem in the college, and running Old Barnacles

hard for the head of the class—Old Barnacles, who did nothing but grub

at his books night and day, and who sucked at Greek roots as little

chaps would at lollipops. He made one of “the eleven” that year against

Cambridge at Lord’s, and saved the game from becoming a disastrous

defeat to his university by his plucky and cool play against that

terrible left-hand bowler. How proud his father was of him that day! He

could almost have gone up and shaken hands with Harry Clifford, whom

he saw there with his wife and a beautiful young lady in the carriage,

so divided in looks between Harry and his sweet wife that she could

have belonged to no one else but to them. “A Clifford to the tip of her

nose!” he kept repeating to himself, as he stole a sly glance at them

now and then, and yearned for a grasp of his old friend’s hand; but the

stubborn Cranstone blood was too strong within him, and he turned away

slowly to watch the game.

It was going badly for Oxford in the second innings; the Cambridge men

had a hard hitter in, who hit so hard and so furiously, and had so

completely “mastered the bowling,” that the score mounted rapidly, and

every new hit elicited shouts of applause for Cambridge. All over the

field flew the ball, sometimes in among the rows of carriages which

lined the ground. “They’ll never get him out,” said the spectators

one to another, as the Cantab struck away right and left as freely as

though he were playing with the bowlers. “There she goes! Bravo! Well

hit!” they shouted, as the ball flew from the bat right across the

field, straight and furious, full at the carriage where were seated

the Cliffords. “Look out there! Look out—look out!” they shout, as

the carriage party, conversing together, are utterly unconscious of

the danger approaching them. It takes a long time to tell this here,

though it was all over in half a minute. The cricket-ball was flying

at lightning speed straight at the head of the young lady, who at the

moment was looking in another direction, inattentive to the warning

cries that rose from all parts of the field. The shouts were hushed

into that deadly silence that will settle so awfully over a vast

assembly when every eye is bent in one direction, and every heart

beats as one great one with the expectation of immediate disaster. All

saw the danger of the young girl, but no one could prevent it, when

suddenly there is a rush of something white, a leap in the air, a bare

arm flashes in the sun, and the ball is clasped in the hand of one

who never missed a catch yet, as he falls back over the side of the

carriage, right in among the party, holding the ball all the while, and

the great Cantab is out.

“Bravo, Cranstone! Bravo, Cranstone!” What a shout from the Oxonians!

What a shout and a rush from all sides of the field to applaud the

young fellow whose Eton fame had not belied him for speed, and whose

swiftness and agility, and that high leap in the air and splendid

catch, had perhaps saved a young girl’s life, while it rid his side

of a terrible foe, and revived the hopes of Cambridge! But Cranstone

never heeded the shouts; he lay back there in the carriage, lifeless,

his head on Harry Clifford’s knee, his eyes closed, and his face white,

while the frightened ladies, who scarcely yet knew from what a danger

they had escaped, bent over him in terror. He had fallen heavily on the

side of the carriage, and the shock caused him to faint.

The crowd is parted by a strong man, who rushes wildly to the spot.

“Dick, my boy, Dick, are you hurt? Good God! Harry, it’s my son. Water,

some of you—water. Clear away there, and let him have air!” The water

is brought, and in a few moments he revives, to open his eyes on a pair

of the tenderest blue eyes looking pityingly and frightened into his.

A shake or two, like a strong mastiff, and he is all right again; the

game goes on, and, though Oxford was beaten, that catch lives in men’s

memories; while Ralph Cranstone and Harry Clifford were old friends

again, and Mr. Dick Cranstone was reintroduced to his old playmate,

Miss Ada Clifford.

Dick went back to Oxford that year with another feeling creeping into

his heart side by side with the great love for his father which had

hitherto possessed it. He was not over head and ears in love with

Ada Clifford, nor, since it must be confessed, she with him; but his

father and himself rode over often that vacation, and Dick found the

family one of the most agreeable in every way that he had ever met,

while Ralph atoned for his former rudeness in a thousand ways that come

with such an indescribable charm from a strong nature. Dick took back

this memory with him to the university, and perhaps it saved him from

getting among the “fast men”—a society only too fascinating for young

fellows blessed with health, strength, good nature, good looks, and

money.

