CHAIS DOS.
m
ing offloes, the contest between weakness that suffered
mortally and power that unsparingly enjoyed. The
terrible bondage had enclosed Agostino's whole life ;
ho felt at times that it would pursue him even beyond
tn\i grave.
"Is there no price lean pay at once?" he said,
huskily; his voice broken as with physical pain—" no
task I can work out at a bl»w?—no tribute-money I
can toil for, that, gained, will buy me peace!"
" As if I ever touched a sou of his earnings, or set
him to paint my walls for nothing ! Mercy ! the in-
gratitude of the Hebrew race!" cried Trevenna,
amusedly, to his cigar.
The black, sad, lustrous eyes of the Spanish Jew
flashed with a momentary fire that had the longing in
them, for the instant, to strike Ms tyrant down stone-
dead.
" Take my money? No! You do not seek that, be-
eause it is a drop in the ocean beside all that you
Fossess, all that you have robbed other men of so long :
make too little to tempt you, or you would have
wrung it out of me. But you have done a million
times worse. You have taken my youth, my hope, my
spirit, my liberty, and killed them all. You have made
a mockery of mercy, that you might hold me in a cap-
tivity worse than any slave's. You have made me
afraid to love, lest what I love should be dragged be-
neath my shame. You have made me dread that she
should bear me children, lest they be born to their
father's fate. You have ruined all manhood in me,
and made me weak and base and terror-stricken as
any cur that cringes before his master's whip. You
have made me a poorer, lower, viler wretch than I
could ever have been if the Law had taken its course
on me, and beaten strength and endurance into me in
my boyhood, by teaching me openly and unflinchingly
the cost of crime, yet had left me some gate of free-
dom, some hope of redemption, some release to a
liberated life when my term of chastisement should
•have been over—left me all that you have denied me
since the hour you first had me in your power, in a
cruelty more horrible and more unending than the
hardest punishment of justice ever could have been."
The torrent of words poured out in his rich and ring-
ing voice, swifter and more eloquent the higher his
revolt and the more vain his anguish grew. This was
Ms nature to feel passionately, to rebel passionately, to
lift up his appeal in just and glowing protestation, to
recoil under his bondage suffering beyond all expres-
sion, but to do no more than this—to be incapable of
action, to be powerless for real and vital resistance,
to spend all his strength in that agonized upbraiding,
whieh he must have known to be as futile as for the
breakers to fret themselves against the granite sea-
wall.
Trevenna listened quietly, with a certain amusement.
It was always uncommonly droll to him to see the
struggles of weak natures; he knew they would recoil
into his hand, passive and helpless agents, conquered
by the sheer, unexpressed force of his own vigorous and
practical temperament. Studies of character were al-
ways an amusement to him; he had a La Bruyère-like
taste for their analysis; the vastness of his knowledge
of human nature did not prevent his relishing all its
minutiae. What the subjects of his study might suffer
under it was no more to him than what the frog suf-
fers, when be pricks, flays, cuts, beheads, and lights a
lucifer match under it, is to the man of science in his
pursuit of anatomy and his refutation of Aristotle.
" Very well done 1 pity it's not at the Porte St. Mar-
tin. All bosh! Still, that's nothing against a bit of
melodrama anywhere," he said carelessly. " Shut up
now, though, please.   Let's go to business."
The artist seemed to shiver and collapse under the
bright, brief words; the heart-sick passions, the flame
of sudden rebellion, and the fire of vain recrimination
faded off his face, his head sank, his lips trembled -just
SO, years before, had the vivid grace of his youth
shrunk and withered under his taskmaster's eye.
" You paint the Princess Rossillio's portrait?" pursued
his catechist.
Agostino bent his head.
" And go to her, of course, to take it?"
The Spanish Jew gave the same mute assent.
"Can't you speak? Don't keep on nodding there,
like a mandarin in a tea-shop. You'd words enough
just now. You paint it in her boudoir, don't you, be-
cause the light's best?"
Agostino lifted his heavy eyes.
"Since you know, why ask me?"
" Leave questions to me, and reply tout bref," sard his
interrogator, with a curt accent that bore abundant
meaning. " You've seen a Russian cabinet that's on
the right hand of the fireplace?"
"Ah! you can answer sensibly at last! Well, that
cabinet's madame's despatch-box. You know, or you
may kne./, that she is the most meddlesome intriguer
to Europe; but that's nothing to you. In the left-hand
top drawer is her Austro-Venetian correspondence.
