CHAIN DOS.

Boble, which had paralyzed his companions. "Every-
thing, M. le Due, that tact and good sense could sug-
gest. But you cannot dam up an avalanche once on
its downward road; no mortal skill could arrest his
ruin.   It was far too vast, too complete."
Philippe d'Orvâle seemed as though he heard noth-
ing; he stood there in his herculean stature, with his
fiery glance flashing on the men before him, his lips
drawn into a close tight line under the chestnut shower
of his beard. So only had they set once before, when
he had seen a young girl struck and kicked by her
owners on a winter's night outside the guingette, where
he had been as Pierrot to a barričre ball of ouvriers
and grisettes; and the man who had beaten her till she
moaned where she lay like a shot fawn had been felled
down in the snow by a single crashing stroke from the
arm in whose veins ran the blood of French nobles who
had charged with Godefroi de Bouillon, and died with
Bayard, and fought at Ivry under the White Plume.
''What is left him?" he asked, curtly. His breath
came short and sharply drawn.
"Nothing, monseigneur."
Trevenna felt his hate rising against this haughty
roysterer, this sobered reveller, who came to challenge
the hopelessness and the completeness of the devasta-
tion he had wrought. He could not resist the malicious
pleasure of standing there face to face with the aristo-
crat-ally, the titled boon-companion, of the ruined
man, and dinning in his ear the total beggary that had
fallen on his favorite and his friend.
"Nothing! Not a shilling!" he repeated, with the
same relish with which a hound turns his tongue over
his lips after a savory, thirsty plunge of his fangs into
the blood he is allowed to taste.
"'Nothing!'   Is this place gone?"
" It is going by aution, M. le Due."
The curt, caustic, complacency of the answer was
not to be restrained for all that prudence could sug-
gest.
" Good God! what he has suffered!"
The words broke unconsciously from D'Orvâle'slips:
he knew how he had suffered, in the moment he
almost suffered as much. Due Philippe was reck-
less, wayward, wasteful of the goods of the earth and
the gifts of his brain,,was eccentric to the verge, of in-
sanity, and fooled away his mature years in the follies
of a Rochester, in the orgies of a Sheridan ; but he had
a generosity as wide and a heart as warm as the
stretch of his Southern tends, as the light of his South-
ern suns. For a moment the grief on him had the
mastery; then, shaking his hair as a lion shakes its
tawny mane, he dashed his hand down again on the
marble breadth of the console.
"Sold? By the heaven above us, never!"
Trevenna bowed with a tinge of ironic insolence of
which he was scarcely aware himself.
" It would be happy if monseigneur could make his
words good; but, unfortunately, creditors are stubborn
things. Clarencieux is no longer our poor friend's, but
belongs to his claimants. It will be parcelled out by
the auctioneer's hammer."
Trevenna bowed again.
" With every respect, M. le. Due, for your very strong
negative, I fear it is quite impossible that it can take
effect.   Clarencieux is doomed!"
D'Orvâle flashed his glance oser him with that mute
scorn which his grandfather had given to ganson when
he sauntered up the steps of the guillotine as calmly as
he had gone through a minuet with Marie Antoinette
or Lamballe.
"You triumph in your patron's adversity, sir! That
is but inevitable ; every jackal is content when the lion
falls ! By the God above us, 1 tell you Clarencieux shall
nor be bartered!"
Trevenna shrugged his shoulders.
" With every deference, M. le Due, your language,
thoagh you are a prince, is not polite.   With regard to
Clarencieux-----' '
"It shall be mine."
The words were said as Philippe d'Orvâle. could say
S'.rch when he chose, with a dignity that none could
have surpassed, with a sovereignty that sat finely on
Elm in its negligent ease, with a force of will which now
and then flashed out of his mad caprices and his fan-
tastic vagaries, and showed what this man might have
been had he so willed to lead the world instead of to be
the hero of a night's wild masking, the king of a score
of wine-cup rioters.
"Yours?   Impossible!"
Trevenna was startled almost into self-betrayal of
the thirst that was upon him for the dispersion and
destruction of the lands of Clarencieux—of the terror
that seized him lest by some mischance any portion of
the bitterness of his fate should be spared to Chandos,
any fragment of the home he had been exiled from be
saved from ignominy and outrage.
"Impossible?" echoed Philippe d'Orvâle. "No one
ever says the word to me!"
There was all the superb defiance of the old nobles of
Versailles, all the disdainful omnipotence of the ancient
régime, in the reply. When he would, he could exert
his command as imperiously, as intolerantly, as any
marshal of Louis Quinze.