Without actually giving up his practices of muscular Christianity,

association with more intellectual minds brought him soon to perceive

that there was a higher ambition in this life for a young man than

being the captain of a cricket eleven, the “stroke” of a university

eight, the best pigeon shot, or the proprietor of the most startling

“turn-out” on the road. Association with intellectual men brought with

it intellectual thoughts, inquiries, pursuits; while under all happily

ran the boy’s innate love of honor, of what was fair and truthful,

supporting him somewhat, and keeping him, on the whole, straight in the

midst of the dangerous speculations and vexed problems which were being

agitated around him, and discussed with all the boldness natural to

undisciplined minds.

His Oxford course was drawing to a close, and he began to think of

adopting some career, though the wealth and property to which he was

heir necessitated no pursuit at all other than that of a quiet country

gentleman living on his estates. During his last year particularly he

had read and studied much, and the result of his studies and inquiries

always came home to him in the form of the old question of Pilate, What

is truth? He was, like his father, a loyal Englishman, a supporter of

the state, rather because he found it there established, and could see

no better, than for any divine right which, in his father’s mind, and

in the minds of so many Englishmen, the glorious British Constitution

possesses. But the church was another affair. That question puzzled

him sorely. That it might be a very fine institution, that it had

given birth to many splendid minds, that it still possessed many very

amiable and worthy followers, he did not deny; but that an institution

which was at best a very mixed affair, which was not believed in by

the majority of his countrymen, which had been patched, and stretched,

and mended, and cobbled to meet the exigencies of every changing hour,

which was not believed in even by so many of its professed members and

teachers, was in any sense a divine institution, he could not concede.

To his truthful mind, it dated from Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, not from

Jesus Christ; it was simply in its present form an amiable machine of

state, not a divine organization which should command the approving

consent of all were it what men who believed in salvation ought to

follow. As for the rest of the wrangling sects, he looked upon them as

so many ecclesiastical tinkerings, better calculated to bore holes in

the edifice of faith than to build up a system strong, enduring, and

right.

Filled with thoughts of this description, he came home restless,

dissatisfied, questioning; too true and too earnest to throw quite

overboard all belief as a sham, and take the world as he found it—a

mixture of good and bad, inexplicable save as a result of chance and

conventionality. He visited the Cliffords, and they found laughing Dick

Cranstone an altered man, somewhat graver, and evidently unsettled.

One day, when his father was not present, he unbosomed himself to Mr.

Clifford, who was a very intellectual man. The latter listened kindly

to the boy, though he knew the story well; he had gone through it all

himself. He did not try to explain matters there and then; he merely

told him that what he was then experiencing was the exact counterpart

of what he himself had experienced. “If you like to come over in a few

days, I expect to have F. Leslie here, a Jesuit, and a convert like

myself. He will explain matters to you much better than I can, if you

are not afraid of meeting a Jesuit, Richard.”

Dick winced a little at this proposal; he had never in his life met

with a Jesuit, and his opinion of the society was formed on what he had

read of them as the most deceitful, crafty, and cunning set of men

ever organized to blind men’s eyes and lead them astray from freedom

and light; though, when he came to think the matter over, he could not

bring to mind a single case of any of his friends who had come across

them and been converted to Catholicity, as some of them had, turning

out fiends or blind enthusiasts. So he resolved to meet F. Leslie.

It was the old story. After due inquiry and preparation, he was

converted, and immediately after went straight to his father, and told

him all.

To describe Ralph Cranstone’s wrath at the news would be impossible. He

only saw one terrible fact—his family disgraced for ever in the person

of their last descendant his son, from whom he had hoped so much. The

line of the Cranstones was poisoned, defiled in the person of one who

could thus turn traitor to his queen and country. A Cranstone a Papist!

And that Cranstone his son Dick! He did not ask him to retract—he rose

up and cursed the boy, and turned him out of the house.

Protestant friends, this part of the story, though inwoven with

fiction, is a very hard fact. It is not of unfrequent occurrence; the

writer to-day has friends who in their own persons can corroborate it.

Ralph Cranstone could have borne anything rather than this—that his

son should turn Papist. He might become an infidel, and believe in no

God at all; he might join any one he chose of the sects, however low;

he might even turn Mussulman or Jew—but a Cranstone a Papist! Good

God! it were better that he had never been born.