Among it is a letter from the Vienna Nuncio. When
you leave the boudoir to-day, you will know what that
letter contains."                                       ...            .
Agostino started; a dew broke out on his forehead, a
flush stained Ms clear brown cheek with its burning
shame; his eyes grew terribly piteous.
"More sin! more dishonor!" he muttered, in his
throat. ' " Let me go and starve in the streets, rather
than drive me to such deeds as these !"
Trevenna laughed, his pleasant bonhomie in no way
changed, though there was a dash more of authority in
his tone.                                                ,                      .
" Quiet, you Jew dog! Really, you do get too melo-
dramatic to be amusing. There's no occasion for any
heroics; but —you'll be able to tell me this time to-
morrow "                                                                       •
The artist covered his face with his hands, and his
form shook to and fro in an irrepressible agitation.
"Anything but this!—anything but this! Give me
what labor you will, what poverty, what shame; but
not this! I can never look in peace into my darling s
eyes, if I take this villainy upon my hie.
" Nobody's alluding to villainy," sard Trevenna, with
a tranquil brevity. " As to your darling s eyes, they re
nothing to anybody except yourself: you can make
what arrangements for 'looking into' em you like.
If the only men who ' look into ' women's eyes are the
honest ones, the fair sex must get uncommon tew
lovers. You've heard what I said. Know what the
letter's about. I don't tell you how you're to know it.
Get the princess to show it you. You're a handsome
fellow—blacli curls and all the rest of it—and her High-
ness is a connoisseur in masculine charms.
With which Trevenna laughed, and got up out of the hatred with them. But he was hunted and helpless;
depths of the painting-chair.                                              he had no resistance; throughout his life he had paid
Agostino stood in his path, a deep-red flush on his ; the price exacted, rather than meet the fate that
forehead, the blaze of freshly-lightened rebellion in his . waited him if it were unpaid. He clung to the ?weet-
eyes, his Murillo-like beauty all ou fire, as it were, with ! ness, the tranquillity, the growing renown, esid the
wretchedness and passion.                                                ! newly won love of his existence; he clung to them,
i " You use your power over me to force me to such ! even embittered by the serpent s trail that was over
things in your service as thisl   What if they were 1 them, with a force that made him embrace any alter-
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spoken? what if they were cited against you? You,
high as you are in your success and your wealth, and
your rank, would be thought lower yet than / have ever
fallen. Do you not fear, even you, that one da3' you
may sting and goad me too far, and I may give myself
up to your worst work for the sake of obtaining my
vengeance?"
Trevenna smiled, with a certain laughing good-
tempered indulgence, such as a man may extend to ^
child who menaces him with its impotent fury.
"Très-cher, who icould believe you t Say anything
you like; it's nothing to me. I have a little bit of paper
by me that, once upon a time, M. Agostino Mathias
signed with a name not bis own. I was very lenient to
him; and if he doesn't appreciate the clemency the
world will, and think him an ungrateful young Hebrew
cur, who turns, like all curs, on his benefactor. Prose-
cute you now it wouldn't, perhaps, since the matter's
been allowed to sleep; but criminate you and disgrace
you it would most decidedly. You'd be hounded out
all over Europe; and for your pretty Spaniard, I heard
a court chamberlain admiring her yesterday, and say-
ing she was too good for an atelier: she'd soon be his
mistress, when she knew you a felon. Ah, my poor
Agostino, when you once broke the law, you put your
head into a steel-trap you'll never draw it out again.
Only fools break the tews.    Excuse the personality 1"
Under the ruthless words of truth Agostino shrank
and cowered again, like a beaten hound; he had no
strength against his taskmaster—he never could have
had: he was hemmed in beyond escape. Moreover,
now he had another and a yet more irresistible rein by
which to be held in and coerced—the love that he bore,
and that he received from, his young wife.
" You'll do that, then?" said Trevenna, with the care-
lessness of a matter of course. " Bring some picture to
show me to-morrow morning—Darshampton likes pic-
tures, because it couldn't tell a sixpenny daub from a
Salvator Rosa—and remember every line of the Nun-
cio's letter. You understand? I don't want to hear
your means; I only want the results."
