CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VI.Eoa was now sixteen years old, tall, and lithe, and graceful as the creepers of tropic woodlands. Her face was of the clearest oval, a quick concise terse oval, such as we find in the eggs of wild birds rather than of tame ones. Her eyes were of bewildering brightness, always flashing, always in motion, rarely allowing the gazer a chance of guessing what their colour was. Very likely they were of no positive colour, but a pure dark lustre, such as a clear swift river has, when overhung by palm–trees. Her complexion, beautifully soft and even, was toned with a delicate eastern tinge, like that fawn–coloured light which sometimes flushes a cloudless sky before the midsummer sunrise. And her warm oriental blood suffused it, at the slightest emotion, as the leaping sun pervades that sky with a flood of limpid rubies.She had never been flattened by education: all her qualities and feelings, like her beauty, were in excess. You could see it in the quick rise and fall of her breath, in the sudden grace of her movements, in the infinite variety of her attitudes and aspects.Whatever she thought, she said at once; yet none ever called her a bold girl. Her modes of thought were as widely different from those of an English maiden, as a wild honeysuckle differs in form, habit, and scent, from a rose. She cared for no oneʼs opinion of her, any more than the wind cares how a tree swings; unless indeed it were one whom she loved, and then she would crawl to please him. For she loved with all her heart and soul, and hated with no less; and she always took care in either case to apprise the object of it. And yet, with all her depth of passion, Eoa was pure of heart and mind,—ay, as pure as our own Amy.She soon recovered from her bruises, being perfectly healthy, and elastic as india–rubber. Nevertheless, she would not have been saved from that terrible sea but for the generosity of poor Captain Roberts, and the gallantry of Bob Garnet.Now Bob was hurt rather seriously, and, being (as we are well aware) an uncommonly shy young fellow, he was greatly astonished, and shocked a little, when on the Friday morning a beautiful girl, very strangely dressed, ran to the side of his sofa, threw her arms round him, and kissed himtill he was out of breath, and his face was wet with the dew of her tears.“Oh, please donʼt,” said Bob; “I am sure I donʼt deserve it.”“Yes, you do; and I will marry you when I am old enough. I donʼt know what you are like, and I donʼt care two straws, directly they told me what you had done. Only I must have papaʼs leave. Kiss me again, I like it. Now where is my darling papa?”“What, donʼt you know? Havenʼt they told you? Oh, poor thing!”At the tone of his voice she leaped back, like a bird at the gun–flash, and stood with her little hands clasped on her head, her eyes with their deep light quivering, and the whole of her form swinging to and fro, from the wild push of sudden terror. Then she spoke with a hollow depth, which frightened Bob more than the kissing.“They told me that he was well, gone to his brother somewhere, and I thought it wasnʼt like him to leave me so, and—tell me the truth, or Iʼll shake you to pieces.”“No, donʼt,” said Bob, as she leaped at him; “I have had shaking enough.”“Yes, you poor boy, and for my sake. I am a brute, I know. Tell me the truth, if you love me.”“Your dear father is dead. But they have found his body.”“Do you mean to say that God has been so wicked as to kill my father?”“God knows best,” said Bob; he could think of nothing else to say.“No, He doesnʼt. No, He doesnʼt. No, He never knows anything. He couldnʼt have known who he was, and how terribly I loved him, or He wouldnʼt have the heart to do it. Oh, you wicked boy; oh, you wicked boy! I will never forgive you for saving me. Hya, hya, hya!”Bob never saw such a thing before, and never will again. And he wonʼt be much the loser; although the sight was magnificent. The screams and shrieks of the clearest voice that ever puzzled echo brought up the landlord and landlady, and our good friend Rufus Hutton, who had set forth full speed from home on hearing about theAliwal. He caught Eoa in his arms, carried her back to her room, and dosed her. He gave her some Indian specific, some powder of a narcotic fungus, which he had brought on purpose.It stupefied her for nearly three days, and even then she awoke into the dreamy state of Nirwana, that bliss of semi–consciousness, like mild annihilation, into which the Buddha is absorbed, and to which all pious Buddhists look as their eternal happiness. Then she opened her delicate tapering arms, where you could see the grand muscles moving, but never once protruding, and she called for her darling father to come. Finding that he did not come, she was satisfied withsome trifling answer, and then wanted to have Bob instead; but neither was Bob forthcoming.On the very day when Dr. Hutton came to look for Eoa, Mr. Garnet found himself getting better from that wretched low nervous fever into which his fright had thrown him. Then he asked Dr. Hutton whether there would be any danger in moving Robert, and, finding that there would be none whatever, if it were carefully managed, he ordered a carriage immediately, and with some of his ancient spirit. The Crown, which had the cross–bar of its N set up the wrong way (as is done, by–the–by, on the roof of Hampton Court chapel, and in many other places), made public claim to be regarded as a “commercial hotel and posting–house.” No Rushford folk having yet been known to post anything, except a letter at rare intervals, and a bill at rarer, this claim of the Crown had never been challenged, and strangers entertained a languid theoretical faith in it. But Mr. Brown looked very blue when Bull Garnet in reviving accents ordered “a chaise and pair at the door in half an hourʼs time; a roomy chaise, if you please, because my son must keep his feet up.”“Yes, sir; yes, to be sure, sir; I quite understand, sir. It shall be attended to, sir.”“Then why donʼt you go and order it?”“To be sure, sir; I forgot. I will speak to Mrs. Brown, sir.”Mrs. Brown, being a woman of resource, mounted the boy on her donkey, the only quadruped shepossessed, but a “wonner to go,” as the boy said, “when you knows the right place to prog him in,” and sent him post–haste to Lymington, whence the required conveyance arrived in about an hour and a half.Rufus Hutton, having promised to be at home that evening, left Eoa to sleep off her heavy soporific, and followed the carriage on horseback; neither did he leave its track where the Ringwood Road turns off, for he had undertaken to tell Sir Cradock how his niece was getting on. He started nearly half an hour after the Lymington chaise, for Polly would never demean herself by trotting behind the “posters.” During that half–hour he drank hot brown brandy–and–water, although he could not bear it, to ingratiate him with Mrs. Brown for the sake of the poor Eoa. For Mrs. Brown had no other hot method of crowning the flowing bowl. And now, while I think of it, let me warn all gentle and simple people who deign on this tale of the New Forest, never to ask for pale brandy within the perambulations. How do you think they make it? By mixing brown brandy with villanous gin. Rufus was up to this, of course; and, as he must take something for the good of the house, and to get at the kindly kernel of the heavy–browed hostess, he took that which he thought would be least for his own evil. Then, leaving Mrs. Brown (who, of course, had taken her own glass at his sole charge and largesse, after fifty times “Oh no, sir, never! Oh Lord, how myBrown would be shocked!”), having imbued that good Mrs. Brown, who really was not a bad woman—which means that she was a good one, for women have no medium—with a strong aromatic impression that he was a pleasant gentleman, and no pride, not a bit of it, in him, no more than you nor me might,—off he trotted at a furious pace, smoking two cheroots at once.I believe that there was and is—for I am happy to say that he still inhales the breeze of life down his cigar, and looks browner and redder than ever—I believe that, in spite of all his troubles in connexion with this story, which took a good deal out of him, there was and is no happier man in our merry England than the worthy Rufus Hutton. And, as all happiness is negative, and goes without our knowing it, and only becomes a positive past for us to look back upon, so his went before it came, and goes or eʼer it comes. And yet he enjoys it none the less; he multiplies it by three for the past and by nine for the future, and he never finds it necessary to deduct for the present moment.Happy man who never thinks beyond salutary average, who can accept, in perfect faith, the traditions of his forbears, and yet is shrewd enough to hope that his grandsons will discard at least a portion of them,—who looks upon the passing life as a thing he need not move in, a world which must improve itself, and every day is doing it. And all the while he sympathises with his fellow–men, enjoys a bit of human nature, laughs at the cross–purposesof native truth and training, loves whatever he finds to be true, and does his best to foster it, is pleased with his after–dinner story, and feels universally charitable; then smiles at his wife, and kisses his children; and goes to bed with the firm conviction that they are worth all the rest put together.Yet this manʼs happiness is not sound, because it is built upon selfishness.In Nowelhurst village Dr. Hutton met Mark Stote, the gamekeeper, who begged him to stop for a moment, just to hear a word or two. Rufus, after hearing his news, resolved to take the upper road to the Hall, past Mr. Garnetʼs house; it was not so very far out of his way, and perhaps he might be of service there, and—ah, yes, Dr. Hutton, this last was the real motive, though you may not have thought so—what a fine opportunity to discover something which plagued him! Perhaps I ought to say rather, the want of which was plaguing him. Rufus took so kind an interest in his neighbours’ affairs, that anything not thoroughly luculent in their dealings, mode of life or speech, or management of their households, was to him the subject–matter of continual mental scratchings. Ah, how genteel a periphrase, worthy of Bailey Kettledrum; how happily we have shown our horror of that English monosyllable, beginning with the third vowel, which must be (according to Dr. Aldrich) the correlative of scratch! Score two, and go on after Dr. Hutton.He overtook the Garnets twain just at their front gate, whence the house could not be seen, on account of a bank of evergreens. The maid came out with her cap flying off, and all her mind perturbed. Rufus Hutton, checking his mare, for the road was very narrow, heard the entire dialogue.“Oh, sir! oh, master! have you heard of it? Such a thing, to be sure!”“Heard of what, Sarah? Of course I have heard of the great disaster at Rushford.”“No, no. Here, sir, here! The two big trees is down on the house. Itʼs a mussy as Nanny and me wasnʼt killed. And poor Miss Pearl have been in hysterics ever since, without no dinner. There, you can hear her screeching now, worse than the mangle, ever so much.”Mr. Garnet did not say a word, but set off for the house full speed, even forgetting that Bob wanted help to get from the gate to the doorway.Rufus Hutton jumped down from his mare, and called to the driver to come and hold her, just for a minute or two; no fear ofhishorses bolting. Then, helping Bob to limp along, he followed through the shrubbery. When they came within full view of the house, he was quite amazed at the mischief. The two oaks interlocked had fallen upon it, and, crashing as they did from the height above, the breaches they made were hideous. They had cloven the house into three ragged pieces, from the roof–ridge down to the first floor, where the solid joists had stopped them. It had happened in theafternoon of the second day of the tempest; when the heart of the storm was broken, but tremendous squalls came now and then from the bright north–west. Mr. Garnetʼs own bed was occupied by the tree which he detested. Pearl had screamed “Judgment, judgment!” and danced among the ruins; so the maid was telling Mr. Garnet, as he feared to enter his own door.“Judgment for what?” asked Rufus Hutton, and Mr. Garnet seemed not to hear him.“I am sure I donʼt know, sir,” answered the maid, “for none of us done any harm, sir; unless it was the bottle of pickled onions, when master were away, and there was very few of them left, sir, very few, I do declare to you, and we thought they was on the turn, sir, and it seemed such a pity to waste them. And please, sir, weʼve all been working like horses, though frightened out of our lives ‘most; and we fetched down all the things from your room, where the cupboards was broken open, for ‘fraid it should come on to rain, sir; and weʼve taken all our meals standing, sir; and made up a bed in the meat–screen, and another upon the dresser; and Miss Pearl, what turns she have given us—— Here she comes, I do declare.”“Dr. Hutton,” said Bull Garnet, hastily, “good–bye; I am much obliged to you. I shall see you, I hope, next week. Good–bye, good–bye. Excuse me.”But, before he could get him out of the way—for Rufus lingered strangely—Pearl Garnet cameinto the little hall, with her eyes distended fearfully. “There, there it is,” she cried, “there it is, I tell you! No wonder the tree came down upon it. No wonder the house was crushed for it.” And she pointed to a shattered box, tilted up endwise, among a heap of account–books, clothes, and furniture.“Oh yes, you may look at it. To be sure you may look at it. God would not have it hidden longer. I have done my best, God knows, and my heart knows, and my—I mean that man there knows. Is there anything more I can do for you, anything more,dear father? You have done so much for me, you know. And I will only ask you one little thing—put me in his coffin.”“The girl is raving,” cried Mr. Garnet. “Poor thing, it comes from her mother.”“No, it comes from her father,” said Pearl, going boldly up to him, and fixing her large bright eyes upon his. “Do as you like with me; I donʼt care; but donʼt put it on any one else. Oh, father, father, father!”Moaning, she turned away from him; and then sprang into his arms with shrieks. He lifted her tenderly, and forgot all about his own safety. His great tears fell on her wan, sick face; and his heavy heart throbbed for his daughter only, as he felt hers bounding perilously. He carried her off to an inner room, and left them to their own devices.“I should like uncommonly,” said Rufus Hutton,rubbing his chin, “to know what is in that box. Indeed, I feel it my duty at once to ascertain.”“No, you shanʼt,” cried Bob, limping across in front of it; “I know no more than you do, sir. But I wonʼt have fatherʼs things pryed into.”“You are very polite,” replied the Doctor; “a chip of the old block, I perceive. But, perhaps, you will believe me, my boy, when I tell you that, if ever there was a gentleman totally devoid of improper curiosity, it is Dr. Rufus Hutton, sir.”“Oh, I am so glad,” said Bob; “because you wonʼt be disappointed, then.”Rufus grinned, in spite of his wrath; but he was not to be baffled so easily. He could not push poor Bob aside, in his present disabled state, without being guilty of cowardice. So he called in an auxiliary.