And so Ralph sat there looking out into the storm, where the form of

his brave, handsome boy had vanished. He was conscious only of the

storm raging in his own breast, of the terrible curse he had uttered

out of his heart on the head of the one he had loved more, infinitely

more, than himself. That curse was ringing around the room still,

and seemed to mock him like a fiend. He rose at last, and staggered

to his room, not noticing the tearful old housekeeper, who knew that

something dreadful had happened, and who came timidly asking him to

take something to eat, for the day had gone. His day had gone out with

his boy, and the light of his life went out with Dick into the winter

storm, to be swallowed up and buried away in it for ever.

* * * * *

Dick had a hard time of it. He refused all offers of assistance

tendered him by Mr. Clifford. He would not even go down to visit them;

he would not appear in the neighborhood; for he could not meet his

father again. He wrote to him many times, but his letters were always

returned unopened. He soon received news from Mr. Clifford that his

father had broken up his home, left the neighborhood, and gone no one

knew whither. He could only pray for him to the God to whom, for the

first time in his life, he found he could pray with a strong faith and

earnest belief. He still would not go to the Cliffords’, though he

corresponded with them from London, and saw them now and then when they

came up. He had friends on the press, and with their assistance managed

to eke out enough to live upon by means of his pen. He worked away,

sustained, in his loss of father, fortune, and place, by the religion

of Jesus Christ, discovering each day new wonders in an exhaustless

region. His father he never heard from, nor gained any intelligence of

his whereabouts, nor whether he was living or dead. The trial was a

sore one, but he felt that perhaps he was in some small degree atoning

for all the evils which had followed that first defection of his family

from the religion to which they belonged. And so he worked away, and

rose; for he had talent, and soon attained a position which relieved

him from all fears of absolute want, though still poor enough.

The Cliffords were a great comfort to him, and the thought of Ada often

inspired the weary pen to fresh exertion when it flagged from sheer

fatigue. The more he found the love of her growing upon him, the more

he avoided the presence of the family; for his poverty set a boundless

sea, in his imagination, between himself and her. He excused himself

for not calling on them by a thousand reasons—press of business, and

the usual excuses; till at last their intercourse almost ceased, and

poor Dick, laughing Dick, became wretchedly miserable, and began to

look upon the world as a poor sort of place after all, while Cranstone

Hall would force itself upon his mind, dreary and deserted, the garden

weedy, and the oaks lonely, with that terrible, heartless curse hanging

over all.

One night, while seated in his room thinking such thoughts as these, a

hasty knock came to the door, and, opening it, the old housekeeper fell

forward almost fainting in his arms, with the exclamation:

“O Master Richard! Master Richard, dear! he’s come back at last.”

Dick staggered as though the old woman’s trembling voice had been a

giant’s arm which smote him.

“Yes, yes,” he murmured.

“For God’s sake and your dear mother’s, Master Richard, fly! He’s

ill—he’s dying—he’s raving of you!... At the Hall.... Yes. Go, go, or

you’ll be too late.”

He rushed into the street, she following him. The snow was falling

again as bitterly as on the day when he last saw his father. The train,

though it flew along, seemed to him to travel at a snail’s pace. The

snow blocked the roads leading to the Hall: the chaise could not

advance. He leaped out, unyoked one of the horses, bade the driver

follow as best he could with the housekeeper, mounted the animal, and,

by what means he never knew, found himself at the Hall. He was about

to dash up to his father’s rooms, when a light in the library window

attracted his attention. Mother of God! can that be his father?

The brown curls bleached to snow, the face white, and thin, and

bloodless, the eyes staring wildly straight out of the window, the form

shrunk, the mouth mumbling some incoherent words. The light of a candle

shone full on his father’s face, altered to that of a ghost.

Dick entered trembling, uncertain whether it was a spirit or his father

himself whom he saw before him.

“I want my boy, my Dick, my brave, handsome son. Bring him back to me.

You stole him away. Where is he?”

“Father, he is here. Look at me, father. Here I am, Dick—your own son

Dick, come back to you. Do you not know me?”

“You? You’re not my son. I’ve got no son. He went away from me. He

hates his father—his poor father. I—I—cursed him, when I could have

blessed him, and he believed me; and Dick’s gone—gone—gone.” And the

poor creature moaned, and covered his crazed head with his hands, while

the sharpest pang that ever rent his boy’s heart rent it at that moment

with the thought that, perhaps, it was all his fault, and that, had he

only forced himself upon him, his father might have forgiven him, all

might have gone well, and he would not now have been summoned to the

side of the lost wreck before him.