" I will try," muttered Agostino. He loathed crime
and dishonor with an unutterable hatred of it; he
longed, he strove, to keep the roads of right and jus-
tice; his nature was one that loved the peace of virtue
and the daylight of fair dealing. Yet, by his uncon-
querable fear, by Ms wax-like mobility of temper, by
his past sin, and by his future dread, he was forced into
the very paths and made the very thing that he ab-
horred.
"People who ' try ' aren't my people," said the Mem-
ber for Darshampton, curtly. "Those who do are the
only ones that suit me."
Agostino shrank under his eye.
"Iwill come to you to-morrow," he murmured,
faintly. He had no thought, not the slightest, of how
he should be able to accomplish this sinister work that
was set him; but he knew that he must do it, as surely
as his count-ymen of old must make their bricks
without straw, for their conquerors and enslavers.
Trevenna nodded, and threw down his mahl-stick
with a final lunge at the Dryad.
"Allright! of course you will. You ought to be very
grateful to me that I let you off so easily. Some men
would make you give up to them that charming Span-
ish Sefrora of yours, as Maurice de Saxe took Favart's
wife, de la part du roi. But that isn't my line. I've
coveted a good many things in my day, but I never
coveted a woman."
With which he threw his smoked-out cigar away, and
went across the atelier and out at the door, with a care-
less nod to his victim. He had so much to fill up every
moment of his time that he could ill spare the ten
minutes he had flung away in the amusement of rack-
ing and tormenting the helplessness of the man he tor-
tured, and he knew that he would be obeyed as surely
as though he spent the whole day in further threats.
Trevenna had two especial arts of governing at his
fingers' ends: he never, by any chance, compromised
himself, but also he never was, by any hazard, diso-
beyed. He had a large army of employés on more or
less secret service about in the world; but as there was
not one of them who held a single trifle that could
damage him, so there was not one of them who ever
ventured not to " come up to time " exactly to his
bidding, or to fail to keep his counsel with " silence d
la mort."                                                   ,               , .
The artist Agostino, left to his solitude, threw him-
self forward against the broad rest of the chair, his
arms flung across it, his head bent down on them: he
native rather than see them perish, that laid him ab-
jectly at the mercy of the one who menaced them.
Lost in his thoughts, he did not hear the footfall of
the Spanish girl as she re-entered the atelier. She
paused a moment, amazed and terrified, as she saw
his attitude of prostrate grief and dejection, then
threw herself beside him with endearing words and
tearful caresses, in wonder at what ailed him. Heraised
himself and unwound her arms from about him, shun-
ning the gaze of her eyes. She thought him as true, ae
loyal-hearted, as great, as he knew himself to be weak
and criminal and hopelessly enslaved.
" What is it? What has happened?" she asked him,
eagerly, trying to draw down liis face to hers.
He smiled, while the tears started woma»-like be-
neath his lashes. He led her gently towards the ruined
canvas.
" Only that; an accident, my love!"
The brightness of the Dryad all blurred and marred
by the ruthlessness of tyranny was a fit emblem of bis
life.
By noon that day, in the boudoir of the Italian
princess, all glimmering with a soft glisten of azure
and silver through its rose-hued twilight, he chanced
to be left for a few moments in solitude. Her High-
ness had not yet risen.
"O, God!" he thought, "do devils rule the world?
There are always doors opened so wide for any medi-
tated sin !" Then, with a glance round him like a thief
in the night, his hand was pressed on the spring of the
Russian cabinet; the letter of the Nuncio lay upper-
most, with its signature folded foremost; a moment,
and its delicate feminine writing was scanned, and each
hue remembered with a hot and terrible eagerness that
made it graven as though bitten in by aquafortis on
his memory. The note was put back, the door closed;
the artist stood bending over his palette, and pouring
the oil on some fair carmine tints, when the Princess
of Naples swept into the chamber.
She greeted him with a kindly, careless grace; with
a pleasant smile in the brown radiance of her eyes; and
she saw that his cheek turned pale, that his eyelids
drooped, that his voice quivered as he answered her.
" Povero ! com' è bello !" thought Irene Rossillie; and
she laughed a little, as she thought that even this
Spanish Jew of a painter could not come into her
presence without succumbing to its spell.
--------o--------
BOOK THE EIGHTH.
Leave him, still loftier than the world suspects,
Living or living.
HOBKRT BBOWNIKG.
CHAPTER I.
