58
-u-tiAxs juva.
come; that unrivalled silver wit could consummate
what conferences and coalitions failed to compass ; that
magical feminine subtlety eould dupe, and mask, and
net, and seduce, and wind, and unravel, and give a
poison-drop of treachery in a crystal-clear sweetmeat
of frankness and compliment, and join with both sides
at once, and glide unharmed away, compromised with
neither, as no male state-craft ever yet could do. The
only mistake she made was that she thought the
growth of fhe nations was to be pruned by an enam-
elled paper-knife, and the peoples that were struggling
for liberty, as drowning men for air, were to be bound
helpless by the strtaf s of Foreign Portfolios. But the
error was not only he.s; male state-craft has made it
for ages.
No .v it was of an idle thing she was speaking. One
of her attendants stood before her. a slight, pale,
velvet-voiced Greek, long in her service, and skilled in
many tongues and many ways. He was reciting, with
his finger on a little note-book, the heads of some
trifling researches—very trifling he thought them, he
who was accustomed to be a great lady's political
mouchard.
"Still wandering; close onVenetia; will soon want
food; takes no alms; left Vallombrosa two months
ago; is known only by the name of Castalia; parentage
unknown; reaied by charity of the Church; supposed
by the peasants to have fled to a stranger who spent
the spring there in a villégiatura. That is all mad-
She listened, then beat her jewelled fingers a little
impatiently.
'* That is not like your training—to bring me an unfin-
"There is nothing to be learned, madame."
The amused scorn of his mistress's eyes flashed
lightly over him.                                                          .
" If a thing is on the surface, a blind man can feel »t.
Go; and tell me when you come back both the name of
this stranger and the name of her mother."
"It is impossible, madame."
She gave a sign of her hand in dismissal.
"You must make impossibilities possible, if you
remain with me."
The voice was perfectly gentle, but inflexible. Her
servant bowed, and withdrew.
" She is belle à faire peur. I will know what she is to
him," murmured Heloïse de la Vivarol.
The fair politician had not forgotten her oath.
Two weeks later, the Greek, who dared not reappear
with his mission unaccomplished, sent his mistress,
with profound apology for continued failure, a trifle
that, by infinite patience and much difficulty, had been
procured, with penitent confession of its theft, from a
contadina of Fontane Amorose—a trifle that had been
taken from the dead, and secreted rather from super-
stitious belief in its holy power than from its value. It
was a little worn, thin, silver relic-case; on it was
feebly scratched, by some unskilful hand, a name—
"Valeria Lulli."
CHAPTER  VIII.
In his atelier, early in the next day, an artist stood
painting. His studio looked on part of the Forest of
Fontainebleau. The garden was very tranquil below;
and the light within shone on easts, antiques, bronzes,
old armor, old cabinets, and half-completed sketches,
all an artist's picturesque lumber. He had a fair fame,
and, though not rich, could live in ease. He did not
eare for the gay Bohemianism of his brethren ; he had
never done so. A sensitive, imaginative man—poet as
wellas painter—of vivid feeling and secluded habits,
he preferred solitude, and made companions of his own
creations. He stood before one now, lovingly touching
and retouching it—a man with Southern blood in every
line of his limbs and his features, with a head like a
Murillo picture, and a rich Spanish beauty that would
have been very noble, but for a look of wavering inde-
cision and a startled, timorous, appealing glance too
often in his eyes.
Itwas not there now; he was smiling down on his
picture with a blissful content in its promise. It had
the pure, clear, cool color of the French school, with
the luxuriance of an overflowing fancy less strictly
educated, more abundantly loosened, than theirs; it
was intensely idealic, far from all realism, withal vol-
uptuous, yet never sensual. The type of Ms nature
might be found in the picture; it was high, but it had
scarcely strength enough in it to be the highest. Still,
itwas of a rare talent, a rare poetry, and he might well
look on it contented: he only turned from it to smile
more fondly even still in the face of a young girl who
leaned her hands on his shoulder to look at it with him
—a girl with the glow in her laughing loveliness that
was in the warm autumnal sunlight without, the love-
liness rich and full of grace of a Spaniard of Mexico.
" You are happy, Agostino, with it and with me?" she
asked, in a caressing murmur, with her ripe scarlet
lips, that had the bloom of their earliest years on them,
close against his.
There was a passionate love in his eyes, and there
was something of as passionate a regret, as he an-
swered her :—
" Miquerida! you and it give me all of happiness I
ever know."