They bore him back to the bed whence he had stolen while those who

should have watched him had dozed a little. The next day the Cliffords

came over, and took up their abode in the old Hall, where Ada and her

mother watched and tended the sufferer as only women can do. Dick was

around them and about them, and in and out, and happy and miserable,

and all contraries in a breath. Ada alone could set him right, and

prevent him from going as mad as his father.

Ralph lay long between the two worlds. His strong reason; once forced

out, seemed sullen to return. But it did come at last, and his weak

eyes opened on his son, while the heart of the father, with all the

pent-up feelings of these years, gushed out over his boy. He had gone

away and wandered everywhere. He drank till his brain gave way, and

only enough reason was left to lead him home to die.

But death seems a long way off from Ralph Cranstone yet. The saying is

oftener than ever on people’s lips, “They’re as fond of each other as

the two Cranstones.” Old Cranstone’s face—the Elizabethan—has taken a

new scowl, for underneath his picture rises up an ivory crucifix which

Ralph himself set there. The snow falls merrily and cheerily; the old

oaks smile in their winter garb; no mist rises up from where the river

runs. Yes; that’s young Ralph there dashing out of the hall door to

meet his uncle and papa; there he goes climbing up uncle’s legs, and

shaking him as though he were a telegraph post set up there for him to

shake; and, if ever there was a happy couple, that couple is Ada and

laughing Dick; and the old Cranstone frowns down on it all out of his

dim canvas, for the Cranstone line has gone back to its old faith.

SONNET

TO A BOOK OF IMAGINATION; OR, THE LITERATURE OF THE FUTURE.

Go forth, fair book! Go, countenanced like that man

Upon whose brow all Eden’s light was stayed;

Beauteous as truth, go forth to cheer and aid,

Breathing of greatness ours ere sin began;

With angel-wing from eyes earth-wearied fan

Convention’s mist; revive great hopes that fade;

Bid nature rule where reigned but masquerade;

Bear witness to the joy divine that ran

Down to Creation’s heart, while, bending o’er it,

The great Creator saw that all was good—

The mightier joy, when, dying to restore it,

He rose who washed it in his conquering blood.

Go forth, a seer in minstrel raiment clad;

Say to the meek, “Be strong”; the poor, “Be glad!”

—_Aubrey de Vere._

THE PRESENT GREATNESS OF THE PAPACY.

FROM THE CIVILTA CATTOLICA.

I.

WE do not know that history, ancient or modern, offers a spectacle

similar to the one presented to the world by the Vatican to-day. Upon

the brow of that hill sits an august Pontiff and king, an octogenarian,

unarmed, dethroned, a prisoner. He is strong only in the power infused

into him from God; rich only in heavenly wisdom and the love of

nations; great in his merits towards Christendom; great, above all, in

the treasure of rights divine and human which he represents. The powers

of earth have attacked or forsaken him; the base world concentrates

against him all its rancor for the extermination of everything that

Christian civilization holds sacred. Standing alone, with serene

brow and heart unshaken, he lifts his head before this concourse. He

humbles, confounds, sears them; the more furious the attack, the more

does he show himself invincible to assault and terrible to assailants.

The enemy has hitherto triumphed over all and conquered all; subduing

empires, destroying kingdoms, subjugating nations. He holds in his

hand all the instruments of brutal force, and in his service all the

passions of brute nature. He is to-day almost master of the civilized

globe; yet he cannot rule that venerable man of eighty years, who

stands as high in glory and authority as the opponent lies low in vile

infamy.

Such is the spectacle, historically unique in all its accessories,

which we have witnessed for several years, and have never seen so grand

and august in aspect as to-day—the contrast between Pope Pius IX. and

the Revolution. Unique, we say, for in no age of Christianity do we

find its equal for the universality of war, and arms, and desolation,

or for the duration and variety of outrages. Therefore, the contrasts

between Gregory VII., Innocent III., Boniface VIII., and Pius VII.,

with the impious sovereigns who dared to oppress them, do not in

several points present a parallel.

There are feeble spirits, unmindful of the past, and weak of faith

in the unfailing promises of Christ, who cannot read the lucid words

graven by his finger on the tiara of Pius IX.: I am the strength of

God; let no man touch me!