Before the door of an Italian albergo, some men had
been drinking and laughing in the ruddy light of an
autumn day, just upon the setting of the sun—men of
the mountains, shepherds, goat-herds, and one or two
of less peaceable and harmless callings—rough com-
rades for a belated night on the hill-side, whose argu-
ment was powder and ball, and whose lair was made
with the Wolves and the hares.   The house, low, lonely,
Eoor, was overhung with the festoons of vines, and
igher yet with the great shelf of roadside rock, from
"which there poured down, so close that the wooden
loggia was often splashed with its spray, a tumbling,
foaming, brown glory of water that rolled hissing into
a pool dark as night, turning as it went the broad
black wood of a mighty mill-wheel. The men had
been carousing carelessly, and shouting over their wine
and brandy snatches of muleteer and boat-song, or
the wild ribaldry of some barcarolle, their host drink-
ing and singing with them, for the vintage had been
good, and things went well with him in his own way,
here out of the track of cities, and in the solitude of
great stretches of sear sunburnt grass, of dense chest-
nut-forest, of hills all purple and cloud-topped in the
vast clear, dream-like distance. Now, flushed with
their drink and heedless in their revels, rough and
tumultuous as wild boors at play, they were circled
round the doorway in a ring that shut out alike all
passage to the osteria and all passage to the road; and
they were enjoying torture with that strange instinctive
zest for it that underlies most human nature, and
breaks out alike in the boor who has a badger at his
mercy and the Caesar who has a nation under his foot.
They had the power and they had the temptation to
torment, and the animal natures in them, hot with wine
SdTofbeTS^^^
to him; peace surrounded him; the desires of his heart   rang out from them on the sunnv autumn au. ^
were^fulfilled to nim; and all was poisoned and broken      "Sing, my whrte-throatedbrr d.    cued one
and ruined and made worthless by the tyranny that
dogged him unceasingly,  that seized  him when he
thought he  had cheated  it into forgetfulness, that
haunted him and hunted him with the phantom of Ms
dead crime, and through it drove him on to do the
things he cursed and scorned.   He might have been so
happy' and this chain was forever weighting his limbs,
eating into his flesh, dragging him back as he sought a
purer life, waking him from his sleep with its chill
touch, holding him ever to his master's will and to his
master's work—will and work that left him free and
unnoticed perhaps for years, and then, when he had
begun to breathe at liberty and to hope for peace,
would find him out wherever he was and force Mm to
the path they pointed !             .                         •
Agostino had hoped oftentimes that as his bond-
ruler rose in the honor of men and the success of the
world he would forget so nameiess and so powerless a
life as his own: he had found his hope a piteous error.
Trevenna had said truly he never forgot; the smallest
weapon that might be ready to his hand some day he
kept continually finely polished and within his reach.
The painter knew that he must learn what was indi-
cated to him-by betrayal or chicanery, or secret vio-
lence or whatsoever means might open to him—or be
blasted for life by one word of his tyrant. He abhorred
the dishonor, but he had not courage to refuse it, know-
ing the cost of such refusal. It was not the first time
by many that such missions had been bound on him ;
yet every time they brought fresh horror and fresh
a measure with me !" cried another. Pour this down
your pretty lips, and kiss us for it !" " ^ ou'H be hum-
ble enough before we've done with you my proud
beauty!" "We'll tie you up by a rope of that hand-
some bright hair!" "Come, now, laugh and take it
easy, or, by Bacchus, we'll smash those damty hmcsof
yours like maize-stalks!"               .    .
The shouts echoed in tnmult, ringing with laughter,
and broken with oaths, and larded with viler words of
mountain-s'ang, that had no sense to the ear on which
thev were flung in their polluting mirth. In the centre
of the ferocious revelry, beneath the bronzed and crim-
son canopy of the hanging porch-vine, and with the
western light shed full upon her. stood Castalia. The
tall lithe, voluptuous grace of her form rose out against
the darkness of the entrance-way like the slender, lofty
height of a young palm; the masses of her hair swept
backward from her forehead. Her face was white as
death to the lips; an unutterable horror was on it, but
no yielding fear; it was proud, dauntless, heroic with
the spirit of dead Rome, that rose higher with every
menace Her eyes looked steadily at the savage,
flushed faces round her, so coarse, so loathsome in their
mirth; her hands were folded on her bosom, holding to
it the book she carried. They might tear her limb
from limb, as they threatened, like the fibres of the
maize; but the royal courage in her would never bend
down to their will. They had hemmed her in by sheer
brute strength, and their clamor of hideous jest, their
riot of insolent admiration, were a torture to her paS8°