CHAKDOS. 25 Siabitual sobriety had given way, and that some hot wines heated his fancies. "My dear fellow," he said with a touch of stronger impatience, " you must really pardon me, but if you only keep out of bed to propose me astronomical rid- dles, I must with all courtesy, bid you good-night." "Monseigneur, have a little patience. I come on grave matters, and you must hear them," said Tre- venna, quietly. "You lock annoyances out with dou- ble doors in this chamber; but I fear, do what you will, they will ferret through and follow you at last. I asked you, before you went to your fancy-ball, if you knew at what rate you have lived and are living; I ask you, now you have come back from it, the same thing." "And I give you the same answer; I do not know." " Shall I tell you?" "If you please." " I will, then, but wait one moment. Y'ou are per- fectly happy, Chandos?" Chandos looked at him again, in an astonishment not unmixed with amusement. "I? Perfectly 1 I don't think I would live a day longer, if I were not." Trevenna watched him as he spoke, leaning against the marble, with the deep glow of color, the strewn treasures of art and wealth, the white grace of the «tatues, and the intense hues of the painted ceiling around and above. In the court costume, with the diamonds flashing through the lace and gold embroid- eries, the strong resemblance he bore to the last mar- «uis was as great as though the dead man lived again. Trevenna watched him, recompensed at last for a long decade of patient tact, for a lifetime of bitter envy, of gnawing mortification, of impotent hate, of festering jealousy—watched him as the jungle-cheetah watches his prey before the final spring. He went leisurely about his work; the treasured preparation of sueh long and thirsty toil was not to be devoured in an instant, but tasted slowly in its wicked sweetness, drop by drop. He changed his own position slightly nearer; his fea- tures wore a'gravity such as became the matters he ap- proached, but a quicker or a more suspicious observer than the man who trusted him so freely might have no- ticed that in the glisten of his clear bold eyes there was a look of eager expectation, and about the firm hu- morous lines of his lips there was a lurking triumph, a cynical, malicious relish. "You would not live a day, if your fortunes altered? I am sorry to hear that; for the world, then, may lose you soon. We must take those pretty ivory-handled Fistols out of sight; for, though you are so happy now, fear you will not be so happy in tlie future." Chandos rose from the easy indolence of his resting attitude, and looked at him, with a new light rising in his eyes—a light of anger and of impatience very sel- dom there. "Jesters are priviledged proverbially," he said, coldly; "but there are limits to their allowance when their jests have no wit and much insolence. If you have anything to say, say it plainly, and make an end. " Trevenna's words had angered and astonished him, but they had in no sense alarmed him. In his careless peace and his total ignorance of calamity, their mean- ing could not possibly suggest itself ever so dimly. "Très-cher," replied Trevenna, with an irresistible lapse into his habitual manner—for, though the man was a foul traitor and an unblushing liar, it was against the cynical candor of his nature to be a hypocrite, though he could be one with great effect and success if it were absolutely needed—" that confounded hauteur of you thorough-breds is deuced provoking; it is, in- deed; and people won't put up with it, perhaps, quite so patiently in the future. As for saying plainly what I have to say, I suppose you will not believe me if I tell you that your expenditure is, and has been for many years, about quadruple what your income is?" Chandos started, some faint perception of the de- struction that must follow such a course arresting even his careless indifference and ignorance on all things financial. The next moment he smiled contemptuously at the thought. " My expenditure? Impossible !" "Only too possible, unhappily. Even a Chandos of Clarencieux cannot live like an emperor with impunity. Royalties come expensive, mon prince; and who wears the purples must pay for them. Your fortune was fine, but not large enough to bear such a strain as you have put upon it. You have no notion, you say, of all that you have spent. What comes of a man's not knowing the rate at which he lives? Why, that, sooner or later, the last rope-strand gives way, and he is—ruined." The word fell strangely on the silence of that tranquil chamber, bringing, like the stroke of death, desolation where all was peace. Yet still the word passed by him whom it should have warned; his confidence was too secure, his care- lessness too entire, his possession of all that was highest and richest and brightest of too long custom, for the first presage of the storm to have power to force its meaning on him. A flush of amazed anger passed over his face; he stood erect upon his hearth in a haughty and intolerant annoyance. , " Have you drunk too much, or are you mad? This sort of fooling passes all license. If you indeed know what you are saying, I must beg you to leave my pres- ence." Trevenna, in answer, stood in a firmer, sturdier atti- tude, with his feet apart, and his arms folded like the Napoleonic statuettes. 