“Betsy, my dear, your young mistress wished me just to examine that box. Be kind enough to bring it to the light here, unless it is too heavy for your little hands.”Oh, if he had only said “Miss Sarah,” what a difference it might have made!“Betsy, indeed!” cried Sarah, who had followed her mistress, but, being locked out, had come back to see the end of it; “my name, sir, is nothing so low as that. My name is Sarah Mackarness, sir, very much at your service; and my mother keeps a potato–shop, the largest business in Lyndhurst, sir. Betsy, indeed! and from a stranger, not to say a strange gentleman, for fear of making a mistake.And as for my hands”—she thought he had been ironical, for her hands were above regulation size—“my hands are such as pleased God to make them, and honest hands, anyhow, and doesnʼt want to interfere with other peopleʼs business. Oh, what will poor Nanny say, to think of me, Sarah Mackarness, be permiscuous called Betsy?”At this moment, when Sarah Mackarness, having recovered breath, was starting into another native discourse on prænomina, and Rufus was calling upon his resources for some constitutional measure, Bull Garnet came back, treading heavily, defiant of all that the world could do. His quick eyes, never glimpsing that way, but taking in all the room at once, espied the box unmeddled with, and Bob upon guard in front of it. He was his own man now again. What did he care for anybody, so long as he had his children?“Dr. Hutton, I thought that you were gone.”“You see I am not,” said Rufus, squaring his elbows, and looking big, for he was a plucky little fellow, “and, whatʼs more, I donʼt mean to go till I know what is in that box.”“Box, box!” cried Bull Garnet, striking his enormous forehead, as if to recall something; “have we a box of yours, Dr. Hutton?”“No, no; that box ofyours. Your daughter told us to examine it. And, from her manner, I believe that I am bound to do so.”“Bound to examine one of my boxes!” Bull Garnet never looked once that way, and Rufustook note of the strange avoidance; “my boxes are full of confidential papers; surely, sir, you have caught my daughterʼs—I mean to say, you are labouring under some hallucination.”“There are no papers in that box. The contents of it are metal. I have seen one article already through the broken cover, and shall not forget its shape. Beware; there have been strange things done in this neighbourhood. If you refuse to allay my suspicions, you confirm them.”The only answer he received was a powerful hand at the back of his neck, a sensation of being lifted with no increase of facilities for placid respiration; finally, a lateral movement of great rapidity through the air, and a loud sound as of a bang. Recovering reasonʼs prerogative, he found himself in a dahlia, whose blossoms, turned into heel–balls by the recent frost, were flapping round his countenance, and whose stake had gone through his waistcoat back, and grazed his coxendix, or something; he knows best what it was, as a medical man deeply interested.He had also a very unpleasant reminiscence of some such words as these, to which he had no responsive power—“You wonʼt take a hint like a gentleman; so take a hit like a blackguard.”Dr. Rufus Hutton was not the man to sit down quietly under an insult of any sort. At the moment he felt that brute force was irresistibly in the ascendant, and he was wonderfully calm about it. He shook himself, and smoothed his waistcoat,and tried the stretch of his garters; then never once looked toward the house, never shook his fist, nor frowned even. He walked off to his darling Polly as if nothing at all had happened; gave the man a shilling for holding her, after looking long for a sixpence; then mounted, and rode towards Nowelhurst Hall, showing no emotion whatever. Only Polly knew that burning tears of a brave manʼs sense of ignominy fell upon her glossy shoulder, and were fiercely wiped way.At the Hall he said nothing about it; never even mentioned that he had called at Garnetʼs cottage; but told Sir Cradock, like a true man, of Eoaʼs troubles, of her poor forlorn condition, and power of heart to feel it. He even contrived to interest the bereaved man, now so listless, in the young life thrown upon his care, as if by the breath of heaven. We are never so eloquent for another as when our own hearts are moved deeply by the feeling of wrong to ourselves; unless, indeed, we are very small, and that subject excludes all others.So it came to pass that the grand new carriage was ordered to the door, and Sir Cradock would himself have gone—only Rufus Hutton had left him, and the eloquence was oozing. The old man, therefore, turned back on the threshold, saying to himself that it would be hardly decent to appear in public yet; and Mrs. OʼGaghan was sent instead, sitting inside, and half afraid to breathe for fear of the crystal. As for her clothes, they weregood enough, she knew, for the Lord Mayorʼs coach. “Five–and–sixpence a yard, maʼam, lave alone trimming and binding.” But, knowing what she did of herbs, she could not answer for the peppermint.Of course, they did not intend to fetch poor Eoa home yet; but Biddy had orders to stay there until the young lady was moveable. Biddy took to her at once, in her heavy, long–drawn sleep, with the soft black lashes now and then lifting from the rich brown cheek.“An’ if she isnʼt illigant, then,” said Biddy to Mrs. Brown, “ate me wiʼout a purratie. Arl coom ov’ the blude, missus. Sazins, then, if me and Pat had oonly got a child this day! Belikes, maʼam, for the matter o’ that, a drap o’ whisky disagrays with you.”Biddy, feeling strongly moved, and burning to drink her new childʼs health, showed a bottle of brown potheen.“To tell you the truth, mem,” said Mrs. Brown, “I know nothing about them subjects. Spirituous liquors is a thing as has always been beyond me.”“Thin Iʼll clap it away again,” said Biddy, “and the divvil only the wiser. I never takes it alone, marm.”“It would ill become me, mem,” replied Mrs. Brown, “to be churlish in my own house, mem. I have heard of you very often, mem. Yes, I assure you I have, from the people as comes to bathe here,as a lady of great experience in diseases of the chest. If you recommend any cordial, mem, on the strength of your experience, for a female of weak witality, I should take it as a dooty, mem, strictly as a dooty to my husband and two darters.”“Arrah, then, Iʼm your femmale. Me witality goes crossways, like, till I has a drap o’ the crather.” And so they made a night of it, and Mr. Brown had some.CHAPTER VII.Leave we now, with story pending, Biddy and Eoa, Pearl, and even Amy; thee, too, rare Bull, and thee, O Rufus, overcast with anger. It is time to track the steps of him whom Fortune, blithe at her cruel trade, shall track as far as Gades, Cantaber, and wild Syrtes, where the Moorish billow is for ever heaving. Will he exclaim with the poet, who certainly was a jolly mortal,—“I praise her while she is my guest. If she flap her nimble wings, I renounce her charities; and wrap me in my manhood robe, and woo the upright poverty, the bride without a dower.” “A very fine sentiment, Master Horace; but were you not a little too fond even of Sabine and Lesbian—when the Massic juice was beyond your credit—to do anything more thanfeelit?”As Cradock Nowell trudged that night towards the Brockenhurst Station, before he got very far from Amy, and while her tears were still on hischeek, he felt a little timid lick, a weak offering of sympathy.Hereby black Wena made known to him that she was melted by his misfortunes, and saw that the right and most feeling course, and the one most pleasing to her dead master, was the transfer of her allegiance, and the swearing of fealty to the brother. To which conclusion the tender mode in which she was being carried conduced, perhaps, considerably; for she was wrapped in Claytonʼs woolly jacket, enthroned on Cradockʼs broad right arm, and with only her black nose exposed to the moon. So she jogged along very comfortably, until she had made up her mind, and given Cradock the kiss of seisin.“Dear little thing,” he cried, for he looked on her now as Amyʼs keepsake, “you shall go with me wherever I go. You are faithful enough to starve with me; but you shall not starve until after me.”Then he put her down, for he thought that a little run would do her good, and, in spite of all her misery, Amy had kept her pretty plump, plumper than she herself was; and it became no joke to carry her, with a travelling–bag, &c., after the first half mile.Then Wena capered about, and barked, and came and licked his shoe, and offered to carry the coat for him. As he would not let her do this, she occupied her mind with the rabbits, which were out upon the feed largely, and were the lastshe would see for a long while, except the fat Ostenders.When he got to London, and took small lodgings at a Mrs. Ducksacreʼs, “greengrocer and general fruiterer, Mortimer–street, Cavendish–square,”—I quote from the ladyʼs bags: confound it, there! I am always saying improper things;honi soit—I mean, of course, her paper bags—it was not long before he made two important discoveries, valuable rather than gratifying.The first of these discoveries was, that our university portals are a mere side–postern, and not the greatjanua mundi. He found his classical scholarship, his early fame at Oxford, his love of elegant literature, rather a disadvantage than a recommendation for business.“Prigs, sir, prigs,” said a member of an eminent City firm; “of course, I donʼt mean to be personal; but I have always found you Oxford men prigs, quite unfit for desk–work. You fancy you know so much; you are always discovering mareʼs–nests, and you wonʼt bear to be spoken to, even if you stick to your work; which, I assure you, is quite the exception. Then you hold yourself aloof, with your stupid etiquette, from the other young men, who are quite as good as you are. I assure you, the place was too hot to hold us with the last Oxford man we took in the counting–house; he gave himself such airs, the donkey! I vowed never to do it again: and I never will, sir. Goodmorning, sir; Gregson, show this gentleman the way out.”Gregson did so with a grin, for Cradockʼs face proved that the principal had not been altogether wrong.Is this prejudice, or, rather, perhaps, I should say, this aversion, disappearing now–a–days, or is it upon the increase? At any rate, one cause of it is being removed most rapidly; for the buckram etiquette of Oxford will soon become a tradition. We will only hope she may not run too far into the free and easy.Cradockʼs other discovery was that 50l.is no large capital to commence in life with, especially when the owner does not find his start prepared for him; fails to prepare it for himself; and has never been used to economy. He would not apply to any of his fatherʼs friends, or of the people whom he had known in London, to help him in this emergency. He would rather starve than do that; for he had dropped all name and claim of Nowell, and cut his life in twain at manhood; and the parts should never join again. Only one feeling should be common to the two existences, to the happy and the wretched life; that one feeling was the love of Amy, and, what now seemed part of it, his gratitude to her father.John Rosedew had given him a letter to a clergyman in London, a man of high standing and extensive influence, whom John had known atcollege. But the youth had not undertaken to deliver that credential, and he never did so. It would have kept him to his identity, which (so far as the world was concerned) he wished to change entirely, immediately, and irrevocably. So he called himself “Nowell” no longer—although the name is common enough in one form or another: the Nowells of Nowelhurst, however, are proud of the doublel, and think a good deal of thew—and Cradock Nowell became “Charles Newman,” without license of Her Majesty.Even before his vain attempts to enter the stronghold of commerce, and before he had learned that Oxford men are not thought “prima virorum,” he had lifted the latch of literature, but the door would not swing back for him. Themare magnum—to mix metaphors, although bars are added to the Lucrine—themare magnumof letters was more like his native element; and, if he once could have gotten—bare–footed as we must be—over the jagged rocks which hedge that sea, I believe he might have swum there.In one respect he was fortunate. The publishers upon whom he called were gentlemen, and told him the truth.“Oh, poetry!” exclaimed one and all, as their eyes fell upon his manuscript, “we cannot take it on our own account; and, if we published it at your expense, we should only be robbing you.”“Indeed!” replied Cradock, in the first surprise;“is there no chance, then, of a sale for it?”“None whatever. Poetry, unless it be some oneʼs whose name is well known, is a perfect drug in the market. In the course of ten or a dozen years, by advertising continually, by influence among the reviewers, by hitting some popular vein, or being taken up by some authority, you might attain an audience. Are you ready to encounter all this? Even if you are, we must decline, we are sorry to say, to have anything to do with it.”