Through the shower of hostile darts raining around the Vatican they do

not discern the glory of moral grandeur radiating from it. Therefore

they are discouraged and scandalized. For the comfort of such as these,

it seems well to speak of this grandeur, which, in our opinion, is

clearly shown in the glorious cause defended by the Pontiff, in the

mode and circumstances of his defence, in the quality of the enemies

who attack him, as well as of the friends who support him.

II.

The cause for which Pius IX. wages so stern a war is the cause of God

and man; the cause of liberty, individual, domestic, and social; in

short, a cause embracing all those ordinances without which no public

or private right, no property, or virtue, or justice, or peace, could

be maintained. In the Sovereign Pontiff temporarily imprisoned in the

Vatican, the Revolution attacks not only the liberty of the supreme

Catholic apostolate and the legitimacy of the most inviolable of

thrones, but also all rational liberty of conscience, and the source of

all social authority. In the Sovereign Pontiff, it attacks God, whose

vicegerent on earth he is, and with God all rights and duties of nature

and of grace, which proceed originally from him.

The Revolution, essentially satanic, full of hate towards God and man,

_extollitur supra omne quod dicitur Deus_.[131] It tries to supplant

God, whose every image in creation it would gladly see cancelled. From

the beginning, it has always attacked the Papacy as the most vivid and

universal representation of God among men; of God under the double

aspect of Creator and Saviour, author of reason and faith, eternal

founder of natural society and of the church; in one word, of Christ

the God-man. As it cannot dethrone Christ in heaven, it would dethrone

him on earth: and, to accomplish this hellish work of madness under

the guidance of Satan, it directs all its efforts against the Roman

Pontificate, truly the true vicariate of Christ, the king of the world.

All moral grandeur, human and divine, is therefore included in the

cause defended by Pius IX. against the ministers and satellites of the

enemy of human nature and of God’s Word. The accursed phalanx make use

of innumerable frivolous and false pretexts to reach their aim; but in

truth they thirst to destroy the Papacy because the Papacy embraces all

morality of reason and faith emanating from the Word, the unchangeable

and eternal wisdom. In vain the Revolution masks its batteries behind

the dazzling names of liberty, civilization, and progress, pretending

to seek the destruction of the Papacy as their implacable adversary.

Indeed, after eighty years of experience, it is evident, palpably

certain, that under its false liberty lies hidden the most ruinous

tyranny that ever oppressed the world. It usurps the dominion of

conscience and of family life, and confiscates at its wanton and fickle

will the blood and gold of nations which it has trampled underfoot,

giving them in return only the liberty of corruption and blasphemy.

Its treacherous civilization covers a refined barbarism fully shown by

the carnage and ruin of France in 1793, and of Spain in 1834, and by

the massacres and conflagrations of the Commune in 1871. Its baleful

progress tends to change the partnership of Christian nations into a

horrible hell of disorder, where, as in the kingdom of Satan, _nullus

ordo sed sempiternus horror inhabitat_.[132]

Therefore, strictly speaking, Pope Pius IX., with his indomitable

resistance, defends all the wealth of humanity against the monster

that would destroy it as the communists destroyed it before our eyes

in Paris lately. The religious, civil, and material ruin of the human

race is the final end for which, directly or indirectly, with or

without deliberate purpose, all the partisans of the Revolution exert

themselves, from the most hypocritical or dull of moderates to the

grossest socialist.

The immeasurable grandeur of this cause defended by the Roman Pontiff

is generally seen and felt by all, even more by the enemies than by the

friends of the Papacy. Upon their war against the Vatican they have

concentrated their best strength, sagacity, and industry. They care for

nothing so much as for the least trifle connected with the Pope; they

talk, and write, and vociferate of nothing so much as of the Pope’s

sayings and doings; of the hopes and fears which agitate them in this

war. Hence the first position in the political world and in what we

call public opinion is held by the Pontiff. It is preserved to him and

nourished by that very Revolution which would gladly annihilate for

ever his name and memory. It cries a thousand times a day that he is

dead and buried, and a thousand times a day it is forced to bewail his

vitality and energy; neither more nor less than do the demons and the

damned in the abyss, forced to glorify God for ever, in that they will

eternally blaspheme him.

This is one of the marvellous sports of Providence in our day: to make

use of the wild beasts of the Revolution to strengthen the Papacy. When

they think to devour it, they find themselves drawing its triumphal

car. So it was with Nero and Domitian in their persecutions against

Christianity; so with Henry IV. and Barbarossa in the middle ages; so

with the Directory and Bonaparte in modern times. What doubt can there

be that the same will come to pass with the Lanzas, the Bismarcks, and

their compeers in our own day?