And that was much, in such moments at least, with
the gloriousness of his own art on the canvas before
him in a shape that men would admire and honor, and
thai spoke to his heart more sweetly than it could ever
speak to theirs, and against his cheek the full and fra-
frant lips of a w man lie had loved at a glance with a
outhern fervor, and won at a sharp cost heightened
th e joy of possession. In that moment at least, the
artist, the lover, was happy.
As he stood before his picture, in the peace of the
early day, the door opened, a light quick step trod on
the oak floor.
"Ah, cher Agostino! how go the world and the pic-
tures?   You and La SeBora are a study for one!"
The painter started, with a sudden shiver thnt ran
through all his limbs; a deathly pallor came under the
warm oUve tint of his cheek; he stood silent, like a
stricken man. The Spanish girl, who had hurriedly
moved from his embrace, with a blush over her face,
did not see his agitation; she was looking shyly and in
wonder at the stranger who entered so unceremoni-
ously on their solitude.
" Haven't seen you for some time, my good Agos-
tinc," pursued John Trevenna, walking straight up
towards the easel, without taking the trouble to
remove his hat from over his eyes or his cigar from
between his lips—bright, quick, good-humored, care-
less, and easy, as he was everywhere, saunter-
jPg up the body of the Commons, chatting at a
over-side, discussing  foreign  questions in a Lega-
tion, or playing billiards with a duke. " What are
you doing here?—anything pretty? Queer thing, Art,
to be sure! Never did understand it—never should.
Let me see: a young lady without any drapery—unless
some ivy on her hair can be construed into "a conces-
sion to society on that head—and a general atmosphere
about her of moist leaves and hazy uncomf ortableness.
Now you've * idealized ' her into something, I'll be
bound, and will give her some sonorous Hellenic title,
eh? That's always the way. An artist gives his por-
ter's daughter five francs and a kiss to sit to him,
dresses her up with some two-sous bunches of prim-
roses from the Marché des Fleurs, paints her while
they smoke bad tobacco and chatter argot together,
and calls her the Genius of the Spring, or something as
crack-jaw. Straightway the connoisseurs and critics
go mad: it's an 'artistic foreshadowing of the divine
in woman;' or it's an 'idealic representation of the
morning of life and the budding renaissance of the
earth;' or it's a 'fusion of many lights into one har-
monious whole;' or it's some other art-jargon as non-
sensical. And if you talk the trash, and stare at the
nude 'Genius,' it's all right; but if you can't talk the
trash, and like to look at the live grisette dancing a
rigolboche, it's all w-rong, and you're ' such a coarse
fellow!' That's why I don't like Art; she's such a hum-
bug. 'Idealism!' Why, it's only Realism washed out
and vamped up with a little glossing, as the raw-boned,
yellow-skinned ballet-hacks are dressed up in paint
and spangles and gossamer petticoats and set floating
about as fairies. ' Idealism !'—that's the science of
seeing things as they aren't; that's all."
With which Trevenna, with his glass in his eye and
his cigar in his teeth, completed his lecture on art, hit-
ting truth in the bull's eye, as he commonly did, re-
freshing the Hudibrastic vein in himforhiscompulsory
hypocrlsies by a sparring-match with other people's
humbugs. He lied because everybody lied, because it
was politic, because it was necessary, because it was
one of the weapons that cut a way up the steep and
solid granite of national vanity and social convention-
alities; but the man himself was too jovially cynical
(if such an antithesis may be used) not to be naturally
candid. He would never have had for his crime the
timorous conventional Ciceronian euphemism of Vixe-
runt; .he would have come out from the Tullianum
and told the people, with a laugh, that he'd killed
Lentullus and the whole of that cursed set, because
they were horribly in the way and were altogether a
bad lot. He held his secret cards closer than any man
living; but all the same he never pandered with his
actions under specious names to himself, and he had
by nature the " cynical frankness " of Sulla. Indeed,
this would sometimes break out of him, and cleave the
dull air of English politics with a rush -that made its
solemn respectatalities aghast—though the mischief
happened seldom, as Trevenna, Hke Jove, held his
lightning in sure command, and was, moreover, the
last man in the universe to risk an Icarus flight.
Meanwhile, the great popular leader uttered his dia-
tribe against art, standing before the easel, puffing
smoke into the fair face of a young Dryad, who might
justly have claimed sisterhood with Ingres' creations,
the painter had remained silent and passive, his Rubens
head bent down, on his face a still, cold, gray look, like
that of a man about to faint from physical pain ; the
lids drooped heavily over his eyes; his limbs trembled;
he stood, like a slave before his taskmaster. The girl
had left them at a murmured word in Spanish from
him, and they stood alone. Trevenna dropped himself
into the painting-chair with his easy familiarity, which,
though something polished and toned down by the life
he led and the circles he frequented, had all its old bon-
camarade informality: a looker-on would have said it
was the brilliant minister, the moneyed patron, who
came on a good-natured visit to to the foreign artist.
