CHAKDOS.
11
sensitive delicacy of his nature, which dreaded to press
another supplicant and dependant on his patron's
charity. All he could give (and Chandos' provision for
him made that now not inconsiderable—indeed, what
seemed a mine of wealth to the simplicity of the Pro-
vencal) he sent to Aries for Valeria Lulli, who was
lodged with an old canoness of the city, and began to
be noted, as she grew older, as the most perfect con-
tralto in the girls' choir in all Southern France. St;e
her he could not; a sense of duty to the man by whom
he had been redeemed from death, and the infirmities
of his own health, which that nigh approach of death
had more utterly enfeebled, prevented him from re-
turning to Provence. But he heard of her; he heard
from her; he knew that she was drawing near woman-
hood in safe shelter, and a happy, if obscure, home,
through him ; and it sufficed for him. His affection
for her was the tender solicitude of a brother, shut out
from any tinge of a warmer emotion, both through his
own sense of how utterly banned from him by his
calamity was all thought of woman's love, and through
his own memory of Valeria, which was but of a fair
and loving child.
Two years before this morning in which Chandos had
listened to the Tantum Ergo, aneavy blow fell on the
musician, smiting down all the fond, vague thoughts
with which he had associated Valeria's dawning
womanhood with the dawning success of his own am-
bition in his art. A long silence had passed by, bring-
ing no- tidings of her, when his anxiety grew uncon-
trollable and knew itself powerless; lie had passion-
ately repented of the silence he had preserved on her
name to his only friend. He inquired tidings of the
canoness, but received none. Chandos was away,
yachting in the Mediterranean, and spending the late
summer and the autumn in the East; the winter also
he spent in Paris. Wrhen, with the spring, Lulli saw
him once more, he told him then of Valeria, and en-
treated his aid to learn the ciuse of the silence that
had fallen between him and Aries. Chandos gave it
willingly; he sent his own courier abroad to inquire for
the young, choral singer. All answer with which he re-
turned was that the canoness had died in the course
of that summer, that Valeria Lulli had disappeared
from the city, and that neither priest nor layman
could tell more, save that it wras the general supposi-
tion she had fled with a handsome milord Anglais, who
had visited the cathedral, heard her singing, learned
her residence, and visited her often during the summer
months. He too had left Aries without any one re-
membering his name or knowing where he had gone.
The gossips of the still solemn old Roman city had
noted him often with Valeria at vesper-time, and un-
derneath the vine-hung, gray stone coping of her
casement in the canoness's little tourelle. And Valeria
had grown up into all the rich traditional beauty of
the magnificent women of Aries.
So the history ran—brief, but telling a world. To
Guido Lulli there was room neither for doubt nor hope ;
it was plain as the daylight to him, and needed not an-
other line added to it. It cut him to the heart. Shame
for the honor of his name, which, though sunk into
poverty, claimed descent from him whose divine strains
once floated down the rose-aisles of Versailles; pas-
sionate bitterness against the unknown stranger who
had robbed him ; grief for the loss and dishonor of the
one whom he had cherished from her childhood—all
these were terrible to him; but they were scarcely so
cruel as the sting of ingratitude from a life that he
alone had supported, and for which he had endured,
through many years, deprivations uncounted and so-
licitude unwearying. He said but little, but the iron
went down deep into his gentle suffering nature, and
left a wound there that was never closed.
No more had ever been learned of the fate of Valeria;
it sank into silence, and all the efforts exerted by his
prmron's wealth and by the ingenuity of his hirelings
faired to bring one light on the surface of the darkness
that covered her lost life. As Lulli had said, she was
dead to him. But the pain she had dealt was living,
and would live long. Natures like Lulli's suffer silently,
but suffer greatly; and now, when the monastical
silence closed in again around him as the sound of
Chandos' steps died off the morning stillness, and the
early rays only strayed on the ivory whiteness of the
carved Passion above the little shrine of his antique
chamber, he sat there, listless and lost in thought, his
head sunk, his hands resting immovable upon the keys
with which he could give out fit music for the gods, the
sadness on him which ever oppressed him when he
came back from his own best-beloved world of melo-
dious sound into the coarse, harsh, weary world of fact
and of existence.
He thought of the bright Southern child whose des-
olate life ho had succored, as he had used to see her,
with the sunlight on her hair while she gathered bow-
ing crowns of summer lilies, and feathery wealth of
seeding grasses, among the giant ruins of the Roman
.(Amphithéâtre, where the Gaul and the Frank, the
Latin and the Greek, lay moldering in the community
of death, while the arrowy Rhône flashed its azure in
the light, and the purple grapes.: "rew mellow in the
golden languor of a Southern néon.