“Verse, eh? Better have cut your throat,” more tersely replied an elderly gentleman, well known for his rudeness to authors. However, even that last was a friend, when compared with some whom it might have been his evil luck to consult. They advertise their patent methods of putting a work before the public, without any risk to the author, &c. &c. Disinterested gentlemen! They are to have no profit whatever, except from the sale of the work, and they know they wonʼt sell five copies.However, there are not many of this sort in an honourable and most important profession; and Cradock Nowell was lucky enough not to fall in with any of them. So he accepted the verdict so unanimously returned, and stored away with a heavy heart his laborious little manuscript. It was only a translation in verse of the Halieutics, and a fewshort original pieces—the former at any rate valuable, as having been revised by John Rosedew.There are courts and alleys in the neighbourhood of Mortimer–street which, for misery and poverty, dirt and desperation, may vie with almost any of the more famous shames of London.Cradockʼs own great trouble, the sympathy he had met with, and the comfort he received from it, had begun by this time to soften his heart, and render it more sensitive to the distress of others. At first, it had been far otherwise. The feeling of bitter injustice, resentment at, and defiance of, a blow which seemed to him so unmerited, and, worse than all, his own fatherʼs base and low mistrust of him—who could have been surprised if these things, acting upon a sad lone heart, and a bold mind beginning to think for itself, had made the owner an infidel? And very likely they would have done so, when he was removed from John Rosedewʼs influence, but for that scene with Amy. He loved that girl so warmly, so devotedly, so purely, that, when he found his love returned in equal quantity and quality, it renewed his faith in justice. He saw that there is a measure and law, even where all appears to be anarchy and anomaly; that the hand of God is not stretched forth upon His children wantonly; that we cannot gauge His circling survey by the three–inch space between human eyes, neither does He rest His balance on His earthly footstool. So Cradock escaped the deadly harm, which almost seems designed to poisethat noblest gift of Heaven—a free and glorious intellect—he escaped it through the mercy which gave him true affection.And now once more he looked with love upon his fellow–men, such love as the frigid atheist school shall never form nor educate—which truth alone to a great heart might be conclusive against that school—the love which few religions except our own inculcate, and no other takes for its essence.As yet he was too young to know the blind and inhuman selfishness, the formality and truckling, and the other paltry dishonesties, which still exist and try to cheat us under the name of “Society.” The cant is going by already. Every man who dares to think knows that its laws are obsolete, because they have not for their basis either of these three—truth, simplicity, charity.Even that young man was astonished at the manner in which society ignores its broader and only true meaning—fellowship among men—and renounces all other duties, save that of shaking from its shoes its fellow–dust. He could not look upon the scenes so nigh to him, and to each other, parted often by nothing more than nine inches of brick or two inches of deal; the wealth and the want, the feast and the famine, the satiety and the ravening, the euphemy and the blasphemy—though sometimes that last got inside the door, blew its nose, and was infidelity; the prudery and the indecency, the whispered lie and the yelled one, thesale of maidens by their mothers, or of women by themselves—though here again the difference was never very perceptible; all this impious contrast, spread as if for Godʼs approval, for the Universal Fatherʼs blessing, in the land most chiefly blessed by Him: which of His sons, not cast out for ever, could look on it without weeping?Cradock did something more than weep. He went with his little stock of money, though he knew it could not do much; and he tried to help in little ways, though as yet he had no experience. He bought meat, and clothes, and took things out of pawn, and tried to make peace where fights were.At first he was grossly insulted, as a meddlesome swell; but, when he had done two or three good things, and done them as a brother should, he began to be owned among them. In one thing he was right, although he had no experience; he confined his exertions to a very narrow compass. Of course he got imposed upon—of course he helped the unworthy; but after a while he began to know them, and even the unworthy—some two hundred per cent.—began to have faint ideas of trying to deserve good luck.One man who attempted to pick Cradʼs pocket was knocked down by the biggest thief there. “I wish I had a heap of money,” said Cradock, every day; “I must keep some for myself, I suppose. Perhaps, after all, I was wrong, in throwing up so hastily my chance of doing good.”Then he remembered that, but for his trouble, he might never have thought of the good to be done. And the good done to him was threefold as much as he could do to others. Every day he grew less selfish, less imperious, less exacting; every day he saw more clearly the good which is in the worst of us.There is a flint of peculiar character—I know not the local name of it—which is found sometimes on the great Chissel Bank, and away towards Lyme Regis. It is as hard, and sullen, and dull a flint (with even the outside polish lost from the chafing of the waves)—a stone as grey and foggy–looking;—as ever Deucalion took the trouble to cast away over the left into an empty world. Yet it has, through the heart of it, traversing it from pole to pole (for its shape is always conical) a thread, a spindle, a siphuncle, of the richest golden hue. None but those who are used to it can see the head of the golden column, can even guess its existence. The stone is not hollow; it is quite distinct from all pudding–stones and conglomerates.Many such flints poor Crad came across, and sought in vain for the beauty of them. He never tried to split them with a hammer, as too many do of our Boanergæ; but he was too young to see or feel the chord of the golden siphuncle. One, especially, one great fellow, was harder and rougher than any flint, like the matrix of the concentric jasper.“Confound that fellow,” said Cradock to himself;“I never shall get at the heart of him. If my pluck were up a little more. Iʼd fight him; though I know he would lick me. Heʼd be sorry for me afterwards.”Issachar Jupp could lick any two men in the court. He was a bargee, of good intentions—at least, when he took to the cuddy; but his horses had pulled crosswise ever since; and the devil knew, better than the angels, what his nature now was.“None of your d—d Scripture–reading for me!” he cried, when Cradock came near him; though the young man had never attempted anything of the sort.He knew that the Word of God is not bread to a blackguardʼs empty belly. And another thing he knew—that he was not of the age and aspect for John Bunyanʼs business. Moreover, Jupp was wonderfully jealous of his wife, a gentle but grimy woman, forty–five years old, whom he larruped every day; although he might be an infidel, he would ensure his wifeʼs fidelity. Nevertheless, he had his pure vein, and Cradock at last got at it.Mrs. and Miss Ducksacre were very good–hearted women, but, like many other women of that fibre, whose education has been neglected, of a hot and hasty order. Not that we need suppose the pepper to be neutralized by the refinement, only to be absorbed more equably, and transfused more generally.A little thing came feeling the way into the narrow, dingy shop, one dark November evening, groping along by the sacks of potatoes (all of them “seconds,” for the firm did not deal much in “Ware Regents”), feeling its way along the sacks which towered above its head, like bulky snow–giants embrowned with thaw; and then by the legs of the “tatie–bin,” with the great scales hanging above it, and then by the heap of lighting–wood, piled in halfpenny bundles, with the ends against the wall; and so the little thing emerged between two mighty hills of coleworts, and under the frugal gas–burner, and congratulated itself, with a hug of the heart, upon safety.“Take care, my dear,” cried Mrs. Ducksacre, looking large behind the counter, “or youʼll tumble down the coal–trap, where the black bogeys lives. Bless my heart, if it ainʼt little Loo! Why, Loo, I hardly knew you. You ainʼt looking like yourself a bit, child. And who sent you out at this time of night? What a shame, to be sure!”Loo, the pride of Issachar Jupp, was rather a pretty little body, about three and a half years old, “going on for four,” as she loved to say, if anybody asked her; and her pale but clean face would have beenverypretty, if her mother would have let her hair alone. But it was all combed back, and tied tightly behind, like the tail of a horse at a fair, or as affording a spout to pour the little girl out by. She looked up at Mrs. Ducksacre, while her fingers played with the coleworts, for her hands were hot,and this cooled them; and then, with the instinct of nature, she stuck up for her father and mother.“Pease, maʼam, Loo not fray much,”—though her trembling frock belied her, all over the throat and the heart of it—“and father don from home, maʼam, on the Wasintote” [Basingstoke canal], “and mother dot nobody, onʼy Loo, to do thins. And she send this, ‘cause Looʼs poor troat be bad, maʼam.”The little child, whose throat was tied up with worn flannel from the char–bucket, with the grey edge still upon it, wriggled in and out of her shape and self, in the way only children can do; and at length drew, from some innermost shrine, a halfpenny and a farthing.“And what am I to give you for it, Loo? Oh, you poor little thing, how very hoarse you are!”Loo, with a confidence in human nature purely non–Londinian, had placed her cash upon the altar, upon the inside of which so many worship, while on the outside so many are sacrificed; without circumlocution, the counter. Her eyes were below the rim of it, till she stood upon tiptoe with one foot, while the other was up in the colewort roots, and then she could see the money, and she poked out her little lips at it, as if she would fain suck it back again.“Pease, maʼam, Looʼs troat so bad, mother are goin to make a ‘tew, tree haʼporth of tipe and a haʼporth of ‘egents, and a fardy of inons!”“What a splendid stew, Loo!” said Mrs. Ducksacre,seeming to smell it; “and so you want a haʼporth of taties, and a farthingʼs worth of onions. And you shall have them, my dear, and as good a three farthings’ worth as ever was put up in London. Where are you going to put them all?”Loo opened her sore throat, and pointed down it. She had not yet lost her appetite; and that child did love tripe so.“No, no, I donʼt mean that, Loo. I know you have a nice room inside; though some will be for mother, wonʼt it, now? I mean, how are you going to carry it home?”“In Looʼs pinney,” replied the child, delighted with her success; for ever so many people had told her, that the Ducksacres now were getting so high, they would soon leave off making farthings–worths; and any tradesman who does that is above the sphere of the street–child.“My dear, your pinney wonʼt hold them, potatoes are so cheap now”—she had just sworn they were awfully dear to a person she disliked—“I am sure you canʼt carry a haʼporth. Oh, Mr. Newman, you are so good–natured”—Cradock was just coming in, rather glum from another failure—“I really donʼt believe you would think you were bemeaning yourself by going home with this poor little atom.”“I should rather hope I would not,” replied Cradock, looking grand.“Oh, I did not know. I beg your pardon, Iʼm sure. I would go myself, only Sally is out, andthe boy gone home ever so long ago. I beg your pardon, Iʼm sure, Mr. Newman; I thought you were so good–natured.”“Mrs. Ducksacre,” said Cradock, “you utterly misunderstand me. I replied to the form of your sentence, perhaps, rather than to its meaning. What I meant was, that I should rather hope I would not think it below me to go home with this little dear. If I could suppose it any disgrace to me, I should deserve to be kicked by your errand–boy all round this shop, Mrs. Ducksacre; and I am surprised you misunderstand me so. Why, I know this little girl well; and her name is Louisa Jupp.”“Tiss Loo,” said the little child, standing up on tiptoe, and spreading out her arms to Cradock. All the children loved him, as the little ones at Nowelhurst would run after Mr. Rosedew. Children are even better judges of character than dogs.“Why, you poor little soul,” said Crad, as he seated her on his strong right arm with her little cheek to his, and she drew a thousand straws of light through her lashes from the gas–jet, which she had never yet been so close to, “how hot and dry your lips are! I hope you are not taking the—sickness”—he was going to say “fever,” but feared to frighten Loo.“Mother fray,” cried the small girl, proud of the importance accruing to her, “Loo dot wever; Irishers dot bad wever on the foor below mother.Loo det nice thins, and lay abed, if me dot the wever.”“Put the poor childʼs things, whatever they are, in a basket, Mrs. Ducksacre. How odd her little legs feel! And a shillingʼs worth of grapes, if you please, in a bag by themselves. Hereʼs the money for them. You know Iʼll bring back the basket. But the bags donʼt come back, do they?”“No, sir, of course not. Half–a–crown a gross for the small ones, with the name and the cross–handle basket, and the cabbage and carrots, sir. Sixpence more for cornopean–pattern with a pineapple, and grapes and oranges. But lor, sir, the cornopean” [cornucopiæ] “would frighten half our customers. The basket–pattern pays better for an advertisement than to get them back again, even if parties would bring them, which I knows well they never would, sir.”Then Cradock set forth with the child on his arm, his coat thrown over his shoulders, and the best shillingʼs worth of foreign grapes—Mrs. Ducksacre never bought English ones—and the best three farthingʼs worth of potatoes and onions that was made that day by any tradesman in any part of London, not excluding “them low costers,” as the Ducksacre firm expressed it.Little Loo Juppʼs sore throat proved to be, as Cradock feared it would, the first symptom of scarlet fever; and the young man had the pleasure—one of the highest and purest pleasures which any man can have—of saving a human life. Hewatched that trembling flame of life, and fostered it, and sheltered it, as if “the hopes of a nation hung”—as the penny–a–liners love to say of some babe not a whit more valuable—upon its feeble flicker. He hired another room for her, where the air was purer; he made the doctor attend to the case, which at first that doctor cared little to do; he brought her many a trifling comfort; in a word, he waited upon her so that the old women of the court called him thenceforth “Nurse Newman.”“What, you here again, you white–livered young sneak!” cried Issachar Jupp, reeling in at the door, just as Cradock was coming out; “take that, then——” and he lifted a great oak bludgeon, newly cut from the towing–path of the Basingstoke Canal. If Cradock had not been as quick as lightning, and caught the stick over the bargemanʼs shoulder, there would have been weeping and wailing and a lifelong woe for Amy.“Hush,” he said; “donʼt make such a noise, man. Your child is at the point of death, in the room overhead.”Poor Crad, naturally of a bright complexion, but pale from long unhappiness, might now have retorted the compliment as to the “pallor jecoris.” The bargee turned so pale, that he looked like a collierʼs tablecloth. Then he planted his heavy stick on the ground; else he would have lain flat on his threshold.“My Loo, my Loo!” was all he could say; “oh my Loo!Itʼs a lie, sir!”“I wish it was,” replied Cradock; “take my arm, Mr. Jupp. Donʼt be over–frightened. We hope with all our hearts to save her, and to–night we shall know. Already I think I perceive some change in her breathing, though her tongue is like a furnace.”He spoke with a tone and in a voice which no man ever has described, nor shall, but which every born man feels to be genuine, long ere he can think.“[Condemn] me for a [sanguineous] fool,” cried Jupp, with two enormous tears guttering down the coal–dust, and his great chest heaving and wanting to sob, only it didnʼt know the way; “[condemn] my eyes for swearing so, and making such a [female dog] of myself, but what the [Hades] am I to do? Oh my Loo, my Loo! If you die, Iʼll go to [Hades] after you.”Excuse me for washing out this speech to regulation weakness; perhaps it was entered in white on high, as the turn of a life of blackness.Cradock turned away, and trembled. Who can see a rugged man split to the bottom of his nature, and not himself be splintered? I donʼt believe that any can: not even the cold iron scoundrels whom modern plays delight in.“Now come up with me, Mr. Jupp,” said Crad, taking care not to look at him, “out at this door,in at the other. Poor little soul! she has been so good. You canʼt think how good she has been. And she has taken her medicine so nicely.”“Pray God Almighty not to [condemn] me, for not [condemning] myself enough,” said Issachar Jupp, below his breath, as he leaned on Cradockʼs arm.It was his form of prayer; and it meant more than most of ours do. Though I may be discarded by turtle–dove quill–drivers for daring to record it, will he ever be worse for uttering it? Of course, it was very shocking; but far more so to men than to angels.