"Indeed! I fear his creditors will say it."
Trevenna eould pause neither for the courtesies of
custom nor the ceremonies to rank; he could have
killed, if a glance would have stein, this loathed French
noble, who, with his seigneur'ssympathies and his aris-
tocrat's loyalty to his order and his friend, came to ar-
rest the consummation of that unsurpassed edifice of
vengeance which he had erected, at such labor and
with such genius, to crush the might of Clarencieux
and lie heavy above a suicide's grave.
A fierce oath, passionate as a tornado, broke from
under the sweeping beard of Due Philippe where he
stood. But that his patrician honor forbade him to
strike aman whom his patrician pride could not have
met and satisfied as his equal, he eould have dashed
Trevenna down on the hearth he insulted, with a single
blow of his stalwart right hand.
"Sayit?" he repeated. "By God, then, they shall
;wt. What! parcel his lands out among thieves? let a
broker be master here in his stead? sell his home to
s»me trader's new gold? Never, while there is life left
in me! never, if my own castles are mortgaged over
my head to get the money they ask ! Where is your
country's gratitude, that they let his father's memory
go pawn? Where are al' those he benefited, that there
is not a voice lifted against such shame?"
Trevenna shrugged his shoulders.   That this man
was a prince and a millionaire whom he bearded he
cared not two straws: he only remembered Philippe
Orvâle as a madman vrfth whose outrageous follies
all Europe had rung ; he only remembered him as one
who clung to the idol the world had dethroned, and
who threatened to tear down the topmost laurel-wreath
with which his own hand had crowned his labor of
vengeance.
"Monseigneur d'Orvâle," he said, with that malicious
banter which Trevenna could no more hold back in his
wrath than the leopard in his will hold back his claws,
"if the country spent its money on every great man's
extravagant scions, it would have some uncommonly
uncomfortable legacies. It don't even pay its own
debt; deuce take me if I can see why it should pay
Chandos' because his father once was First Lord of its
Treasury and he has seen fit to squander as pretty a
property as ever was made ducks and drakes of for
pictures and dinners and women. As for those he
benefited—granted they're a good many; but if a lot
of artists, and singers, and dancers, and shabby boys
who think themselves Shakspeares, and bearded Bo-
hemians who swig beer while they boast themselves
Raphaels, were all to club together to help him with a
shilling subscription, I don't suppose they'd manage to
buy back much more than a shelf of his yellow French
novels. I'm as sorry for him as you can be (you can't
doubt my sincerity, I shall never get such good din-
ners) ; but I candidly confess I don't see, and can't see,
why, just because he has been a fool and a spendthrift,
a whole nation of sane people are bound to rush to his
rescue with their purses wide open. As he sowed, so
lie reaps; nobody can complain of that."
Due Philippe shook in all his mighty limbs; and ashe
looked at the speaker planted there lightly, firmly, with
, . feet apart and the insolence of triumph irrepressi-
.;. spoken in his face and his attitude, he could have
. ,;ped forward like a staghound and shaken all the life
¦ >at of him with a single gripe. It was with a mighty
elfort that he kept the longing in.
" If you reap as you sow, M. Trevenna, you will have
a fine harvest of woven hemp!" he said, curtly, in the
depths of his brown beard, as he swung with an undis-
guised loathing from him, and turned towards the other
men, who, mute with astonishment, and out of defer-
ence for the rank of the mad noble who had bioken in
on them thus, stood passive. "You are his men of
business, are you not?—wreckers enriched by the flot-
sam and jetsam you save out of his shipwreck ! Listen
to me, then. Whoever they be, or however his credi-
tors hold this place, it shall be mine. Whatever price
they ask, whatever liabilities bo on it, I will give them
and I will discharge. Let them name the most extrava-
gant their extortion can grasp at, it shall not be
checked; I will meet it. I will buy Clarencieux as it is,
from its turrets to its moorlands; do you hear? Not a
tree shall be touched, not a picture be moved, not a
stone be displaced. It shall be mine. And, hark you
here; I offer them their own terms—all their greed can
crave or fancy ; but tell them this, on the word of Phil-
ippe d'Orvâle, that if they do not part with it peacea-
bly, if they do not send their hell-dogs out of its places
and take the bidding I give them, 1 will so blast their
names through Europe that their trade and their credit
shall be gone forever, and they shall perish in worse
beggary than this that they have caused. Tell them
that—Europe can let them know in what fashion I
keep my oaths—and with to-morrow make Clarencieux
mine."                                                         ,       .,           .