'fI am neither mad nor drunk, and I am not fooling. I wish, for your sake, I could discover it were a night- mare after two dozen oysters; but I can't. I digest everything, and I don't dream! Briefly, Chandos, I must tell you what I have staved off perhaps too long: but I shrank from the task. I let time pass. I thought you might marry some rich or even royal bride, whose alliance would change the whole aspect; but your bid- ding me arrange the settlements for Lady Valencia compels me to withhold the truth no longer from you. There is nothing to settle on her!" "Nothing to settle on her? What can you mean?" Still, no doubt, no prescience of the truth, came to him. He looked at Trevenna with a wonder in which some disgust and more pity were mingled ; he thought that the strangeness of his sudden mania rose from some unusual indulgence in drink, that filled his brain with these singular, distorted fantasies. " I mean what I say, monseigneur. There is not a ¦sou's worth—not even those diamonds that glitter so bravely on your dainty dress—that is free to^o to her pie fact suggest? You must be financier enough to his studied craft, for all his fondly-nursed revenge for know that! Hang it, Chandos! I am not a deep-feel- ; all his unrelinquished hatred—repaid to the uttermost ing man-I don't go in for all that, as you know; but I coin by every gasped breath that he counted, by every wish from my soul that I could spare you. or that fome shiver of the voiceless anguish that he watched, other could better break to you the news you must I He did not heed the prayer for silence but took up hear to-night " I the broken thread of his discourse, and played with it Chandos listened; a gray, deadly pallor came on his as though loving it in every shape and on every side face, his lips grew white, his heart almost ceased to "Your property you see was fine, no doubt; but fine beat; the first shadow of this dim horror stole on him. ! properties are not Monte-Chnsto caverns of exhaust.ess A glimpse of its meanings was forced at length upon wealth Dipped into they will waste, you nave him ; he had heard of such fates for other men. i eclipsed princes, and starred through all Eui ope you He drew his breath with a gasping effort. "If you pay now for the pre-eminence. You.have hadL women s speak truth, speak out," he said, in that strange and love-no toy so cost y ! you have had the great world s deadly calmness which falls upon the mind and senses worship-no chentela so expensive! you have beena Un^rt«<, *!./, T.lftUrtl.'»- y*£ y.y-~*-. S. .,-..,...+ ....!., tVllllf A f*3 lTst: before the visitation of some great calamity. A faint, vague sense of this evil approaching him was all he felt; it was not possible that it could come to him yet more fixedly or fully. '' I speak the sad and sober truth," returned Treven- dilettante, a lion, a leader of fashion, a man of endless pleasures—no pursuits take so much gold ! You have lived in such a style that you would have run through millions, had you had them ; and you had not one mil- lion, though you had a noble inheritance. Of course na. far more quietly than he had ever spoken, his eyes you possess such quantities of pcturea' ^?£*"*» still resting on the Daphne opposite, as though to guard and all that kind of thing and your estate itself is such against a tell-tale flash from them of that lustful exul- an untouched mine, that there can be no feai of your tltion that he knew was in their glance. "I can't personal liberty ever being endangered, but,1 am speak to you as coyly and as delicately as your grievously afraid, I am indeed, that you^wilbe obhged p'atrician friends and relatives would do. I'm a plain, frank man, Chandos, and I've the very devil's own mischief-making to tell you of now; but, believe me once for all, it costs me almost as much to tell as it can do you to hear. There is no good in beating about the bush—no good in being discursive over a thing so hor- rible as this ; you must know the worst at once, and it is better, perhaps, told without varnish or veil ; a short shrift and a quick death. That is truer mercy, after all, than all the endless preparation your fellow-aristo- crats might give you. Listen !