III.

But the glories of the cause for which Pius IX. is fighting receive

also wonderful lustre from the strange modes and conditions of his

warfare. He has neither arms nor soldiers; he is poor in gold; neither

diplomacy, nor journalism, nor the telegraph is subject to his orders;

he is morally deprived of the liberty of leaving the precincts of

the Vatican, whose outer gates are guarded by the cut-throats of the

Revolution. Arms, money, diplomacy, newspapers, and the telegraphic

wires are in the hands of the enemy who besieges him before the tomb

of S. Peter, and who uses them as far as possible to his injury. The

artifices, conspiracies, calumnies, outrages, and insults of the

Revolution succeed each other like waves on a tempestuous sea. And to

make them more exquisitely atrocious, the greater number are hurled at

him with the absurd protest that his inviolability is guaranteed by the

majesty of the laws.[133]

Literally speaking, no other arms are left to the Holy Father than

his constancy and his word; but it is a constancy that makes the

enemy despair, and a word that confounds him. That apostolic breast

is inaccessible to seduction, those august lips are inexhaustible of

truth. He boldly defines theft to be theft, injustice to be injustice,

tyranny to be tyranny; his language does not change with the times, nor

to suit any one whomsoever. In condemning crimes and reproving villany,

he has no respect for persons. He fears the powerful no more than the

faint-hearted. He does not suffer himself to be deluded by the promises

or dismayed by the threats of those who boast innumerable armies and

glory in formidable artillery. The heart of Pius IX. is undaunted by

the flash of swords and the thunder of cannon. The Revolution, unable

to shake the firmness or chain the tongue of Piux IX., regards him with

a shuddering admiration, and exalts with demoniac yells his superhuman

power.

In very truth, a strange case! We see a victim and an assassin. The

victim has only the moral strength of dignity and right: the assassin

is opulent in brute force; yet the victim does not tremble before the

assassin, but the assassin before the victim. The Revolution does not

make Pius IX. turn pale: Pius IX. intimidates the Revolution. A rebuke

from the victim strikes sharper terror into the assassin than the whole

arsenal of the assassin can infuse into the victim.

This fact alone, in our opinion, is a striking proof that the Papacy

is divine in origin, in its prerogatives, its life, its activity, its

manifestation. The mysterious power which, with the simple virtue of a

_non possumus_ and a _non licet_, it exercises on earth, proves that

God speaks in it, and its word proceeds from the Word of truth. What

other mere mortal could by his own power produce effects so great with

arguments so slight? A motto of Napoleon I. intimidated whole nations,

because at his beck armed men stood forth and always victorious: his

power was founded on iron and in blood. But on what soldiery rests the

word of the Vicar of Christ, imprisoned in the Vatican? What invasion,

what battle, can be dreaded as the result of a _non possumus_ and a

_non licet_ of Pius IX.? Yet these words, uttered by his lips, strike

perplexity into the leaders of all Revolutionary armies. How explain

this wonder without admitting that the strength of Pius IX. is God’s

strength? And after that, how deny that the stupendous greatness of

the Roman Pontificate never shone more gloriously than now, whilst

Pope Pius, in the name of the King of kings, and of the Lord of lords,

_pugnat gladio oris sui_,[134] strikes with the sword of the Word, and

conquers the satanic hydra of the insolent Revolution?

IV

The assailants of the Papacy are wont to say, in their own praise,

that the Vatican has for its adversaries the most enlightened,

cultivated, and virtuous men of our time. We, on the contrary, see

the very opposite. With certain exceptions, including the blind,

the dull, and the deluded, in the throng of declared enemies of the

Roman Pontificate, we find only the moral dregs of society. There

are great and small, of course, but, when put to a moral test, they

are all equal, one as good as another, unless, indeed, the great are

worth less than the small. In the throng, there are heretics without

a creed, Jews without a Testament, atheists without a God, and

Catholics without laws. We find deserters from every flag—those who

betray their masters, and bite the hands of benefactors; doubled-faced

deceivers—men who have instigated horrible massacres, and flattered

every social crime; men guilty of infamous sacrilege, awful rapine,

nefarious murders. We see corruptors of the people—burglars, brawlers,

bombarders of harmless cities, mercenary writers, vendors of honor,

protectors of evil haunts, worshippers of luxury. We notice all the

apostates from the church and the priesthood: renegade Christians,

silenced priests, unfrocked friars. We see men who insult God, disturb

civil order, tear down thrones, cheat and defraud their neighbor—in

short, men who blaspheme against the faith, and trample on the Ten

Commandments. There is no kind of sectarian, from the most stupid of

Freemasons to the most brutal of communists, that does not make part of

this crowd of enlightened, cultivated, virtuous men of the present age.