CHAPTER VII.
"Lots of news!" said Trevenna, crushing up a
pile of journals as he sat at breakfast in Park Lane—
his second breakfast, of course, for which he common-
ly dtopped in as Chandos was taking his first. He
managed all his friend's concerns, both monetary and
household, both in town, in Paris, and at Clarencieux,
and had always something or other on which to confer
with his patron at the only hour in the day at which
Chandos was ever likely to be found disengaged; some
stud from which to suggest a purchase; some new
pictures coming to the hammer, of which to bring a
catalogue; some signature to a check or a deed tore-
quire; or some expensive temptation to suggest to one
who, as he well knew, had never been taught provi-
dence and never been accustomed to resist either
Îileasure or inclination. This last was a Mephistophe-
ian occupation to which Trevenna was specially suited.
He tempted delightfully, always putting in just so
much of bantering dissuasion to enhance the charm,
and spur on the tempted, as would furnish the truffles
to the game, till the truffé he held out became irresist-
ible.
" Lots of news!" he cried, now washing the quantity
down with a-Jraught of Yquem. " Queer thing a paper
is; sort of prosaic phoenix, eh? Kings die, ministers
die, editors go to pot, its staff drops under the sod,
governments smash, nations swamp, actors change;
out on goes the paper, coming out imperturbably every
morning. Nothing disturbs it; deaths enrich it: wars
enlarge It;  if c, royal head goes into the grave, it
politely prints itself with a black border by way of
gratifying his soul, and sells itself to extreme advan-
tage, with a neat dovetailing of ' Le roi est mort,' and
' Vive la roi.'   Queer thing, a paper!"
" A melancholy thing in that light," said Chandos, as
he drank his chocolate. " To think of the swarm of
striving life pressed into a single copy of the Times is
as mournful as Xerxes' crowds under Mount Ida,
though certainly not so poetic."
' Mournful? Don't see it," responded Trevenna, who
never did see any thing mournful in life, except the
miserable mistake by which he had not been born a mil-
lionaire. "It's rather amusing to see all the pother and
bother, and know that they'll all be dead, every man of
'em, fifty years hence; because one always has an un-
uttered conviction that some miracle will happen by
which one won't die oneself. How thoroughly right
Lucretius is ! it is so pleasant to see other men in a
storm while one's high and dry beyond reach of a drop;
and to watch them all rushing and scuttling through
life in the Times columns is uncommonly like watching
them rush through a tempest. You know they'll all
of them get splashed to the skin, and not one in ten
thousand reach their goal."
Chandos laughed.
"But when you are in the tempest, my friend, I
fancy you will be very glad of a little more sympathy
than you give, and would be very grateful for an um-
brella?"
" Oh, the devil take sympathy !   Give me success."
" The selection is not new !   But in defeat:-----' '
" In defeat? let it go ten leagues further to the
deuce! Sympathy in success might be genuine; peo-
ple would scramble for the bonbons I dropped; but
sympathy in defeat was never anything better yet than
a sneer delicately veiled."
"Poor humanity 1 You will allow nothing good to
come out of Nazareth; a sweeping verdict, when by
Nazareth you mean mankind. Well, I would rather
give twenty rogues credit for being honest men, than
wrong one honest man by thinking him a rogue. To
think evil unjustly is to create evil; to think too well of
a man may end in making him what you have called
him."
Trevenna smiled—his arch, humorous smile, that
danced in the mirth of his eyes, and twinkled so joy-
ously and mischievously about the corners of his
mouth.
"If it be your preference to think too well of men,
très-cher, you can hardly miss gratifying it. Rogues
grow thick as blackberries. Only when Turcaret,
whom you think the mirror of honor, makes you bank-
rupt, and Gingillino, whom you believe the soul of
probity, makes off with your plate, and Tartuffe, whom
you have deemed a saint of the first water, forges a
little bill on your name, blame nobody but your own
delightful and expensive optimism; that's all! Don't
you know you think too Veil of met"
There was a shade of earnestness and, for the instant,
of regret in his bold, bright eyes, as they fastened them-
selves on Chandos' ; there was, for the moment, one
faint impulse of compunction and of conscience in his
heart. He knew that the man before him trusted him
so utterly, so loyally; he knew that the witness of the
world to sink and shame him would only have made
the hand of Ernest Chandos close firmer on his own.
That hand was stretched out now in a gesture of gen-
erous, frank grace, of true and gallant friendship. The
action was very rare with Chandos, and spoke with
a great eloquence.