-----' ' He paused a moment, as though that which he had to bring bore even him down in its bitter burden ; but his eyes glanced swiftly and longingly at the man he tor- tured: he loved this protracted torment. Like a cat, he played with his victim's misery before he killed him, and if without suspicion he could have prolonged it through hours of ignorance and dread, he would have done so with all the endless patience of hate. " Listen," he said, more softly; " as 1 bave said, you lave'long lived—indeed, I think since your majority— at the rate of four times your income. You have kept two households in England nearly such as princes keep; you have had your Paris hotel, your Turkish palace; you have lavished money on art, like another Bt-ck- ford; you have spent God knows what on women; you have given entertainments that cost you (though you never asked the cost) a couple of thousand a night; you have played the patron to every starving genius you met : in a word, you have lived like a king, my dear Ernest, and not being a king, but only an English gentleman, your royalty has broken down, and will, I fear, end in a very unavoidable abdication. In a word, you are Sn debt to an extent I hardly dare compute to you. To sell everything you possess will hardly satisfy your claimants; bill-discounters and money-lenders have your signature in their hands, and will call for payment without mercy. Briefly, you have sold your birthright for ten years' enjoyment, and you now are, beyond all hope of ransom, irrevocably and most utterly—ruin ed. " The word cut down again upon the stillness with a shrill, sharp, pitiless echo, as a sword cuts down through the air before it falls on the bowed neck of the doomed. ' . Its utterance repaid its speaker for all he had fore- gone, for all he had forborne, for every slight endured in silence from the world he hated, for every benefit taken with an inward curse from the man he hunted down. He loved that word so well, he could have dinned it on the silence in incessant repetition, hurling down with it the brilliant and gracious life he had so long envied from the thrones of pleasure and of power into the nethermost darkness of a hopeless desolation. "Ruined? It" Chandos echoed the word hoarsely, faintly, scarcely with any comprehension of it, as a man suddenly wakened from a deep, sweet sleep to learn some unut- terable shame or misery that has befallen him repeats the phrase that tells it, mechanically and without sense. The agony of horror that gathered, white and bewildered, on the gallant beauty of his face, was m as ghastly a contrast with the glittering splendor of his dress as though the face of a corpse gazed out from the laces and jewels of a gay masquerade. " Yes; even you, my brilliant Lord of Clarencieux! answered the friend who stood upon his hearth; and with the words went an irrepressible snarl and sneer of triumph and of mockery that passed him unnoted in that moment of breathless, burning, inconceivable anguish. ",»)«!. you ! Details you will learn for your- self hereafter; for to-night the broad, brief facts enough. I would have warned you long ago, if you would only have listened; but you know as well as I do you would never hear of business, never think of money. Besides, in truth, I scarcely thought it was so very, so hopelessly bad as it seems now to be. I sup- pose your marriage with a bride who has no dower has set the fellows on: they are hounding for their money now like mad. 1 have had hard work to keep them even from arresting you; I have, upon my honor! To-night, when you went out to your princess's ball with all those thousands of pounds' worth of rose-dia- monds about you, it was a wonder, on my life, that some one of your hungry creditors didn't stop those dainty jewels. You shall see to-morrow that I tell you but the plain, unvarnished truth. You are so deeply involved now, Chandos, that I doubt if there is a single little cabinet picture on these walls, or a single rood of land at your beloved Clarencieux, that in a month s time you will call y our own-----" " Stop!—oh, my God! have some mercy!" The words broke out like the last cry wrung from one driven to the extremity of physical endurance- wrung from him in the abandonment of human mis- ery against all strength of manhood and all power of will He could bear no more; he was stunned and blinded like a man struck from behind him a murder- ous blow upon the brain which blasts his sight to dark Rtiin!—it had no meaning for him; it came to him like some dim, shapeless, devil-begotten thing that had no form or substance, a hideous lemur of a night s delirious dream. ....... Trevenna stood by and watched him; his hour had come at last, the hour which paid him back the can- kerous evil, the relentless toil, the unremitting chase, This moment to give up almost everything—give up even Claren- dower "canTou nÔr^unaersFand me 'when f ïeïï you of such long, wakeful, hungjy years that you have lived at the rate of four times the amount had been hoardedup.by him_ ai a. J^r hoards bis ot your annual income? What history does that sun- gold, and now, in its full seizure, he ws cieux!" The words, so deftly strung together to goad and taunt and add misery to misery, wound their pitiless speech, unchecked, with all the fiendish ingenuity of hatred that could not sate itself enough in the vastneas of this wreck it wrought. Chandos heard them, yet only dimly as men