The Prophet Daniel contemplated, in four shadowy, mysterious creatures,

not only the four great monarchies of the earth, but the four great

persecutions to which Christ’s church would be subjected in the course

of ages. The interpreters of this acceptation of the vision agree in

saying that the first, symbolized by the lioness, meant the persecution

of Gentiles so cruelly prosecuted by the Roman Cæsars; the second,

denoted by the bear, that of heretics; the third, represented by the

leopard, that of false Christians; and the last, figured by a nameless

creature awfully hideous, that of Antichrist, and so designated

because, _in ea erit omnium perversitatum concursus_, it shall contain

in itself the wickedness of the three preceding ones.[135]

It is, indeed, difficult to decide whether the terrible and universal

persecution which the Catholic Church is now sustaining, especially in

the person of the Sovereign Pontiff, should be referred to the third as

its completion, or to the fourth as its preparation. When we consider

the quality of the persecutors, they are undoubtedly false Christians,

and worthy to be compared in ferocious malice to the leopard. But when

we see in them the union of all perversity united to slay the church

in its head, we suspect that the present is, indeed, a preparation for

that final persecution which must forerun the consummation of the human

race.

However that may be, it is beyond controversy that the persecution of

to-day bears all the marks of Antichristianity, and that its promoters,

followers, and accomplices accord with the description given by the

apostle S. Paul to his disciple and Timothy. We give the text, let him

deny it who can:

“Know also this, that, in the last days, shall come dangerous times.

“Men shall be lovers of themselves, covetous, haughty, proud,

blasphemers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, wicked,

“Without affection, without peace, slanderers, incontinent, unmerciful,

without kindness,

“Traitors, stubborn, puffed up, and lovers of pleasures more than of

God;” and the following verses.[136]

Now, if, according to the proverb, the vituperations of the wicked

are praise, is it not glory for the Papacy to see unchained against

it to-day all the malice of the world, and to be lashed by all that

Christendom holds in its bosom most odious, despotic, base, and

abominable? Is not this the highest summit of grandeur? Is it not an

unexampled participation in the glories of Christ?

V.

The more startling the contrast of opposite qualities in those who

love and are faithful to the Papacy, the more must we admire them.

To the moral dregs of society we see opposed the very flower of good

men of every condition and in every country; not only among Catholic

Christians, but among Protestants and schismatics, and even among

Turks, Jews, and the barbarians of Asia. In vain does the Revolution

try to vilify with terms of reproach those who are devoted to the

Pope and to his sacred rights. It cannot prevent them from being what

they are—an honor to the world, and the support of justice. It is

impossible to be sincere, to understand clearly the significance of the

cause defended by the Papacy, and not feel for it love and veneration.

For this end it is not necessary to have supernatural faith, and

to belong to the fold of the church: the light of reason, human

understanding, are sufficient. Reason and sense make it clear to the

least astute minds that the Pontiff is now defending all order, every

right, every social law, against an enemy who hates God in humanity,

and every good of God in the good of mankind.

The ardor of Catholics all over the world for Pius IX., and the close

union of the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy with his see, constitute a

plain and lasting fact which will surely be the greatest glory of this

age in the annals of Christianity. It is a glory due chiefly to the

Revolution, which has been providentially permitted and ordained by

God, chiefly for the end of better strengthening and confirming unity

in the hierarchy of his church. The result has been an exaltation of

Papal authority among Christian nations so new and striking that it

now forms a large part of the strength with which the Papacy repels

the attacks of the Revolution, and promises to surpass before long

the effective power which it possessed in the middle ages of our era.

The complication of events leads nations to recognize in the Roman

Pontificate the sole anchor of safety left to them in these tempests

raised by the Revolution. We may say that an irresistible power is

little by little bringing them to seek refuge in this asylum. Not only

has the Pontiff’s voice found a wonderful echo in the soul of peoples,

but his sacred person is oppressed, so to speak, with demonstrations of

faith and love more solemnly magnificent than could be imagined. The

voluntary tribute of blood has been and is offered to him by thousands

of valiant men; that of gold is constantly given to him by millions of

the faithful. He is truly the most beloved, praised, and honored among

men. In our time, there is no name of magnate or of king which ranks so

high as the name of Pius IX.