CHAPTER VI.Eoa was now sixteen years old, tall, and lithe, and graceful as the creepers of tropic woodlands. Her face was of the clearest oval, a quick concise terse oval, such as we find in the eggs of wild birds rather than of tame ones. Her eyes were of bewildering brightness, always flashing, always in motion, rarely allowing the gazer a chance of guessing what their colour was. Very likely they were of no positive colour, but a pure dark lustre, such as a clear swift river has, when overhung by palm–trees. Her complexion, beautifully soft and even, was toned with a delicate eastern tinge, like that fawn–coloured light which sometimes flushes a cloudless sky before the midsummer sunrise. And her warm oriental blood suffused it, at the slightest emotion, as the leaping sun pervades that sky with a flood of limpid rubies.She had never been flattened by education: all her qualities and feelings, like her beauty, were in excess. You could see it in the quick rise and fall of her breath, in the sudden grace of her movements, in the infinite variety of her attitudes and aspects.Whatever she thought, she said at once; yet none ever called her a bold girl. Her modes of thought were as widely different from those of an English maiden, as a wild honeysuckle differs in form, habit, and scent, from a rose. She cared for no oneʼs opinion of her, any more than the wind cares how a tree swings; unless indeed it were one whom she loved, and then she would crawl to please him. For she loved with all her heart and soul, and hated with no less; and she always took care in either case to apprise the object of it. And yet, with all her depth of passion, Eoa was pure of heart and mind,—ay, as pure as our own Amy.She soon recovered from her bruises, being perfectly healthy, and elastic as india–rubber. Nevertheless, she would not have been saved from that terrible sea but for the generosity of poor Captain Roberts, and the gallantry of Bob Garnet.Now Bob was hurt rather seriously, and, being (as we are well aware) an uncommonly shy young fellow, he was greatly astonished, and shocked a little, when on the Friday morning a beautiful girl, very strangely dressed, ran to the side of his sofa, threw her arms round him, and kissed himtill he was out of breath, and his face was wet with the dew of her tears.“Oh, please donʼt,” said Bob; “I am sure I donʼt deserve it.”“Yes, you do; and I will marry you when I am old enough. I donʼt know what you are like, and I donʼt care two straws, directly they told me what you had done. Only I must have papaʼs leave. Kiss me again, I like it. Now where is my darling papa?”“What, donʼt you know? Havenʼt they told you? Oh, poor thing!”At the tone of his voice she leaped back, like a bird at the gun–flash, and stood with her little hands clasped on her head, her eyes with their deep light quivering, and the whole of her form swinging to and fro, from the wild push of sudden terror. Then she spoke with a hollow depth, which frightened Bob more than the kissing.“They told me that he was well, gone to his brother somewhere, and I thought it wasnʼt like him to leave me so, and—tell me the truth, or Iʼll shake you to pieces.”“No, donʼt,” said Bob, as she leaped at him; “I have had shaking enough.”“Yes, you poor boy, and for my sake. I am a brute, I know. Tell me the truth, if you love me.”“Your dear father is dead. But they have found his body.”“Do you mean to say that God has been so wicked as to kill my father?”“God knows best,” said Bob; he could think of nothing else to say.“No, He doesnʼt. No, He doesnʼt. No, He never knows anything. He couldnʼt have known who he was, and how terribly I loved him, or He wouldnʼt have the heart to do it. Oh, you wicked boy; oh, you wicked boy! I will never forgive you for saving me. Hya, hya, hya!”Bob never saw such a thing before, and never will again. And he wonʼt be much the loser; although the sight was magnificent. The screams and shrieks of the clearest voice that ever puzzled echo brought up the landlord and landlady, and our good friend Rufus Hutton, who had set forth full speed from home on hearing about theAliwal. He caught Eoa in his arms, carried her back to her room, and dosed her. He gave her some Indian specific, some powder of a narcotic fungus, which he had brought on purpose.It stupefied her for nearly three days, and even then she awoke into the dreamy state of Nirwana, that bliss of semi–consciousness, like mild annihilation, into which the Buddha is absorbed, and to which all pious Buddhists look as their eternal happiness. Then she opened her delicate tapering arms, where you could see the grand muscles moving, but never once protruding, and she called for her darling father to come. Finding that he did not come, she was satisfied withsome trifling answer, and then wanted to have Bob instead; but neither was Bob forthcoming.On the very day when Dr. Hutton came to look for Eoa, Mr. Garnet found himself getting better from that wretched low nervous fever into which his fright had thrown him. Then he asked Dr. Hutton whether there would be any danger in moving Robert, and, finding that there would be none whatever, if it were carefully managed, he ordered a carriage immediately, and with some of his ancient spirit. The Crown, which had the cross–bar of its N set up the wrong way (as is done, by–the–by, on the roof of Hampton Court chapel, and in many other places), made public claim to be regarded as a “commercial hotel and posting–house.” No Rushford folk having yet been known to post anything, except a letter at rare intervals, and a bill at rarer, this claim of the Crown had never been challenged, and strangers entertained a languid theoretical faith in it. But Mr. Brown looked very blue when Bull Garnet in reviving accents ordered “a chaise and pair at the door in half an hourʼs time; a roomy chaise, if you please, because my son must keep his feet up.”“Yes, sir; yes, to be sure, sir; I quite understand, sir. It shall be attended to, sir.”“Then why donʼt you go and order it?”“To be sure, sir; I forgot. I will speak to Mrs. Brown, sir.”Mrs. Brown, being a woman of resource, mounted the boy on her donkey, the only quadruped shepossessed, but a “wonner to go,” as the boy said, “when you knows the right place to prog him in,” and sent him post–haste to Lymington, whence the required conveyance arrived in about an hour and a half.Rufus Hutton, having promised to be at home that evening, left Eoa to sleep off her heavy soporific, and followed the carriage on horseback; neither did he leave its track where the Ringwood Road turns off, for he had undertaken to tell Sir Cradock how his niece was getting on. He started nearly half an hour after the Lymington chaise, for Polly would never demean herself by trotting behind the “posters.” During that half–hour he drank hot brown brandy–and–water, although he could not bear it, to ingratiate him with Mrs. Brown for the sake of the poor Eoa. For Mrs. Brown had no other hot method of crowning the flowing bowl. And now, while I think of it, let me warn all gentle and simple people who deign on this tale of the New Forest, never to ask for pale brandy within the perambulations. How do you think they make it? By mixing brown brandy with villanous gin. Rufus was up to this, of course; and, as he must take something for the good of the house, and to get at the kindly kernel of the heavy–browed hostess, he took that which he thought would be least for his own evil. Then, leaving Mrs. Brown (who, of course, had taken her own glass at his sole charge and largesse, after fifty times “Oh no, sir, never! Oh Lord, how myBrown would be shocked!”), having imbued that good Mrs. Brown, who really was not a bad woman—which means that she was a good one, for women have no medium—with a strong aromatic impression that he was a pleasant gentleman, and no pride, not a bit of it, in him, no more than you nor me might,—off he trotted at a furious pace, smoking two cheroots at once.I believe that there was and is—for I am happy to say that he still inhales the breeze of life down his cigar, and looks browner and redder than ever—I believe that, in spite of all his troubles in connexion with this story, which took a good deal out of him, there was and is no happier man in our merry England than the worthy Rufus Hutton. And, as all happiness is negative, and goes without our knowing it, and only becomes a positive past for us to look back upon, so his went before it came, and goes or eʼer it comes. And yet he enjoys it none the less; he multiplies it by three for the past and by nine for the future, and he never finds it necessary to deduct for the present moment.Happy man who never thinks beyond salutary average, who can accept, in perfect faith, the traditions of his forbears, and yet is shrewd enough to hope that his grandsons will discard at least a portion of them,—who looks upon the passing life as a thing he need not move in, a world which must improve itself, and every day is doing it. And all the while he sympathises with his fellow–men, enjoys a bit of human nature, laughs at the cross–purposesof native truth and training, loves whatever he finds to be true, and does his best to foster it, is pleased with his after–dinner story, and feels universally charitable; then smiles at his wife, and kisses his children; and goes to bed with the firm conviction that they are worth all the rest put together.Yet this manʼs happiness is not sound, because it is built upon selfishness.In Nowelhurst village Dr. Hutton met Mark Stote, the gamekeeper, who begged him to stop for a moment, just to hear a word or two. Rufus, after hearing his news, resolved to take the upper road to the Hall, past Mr. Garnetʼs house; it was not so very far out of his way, and perhaps he might be of service there, and—ah, yes, Dr. Hutton, this last was the real motive, though you may not have thought so—what a fine opportunity to discover something which plagued him! Perhaps I ought to say rather, the want of which was plaguing him. Rufus took so kind an interest in his neighbours’ affairs, that anything not thoroughly luculent in their dealings, mode of life or speech, or management of their households, was to him the subject–matter of continual mental scratchings. Ah, how genteel a periphrase, worthy of Bailey Kettledrum; how happily we have shown our horror of that English monosyllable, beginning with the third vowel, which must be (according to Dr. Aldrich) the correlative of scratch! Score two, and go on after Dr. Hutton.He overtook the Garnets twain just at their front gate, whence the house could not be seen, on account of a bank of evergreens. The maid came out with her cap flying off, and all her mind perturbed. Rufus Hutton, checking his mare, for the road was very narrow, heard the entire dialogue.“Oh, sir! oh, master! have you heard of it? Such a thing, to be sure!”“Heard of what, Sarah? Of course I have heard of the great disaster at Rushford.”“No, no. Here, sir, here! The two big trees is down on the house. Itʼs a mussy as Nanny and me wasnʼt killed. And poor Miss Pearl have been in hysterics ever since, without no dinner. There, you can hear her screeching now, worse than the mangle, ever so much.”Mr. Garnet did not say a word, but set off for the house full speed, even forgetting that Bob wanted help to get from the gate to the doorway.Rufus Hutton jumped down from his mare, and called to the driver to come and hold her, just for a minute or two; no fear ofhishorses bolting. Then, helping Bob to limp along, he followed through the shrubbery. When they came within full view of the house, he was quite amazed at the mischief. The two oaks interlocked had fallen upon it, and, crashing as they did from the height above, the breaches they made were hideous. They had cloven the house into three ragged pieces, from the roof–ridge down to the first floor, where the solid joists had stopped them. It had happened in theafternoon of the second day of the tempest; when the heart of the storm was broken, but tremendous squalls came now and then from the bright north–west. Mr. Garnetʼs own bed was occupied by the tree which he detested. Pearl had screamed “Judgment, judgment!” and danced among the ruins; so the maid was telling Mr. Garnet, as he feared to enter his own door.“Judgment for what?” asked Rufus Hutton, and Mr. Garnet seemed not to hear him.“I am sure I donʼt know, sir,” answered the maid, “for none of us done any harm, sir; unless it was the bottle of pickled onions, when master were away, and there was very few of them left, sir, very few, I do declare to you, and we thought they was on the turn, sir, and it seemed such a pity to waste them. And please, sir, weʼve all been working like horses, though frightened out of our lives ‘most; and we fetched down all the things from your room, where the cupboards was broken open, for ‘fraid it should come on to rain, sir; and weʼve taken all our meals standing, sir; and made up a bed in the meat–screen, and another upon the dresser; and Miss Pearl, what turns she have given us—— Here she comes, I do declare.”“Dr. Hutton,” said Bull Garnet, hastily, “good–bye; I am much obliged to you. I shall see you, I hope, next week. Good–bye, good–bye. Excuse me.”But, before he could get him out of the way—for Rufus lingered strangely—Pearl Garnet cameinto the little hall, with her eyes distended fearfully. “There, there it is,” she cried, “there it is, I tell you! No wonder the tree came down upon it. No wonder the house was crushed for it.” And she pointed to a shattered box, tilted up endwise, among a heap of account–books, clothes, and furniture.“Oh yes, you may look at it. To be sure you may look at it. God would not have it hidden longer. I have done my best, God knows, and my heart knows, and my—I mean that man there knows. Is there anything more I can do for you, anything more,dear father? You have done so much for me, you know. And I will only ask you one little thing—put me in his coffin.”“The girl is raving,” cried Mr. Garnet. “Poor thing, it comes from her mother.”“No, it comes from her father,” said Pearl, going boldly up to him, and fixing her large bright eyes upon his. “Do as you like with me; I donʼt care; but donʼt put it on any one else. Oh, father, father, father!”Moaning, she turned away from him; and then sprang into his arms with shrieks. He lifted her tenderly, and forgot all about his own safety. His great tears fell on her wan, sick face; and his heavy heart throbbed for his daughter only, as he felt hers bounding perilously. He carried her off to an inner room, and left them to their own devices.“I should like uncommonly,” said Rufus Hutton,rubbing his chin, “to know what is in that box. Indeed, I feel it my duty at once to ascertain.”“No, you shanʼt,” cried Bob, limping across in front of it; “I know no more than you do, sir. But I wonʼt have fatherʼs things pryed into.”“You are very polite,” replied the Doctor; “a chip of the old block, I perceive. But, perhaps, you will believe me, my boy, when I tell you that, if ever there was a gentleman totally devoid of improper curiosity, it is Dr. Rufus Hutton, sir.”“Oh, I am so glad,” said Bob; “because you wonʼt be disappointed, then.”Rufus grinned, in spite of his wrath; but he was not to be baffled so easily. He could not push poor Bob aside, in his present disabled state, without being guilty of cowardice. So he called in an auxiliary.“Betsy, my dear, your young mistress wished me just to examine that box. Be kind enough to bring it to the light here, unless it is too heavy for your little hands.”Oh, if he had only said “Miss Sarah,” what a difference it might have made!“Betsy, indeed!” cried Sarah, who had followed her mistress, but, being locked out, had come back to see the end of it; “my name, sir, is nothing so low as that. My name is Sarah Mackarness, sir, very much at your service; and my mother keeps a potato–shop, the largest business in Lyndhurst, sir. Betsy, indeed! and from a stranger, not to say a strange gentleman, for fear of making a mistake.And as for my hands”—she thought he had been ironical, for her hands were above regulation size—“my hands are such as pleased God to make them, and honest hands, anyhow, and doesnʼt want to interfere with other peopleʼs business. Oh, what will poor Nanny say, to think of me, Sarah Mackarness, be permiscuous called Betsy?”At this moment, when Sarah Mackarness, having recovered breath, was starting into another native discourse on prænomina, and Rufus was calling upon his resources for some constitutional measure, Bull Garnet came back, treading heavily, defiant of all that the world could do. His quick eyes, never glimpsing that way, but taking in all the room at once, espied the box unmeddled with, and Bob upon guard in front of it. He was his own man now again. What did he care for anybody, so long as he had his children?“Dr. Hutton, I thought that you were gone.”“You see I am not,” said Rufus, squaring his elbows, and looking big, for he was a plucky little fellow, “and, whatʼs more, I donʼt mean to go till I know what is in that box.”“Box, box!” cried Bull Garnet, striking his enormous forehead, as if to recall something; “have we a box of yours, Dr. Hutton?”“No, no; that box ofyours. Your daughter told us to examine it. And, from her manner, I believe that I am bound to do so.”“Bound to examine one of my boxes!” Bull Garnet never looked once that way, and Rufustook note of the strange avoidance; “my boxes are full of confidential papers; surely, sir, you have caught my daughterʼs—I mean to say, you are labouring under some hallucination.”“There are no papers in that box. The contents of it are metal. I have seen one article already through the broken cover, and shall not forget its shape. Beware; there have been strange things done in this neighbourhood. If you refuse to allay my suspicions, you confirm them.”The only answer he received was a powerful hand at the back of his neck, a sensation of being lifted with no increase of facilities for placid respiration; finally, a lateral movement of great rapidity through the air, and a loud sound as of a bang. Recovering reasonʼs prerogative, he found himself in a dahlia, whose blossoms, turned into heel–balls by the recent frost, were flapping round his countenance, and whose stake had gone through his waistcoat back, and grazed his coxendix, or something; he knows best what it was, as a medical man deeply interested.He had also a very unpleasant reminiscence of some such words as these, to which he had no responsive power—“You wonʼt take a hint like a gentleman; so take a hit like a blackguard.”Dr. Rufus Hutton was not the man to sit down quietly under an insult of any sort. At the moment he felt that brute force was irresistibly in the ascendant, and he was wonderfully calm about it. He shook himself, and smoothed his waistcoat,and tried the stretch of his garters; then never once looked toward the house, never shook his fist, nor frowned even. He walked off to his darling Polly as if nothing at all had happened; gave the man a shilling for holding her, after looking long for a sixpence; then mounted, and rode towards Nowelhurst Hall, showing no emotion whatever. Only Polly knew that burning tears of a brave manʼs sense of ignominy fell upon her glossy shoulder, and were fiercely wiped way.At the Hall he said nothing about it; never even mentioned that he had called at Garnetʼs cottage; but told Sir Cradock, like a true man, of Eoaʼs troubles, of her poor forlorn condition, and power of heart to feel it. He even contrived to interest the bereaved man, now so listless, in the young life thrown upon his care, as if by the breath of heaven. We are never so eloquent for another as when our own hearts are moved deeply by the feeling of wrong to ourselves; unless, indeed, we are very small, and that subject excludes all others.So it came to pass that the grand new carriage was ordered to the door, and Sir Cradock would himself have gone—only Rufus Hutton had left him, and the eloquence was oozing. The old man, therefore, turned back on the threshold, saying to himself that it would be hardly decent to appear in public yet; and Mrs. OʼGaghan was sent instead, sitting inside, and half afraid to breathe for fear of the crystal. As for her clothes, they weregood enough, she knew, for the Lord Mayorʼs coach. “Five–and–sixpence a yard, maʼam, lave alone trimming and binding.” But, knowing what she did of herbs, she could not answer for the peppermint.Of course, they did not intend to fetch poor Eoa home yet; but Biddy had orders to stay there until the young lady was moveable. Biddy took to her at once, in her heavy, long–drawn sleep, with the soft black lashes now and then lifting from the rich brown cheek.“An’ if she isnʼt illigant, then,” said Biddy to Mrs. Brown, “ate me wiʼout a purratie. Arl coom ov’ the blude, missus. Sazins, then, if me and Pat had oonly got a child this day! Belikes, maʼam, for the matter o’ that, a drap o’ whisky disagrays with you.”Biddy, feeling strongly moved, and burning to drink her new childʼs health, showed a bottle of brown potheen.“To tell you the truth, mem,” said Mrs. Brown, “I know nothing about them subjects. Spirituous liquors is a thing as has always been beyond me.”“Thin Iʼll clap it away again,” said Biddy, “and the divvil only the wiser. I never takes it alone, marm.”“It would ill become me, mem,” replied Mrs. Brown, “to be churlish in my own house, mem. I have heard of you very often, mem. Yes, I assure you I have, from the people as comes to bathe here,as a lady of great experience in diseases of the chest. If you recommend any cordial, mem, on the strength of your experience, for a female of weak witality, I should take it as a dooty, mem, strictly as a dooty to my husband and two darters.”“Arrah, then, Iʼm your femmale. Me witality goes crossways, like, till I has a drap o’ the crather.” And so they made a night of it, and Mr. Brown had some.