The passionate words quivered out on the silence of
the panted chamber, furious as a hound's bay, firm
and ringing as an army's sound to assault.   Then, with-
out another syllable, Philippe d'Orvâle swung round
and strode out of the cabinet, his lion eyes alight with ;
a terrible menace, his lion's mane of hair tossed back.
He had said enough.   When once he roused from his
wild masquerades and his headlong Bohemiamsm to !
use his leonine might and to vindicate his princely !
blood, there was not a man in all the breadth of the
nations that ever dared say nay to the " mad duke.
He saved Clarencieux-saved it from being sundered
in a thousand pieces and given over to the spoilers,
though he could not ssve the honor of its house, the ;
ruin of its race. The world was bitterly aggrieved—it
was deprived of so absorbing a theme, of so precious a
prize; and Trevenna could have killed him.
The pyramid of his vengeance had risen so perfectly,
step by'step, without a flaw; it was unbearable to h:m
that the one stone for its apex should be wanting, the
one last line of the record of the triumphs engraved on
it should be missing.   He had swept all the herds away,
leaving not one; it was unendurable to him that the I
last coveted ewe-lamb should alone have escaped him.
He had destroyed Chandos utterly, hopelessly, body
and soul, as he believed—slain honor and genius and ,
life in him, without a pause in his success.   It was in-
tolerable to him that the last drop should not crown
the cup, that the green diadem of the Clarencieux
woods should wreathe its castle untouched, that the ;
royalties of the exiled race should be left in sanctified |
solitude, in lieu of being flung out to the crowds and
parcelled among the Marseillaise in the desolated courts
of the princes.                                          „,-   .,      ,      ,
He had longed to see, had it been possible, the plough
pass over the lands and the harrow rake out every
trace of the banished race; he had longed to see, if he
could, the flame of the culturer licking up all the
beautiful, wild, useless wealth of heather and fern and
forest lilies; he had longed to hear the hammers clang
among the woodland stillness, to watch the oaks crash
down under the axe, to behold the beauty crushed out
under the iron roll and the timber scaffolding of the
new speculators-to know that the very place and name
and relics of the exiled lord were effaced and forgotten.
Through Philippe d'Orvâle this last crowning luxury
^Clarencieux, though he had driven from it the last of
its race, escaped him-escapedthe indignity, the obliv-
ion the desecration, he had planned to heap on it, Ire
had made its hearths desolate but his arm was held
back from the final blow with which he had planned to
make them also dishonored and to raze their stones as
hough no fires had ever burned there-till sheep should
have grazed where kings had feasted, and wheat have
waved where its dead rulers had their graves.
Through Philippe d'Orvâle it was denied him.
T lusxome were faithful to the fallen idol; the sun-
brownčd men who toiled from dawn to evening among
the seas of seeding grass and the yellow oceans of the
swelling corn; the crippled dreamer whom his fellows
though! an idiot that a child might lead; the reckless
voluptuary, the prince-Bohemian, whom the worn
called a madman, and vested with every vice that
Hbertines can frame; the dog whom human reason
disdatas as a brute without speech; those were faithful
-those only. But there were many, as the world stands
Thei twowho were deadliest against him, and chief est
without pity or mercy in his fall, were the mau he had
succored with his friendship and hin gold, and the
woman he had loved and honored.
BOOK  THE FOURTH.
" Delexi jristitianr et odivi iniqnitatcin, proptei-oa nit*.
ior in exilio."                                          —Hildkbuai*.
" Is not the bread thou cat's!, the rcbe then wearV"
Thy wealth, and honor», all the pure Indulgence
Of him thou wouldst tlesl n.y Î
Why, then, no bond is loft on human kind."
DliYMMJ.
CHAPTER I.
It was far past midnight in Paris; a chilly, bitter win-
ter's night, in the turn of the going year; a night with-
out stars, in which the snow drifted slowly down, and
the homeless couched down shivering into a traitorous
sleep—a merciful sleep, from which they would wake
no more—an endless sleep, to be yearned for passion-
ately when there can be no bread for the parching lips,
if breath linger in them, no peace for the aching eyes,
if they wake again to a world of want.
It was long past midnight in one of the gambling-dens
which mock the law in the hidden darkness of their
secret haunts—the dens which no code will ever sup-
press, which no legislature will ever prevent. Where
any vice is demanded, there will be the supply; let
every shape of forbiddance be exercised as it may, in
vain Wherever men be hungered for their own ruin,
there will be also those who bring their ruin to them.