"Y'ou know I have no fear of that. Our friendship
is of too old a date."
Trevenna hesitated a moment, one slight, impalpable
second of time, not to be counted, not to be noted; then
his hand closed on that held out to him.
The momentary better thought had gone from him.
When he took the hand of Chandos thus, few criminals
had ever fallen lower than he. Were Catholic fancies
true, and "guardian angels with us as we walk," his
guardian spirit would have left Trevenna then forever.
" Well," he said, with his mirthful and ringing laugh,
like his voice, clear and resonant as a clarion, "you
found me in no irreproachable place, mon prince, at
any rate: so you can't complain if I turn out a scamp.
A debtor's prison wasn't precisely the place for the
Lord of Clarencieux to choose an ally."
" Many a ' lord of Clarencieux ' has gamed away his
wit and his wealth—which was your only sin then, my
dear fellow. I am not afraid of the consequences. So
many people who speak well of themselves are worth
nothing, that by inverse ratio, Trevenna, you, who
speak so ill of yourself, must be worth a great deal.
You look at some things from too low a standing-
point, to my fancy, to be sure ; but you see as high as
your stature will let you, I suppose."
" Of course. Literally and metaphorically, you're a
very tall man, and I'm a very short; and, literally and
metaphorically, if you see stars I don't, I see puddles
you don't; if you watch for planets I forget, I watch
for quicksands you forget. My stature will be the
more useful of the two in the end. Apropos of quick-
sands, the first architect of them in the country was
magnificent on the Cat Tax, last night."
"Who?   Milverton?"
"Yes, Milverton! As if you'd forgotten who was
Exchequer! If he were a handsome corypMe, now,
you'd be eager to hear every syllable about the début.
The speech was superb 1 To hear him! he drew the
line so admirably between the necessary and humble
mouser, helpmate of the housewife, and pampered,
idle Angora, fed on panada and kept from caprice; he
touched so inimitably on the cat in Egypt and Cyprus,
tracing the steps by which a deity had become a
drudge, and the once-sacred life been set to preserve
the pantri.es from mice; he threw so choice a sop to
the Exeter Hall party by alluding to its fall as a meet
judgment on a heathen deity, and richly merited by a
creature that was mentioned in Herodotus and not in
the Bible ; he sprinkled the whole so classically with
Greek quotations that it greatly imposed the House,
and greatly posed it, its members having derived hazy
Attic notions from Greek cribs at the 'Varsities and
Grote on rainy afternoons in the country. By Jove,
the whole thing was masterly I The Budget will pass
both chambers."
Chandos laughed as he ate the mellowest of peaches.
"And that you call public life? a slavery _ to send
straws down the wind, and (."wist cables of sand I The
other evening I drove Milverton to Claire Rahel's.
Just at her door a hansom tore after us, his Whip
dashed up; the House was about to divide; Milverton
must go, down directly. And he went! There is an
existence to spend 1 Fancy the empty platitudes of
the benches, instead of the bright mots at Rahel's; the
empty froth of place-men patriots, instead of the taste-
ful foam of sparkling Moselle!"
"Fie, fie, Chandos! You shouldn't satirize St. Ste-
phen's, out of filial respect."
"The St. Stephen's of my father's days was a very dif-
ferent affair.   Thsy are not politicians now, they are
only place-men ; they don't dictate to the Press, the
Press dictates to them ; they don't care how the country
' is lowered, they only care to keep in office..   When
there is a European simoon blowing through the House,
: I may come and look on : so long as they brew storms
in the saucer, I have no inclination for the tea-party.
i Would you like public life, Trevenna ?"
|     "I?   What's the good of my liking anything?   I'm a
Pariah of the pave, a Chicot to the clubs; I can only
float myself in dinner-stories and gossip."
" Gossip ! You inherit the souls of Pepys and
Grimm.   That such a clever fellow as you can-.—"
" Precisely because I am a clever fellow do I collect
what everybody loves, except raMneurs like yourself.
I am never so welcome as when I take about a charm-
ingly chosen bundles of characters to be crushed and
reputations to be cracked. To slander his neighbor is
indirectly to flatter your listener; of course, slander is
welcome. Every one likes to hear something bad of
somebody else; it enhances his comfort when he it
comfortable, and makes him think ' somebody's worse
off than I am' when he isn't."
Chandos laughed.
" I wonder if there were ever such a combination of
Theophrastus's bitterness and Plautus's good humorin
any living being before you, Trevenna? You judge hu-
manity like Rochefoucauld, and laugh with it like Fal-
staff ; and you tell men that they are all rascals, as
merrily as if you said they were all angels."