Eoa was now sixteen years old, tall, and lithe, and graceful as the creepers of tropic woodlands. Her face was of the clearest oval, a quick concise terse oval, such as we find in the eggs of wild birds rather than of tame ones. Her eyes were of bewildering brightness, always flashing, always in motion, rarely allowing the gazer a chance of guessing what their colour was. Very likely they were of no positive colour, but a pure dark lustre, such as a clear swift river has, when overhung by palm–trees. Her complexion, beautifully soft and even, was toned with a delicate eastern tinge, like that fawn–coloured light which sometimes flushes a cloudless sky before the midsummer sunrise. And her warm oriental blood suffused it, at the slightest emotion, as the leaping sun pervades that sky with a flood of limpid rubies.

She had never been flattened by education: all her qualities and feelings, like her beauty, were in excess. You could see it in the quick rise and fall of her breath, in the sudden grace of her movements, in the infinite variety of her attitudes and aspects.

Whatever she thought, she said at once; yet none ever called her a bold girl. Her modes of thought were as widely different from those of an English maiden, as a wild honeysuckle differs in form, habit, and scent, from a rose. She cared for no oneʼs opinion of her, any more than the wind cares how a tree swings; unless indeed it were one whom she loved, and then she would crawl to please him. For she loved with all her heart and soul, and hated with no less; and she always took care in either case to apprise the object of it. And yet, with all her depth of passion, Eoa was pure of heart and mind,—ay, as pure as our own Amy.

She soon recovered from her bruises, being perfectly healthy, and elastic as india–rubber. Nevertheless, she would not have been saved from that terrible sea but for the generosity of poor Captain Roberts, and the gallantry of Bob Garnet.

Now Bob was hurt rather seriously, and, being (as we are well aware) an uncommonly shy young fellow, he was greatly astonished, and shocked a little, when on the Friday morning a beautiful girl, very strangely dressed, ran to the side of his sofa, threw her arms round him, and kissed himtill he was out of breath, and his face was wet with the dew of her tears.

“Oh, please donʼt,” said Bob; “I am sure I donʼt deserve it.”

“Yes, you do; and I will marry you when I am old enough. I donʼt know what you are like, and I donʼt care two straws, directly they told me what you had done. Only I must have papaʼs leave. Kiss me again, I like it. Now where is my darling papa?”

“What, donʼt you know? Havenʼt they told you? Oh, poor thing!”

At the tone of his voice she leaped back, like a bird at the gun–flash, and stood with her little hands clasped on her head, her eyes with their deep light quivering, and the whole of her form swinging to and fro, from the wild push of sudden terror. Then she spoke with a hollow depth, which frightened Bob more than the kissing.

“They told me that he was well, gone to his brother somewhere, and I thought it wasnʼt like him to leave me so, and—tell me the truth, or Iʼll shake you to pieces.”

“No, donʼt,” said Bob, as she leaped at him; “I have had shaking enough.”

“Yes, you poor boy, and for my sake. I am a brute, I know. Tell me the truth, if you love me.”

“Your dear father is dead. But they have found his body.”

“Do you mean to say that God has been so wicked as to kill my father?”

“God knows best,” said Bob; he could think of nothing else to say.

“No, He doesnʼt. No, He doesnʼt. No, He never knows anything. He couldnʼt have known who he was, and how terribly I loved him, or He wouldnʼt have the heart to do it. Oh, you wicked boy; oh, you wicked boy! I will never forgive you for saving me. Hya, hya, hya!”

Bob never saw such a thing before, and never will again. And he wonʼt be much the loser; although the sight was magnificent. The screams and shrieks of the clearest voice that ever puzzled echo brought up the landlord and landlady, and our good friend Rufus Hutton, who had set forth full speed from home on hearing about theAliwal. He caught Eoa in his arms, carried her back to her room, and dosed her. He gave her some Indian specific, some powder of a narcotic fungus, which he had brought on purpose.

It stupefied her for nearly three days, and even then she awoke into the dreamy state of Nirwana, that bliss of semi–consciousness, like mild annihilation, into which the Buddha is absorbed, and to which all pious Buddhists look as their eternal happiness. Then she opened her delicate tapering arms, where you could see the grand muscles moving, but never once protruding, and she called for her darling father to come. Finding that he did not come, she was satisfied withsome trifling answer, and then wanted to have Bob instead; but neither was Bob forthcoming.

On the very day when Dr. Hutton came to look for Eoa, Mr. Garnet found himself getting better from that wretched low nervous fever into which his fright had thrown him. Then he asked Dr. Hutton whether there would be any danger in moving Robert, and, finding that there would be none whatever, if it were carefully managed, he ordered a carriage immediately, and with some of his ancient spirit. The Crown, which had the cross–bar of its N set up the wrong way (as is done, by–the–by, on the roof of Hampton Court chapel, and in many other places), made public claim to be regarded as a “commercial hotel and posting–house.” No Rushford folk having yet been known to post anything, except a letter at rare intervals, and a bill at rarer, this claim of the Crown had never been challenged, and strangers entertained a languid theoretical faith in it. But Mr. Brown looked very blue when Bull Garnet in reviving accents ordered “a chaise and pair at the door in half an hourʼs time; a roomy chaise, if you please, because my son must keep his feet up.”

“Yes, sir; yes, to be sure, sir; I quite understand, sir. It shall be attended to, sir.”

“Then why donʼt you go and order it?”

“To be sure, sir; I forgot. I will speak to Mrs. Brown, sir.”

Mrs. Brown, being a woman of resource, mounted the boy on her donkey, the only quadruped shepossessed, but a “wonner to go,” as the boy said, “when you knows the right place to prog him in,” and sent him post–haste to Lymington, whence the required conveyance arrived in about an hour and a half.

Rufus Hutton, having promised to be at home that evening, left Eoa to sleep off her heavy soporific, and followed the carriage on horseback; neither did he leave its track where the Ringwood Road turns off, for he had undertaken to tell Sir Cradock how his niece was getting on. He started nearly half an hour after the Lymington chaise, for Polly would never demean herself by trotting behind the “posters.” During that half–hour he drank hot brown brandy–and–water, although he could not bear it, to ingratiate him with Mrs. Brown for the sake of the poor Eoa. For Mrs. Brown had no other hot method of crowning the flowing bowl. And now, while I think of it, let me warn all gentle and simple people who deign on this tale of the New Forest, never to ask for pale brandy within the perambulations. How do you think they make it? By mixing brown brandy with villanous gin. Rufus was up to this, of course; and, as he must take something for the good of the house, and to get at the kindly kernel of the heavy–browed hostess, he took that which he thought would be least for his own evil. Then, leaving Mrs. Brown (who, of course, had taken her own glass at his sole charge and largesse, after fifty times “Oh no, sir, never! Oh Lord, how myBrown would be shocked!”), having imbued that good Mrs. Brown, who really was not a bad woman—which means that she was a good one, for women have no medium—with a strong aromatic impression that he was a pleasant gentleman, and no pride, not a bit of it, in him, no more than you nor me might,—off he trotted at a furious pace, smoking two cheroots at once.

I believe that there was and is—for I am happy to say that he still inhales the breeze of life down his cigar, and looks browner and redder than ever—I believe that, in spite of all his troubles in connexion with this story, which took a good deal out of him, there was and is no happier man in our merry England than the worthy Rufus Hutton. And, as all happiness is negative, and goes without our knowing it, and only becomes a positive past for us to look back upon, so his went before it came, and goes or eʼer it comes. And yet he enjoys it none the less; he multiplies it by three for the past and by nine for the future, and he never finds it necessary to deduct for the present moment.

Happy man who never thinks beyond salutary average, who can accept, in perfect faith, the traditions of his forbears, and yet is shrewd enough to hope that his grandsons will discard at least a portion of them,—who looks upon the passing life as a thing he need not move in, a world which must improve itself, and every day is doing it. And all the while he sympathises with his fellow–men, enjoys a bit of human nature, laughs at the cross–purposesof native truth and training, loves whatever he finds to be true, and does his best to foster it, is pleased with his after–dinner story, and feels universally charitable; then smiles at his wife, and kisses his children; and goes to bed with the firm conviction that they are worth all the rest put together.

Yet this manʼs happiness is not sound, because it is built upon selfishness.

In Nowelhurst village Dr. Hutton met Mark Stote, the gamekeeper, who begged him to stop for a moment, just to hear a word or two. Rufus, after hearing his news, resolved to take the upper road to the Hall, past Mr. Garnetʼs house; it was not so very far out of his way, and perhaps he might be of service there, and—ah, yes, Dr. Hutton, this last was the real motive, though you may not have thought so—what a fine opportunity to discover something which plagued him! Perhaps I ought to say rather, the want of which was plaguing him. Rufus took so kind an interest in his neighbours’ affairs, that anything not thoroughly luculent in their dealings, mode of life or speech, or management of their households, was to him the subject–matter of continual mental scratchings. Ah, how genteel a periphrase, worthy of Bailey Kettledrum; how happily we have shown our horror of that English monosyllable, beginning with the third vowel, which must be (according to Dr. Aldrich) the correlative of scratch! Score two, and go on after Dr. Hutton.

He overtook the Garnets twain just at their front gate, whence the house could not be seen, on account of a bank of evergreens. The maid came out with her cap flying off, and all her mind perturbed. Rufus Hutton, checking his mare, for the road was very narrow, heard the entire dialogue.

“Oh, sir! oh, master! have you heard of it? Such a thing, to be sure!”

“Heard of what, Sarah? Of course I have heard of the great disaster at Rushford.”

“No, no. Here, sir, here! The two big trees is down on the house. Itʼs a mussy as Nanny and me wasnʼt killed. And poor Miss Pearl have been in hysterics ever since, without no dinner. There, you can hear her screeching now, worse than the mangle, ever so much.”

Mr. Garnet did not say a word, but set off for the house full speed, even forgetting that Bob wanted help to get from the gate to the doorway.

Rufus Hutton jumped down from his mare, and called to the driver to come and hold her, just for a minute or two; no fear ofhishorses bolting. Then, helping Bob to limp along, he followed through the shrubbery. When they came within full view of the house, he was quite amazed at the mischief. The two oaks interlocked had fallen upon it, and, crashing as they did from the height above, the breaches they made were hideous. They had cloven the house into three ragged pieces, from the roof–ridge down to the first floor, where the solid joists had stopped them. It had happened in theafternoon of the second day of the tempest; when the heart of the storm was broken, but tremendous squalls came now and then from the bright north–west. Mr. Garnetʼs own bed was occupied by the tree which he detested. Pearl had screamed “Judgment, judgment!” and danced among the ruins; so the maid was telling Mr. Garnet, as he feared to enter his own door.

“Judgment for what?” asked Rufus Hutton, and Mr. Garnet seemed not to hear him.

“I am sure I donʼt know, sir,” answered the maid, “for none of us done any harm, sir; unless it was the bottle of pickled onions, when master were away, and there was very few of them left, sir, very few, I do declare to you, and we thought they was on the turn, sir, and it seemed such a pity to waste them. And please, sir, weʼve all been working like horses, though frightened out of our lives ‘most; and we fetched down all the things from your room, where the cupboards was broken open, for ‘fraid it should come on to rain, sir; and weʼve taken all our meals standing, sir; and made up a bed in the meat–screen, and another upon the dresser; and Miss Pearl, what turns she have given us—— Here she comes, I do declare.”

“Dr. Hutton,” said Bull Garnet, hastily, “good–bye; I am much obliged to you. I shall see you, I hope, next week. Good–bye, good–bye. Excuse me.”

But, before he could get him out of the way—for Rufus lingered strangely—Pearl Garnet cameinto the little hall, with her eyes distended fearfully. “There, there it is,” she cried, “there it is, I tell you! No wonder the tree came down upon it. No wonder the house was crushed for it.” And she pointed to a shattered box, tilted up endwise, among a heap of account–books, clothes, and furniture.

“Oh yes, you may look at it. To be sure you may look at it. God would not have it hidden longer. I have done my best, God knows, and my heart knows, and my—I mean that man there knows. Is there anything more I can do for you, anything more,dear father? You have done so much for me, you know. And I will only ask you one little thing—put me in his coffin.”

“The girl is raving,” cried Mr. Garnet. “Poor thing, it comes from her mother.”

“No, it comes from her father,” said Pearl, going boldly up to him, and fixing her large bright eyes upon his. “Do as you like with me; I donʼt care; but donʼt put it on any one else. Oh, father, father, father!”

Moaning, she turned away from him; and then sprang into his arms with shrieks. He lifted her tenderly, and forgot all about his own safety. His great tears fell on her wan, sick face; and his heavy heart throbbed for his daughter only, as he felt hers bounding perilously. He carried her off to an inner room, and left them to their own devices.

“I should like uncommonly,” said Rufus Hutton,rubbing his chin, “to know what is in that box. Indeed, I feel it my duty at once to ascertain.”

“No, you shanʼt,” cried Bob, limping across in front of it; “I know no more than you do, sir. But I wonʼt have fatherʼs things pryed into.”

“You are very polite,” replied the Doctor; “a chip of the old block, I perceive. But, perhaps, you will believe me, my boy, when I tell you that, if ever there was a gentleman totally devoid of improper curiosity, it is Dr. Rufus Hutton, sir.”

“Oh, I am so glad,” said Bob; “because you wonʼt be disappointed, then.”

Rufus grinned, in spite of his wrath; but he was not to be baffled so easily. He could not push poor Bob aside, in his present disabled state, without being guilty of cowardice. So he called in an auxiliary.

“Betsy, my dear, your young mistress wished me just to examine that box. Be kind enough to bring it to the light here, unless it is too heavy for your little hands.”

Oh, if he had only said “Miss Sarah,” what a difference it might have made!

“Betsy, indeed!” cried Sarah, who had followed her mistress, but, being locked out, had come back to see the end of it; “my name, sir, is nothing so low as that. My name is Sarah Mackarness, sir, very much at your service; and my mother keeps a potato–shop, the largest business in Lyndhurst, sir. Betsy, indeed! and from a stranger, not to say a strange gentleman, for fear of making a mistake.And as for my hands”—she thought he had been ironical, for her hands were above regulation size—“my hands are such as pleased God to make them, and honest hands, anyhow, and doesnʼt want to interfere with other peopleʼs business. Oh, what will poor Nanny say, to think of me, Sarah Mackarness, be permiscuous called Betsy?”

At this moment, when Sarah Mackarness, having recovered breath, was starting into another native discourse on prænomina, and Rufus was calling upon his resources for some constitutional measure, Bull Garnet came back, treading heavily, defiant of all that the world could do. His quick eyes, never glimpsing that way, but taking in all the room at once, espied the box unmeddled with, and Bob upon guard in front of it. He was his own man now again. What did he care for anybody, so long as he had his children?

“Dr. Hutton, I thought that you were gone.”

“You see I am not,” said Rufus, squaring his elbows, and looking big, for he was a plucky little fellow, “and, whatʼs more, I donʼt mean to go till I know what is in that box.”

“Box, box!” cried Bull Garnet, striking his enormous forehead, as if to recall something; “have we a box of yours, Dr. Hutton?”

“No, no; that box ofyours. Your daughter told us to examine it. And, from her manner, I believe that I am bound to do so.”

“Bound to examine one of my boxes!” Bull Garnet never looked once that way, and Rufustook note of the strange avoidance; “my boxes are full of confidential papers; surely, sir, you have caught my daughterʼs—I mean to say, you are labouring under some hallucination.”

“There are no papers in that box. The contents of it are metal. I have seen one article already through the broken cover, and shall not forget its shape. Beware; there have been strange things done in this neighbourhood. If you refuse to allay my suspicions, you confirm them.”

The only answer he received was a powerful hand at the back of his neck, a sensation of being lifted with no increase of facilities for placid respiration; finally, a lateral movement of great rapidity through the air, and a loud sound as of a bang. Recovering reasonʼs prerogative, he found himself in a dahlia, whose blossoms, turned into heel–balls by the recent frost, were flapping round his countenance, and whose stake had gone through his waistcoat back, and grazed his coxendix, or something; he knows best what it was, as a medical man deeply interested.