" You are not lively company, cher Agostino, nor yet
a welcoming host," he resumed. " Didn't expect to see
me, I dare say? I haven't much time to run about
ateliers; still, as I was staying at the court, I thought
I'd give you a look. So you've married, eh? Very
pretty creature, too, I dare say, for men who under-
stand that style of thing; myself, I'm a better judge of
bouillabaisse than of a mistress. Married, eh! You
know what Bacon says about marriage and hostages to
fortune, don't you?"
The artist's dry lips opened without words; his eye-
lids were raised for a moment, with a piteous, hunted
misery beneath them; he knew the meaning of the
question put to him.
" Don't know very well what Bacon meant, myself,"
pursued Trevenna, beating a careless tattoo with the
mahl-stick. " Wives and brats are hostages most men
would be uncommonly glad to leave unredeemed, I
fancy—goods they wouldn't want to take out of pawn
in a hurry, if they once got rid of 'em. So you've mar-
ried? Well, I've no objection to that, if you see any fun
in it: / shouldn't. You've learned one piece of wisdom:
you never try dodging now. Quite right. Wherever
you might go, /should know it."
The man who stood before him, like a slave whom
the bloodhounds have run down and brought back to
their bondage, shuddered as he heard.
"Oh, God!" he murmured, " can you not spare me
yet? I am so nameless a thing in the world's sight, be-
side you ! You have such vast schemes, such vast am-
bitions, so wide a repute, so broad a field: can you
never forget me, and let me go?"
"Cher Agostino," returned the Right Honorable
Member, " you are illogical. A thing may be insignifi-
cant, but it may be wanted. A pawn may, before now,
have turned the scale of a champion game of chess.
Take care of the trifles, and the big events will take
care of themselves. That's my motto; though, of
course, you don't understand this, seeing that your
trade in life is to scatter broad splashes of color and
leave fancy to All 'em up—to paint a beetle's back as if
the universe hung in the pre-Raphaelism, and to trust
to Providence that your daub of orange looks like a
sunset—to make believe, in a word, with a little pot of
orl and a little heap of colored earths, just for all the
world as children play at sand-building, in the very
oddest employment that ever a fantastic devil set the
wits of man after! You are unpractical, that's a mat-
ter of course; but you are more—you are desperately
ungrateful!"
A quiver of passion shook the artist's frame; the
scarlet flood flushed the olive of his delicate cheek; he
recoiled and rebelled against the tyranny that set its
iron heel upon his neck, as years before the beautiful
lad, whom the old Hebrew loved, had done so in the
gloomy city den.
" Ungrateful ! Are men grateful whose very life is
not their own?   Are men grateful who hourly draw
their breath as a scourged dog's? Are men grateful
who from their boyhood upward have had their whole
future held in hostage as chastisement for one poverty-
sown sin?—grateful for having their spirits broken,
their soulis accursed, their hearts fettered, their step*
dogged, their sleep haunted, their manhood ruined? If
they are grateful, so am I; not else."
Trevenna laughed good-humoredly.
" My good fellow, 1 always told you you ought to go
on the stage: you'd make your fortune there. Such a.
speech as that, now—all d l'improviste, too—would
bring down any house. Decidedly you've histrionic-
talents, Agostino; you'd be a second Talma. All your
raving set apart, however (and you're not good at. elocu-
tion, très-cher; who can 'fetter' hearts? who can
' break ' spirits? It sounds just like some doggerel for
a valentine), you are ungrateful. I might have sent
you to the hulks, and didn't. My young Jew, you
ought to be immeasurably my debtor."
He spoke quite pleasantly, beating a rataplan with
the mahl-stick, and sitting crosswise on the painting-
chair. He was never out of temper, and some there
were who learned to dread that bright, sunny, inso-
lent, mirthful good humor as they never dreaded the
most fiery or the most sullen furies of other men.
Even in the polittcal arena, opponents had been
taught that there was a fatal power in that cloudless,
and racy good temper, which never opened the slight
est aperture for attack, but yet caught them so often
and so terribly on the hip.