This was one of the worst hells in Paris—the worst
in Europe. Men who dared venture nowhere else came
here; men on whom the grasp of the law would be
laid, were they seen, came here; men who, having ex-
hausted every form of riot and debauchery, had noth-
ing left except the gamester's excitation, came here;
it embraced them all, and finished the wreck that other
ruin had begun. Other places allured with color, with
glitter, with enticing temptations: this had none cf
these; it allured with its own deadly charm alone, it
made its trade terribly naked and avowed: it let men
come and stake their lives, and raked the stake in, and
went on without a pause; it was a pandemoniac para-
dise only for those already cursed. It was hidden away
in one of the foulest and most secret nests of Paris; its
haunt was known to none save its frequenters, and
none so frequented it save those whom some criminal
brand or some desperate doom already had marked or
claimed. Close at hand to it, in an outer chamber, were
the hot drinks, the acrid wines, the absinthe, and the
opiates that were drunk down by ashen lips and burn-
ing throats as though they were water; these alone
broke the ceaseless tenor of the gambling; these alone
shared with it the days and nights of those who plunged
into the abyss it opened for'them. Often all on through
the dawn, and the noon, and the day, the flaring gas-
jets of its burners would be kept alight: the crowd that
filled its room would know nothing of time—not know
even that the sun had risen. The gay tumult of the
summer life of Paris would be waking and shmmg on
all around it in the clear light of the fresh hours; and
still here where the sullen doors barred out all comers
the gamesters would play on, play on, till they dropped
down dead-drank, or reeled insensible with want of
food and drugs or nicotines. The Morgue had never
owed so many visitants to any place as it had owed to
this: the Bagne had never received so many despera-
does as it had received from here; the walls of Bicetre
had never been so filled with raving brainless lives as
it had been filled with by the haunters of this den hid-
den in the midst of curling crooked streets and crowd-
ing roofs like a viper's nest under the swathes of grass.»
Those who owned it were never known: the longest
frequenter of its room never knew who the bank was;
it was a secret profound, impenetrable—guarded as
closely as its own existence was guarded from the mil-
lion eyes of the clairvoyant law. No one knew that in
two or three superb hotels, with fine carriages, fine din-
ners fine linen, with fashionable wives and blameless
reputations, with a high name on the Bourse and a
reception at the Tuileries, dwelt, m peace and plenty—
Does'the5 world ever guess how a millionth part of
the money that fills it is made?   The world at large,
"Ittwas far past midnight in the hell; the gas-glare
fell on the painted faces of unsexed women and on the
baggered brows of men who had played on here all
through the day and played on through the night. The
croupiers were relieved at intervals: the gamblers never
moved; they hung there till the sheer physical powers
of life gave way, and famine forced them from the
tables; ftirless and breathless, only at long intervals
rending themselves from it to take the drugs and the
stimulants that soddened their senses, they were
riveted there by one universal, irresistible fascination.
Features of every varied kind were seen m the gaudy
; flare of the gas; but they all wore the same look-the
' thirsty, sleepless, intense look of ravenous excitement.
It was not the polished serenity of fashionable kursaals,
the impassivelanguor of aristrocratic gaming-tables
the self-destruct on, taken with a light word, ot the
' safles of Baden, of Homburg, of Monaco; it was gam-
Mum?In all its unreined fever, in all its naked excitation,
inal its headlong delirium, in all "its and quest for
¦ '"There^sďvasrérror in which the world bel.eves-
thatgan esters are moved by the lust of gam only by
the desire of greed, by the longings of avarice. It is
not so Xhe money won, they toss it back without an
r^tant'fpause, to risk its loss at venture Avarice is
no pai to^the delirium which allures them with so
exhaustless a fascination; the spell that.binds them is
the ho4,rd Give a gamester thousands, he cares for
the gold only to purchase with it that delicious feverish
! iScat°ingychaPrm of çhançe^There«adelightmtt.
agony, a
fntensity of sensation in its limitless swing between a
77's treasures and a beggar's death, which lends
nfč aesenseeanëvlr known before^rarely, indeed, once
tthtreTa7scaree°lyeedvena'sound inthe fatal place.
ing' gasping breath brake the Tharmed stillness ^n
which the cďick of the roulette-ball, the rattle of the
dice or the rapid monotone of the croupiers reigned
otherwise alone. The room was crowded.. Men who
had grown old and gray and palsied waiting on the
caprices of the color-men who had wasted on the
framing of cabals intellects that might have rivalled-
Newton's or Descartes'-mea who had consumed tifc