He had also a very unpleasant reminiscence of some such words as these, to which he had no responsive power—“You wonʼt take a hint like a gentleman; so take a hit like a blackguard.”

Dr. Rufus Hutton was not the man to sit down quietly under an insult of any sort. At the moment he felt that brute force was irresistibly in the ascendant, and he was wonderfully calm about it. He shook himself, and smoothed his waistcoat,and tried the stretch of his garters; then never once looked toward the house, never shook his fist, nor frowned even. He walked off to his darling Polly as if nothing at all had happened; gave the man a shilling for holding her, after looking long for a sixpence; then mounted, and rode towards Nowelhurst Hall, showing no emotion whatever. Only Polly knew that burning tears of a brave manʼs sense of ignominy fell upon her glossy shoulder, and were fiercely wiped way.

At the Hall he said nothing about it; never even mentioned that he had called at Garnetʼs cottage; but told Sir Cradock, like a true man, of Eoaʼs troubles, of her poor forlorn condition, and power of heart to feel it. He even contrived to interest the bereaved man, now so listless, in the young life thrown upon his care, as if by the breath of heaven. We are never so eloquent for another as when our own hearts are moved deeply by the feeling of wrong to ourselves; unless, indeed, we are very small, and that subject excludes all others.

So it came to pass that the grand new carriage was ordered to the door, and Sir Cradock would himself have gone—only Rufus Hutton had left him, and the eloquence was oozing. The old man, therefore, turned back on the threshold, saying to himself that it would be hardly decent to appear in public yet; and Mrs. OʼGaghan was sent instead, sitting inside, and half afraid to breathe for fear of the crystal. As for her clothes, they weregood enough, she knew, for the Lord Mayorʼs coach. “Five–and–sixpence a yard, maʼam, lave alone trimming and binding.” But, knowing what she did of herbs, she could not answer for the peppermint.

Of course, they did not intend to fetch poor Eoa home yet; but Biddy had orders to stay there until the young lady was moveable. Biddy took to her at once, in her heavy, long–drawn sleep, with the soft black lashes now and then lifting from the rich brown cheek.

“An’ if she isnʼt illigant, then,” said Biddy to Mrs. Brown, “ate me wiʼout a purratie. Arl coom ov’ the blude, missus. Sazins, then, if me and Pat had oonly got a child this day! Belikes, maʼam, for the matter o’ that, a drap o’ whisky disagrays with you.”

Biddy, feeling strongly moved, and burning to drink her new childʼs health, showed a bottle of brown potheen.

“To tell you the truth, mem,” said Mrs. Brown, “I know nothing about them subjects. Spirituous liquors is a thing as has always been beyond me.”

“Thin Iʼll clap it away again,” said Biddy, “and the divvil only the wiser. I never takes it alone, marm.”

“It would ill become me, mem,” replied Mrs. Brown, “to be churlish in my own house, mem. I have heard of you very often, mem. Yes, I assure you I have, from the people as comes to bathe here,as a lady of great experience in diseases of the chest. If you recommend any cordial, mem, on the strength of your experience, for a female of weak witality, I should take it as a dooty, mem, strictly as a dooty to my husband and two darters.”

“Arrah, then, Iʼm your femmale. Me witality goes crossways, like, till I has a drap o’ the crather.” And so they made a night of it, and Mr. Brown had some.

CHAPTER VII.Leave we now, with story pending, Biddy and Eoa, Pearl, and even Amy; thee, too, rare Bull, and thee, O Rufus, overcast with anger. It is time to track the steps of him whom Fortune, blithe at her cruel trade, shall track as far as Gades, Cantaber, and wild Syrtes, where the Moorish billow is for ever heaving. Will he exclaim with the poet, who certainly was a jolly mortal,—“I praise her while she is my guest. If she flap her nimble wings, I renounce her charities; and wrap me in my manhood robe, and woo the upright poverty, the bride without a dower.” “A very fine sentiment, Master Horace; but were you not a little too fond even of Sabine and Lesbian—when the Massic juice was beyond your credit—to do anything more thanfeelit?”As Cradock Nowell trudged that night towards the Brockenhurst Station, before he got very far from Amy, and while her tears were still on hischeek, he felt a little timid lick, a weak offering of sympathy.Hereby black Wena made known to him that she was melted by his misfortunes, and saw that the right and most feeling course, and the one most pleasing to her dead master, was the transfer of her allegiance, and the swearing of fealty to the brother. To which conclusion the tender mode in which she was being carried conduced, perhaps, considerably; for she was wrapped in Claytonʼs woolly jacket, enthroned on Cradockʼs broad right arm, and with only her black nose exposed to the moon. So she jogged along very comfortably, until she had made up her mind, and given Cradock the kiss of seisin.“Dear little thing,” he cried, for he looked on her now as Amyʼs keepsake, “you shall go with me wherever I go. You are faithful enough to starve with me; but you shall not starve until after me.”Then he put her down, for he thought that a little run would do her good, and, in spite of all her misery, Amy had kept her pretty plump, plumper than she herself was; and it became no joke to carry her, with a travelling–bag, &c., after the first half mile.Then Wena capered about, and barked, and came and licked his shoe, and offered to carry the coat for him. As he would not let her do this, she occupied her mind with the rabbits, which were out upon the feed largely, and were the lastshe would see for a long while, except the fat Ostenders.When he got to London, and took small lodgings at a Mrs. Ducksacreʼs, “greengrocer and general fruiterer, Mortimer–street, Cavendish–square,”—I quote from the ladyʼs bags: confound it, there! I am always saying improper things;honi soit—I mean, of course, her paper bags—it was not long before he made two important discoveries, valuable rather than gratifying.The first of these discoveries was, that our university portals are a mere side–postern, and not the greatjanua mundi. He found his classical scholarship, his early fame at Oxford, his love of elegant literature, rather a disadvantage than a recommendation for business.“Prigs, sir, prigs,” said a member of an eminent City firm; “of course, I donʼt mean to be personal; but I have always found you Oxford men prigs, quite unfit for desk–work. You fancy you know so much; you are always discovering mareʼs–nests, and you wonʼt bear to be spoken to, even if you stick to your work; which, I assure you, is quite the exception. Then you hold yourself aloof, with your stupid etiquette, from the other young men, who are quite as good as you are. I assure you, the place was too hot to hold us with the last Oxford man we took in the counting–house; he gave himself such airs, the donkey! I vowed never to do it again: and I never will, sir. Goodmorning, sir; Gregson, show this gentleman the way out.”Gregson did so with a grin, for Cradockʼs face proved that the principal had not been altogether wrong.Is this prejudice, or, rather, perhaps, I should say, this aversion, disappearing now–a–days, or is it upon the increase? At any rate, one cause of it is being removed most rapidly; for the buckram etiquette of Oxford will soon become a tradition. We will only hope she may not run too far into the free and easy.Cradockʼs other discovery was that 50l.is no large capital to commence in life with, especially when the owner does not find his start prepared for him; fails to prepare it for himself; and has never been used to economy. He would not apply to any of his fatherʼs friends, or of the people whom he had known in London, to help him in this emergency. He would rather starve than do that; for he had dropped all name and claim of Nowell, and cut his life in twain at manhood; and the parts should never join again. Only one feeling should be common to the two existences, to the happy and the wretched life; that one feeling was the love of Amy, and, what now seemed part of it, his gratitude to her father.John Rosedew had given him a letter to a clergyman in London, a man of high standing and extensive influence, whom John had known atcollege. But the youth had not undertaken to deliver that credential, and he never did so. It would have kept him to his identity, which (so far as the world was concerned) he wished to change entirely, immediately, and irrevocably. So he called himself “Nowell” no longer—although the name is common enough in one form or another: the Nowells of Nowelhurst, however, are proud of the doublel, and think a good deal of thew—and Cradock Nowell became “Charles Newman,” without license of Her Majesty.Even before his vain attempts to enter the stronghold of commerce, and before he had learned that Oxford men are not thought “prima virorum,” he had lifted the latch of literature, but the door would not swing back for him. Themare magnum—to mix metaphors, although bars are added to the Lucrine—themare magnumof letters was more like his native element; and, if he once could have gotten—bare–footed as we must be—over the jagged rocks which hedge that sea, I believe he might have swum there.In one respect he was fortunate. The publishers upon whom he called were gentlemen, and told him the truth.“Oh, poetry!” exclaimed one and all, as their eyes fell upon his manuscript, “we cannot take it on our own account; and, if we published it at your expense, we should only be robbing you.”“Indeed!” replied Cradock, in the first surprise;“is there no chance, then, of a sale for it?”“None whatever. Poetry, unless it be some oneʼs whose name is well known, is a perfect drug in the market. In the course of ten or a dozen years, by advertising continually, by influence among the reviewers, by hitting some popular vein, or being taken up by some authority, you might attain an audience. Are you ready to encounter all this? Even if you are, we must decline, we are sorry to say, to have anything to do with it.”“Verse, eh? Better have cut your throat,” more tersely replied an elderly gentleman, well known for his rudeness to authors. However, even that last was a friend, when compared with some whom it might have been his evil luck to consult. They advertise their patent methods of putting a work before the public, without any risk to the author, &c. &c. Disinterested gentlemen! They are to have no profit whatever, except from the sale of the work, and they know they wonʼt sell five copies.However, there are not many of this sort in an honourable and most important profession; and Cradock Nowell was lucky enough not to fall in with any of them. So he accepted the verdict so unanimously returned, and stored away with a heavy heart his laborious little manuscript. It was only a translation in verse of the Halieutics, and a fewshort original pieces—the former at any rate valuable, as having been revised by John Rosedew.There are courts and alleys in the neighbourhood of Mortimer–street which, for misery and poverty, dirt and desperation, may vie with almost any of the more famous shames of London.Cradockʼs own great trouble, the sympathy he had met with, and the comfort he received from it, had begun by this time to soften his heart, and render it more sensitive to the distress of others. At first, it had been far otherwise. The feeling of bitter injustice, resentment at, and defiance of, a blow which seemed to him so unmerited, and, worse than all, his own fatherʼs base and low mistrust of him—who could have been surprised if these things, acting upon a sad lone heart, and a bold mind beginning to think for itself, had made the owner an infidel? And very likely they would have done so, when he was removed from John Rosedewʼs influence, but for that scene with Amy. He loved that girl so warmly, so devotedly, so purely, that, when he found his love returned in equal quantity and quality, it renewed his faith in justice. He saw that there is a measure and law, even where all appears to be anarchy and anomaly; that the hand of God is not stretched forth upon His children wantonly; that we cannot gauge His circling survey by the three–inch space between human eyes, neither does He rest His balance on His earthly footstool. So Cradock escaped the deadly harm, which almost seems designed to poisethat noblest gift of Heaven—a free and glorious intellect—he escaped it through the mercy which gave him true affection.And now once more he looked with love upon his fellow–men, such love as the frigid atheist school shall never form nor educate—which truth alone to a great heart might be conclusive against that school—the love which few religions except our own inculcate, and no other takes for its essence.As yet he was too young to know the blind and inhuman selfishness, the formality and truckling, and the other paltry dishonesties, which still exist and try to cheat us under the name of “Society.” The cant is going by already. Every man who dares to think knows that its laws are obsolete, because they have not for their basis either of these three—truth, simplicity, charity.Even that young man was astonished at the manner in which society ignores its broader and only true meaning—fellowship among men—and renounces all other duties, save that of shaking from its shoes its fellow–dust. He could not look upon the scenes so nigh to him, and to each other, parted often by nothing more than nine inches of brick or two inches of deal; the wealth and the want, the feast and the famine, the satiety and the ravening, the euphemy and the blasphemy—though sometimes that last got inside the door, blew its nose, and was infidelity; the prudery and the indecency, the whispered lie and the yelled one, thesale of maidens by their mothers, or of women by themselves—though here again the difference was never very perceptible; all this impious contrast, spread as if for Godʼs approval, for the Universal Fatherʼs blessing, in the land most chiefly blessed by Him: which of His sons, not cast out for ever, could look on it without weeping?Cradock did something more than weep. He went with his little stock of money, though he knew it could not do much; and he tried to help in little ways, though as yet he had no experience. He bought meat, and clothes, and took things out of pawn, and tried to make peace where fights were.At first he was grossly insulted, as a meddlesome swell; but, when he had done two or three good things, and done them as a brother should, he began to be owned among them. In one thing he was right, although he had no experience; he confined his exertions to a very narrow compass. Of course he got imposed upon—of course he helped the unworthy; but after a while he began to know them, and even the unworthy—some two hundred per cent.—began to have faint ideas of trying to deserve good luck.One man who attempted to pick Cradʼs pocket was knocked down by the biggest thief there. “I wish I had a heap of money,” said Cradock, every day; “I must keep some for myself, I suppose. Perhaps, after all, I was wrong, in throwing up so hastily my chance of doing good.”Then he remembered that, but for his trouble, he might never have thought of the good to be done. And the good done to him was threefold as much as he could do to others. Every day he grew less selfish, less imperious, less exacting; every day he saw more clearly the good which is in the worst of us.There is a flint of peculiar character—I know not the local name of it—which is found sometimes on the great Chissel Bank, and away towards Lyme Regis. It is as hard, and sullen, and dull a flint (with even the outside polish lost from the chafing of the waves)—a stone as grey and foggy–looking;—as ever Deucalion took the trouble to cast away over the left into an empty world. Yet it has, through the heart of it, traversing it from pole to pole (for its shape is always conical) a thread, a spindle, a siphuncle, of the richest golden hue. None but those who are used to it can see the head of the golden column, can even guess its existence. The stone is not hollow; it is quite distinct from all pudding–stones and conglomerates.Many such flints poor Crad came across, and sought in vain for the beauty of them. He never tried to split them with a hammer, as too many do of our Boanergæ; but he was too young to see or feel the chord of the golden siphuncle. One, especially, one great fellow, was harder and rougher than any flint, like the matrix of the concentric jasper.“Confound that fellow,” said Cradock to himself;“I never shall get at the heart of him. If my pluck were up a little more. Iʼd fight him; though I know he would lick me. Heʼd be sorry for me afterwards.”Issachar Jupp could lick any two men in the court. He was a bargee, of good intentions—at least, when he took to the cuddy; but his horses had pulled crosswise ever since; and the devil knew, better than the angels, what his nature now was.“None of your d—d Scripture–reading for me!” he cried, when Cradock came near him; though the young man had never attempted anything of the sort.He knew that the Word of God is not bread to a blackguardʼs empty belly. And another thing he knew—that he was not of the age and aspect for John Bunyanʼs business. Moreover, Jupp was wonderfully jealous of his wife, a gentle but grimy woman, forty–five years old, whom he larruped every day; although he might be an infidel, he would ensure his wifeʼs fidelity. Nevertheless, he had his pure vein, and Cradock at last got at it.Mrs. and Miss Ducksacre were very good–hearted women, but, like many other women of that fibre, whose education has been neglected, of a hot and hasty order. Not that we need suppose the pepper to be neutralized by the refinement, only to be absorbed more equably, and transfused more generally.A little thing came feeling the way into the narrow, dingy shop, one dark November evening, groping along by the sacks of potatoes (all of them “seconds,” for the firm did not deal much in “Ware Regents”), feeling its way along the sacks which towered above its head, like bulky snow–giants embrowned with thaw; and then by the legs of the “tatie–bin,” with the great scales hanging above it, and then by the heap of lighting–wood, piled in halfpenny bundles, with the ends against the wall; and so the little thing emerged between two mighty hills of coleworts, and under the frugal gas–burner, and congratulated itself, with a hug of the heart, upon safety.“Take care, my dear,” cried Mrs. Ducksacre, looking large behind the counter, “or youʼll tumble down the coal–trap, where the black bogeys lives. Bless my heart, if it ainʼt little Loo! Why, Loo, I hardly knew you. You ainʼt looking like yourself a bit, child. And who sent you out at this time of night? What a shame, to be sure!”Loo, the pride of Issachar Jupp, was rather a pretty little body, about three and a half years old, “going on for four,” as she loved to say, if anybody asked her; and her pale but clean face would have beenverypretty, if her mother would have let her hair alone. But it was all combed back, and tied tightly behind, like the tail of a horse at a fair, or as affording a spout to pour the little girl out by. She looked up at Mrs. Ducksacre, while her fingers played with the coleworts, for her hands were hot,and this cooled them; and then, with the instinct of nature, she stuck up for her father and mother.“Pease, maʼam, Loo not fray much,”—though her trembling frock belied her, all over the throat and the heart of it—“and father don from home, maʼam, on the Wasintote” [Basingstoke canal], “and mother dot nobody, onʼy Loo, to do thins. And she send this, ‘cause Looʼs poor troat be bad, maʼam.”The little child, whose throat was tied up with worn flannel from the char–bucket, with the grey edge still upon it, wriggled in and out of her shape and self, in the way only children can do; and at length drew, from some innermost shrine, a halfpenny and a farthing.“And what am I to give you for it, Loo? Oh, you poor little thing, how very hoarse you are!”Loo, with a confidence in human nature purely non–Londinian, had placed her cash upon the altar, upon the inside of which so many worship, while on the outside so many are sacrificed; without circumlocution, the counter. Her eyes were below the rim of it, till she stood upon tiptoe with one foot, while the other was up in the colewort roots, and then she could see the money, and she poked out her little lips at it, as if she would fain suck it back again.“Pease, maʼam, Looʼs troat so bad, mother are goin to make a ‘tew, tree haʼporth of tipe and a haʼporth of ‘egents, and a fardy of inons!”“What a splendid stew, Loo!” said Mrs. Ducksacre,seeming to smell it; “and so you want a haʼporth of taties, and a farthingʼs worth of onions. And you shall have them, my dear, and as good a three farthings’ worth as ever was put up in London. Where are you going to put them all?”Loo opened her sore throat, and pointed down it. She had not yet lost her appetite; and that child did love tripe so.“No, no, I donʼt mean that, Loo. I know you have a nice room inside; though some will be for mother, wonʼt it, now? I mean, how are you going to carry it home?”“In Looʼs pinney,” replied the child, delighted with her success; for ever so many people had told her, that the Ducksacres now were getting so high, they would soon leave off making farthings–worths; and any tradesman who does that is above the sphere of the street–child.“My dear, your pinney wonʼt hold them, potatoes are so cheap now”—she had just sworn they were awfully dear to a person she disliked—“I am sure you canʼt carry a haʼporth. Oh, Mr. Newman, you are so good–natured”—Cradock was just coming in, rather glum from another failure—“I really donʼt believe you would think you were bemeaning yourself by going home with this poor little atom.”“I should rather hope I would not,” replied Cradock, looking grand.“Oh, I did not know. I beg your pardon, Iʼm sure. I would go myself, only Sally is out, andthe boy gone home ever so long ago. I beg your pardon, Iʼm sure, Mr. Newman; I thought you were so good–natured.”“Mrs. Ducksacre,” said Cradock, “you utterly misunderstand me. I replied to the form of your sentence, perhaps, rather than to its meaning. What I meant was, that I should rather hope I would not think it below me to go home with this little dear. If I could suppose it any disgrace to me, I should deserve to be kicked by your errand–boy all round this shop, Mrs. Ducksacre; and I am surprised you misunderstand me so. Why, I know this little girl well; and her name is Louisa Jupp.”“Tiss Loo,” said the little child, standing up on tiptoe, and spreading out her arms to Cradock. All the children loved him, as the little ones at Nowelhurst would run after Mr. Rosedew. Children are even better judges of character than dogs.“Why, you poor little soul,” said Crad, as he seated her on his strong right arm with her little cheek to his, and she drew a thousand straws of light through her lashes from the gas–jet, which she had never yet been so close to, “how hot and dry your lips are! I hope you are not taking the—sickness”—he was going to say “fever,” but feared to frighten Loo.“Mother fray,” cried the small girl, proud of the importance accruing to her, “Loo dot wever; Irishers dot bad wever on the foor below mother.Loo det nice thins, and lay abed, if me dot the wever.”“Put the poor childʼs things, whatever they are, in a basket, Mrs. Ducksacre. How odd her little legs feel! And a shillingʼs worth of grapes, if you please, in a bag by themselves. Hereʼs the money for them. You know Iʼll bring back the basket. But the bags donʼt come back, do they?”“No, sir, of course not. Half–a–crown a gross for the small ones, with the name and the cross–handle basket, and the cabbage and carrots, sir. Sixpence more for cornopean–pattern with a pineapple, and grapes and oranges. But lor, sir, the cornopean” [cornucopiæ] “would frighten half our customers. The basket–pattern pays better for an advertisement than to get them back again, even if parties would bring them, which I knows well they never would, sir.”Then Cradock set forth with the child on his arm, his coat thrown over his shoulders, and the best shillingʼs worth of foreign grapes—Mrs. Ducksacre never bought English ones—and the best three farthingʼs worth of potatoes and onions that was made that day by any tradesman in any part of London, not excluding “them low costers,” as the Ducksacre firm expressed it.Little Loo Juppʼs sore throat proved to be, as Cradock feared it would, the first symptom of scarlet fever; and the young man had the pleasure—one of the highest and purest pleasures which any man can have—of saving a human life. Hewatched that trembling flame of life, and fostered it, and sheltered it, as if “the hopes of a nation hung”—as the penny–a–liners love to say of some babe not a whit more valuable—upon its feeble flicker. He hired another room for her, where the air was purer; he made the doctor attend to the case, which at first that doctor cared little to do; he brought her many a trifling comfort; in a word, he waited upon her so that the old women of the court called him thenceforth “Nurse Newman.”“What, you here again, you white–livered young sneak!” cried Issachar Jupp, reeling in at the door, just as Cradock was coming out; “take that, then——” and he lifted a great oak bludgeon, newly cut from the towing–path of the Basingstoke Canal. If Cradock had not been as quick as lightning, and caught the stick over the bargemanʼs shoulder, there would have been weeping and wailing and a lifelong woe for Amy.“Hush,” he said; “donʼt make such a noise, man. Your child is at the point of death, in the room overhead.”Poor Crad, naturally of a bright complexion, but pale from long unhappiness, might now have retorted the compliment as to the “pallor jecoris.” The bargee turned so pale, that he looked like a collierʼs tablecloth. Then he planted his heavy stick on the ground; else he would have lain flat on his threshold.“My Loo, my Loo!” was all he could say; “oh my Loo!Itʼs a lie, sir!”“I wish it was,” replied Cradock; “take my arm, Mr. Jupp. Donʼt be over–frightened. We hope with all our hearts to save her, and to–night we shall know. Already I think I perceive some change in her breathing, though her tongue is like a furnace.”He spoke with a tone and in a voice which no man ever has described, nor shall, but which every born man feels to be genuine, long ere he can think.“[Condemn] me for a [sanguineous] fool,” cried Jupp, with two enormous tears guttering down the coal–dust, and his great chest heaving and wanting to sob, only it didnʼt know the way; “[condemn] my eyes for swearing so, and making such a [female dog] of myself, but what the [Hades] am I to do? Oh my Loo, my Loo! If you die, Iʼll go to [Hades] after you.”Excuse me for washing out this speech to regulation weakness; perhaps it was entered in white on high, as the turn of a life of blackness.Cradock turned away, and trembled. Who can see a rugged man split to the bottom of his nature, and not himself be splintered? I donʼt believe that any can: not even the cold iron scoundrels whom modern plays delight in.“Now come up with me, Mr. Jupp,” said Crad, taking care not to look at him, “out at this door,in at the other. Poor little soul! she has been so good. You canʼt think how good she has been. And she has taken her medicine so nicely.”“Pray God Almighty not to [condemn] me, for not [condemning] myself enough,” said Issachar Jupp, below his breath, as he leaned on Cradockʼs arm.It was his form of prayer; and it meant more than most of ours do. Though I may be discarded by turtle–dove quill–drivers for daring to record it, will he ever be worse for uttering it? Of course, it was very shocking; but far more so to men than to angels.