It is true that governments occupied almost everywhere by the

Revolution strongly oppose, with a thousand corrupting and despotic

artifices, this movement of nations towards the Papacy; but all in

vain. The wind blows from that quarter, and it is a wind that crushes,

sweeps, and grinds to powder all impediments. See how rapidly the deeds

and men of the Revolution succeed each other in the nations oppressed

by it; the instability of its kingdoms, the fragility of its empires,

the fickleness of its victories, the inanity of its statistics, the

weakness of its institutions; all about it is variable, changeable,

inconstant: the buildings of yesterday crumble to-day.

This is because its satanic power is that of a meteor, not of a star;

it appears, falls to ruin, and disappears. The power of the Papacy, on

the contrary, is a sun which does not pass away, but lives; and the

vivid flashes which it sends through the clouds gathering around the

Revolution already show that the meteor is about to break and melt away.

VI.

Yes, the present greatness of the Roman Pontificate, impersonated in

Pius IX., the visible pole of all social order in this world, the

terror of bad hearts, and joy of upright souls—this glory is only the

first gleam of that which his heroic and lingering passion is preparing

for an approaching future.

For the comfort, meanwhile, of the weak and timid, we repeat, with

the more sagacious minds of our own day, that the future is for the

Papacy, not for the Revolution; that the Papacy has already conquered

the Revolution. We will conclude by making our own those noble words

upon the immortal youth of the Church, spoken by our Holy Father to the

representatives of the Catholic youth of Italy, on Epiphany of this

year, in the Vatican. We accommodate them with perfect propriety to the

supreme office of the Vicariate of Christ, with which he is divinely

invested, and which he so gloriously sustains in the presence of God,

of angels, of men, and of the infernal Revolution itself:

“My sons, let us give battle, and fear nothing. Remember that the

enemies of God are vanishing, and the Papacy remains. The Child

Jesus fled into Egypt, but in the night-time he was told to return,

‘for they are dead who sought the life of the child.’ How many

persecutors of the Papacy are dead! After giving vent to their fury,

and decimating the faithful who served God, they are dead: and the

Papacy is left. Yes; _ipsi peribunt_, but thou, beloved Peter, living

in thy successors—thou, constituted by God his vicar on earth—thou

remainest, and thou shalt always remain: _ipsi peribunt, tu autem

permanebis_. Thou shalt remain, young, vigorous, constant, in contrast

to the persecutions which purify the church, whose head thou art,

wash away its every spot, and make it stronger. _Ipsi peribunt, tu

autem permanebis._ Thou art still with us in the teaching of truth and

morals, in many ways, under many appearances. _Ipsi peribunt, sed tu

permanebis._

“Let this be our consolation, our comfort, our faith. Let us feel

assured that _ipsi peribunt, Petrus autem permanebit usque in finem

sæculorum_.”[137]

And you, great Pontiff, in uttering these sublime words, little thought

that, three days later, he would perish suddenly who for many years had

been the treacherous tormentor of the Papacy in your august person.

Napoleon III. perished uncrowned, humbled, in exile; that Napoleon

who, in the intoxication of his empty triumphs, thought to hold in his

hand, after your death, the victory over the Roman See, _periit_. He

died, let us hope, repentant; and you, Holy Father, survive him to pray

for his peace after death, with the same generous soul that, like your

divine Model on Golgotha, always pardoned him in life. He has vanished

like a shadow, first from the greatest throne in Europe, then from the

sight of men, _periit_; and the Papacy _permanet_ in you more than ever

invincible. You, Pope Pius, for the time a prisoner, continue, from

the Vatican, with Christ and in Christ, to reign beloved, blessed,

applauded, over all who have a believing heart, an upright soul.

Napoleon III. has gone down to that city of the dead which shall form

the pedestal of your greatness in all ages: _scabellum pedum tuorum_;

peopled by beings like Cavour, Palmerston, Mazzini, and by a throng of

many others, who girded their loins for the mad enterprise of crushing

out in his Vicar Christ our God, King of Heaven and Earth.

A MAY CAROL.

BY AUBREY DE VERE.