hear in whose ears the noise of great sea-waves is surging. He raised himself erect, rigid in an unnatural calm. Years of age and wretchedness could not have changed his face as this brief moment had changed it; its radi- ance and its splendor had died out as though the breath of death had passed on it; its ashen white looked ghastlier beside the ball-room gayety of his dress, and in the stillness that followed the loud, slow, labored breathings of his heart were audible—each throb a pang. "You swear that this is truth?" His voice was broken and strained, like the voice Of a man just arisen from a bed of lengthened sickness; and his hot lips had parted twice before words came to them. " To the uttermost letter." Chandos' head drooped as though he had been sud- denly stabbed; all the vigor and grace and perfection of his frame seemed to wither and grow old; a shud- der such as the limbs shiver with involuntarily under some unendurable bodily torment of the flames or of the knife, shook him from head to foot. "Clarencieux lost! OGod!" The words died in his throat—the stifled cry of a vain agony for his lost birthright. This alone, through all the blindness and the stuper of misery that had fallen on him, rose out clear before him in its burning tor- ture—the passionate yearning of his heart towards his home. , .. , As the flare of a torch suddenly shows the abyss that yawns beneath the traveller's feet, so the glare and the shame of the sentence he heard showed him the bottomless desolation over which he stood. He was wakened from his dreamful ease to be flung face to face with an absolute despair ! For the moment strength gave way, manhood was shattered down, consciousness itself could keep no hold on life; the lights of the chamber reeled in giddy gyrations round him, a sound like rushing waters beat in on his brain, a darkness like the darkness of death fell upon him. He swayed forward like a drunken man, against the broad marble ledge above the hearth ; his hands instinctively clenched on the stone as the hands of those sinking to their grave down the glassy slope of an Alpine mountain clench on the ice-ridge that they meet; his head sunk on his arms, the suffocated labor of each breath panted out on the silence like a death-spasm:—at one stroke he was bereaved of all ! ¦ ¦ . His torturer looked on. Never in the cells of the In- quisition could Franciscan or Dominican have watched flie gradual wrenching of the rack, the winding-out of the strained limbs till they broke, the wringing and bruising and slaying of the quivering nerves till they could bear no more, as Trevenna watched this moral torment, this assassination of joy and honor, peace and love and fame, and every fair thing of a gracious world, laid desert and desolate at his word. He looked on, as in the legends of the early Church devils looked on at the impotent despair of those whose souls they had lured and tempted and meshed in their net and made their own. He looked on and was repaid. " Chandos," he said, gravely, almost softly, pQunng the last drop of burning oil into the fresh wound his stab had dealt—" Chandos, believe me—from my soul I pity you!" „ , ... He had studied long the nature of the man now in hi* power, and he knew the keenest sting to give. Yet for once his greed erred in its mark; the last bolt shortened the hour of his rich, insatiate enjoyment. It roused Chandos as the bay of the pack rouses the dving stag from its mortal throes to stagger up and drag its bleeding limbs to solitude, where it can die alone. It pierced his stupefaction; it told him more widely than all other words could tell, how mighty was his fall, how utter his desolation. This man pitied him ! He raised himself with sudden force; the pride of his race was not dead in him, and the same courage inthe teeth of calamity .which had sent the last marquis with a smile to the Tower scaf- ford, was in him now under the lash of his dependant s mockery of compassion. His face was strangely and terribly calm, but a premature age seemed to have withered all life from it; his lips were colorless, and on his forehead alone the dark congested blood flushed heavily, red and burning as in the heat of fever. "If tiiis be the truth," he said, hoarsely, while hi* throat was parched and almost voiceless, you have had little mercy in the telling 1 Go; take the town ; your story; it will startle them. Spare more of it to '"'The words were spoken with a tranquillity more hor- rible than the fiercest outbreaks of delirium or the most hopeless abandonment of w»e. He stood as, m the days of Philip the Fair, one of his race had stood to be bound to the Templars' pyre; his hand was clenched on the marble ledge, and every now and then a quick shudder ran through all his limbs, shaking him as with the shudder of an icy cold; but his eyes were dry and fronted his tormentor with a look under which the'other shrank, and no sign or sigh of pain escaped Trevenna moved slightly ; he could not SMet the gacd