Leave we now, with story pending, Biddy and Eoa, Pearl, and even Amy; thee, too, rare Bull, and thee, O Rufus, overcast with anger. It is time to track the steps of him whom Fortune, blithe at her cruel trade, shall track as far as Gades, Cantaber, and wild Syrtes, where the Moorish billow is for ever heaving. Will he exclaim with the poet, who certainly was a jolly mortal,—“I praise her while she is my guest. If she flap her nimble wings, I renounce her charities; and wrap me in my manhood robe, and woo the upright poverty, the bride without a dower.” “A very fine sentiment, Master Horace; but were you not a little too fond even of Sabine and Lesbian—when the Massic juice was beyond your credit—to do anything more thanfeelit?”

As Cradock Nowell trudged that night towards the Brockenhurst Station, before he got very far from Amy, and while her tears were still on hischeek, he felt a little timid lick, a weak offering of sympathy.

Hereby black Wena made known to him that she was melted by his misfortunes, and saw that the right and most feeling course, and the one most pleasing to her dead master, was the transfer of her allegiance, and the swearing of fealty to the brother. To which conclusion the tender mode in which she was being carried conduced, perhaps, considerably; for she was wrapped in Claytonʼs woolly jacket, enthroned on Cradockʼs broad right arm, and with only her black nose exposed to the moon. So she jogged along very comfortably, until she had made up her mind, and given Cradock the kiss of seisin.

“Dear little thing,” he cried, for he looked on her now as Amyʼs keepsake, “you shall go with me wherever I go. You are faithful enough to starve with me; but you shall not starve until after me.”

Then he put her down, for he thought that a little run would do her good, and, in spite of all her misery, Amy had kept her pretty plump, plumper than she herself was; and it became no joke to carry her, with a travelling–bag, &c., after the first half mile.

Then Wena capered about, and barked, and came and licked his shoe, and offered to carry the coat for him. As he would not let her do this, she occupied her mind with the rabbits, which were out upon the feed largely, and were the lastshe would see for a long while, except the fat Ostenders.

When he got to London, and took small lodgings at a Mrs. Ducksacreʼs, “greengrocer and general fruiterer, Mortimer–street, Cavendish–square,”—I quote from the ladyʼs bags: confound it, there! I am always saying improper things;honi soit—I mean, of course, her paper bags—it was not long before he made two important discoveries, valuable rather than gratifying.

The first of these discoveries was, that our university portals are a mere side–postern, and not the greatjanua mundi. He found his classical scholarship, his early fame at Oxford, his love of elegant literature, rather a disadvantage than a recommendation for business.

“Prigs, sir, prigs,” said a member of an eminent City firm; “of course, I donʼt mean to be personal; but I have always found you Oxford men prigs, quite unfit for desk–work. You fancy you know so much; you are always discovering mareʼs–nests, and you wonʼt bear to be spoken to, even if you stick to your work; which, I assure you, is quite the exception. Then you hold yourself aloof, with your stupid etiquette, from the other young men, who are quite as good as you are. I assure you, the place was too hot to hold us with the last Oxford man we took in the counting–house; he gave himself such airs, the donkey! I vowed never to do it again: and I never will, sir. Goodmorning, sir; Gregson, show this gentleman the way out.”

Gregson did so with a grin, for Cradockʼs face proved that the principal had not been altogether wrong.

Is this prejudice, or, rather, perhaps, I should say, this aversion, disappearing now–a–days, or is it upon the increase? At any rate, one cause of it is being removed most rapidly; for the buckram etiquette of Oxford will soon become a tradition. We will only hope she may not run too far into the free and easy.

Cradockʼs other discovery was that 50l.is no large capital to commence in life with, especially when the owner does not find his start prepared for him; fails to prepare it for himself; and has never been used to economy. He would not apply to any of his fatherʼs friends, or of the people whom he had known in London, to help him in this emergency. He would rather starve than do that; for he had dropped all name and claim of Nowell, and cut his life in twain at manhood; and the parts should never join again. Only one feeling should be common to the two existences, to the happy and the wretched life; that one feeling was the love of Amy, and, what now seemed part of it, his gratitude to her father.

John Rosedew had given him a letter to a clergyman in London, a man of high standing and extensive influence, whom John had known atcollege. But the youth had not undertaken to deliver that credential, and he never did so. It would have kept him to his identity, which (so far as the world was concerned) he wished to change entirely, immediately, and irrevocably. So he called himself “Nowell” no longer—although the name is common enough in one form or another: the Nowells of Nowelhurst, however, are proud of the doublel, and think a good deal of thew—and Cradock Nowell became “Charles Newman,” without license of Her Majesty.

Even before his vain attempts to enter the stronghold of commerce, and before he had learned that Oxford men are not thought “prima virorum,” he had lifted the latch of literature, but the door would not swing back for him. Themare magnum—to mix metaphors, although bars are added to the Lucrine—themare magnumof letters was more like his native element; and, if he once could have gotten—bare–footed as we must be—over the jagged rocks which hedge that sea, I believe he might have swum there.

In one respect he was fortunate. The publishers upon whom he called were gentlemen, and told him the truth.

“Oh, poetry!” exclaimed one and all, as their eyes fell upon his manuscript, “we cannot take it on our own account; and, if we published it at your expense, we should only be robbing you.”

“Indeed!” replied Cradock, in the first surprise;“is there no chance, then, of a sale for it?”

“None whatever. Poetry, unless it be some oneʼs whose name is well known, is a perfect drug in the market. In the course of ten or a dozen years, by advertising continually, by influence among the reviewers, by hitting some popular vein, or being taken up by some authority, you might attain an audience. Are you ready to encounter all this? Even if you are, we must decline, we are sorry to say, to have anything to do with it.”

“Verse, eh? Better have cut your throat,” more tersely replied an elderly gentleman, well known for his rudeness to authors. However, even that last was a friend, when compared with some whom it might have been his evil luck to consult. They advertise their patent methods of putting a work before the public, without any risk to the author, &c. &c. Disinterested gentlemen! They are to have no profit whatever, except from the sale of the work, and they know they wonʼt sell five copies.