"Very ungrateful you are, my would-be Rubens,"
resumed Trevenna. " Only think ! Here is a man who
committed a downright felony, whom I could have put
in a convict's chains any day I liked, and I did nothing
to him but let him grow up, and turn artist, and live to
the pleasantest city in the world, and married when he
fancied the folly, and do all he liked in the way- he liked
best; and he can't see that he owes me anything I Oh,
the corruption of the human heart!"
With which Trevenna, having addressed the exposi-
tion to the Dryad on the easel, dealt her a little blow
with the mahl-stick, and made a long, cruel blur across
the still moist paint of her beautiful, gravely-smiling
mouth, that it had cost the painter so many hours,
so many days, of loving labor to perfect.
Agostino gave an involuntary cry of anguish. He
could have borne iron blows rained down on his own
head like hail, betterthan he could bear that ruin of his
work, that outrage to his darling.
" I do it in the interest of morality ; she's too pretty and
too- sensual," laughed Trevenna, as he drew the instru-
ment of torture down over the delicate brow and the
long flowing tresses, making a blurred, blotted, beaten
mass where the thing of beauty had glowed on the can-
vas. He would not have thought of it, but that the
gleam of fear in his victim's eyes, as the stick had ac
cidentally slanted towards the easel, had first told him
the ruin he might make. To torment was a mischief
and a merriment that he never could resist, strong as
his self-control was in other things.
It was the one last straw that broke the long-suffering
camel's back. With a cry as though some murderers
knife were at his own throat, the painter sprang forward
and caught his tyrant's arm, wrenching the mahl-stick
away, though not until it was too late to save his Dryad,
not until the ruthless cruelty had done its pleasure or
destruction.
"Merciful God!" he cried, passionately, "are you
devil, not man? Sate yourself in my wretchedness;
but, for pity's sake, spare my works, the only treas-
ure and redemption of my weak, worthless, accursed
life!"
Trevenna shrugged his shoulders, knocking his cigar-
ash off against the marvellous clearness of limpid, bub-
bling, prismatic, sunlit water at the Dryad's feet, that
had made one of the chief beauties and wonders of the
picture.
"Agostino, bon enfant, you should go on the stage.
You speak in strophes, and say ' good-day ' to anybody
like an Orestes seeingthe Furies! It must be very ex-
hausting to keep up at that perpetual melo-dramatic
height. Try life in shirt-sleeves and slippers; it's as
pleasant again as life in the tragic toga. Be logical.
What's to prevent my slashing that picture across,
right and left, with my penknife, if I like? Not you.
You think your life ' weak and worthless;' far be it
from me to disagree with you; but what you think you
'redeem ' it in by painting young ladies aunalurel from
immoral models, putting some weed on their head and
a pond at their feet, and calling it 'idealism,'I can't
see: that's beyond me. However, I'm not an idealist:
perhaps that's why."
With which he swayed himself back in the painting
chair, and prodded the picture all over with his .cigar,
leaving little blots of ash and sparks of fire on each
spot. Martin and Gustave Doré are mere novices in
the art of inventing tortures, beside the ingenuity of
Trevenna's laughing humor.
The man he lectured thus stood silent by, paralyzed
and quivering with an anguish that trembled in him
from head to foot. Agostino had not changed; the
yielding, timorous, sensitive nature, blending a vivid
imagination with a woman's susceptibility to fear, was
unaltered in him, and laid him utterly at the mercy of
every stronger temperament and sterner will, even
when he was most roused to the evanescent Are of a
futile rebellion.
" Oh, Heaven !" he moaned, passionately, " I thought
you had forgotten me ! I thought you had wearied of
my misery, and would leave me in a little peace ! You
are so rich, so famous, so successful; you nave had se
many victims greater far than I; you stand so high in
the world's sight. Can you never let one so poor and
powerless as I go free?"
"Poor and powerless is a figure," said Trevenna,
-with a gesture of his cigar. " You will use such exag
gerated language; your beggarly little nation always
did, calling themselves the chosen of Heaven, when
they were the dirtiest little lot of thieves going, and
declaring now that they're waiting for their Messiah,
while they're buying our old clothes, picking up our rags
and lying au-plaisir to our police courts! You aren't
poor, cher Agostino, for a painter; and you're really
doing well, Paris talks of your pictures, and the court
likes your young ladies in ivy and nothing else. You're
prosperous—on my word, you are; but don't flatter
yourself I shall ever forget you.   I don't forget !"
He sent a puff of smoke into the air with those three
Words; in them he embodied the whole of his career,
the key-note of his character, the pith and essence at
once of his success and of his pitilessness.
A heavy struggling sigh burst from his listener as he
heard ; it was the selfsame contest that had taken place
years previous in the lamp-lit den of the bill-discount-