" A great deal more merrily, I suspect. One can get
a good deal of merriment out of rogues; there is no bet-
ter company under the sun ; but angels would be un-
commonly heavy work.   Sin's the best salt."
"Mr. Paul Leslie is waiting, sir," said the groom of
the chambers, approaching his master. " He says that
he comes by appointment, or-----"
"Quite right: I will see him in the library," said
Chandos, as he rose, having finished his breakfast, and
heard all the various things with which his prime min-
ister had come charged.
" Paul Leslie? That's a new name; I don't know it,"
said Trevenna, who made a point of knowing every one
who came to his host, no matter how insignrficant.
" Very likely. He never gives dinners, and could not
lend you a sou."
There was a certain careless, disdainful irony in the
words, half unconscious to Chandos himself. He had
all the manner of the vieille cour, all its stately grace,
and all its delicate disdain; and, cordial as his regard
was for Trevenna; and sincere as was his belief that
the bluntness and professed egotism of the man cov-
ered a thousand good qualities and proclaimed a can-
dor bright and open as the day, he was not, he could
not be blind to the fact that Trevenna never sought or
heeded any living soul except those who coud benefit
him.
"I understand," laughed Trevenna; with a riding-
whip about his shoulders he would stilll have laughed
good-naturedly. "One of your protégés, of course;
some Giotto who was drawing sheep when Clarencieux
Cimabue saw him ; some starving Chatterton who has
plucked up heart of grace to write and ask the author
of Lucrèce to give him the magna nominiz umbra. Tell
him to turn navvy or corn-chandler, Chandos, before
he worships the Muses without having five thousand a
year to support those dissipated ladies upon; and
twenty years hence he'll thank you while he eats his
fat, bacon with a relish in the pot-house, or weighs out
his pottles of barley in sensible contentment."
"You are a thorough Englishman, Trevenna; you
would make a poet an exciseman, and expect him to
be serenely grateful for the patronage! Pray, how
many of those who honor ' the Muses,' as you call them,
have had five thousand a year, or had even their daily-
bread when they started, for that matter? I must give
this boy his audience, so I may not see you till we meet
in the park or the clubs. You dine with me to-night?
There are a triad of serene highnesses coming, and
German royalty is terribly oppressive society."
" Oh, I will be here, monseigneur; I obey orders.
You want me at your dinners as Valois wanted Tribou-
let, eh? The jester is welcomed for the nonsense he
talks, and may be more familiar than guests of higher
degree."
Chandos turned as he was leaving the room, struck
by a certain tone in the words, all light and good-
humored as they were ; and he leaped his hand on John
Trevenna's shoulder with the self-same gesture he had
used to the musician Lulli.
" Triboulet? What are you thinking of? Men of your
talent bring their own welcome, and are far more cred-
itor than debtor to society. Surely, Trevenna, you
never misdoubt the sincerity of my friendship?"
The other looked up with his bright bonhomie.
" You are a Sir Calidore of courtesy. No ; I am as
sure of the quality of your friendship as I am of the
quality of your clarets. I can't say more; and, as the
world bows down before you, the distinction of it is
very gratifying. Besides, you have the best chef in
town ; and I dearly love a friend that gives good din-
ners."
Chandos laughed. Trevenna always amused him;
the utter absence of flattery refreshed him, and he
knew the world too well not to know that sincerity and
warmth of feeling were full as likely to lie under the
frankly-confessed egotism as under the suaver protes-
tations of other men. Yet the answer chilled him ever
so slightly, jarred on him ever so faintly A tempera-
ment that is never earnest is at times we'l-mgh as weari-
some as a temperament that is nve gay,- there comes
a time when, if you can never touch to any depth, the
ceaseless froth and brightness of the surface will create
a certain sense of impatience, a certain sense of want.
He felt this for the moment with Trevenna. Trever.wa
would never be serious; he never gave anything deepen*
than his merry and good-humored banter.
" No wonder the women are so fond o* the caresses
of those mains blanches ; they are as white and as soft
and as delicate as a girl's—curse him!" thought Tre-
venna, while his eyes glanced from Chandos' hand as it
fell from his shoulder, and on to his own, which was
broad, strong, and coarse, both in shape and in fibre,
though tenacious in hold and characteristic in form.
The hand of Chandos was the hand of the aristocrat
and of the artist molded in one; Trevenna's that of the
workingman, of the agile gymnast, of the hardy moun-
tain-climber.
The thought was petty and passionate a» any wo-