However, there are not many of this sort in an honourable and most important profession; and Cradock Nowell was lucky enough not to fall in with any of them. So he accepted the verdict so unanimously returned, and stored away with a heavy heart his laborious little manuscript. It was only a translation in verse of the Halieutics, and a fewshort original pieces—the former at any rate valuable, as having been revised by John Rosedew.

There are courts and alleys in the neighbourhood of Mortimer–street which, for misery and poverty, dirt and desperation, may vie with almost any of the more famous shames of London.

Cradockʼs own great trouble, the sympathy he had met with, and the comfort he received from it, had begun by this time to soften his heart, and render it more sensitive to the distress of others. At first, it had been far otherwise. The feeling of bitter injustice, resentment at, and defiance of, a blow which seemed to him so unmerited, and, worse than all, his own fatherʼs base and low mistrust of him—who could have been surprised if these things, acting upon a sad lone heart, and a bold mind beginning to think for itself, had made the owner an infidel? And very likely they would have done so, when he was removed from John Rosedewʼs influence, but for that scene with Amy. He loved that girl so warmly, so devotedly, so purely, that, when he found his love returned in equal quantity and quality, it renewed his faith in justice. He saw that there is a measure and law, even where all appears to be anarchy and anomaly; that the hand of God is not stretched forth upon His children wantonly; that we cannot gauge His circling survey by the three–inch space between human eyes, neither does He rest His balance on His earthly footstool. So Cradock escaped the deadly harm, which almost seems designed to poisethat noblest gift of Heaven—a free and glorious intellect—he escaped it through the mercy which gave him true affection.

And now once more he looked with love upon his fellow–men, such love as the frigid atheist school shall never form nor educate—which truth alone to a great heart might be conclusive against that school—the love which few religions except our own inculcate, and no other takes for its essence.

As yet he was too young to know the blind and inhuman selfishness, the formality and truckling, and the other paltry dishonesties, which still exist and try to cheat us under the name of “Society.” The cant is going by already. Every man who dares to think knows that its laws are obsolete, because they have not for their basis either of these three—truth, simplicity, charity.

Even that young man was astonished at the manner in which society ignores its broader and only true meaning—fellowship among men—and renounces all other duties, save that of shaking from its shoes its fellow–dust. He could not look upon the scenes so nigh to him, and to each other, parted often by nothing more than nine inches of brick or two inches of deal; the wealth and the want, the feast and the famine, the satiety and the ravening, the euphemy and the blasphemy—though sometimes that last got inside the door, blew its nose, and was infidelity; the prudery and the indecency, the whispered lie and the yelled one, thesale of maidens by their mothers, or of women by themselves—though here again the difference was never very perceptible; all this impious contrast, spread as if for Godʼs approval, for the Universal Fatherʼs blessing, in the land most chiefly blessed by Him: which of His sons, not cast out for ever, could look on it without weeping?

Cradock did something more than weep. He went with his little stock of money, though he knew it could not do much; and he tried to help in little ways, though as yet he had no experience. He bought meat, and clothes, and took things out of pawn, and tried to make peace where fights were.

At first he was grossly insulted, as a meddlesome swell; but, when he had done two or three good things, and done them as a brother should, he began to be owned among them. In one thing he was right, although he had no experience; he confined his exertions to a very narrow compass. Of course he got imposed upon—of course he helped the unworthy; but after a while he began to know them, and even the unworthy—some two hundred per cent.—began to have faint ideas of trying to deserve good luck.

One man who attempted to pick Cradʼs pocket was knocked down by the biggest thief there. “I wish I had a heap of money,” said Cradock, every day; “I must keep some for myself, I suppose. Perhaps, after all, I was wrong, in throwing up so hastily my chance of doing good.”

Then he remembered that, but for his trouble, he might never have thought of the good to be done. And the good done to him was threefold as much as he could do to others. Every day he grew less selfish, less imperious, less exacting; every day he saw more clearly the good which is in the worst of us.

There is a flint of peculiar character—I know not the local name of it—which is found sometimes on the great Chissel Bank, and away towards Lyme Regis. It is as hard, and sullen, and dull a flint (with even the outside polish lost from the chafing of the waves)—a stone as grey and foggy–looking;—as ever Deucalion took the trouble to cast away over the left into an empty world. Yet it has, through the heart of it, traversing it from pole to pole (for its shape is always conical) a thread, a spindle, a siphuncle, of the richest golden hue. None but those who are used to it can see the head of the golden column, can even guess its existence. The stone is not hollow; it is quite distinct from all pudding–stones and conglomerates.

Many such flints poor Crad came across, and sought in vain for the beauty of them. He never tried to split them with a hammer, as too many do of our Boanergæ; but he was too young to see or feel the chord of the golden siphuncle. One, especially, one great fellow, was harder and rougher than any flint, like the matrix of the concentric jasper.

“Confound that fellow,” said Cradock to himself;“I never shall get at the heart of him. If my pluck were up a little more. Iʼd fight him; though I know he would lick me. Heʼd be sorry for me afterwards.”

Issachar Jupp could lick any two men in the court. He was a bargee, of good intentions—at least, when he took to the cuddy; but his horses had pulled crosswise ever since; and the devil knew, better than the angels, what his nature now was.

“None of your d—d Scripture–reading for me!” he cried, when Cradock came near him; though the young man had never attempted anything of the sort.

He knew that the Word of God is not bread to a blackguardʼs empty belly. And another thing he knew—that he was not of the age and aspect for John Bunyanʼs business. Moreover, Jupp was wonderfully jealous of his wife, a gentle but grimy woman, forty–five years old, whom he larruped every day; although he might be an infidel, he would ensure his wifeʼs fidelity. Nevertheless, he had his pure vein, and Cradock at last got at it.

Mrs. and Miss Ducksacre were very good–hearted women, but, like many other women of that fibre, whose education has been neglected, of a hot and hasty order. Not that we need suppose the pepper to be neutralized by the refinement, only to be absorbed more equably, and transfused more generally.

A little thing came feeling the way into the narrow, dingy shop, one dark November evening, groping along by the sacks of potatoes (all of them “seconds,” for the firm did not deal much in “Ware Regents”), feeling its way along the sacks which towered above its head, like bulky snow–giants embrowned with thaw; and then by the legs of the “tatie–bin,” with the great scales hanging above it, and then by the heap of lighting–wood, piled in halfpenny bundles, with the ends against the wall; and so the little thing emerged between two mighty hills of coleworts, and under the frugal gas–burner, and congratulated itself, with a hug of the heart, upon safety.

“Take care, my dear,” cried Mrs. Ducksacre, looking large behind the counter, “or youʼll tumble down the coal–trap, where the black bogeys lives. Bless my heart, if it ainʼt little Loo! Why, Loo, I hardly knew you. You ainʼt looking like yourself a bit, child. And who sent you out at this time of night? What a shame, to be sure!”

Loo, the pride of Issachar Jupp, was rather a pretty little body, about three and a half years old, “going on for four,” as she loved to say, if anybody asked her; and her pale but clean face would have beenverypretty, if her mother would have let her hair alone. But it was all combed back, and tied tightly behind, like the tail of a horse at a fair, or as affording a spout to pour the little girl out by. She looked up at Mrs. Ducksacre, while her fingers played with the coleworts, for her hands were hot,and this cooled them; and then, with the instinct of nature, she stuck up for her father and mother.

“Pease, maʼam, Loo not fray much,”—though her trembling frock belied her, all over the throat and the heart of it—“and father don from home, maʼam, on the Wasintote” [Basingstoke canal], “and mother dot nobody, onʼy Loo, to do thins. And she send this, ‘cause Looʼs poor troat be bad, maʼam.”

The little child, whose throat was tied up with worn flannel from the char–bucket, with the grey edge still upon it, wriggled in and out of her shape and self, in the way only children can do; and at length drew, from some innermost shrine, a halfpenny and a farthing.

“And what am I to give you for it, Loo? Oh, you poor little thing, how very hoarse you are!”

Loo, with a confidence in human nature purely non–Londinian, had placed her cash upon the altar, upon the inside of which so many worship, while on the outside so many are sacrificed; without circumlocution, the counter. Her eyes were below the rim of it, till she stood upon tiptoe with one foot, while the other was up in the colewort roots, and then she could see the money, and she poked out her little lips at it, as if she would fain suck it back again.

“Pease, maʼam, Looʼs troat so bad, mother are goin to make a ‘tew, tree haʼporth of tipe and a haʼporth of ‘egents, and a fardy of inons!”

“What a splendid stew, Loo!” said Mrs. Ducksacre,seeming to smell it; “and so you want a haʼporth of taties, and a farthingʼs worth of onions. And you shall have them, my dear, and as good a three farthings’ worth as ever was put up in London. Where are you going to put them all?”

Loo opened her sore throat, and pointed down it. She had not yet lost her appetite; and that child did love tripe so.

“No, no, I donʼt mean that, Loo. I know you have a nice room inside; though some will be for mother, wonʼt it, now? I mean, how are you going to carry it home?”

“In Looʼs pinney,” replied the child, delighted with her success; for ever so many people had told her, that the Ducksacres now were getting so high, they would soon leave off making farthings–worths; and any tradesman who does that is above the sphere of the street–child.

“My dear, your pinney wonʼt hold them, potatoes are so cheap now”—she had just sworn they were awfully dear to a person she disliked—“I am sure you canʼt carry a haʼporth. Oh, Mr. Newman, you are so good–natured”—Cradock was just coming in, rather glum from another failure—“I really donʼt believe you would think you were bemeaning yourself by going home with this poor little atom.”

“I should rather hope I would not,” replied Cradock, looking grand.

“Oh, I did not know. I beg your pardon, Iʼm sure. I would go myself, only Sally is out, andthe boy gone home ever so long ago. I beg your pardon, Iʼm sure, Mr. Newman; I thought you were so good–natured.”

“Mrs. Ducksacre,” said Cradock, “you utterly misunderstand me. I replied to the form of your sentence, perhaps, rather than to its meaning. What I meant was, that I should rather hope I would not think it below me to go home with this little dear. If I could suppose it any disgrace to me, I should deserve to be kicked by your errand–boy all round this shop, Mrs. Ducksacre; and I am surprised you misunderstand me so. Why, I know this little girl well; and her name is Louisa Jupp.”

“Tiss Loo,” said the little child, standing up on tiptoe, and spreading out her arms to Cradock. All the children loved him, as the little ones at Nowelhurst would run after Mr. Rosedew. Children are even better judges of character than dogs.

“Why, you poor little soul,” said Crad, as he seated her on his strong right arm with her little cheek to his, and she drew a thousand straws of light through her lashes from the gas–jet, which she had never yet been so close to, “how hot and dry your lips are! I hope you are not taking the—sickness”—he was going to say “fever,” but feared to frighten Loo.

“Mother fray,” cried the small girl, proud of the importance accruing to her, “Loo dot wever; Irishers dot bad wever on the foor below mother.Loo det nice thins, and lay abed, if me dot the wever.”

“Put the poor childʼs things, whatever they are, in a basket, Mrs. Ducksacre. How odd her little legs feel! And a shillingʼs worth of grapes, if you please, in a bag by themselves. Hereʼs the money for them. You know Iʼll bring back the basket. But the bags donʼt come back, do they?”

“No, sir, of course not. Half–a–crown a gross for the small ones, with the name and the cross–handle basket, and the cabbage and carrots, sir. Sixpence more for cornopean–pattern with a pineapple, and grapes and oranges. But lor, sir, the cornopean” [cornucopiæ] “would frighten half our customers. The basket–pattern pays better for an advertisement than to get them back again, even if parties would bring them, which I knows well they never would, sir.”

Then Cradock set forth with the child on his arm, his coat thrown over his shoulders, and the best shillingʼs worth of foreign grapes—Mrs. Ducksacre never bought English ones—and the best three farthingʼs worth of potatoes and onions that was made that day by any tradesman in any part of London, not excluding “them low costers,” as the Ducksacre firm expressed it.

Little Loo Juppʼs sore throat proved to be, as Cradock feared it would, the first symptom of scarlet fever; and the young man had the pleasure—one of the highest and purest pleasures which any man can have—of saving a human life. Hewatched that trembling flame of life, and fostered it, and sheltered it, as if “the hopes of a nation hung”—as the penny–a–liners love to say of some babe not a whit more valuable—upon its feeble flicker. He hired another room for her, where the air was purer; he made the doctor attend to the case, which at first that doctor cared little to do; he brought her many a trifling comfort; in a word, he waited upon her so that the old women of the court called him thenceforth “Nurse Newman.”

“What, you here again, you white–livered young sneak!” cried Issachar Jupp, reeling in at the door, just as Cradock was coming out; “take that, then——” and he lifted a great oak bludgeon, newly cut from the towing–path of the Basingstoke Canal. If Cradock had not been as quick as lightning, and caught the stick over the bargemanʼs shoulder, there would have been weeping and wailing and a lifelong woe for Amy.

“Hush,” he said; “donʼt make such a noise, man. Your child is at the point of death, in the room overhead.”

Poor Crad, naturally of a bright complexion, but pale from long unhappiness, might now have retorted the compliment as to the “pallor jecoris.” The bargee turned so pale, that he looked like a collierʼs tablecloth. Then he planted his heavy stick on the ground; else he would have lain flat on his threshold.

“My Loo, my Loo!” was all he could say; “oh my Loo!Itʼs a lie, sir!”

“I wish it was,” replied Cradock; “take my arm, Mr. Jupp. Donʼt be over–frightened. We hope with all our hearts to save her, and to–night we shall know. Already I think I perceive some change in her breathing, though her tongue is like a furnace.”

He spoke with a tone and in a voice which no man ever has described, nor shall, but which every born man feels to be genuine, long ere he can think.

“[Condemn] me for a [sanguineous] fool,” cried Jupp, with two enormous tears guttering down the coal–dust, and his great chest heaving and wanting to sob, only it didnʼt know the way; “[condemn] my eyes for swearing so, and making such a [female dog] of myself, but what the [Hades] am I to do? Oh my Loo, my Loo! If you die, Iʼll go to [Hades] after you.”

Excuse me for washing out this speech to regulation weakness; perhaps it was entered in white on high, as the turn of a life of blackness.

Cradock turned away, and trembled. Who can see a rugged man split to the bottom of his nature, and not himself be splintered? I donʼt believe that any can: not even the cold iron scoundrels whom modern plays delight in.

“Now come up with me, Mr. Jupp,” said Crad, taking care not to look at him, “out at this door,in at the other. Poor little soul! she has been so good. You canʼt think how good she has been. And she has taken her medicine so nicely.”

“Pray God Almighty not to [condemn] me, for not [condemning] myself enough,” said Issachar Jupp, below his breath, as he leaned on Cradockʼs arm.

It was his form of prayer; and it meant more than most of ours do. Though I may be discarded by turtle–dove quill–drivers for daring to record it, will he ever be worse for uttering it? Of course, it was very shocking; but far more so to men than to angels.

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