UHAKDOS.
deer forests. A fairer day had never dawned and
closed on Clarencieux. Far in the distance a white
sail glided in the offing; the stags couched slumbering
under the umbrageous shelter of the greenwood
aisles; the brooks murmured their incessant song of
joy bubbling through the maidenhair and beneath the
wild-rose boughs: its beauty had never been more,
beautiful.
Like the youth whom the ancient Mexican world
decked with'roses, and led out in his loveliness in the
light of the sun, ere the knife of the priestly slaugh-
terer laid his dead limbs to be severed on the altar
of sacrifice, the lands stretched smiling in the warmth,
unshadowed by the doom that would dismember and
destroy them.                                        .                   '
To part from them forever !—easier to lower the life
best loved within the darkness of the grave, easier to
lie down in the fulness of youth and die, easier to suffer
all that the world can hold of suffering, than to leave
the birthright every memory has hallowed, every
thought cherished, every childhood's love, endeared,
every pride and honor of manhood centred in, and the
one mad ruin of an Esau's barter lost.
The night was down—with the shine of the stars on
the sea, and the call of the deer on the silence, with
the grand woods bathed in dew, and tbe moorlands
steeped in a hushing quiet; and with the night he must
pass out from Clarencieux a self-exiled and self-beg-
gared man. All through the day he had wandered in
monotonous, almost unconscious action among the
places that he loved ; by the waves where they stretched
under endless crests of rock and below beetling walls
of pine-topped granite; over the heather, blossoming
on leagues of brown wet sand, where the grouse nested
and the sea-swallow skimmed; through the dark, inter-
minable aisles of oaks without a memory that could
guage their hoary age; through the rich, wild splendor
of forest-growth, all melodious with birds and with the
noise of babbling waters; by the side of lonely lakes
belted in with leafy screens, under the shelter of tow-
ering headlands, all clothed with fern and pine, and
with the fragrant wealth of linden-flowers, and the
clinging luxuriance of summer creepers; through them
he wandered, almost insensibly, walking mile on mile
without a sense of bodily fatigue, wearing out physical
strength without a knowledge of its loss, beaten, strung,
haggard, wellnigh lifeless, yet conscious of nothing
save that he looked his last forever on the place of his
birth and his heritage.
It was near midnight when he reached his home m
sheer exhaustion. Of the flight of time, of the bodtly
suffering that racked his limbs, of the weakness upon
him from want of food, he knew nothing : he only knew
that before the next day dawned he must leave Cla-
rencieux—his own no more, but given over to the
spoilers. All the familiar thin s must pass from him,
and be his no more. The trees that had shed therr
shade over his childish play would fall under the axe;
the roof under which kings had sought covert from the
men of his blood would know him no longer; strangers
would sit by the hearth to which hunted princes had
fled knowing they were safer, trusting in the honor of
a Chandos "than adnridst the Guards of their lost
throne-room. In the banqueting-hall, where his ances-
tors had gathered the chiefs of the nation, curious
throngs would rush to stare and barter: the very mar-
ble that bore his father's semblance would be sold to
whoever would buy; the very canvas from which his
mother's eyes smiled on him would pass away to hang
on dealers' walls. In the place that had been sacred
to his race none would pause to recall his name ; in the
heritage where his sovereignty had been absolute, his
lightest word treasured, his idlest wish fulfilled, he
would have no power to bid a dog be cared for, no
right to arrest a hand that should be raised to tear
down with laugh and jibe the records and the symbols
of the honor of his house.
Through the years, however many, that his life
should stretch to, never agairr could he lay his head
under the roof that had sheltered his childhood's sleep ;
never again could his eyes look upon the things be-
loved so long; never again could his steps come here,
where every rood was hallowed and where no race but
his race had ever yet reigned.
In that hour nothing but his oath to the man who
had bade him live on and meet his fate, whatever
that fate should be, stood between him and a self-
sought grave.            -                                        , " - „
Death took the young, the fair, the well-beloved; O
God! he thought, why would it pass him by? why
would it leave him breath on his lips, strength in his
limbs, consciousness in his brain, when all that was
worth living for was dead, when every pulse ot
existence through his veins was buta fresh pang?
Death! he had known its worst throes a thousand
times with every familiar thing on which his eyes had
looked their last; he had passed through its worst
bitterness without a voice to comfort, without a hand
to succor him, with every farewell gaze at all the living
things, at all the forest haunts, at all the summer love-
liness, with which he had parted as the dying Raphael
parted with longing, yearning love from the glories cf
the canvas that the mists of dissolution blinded from
his sight. Death! he had died a million deaths from
the hour when he had known that he must part with
Clarencieux.
Itwas long past midnight; all was very still. Through
the opened casements came the lulling of the sea, and
the faint, delicate murmur of leaves stirring in a wind-
less air, moved only by the weight of their clinging
dews or by a night-bird's wing. All in the vast buildmj;
slept; all who loved him in the household (and they
were many) had looked their test upon his face—Lie
face that most of them had known since the laugh of
Its childhood had been on it. He could have no eyes
upon him in this the last hour. All was quite still, the
moonlight  streamed  in, clear and white  and cold,
Standing there before them—those memorials of the
dead—he felt as though they drove him out, dishon-
ored, alien, accursed as any parricide. Through him
had gone what had been dearer to them than life;
through him had perished what they had trusted to
him; through him their name must be tarnished by
sneer, by scorn—worse yet, by pity; through him their
might, their fame, their stainless heritage, were drag-
ged in the dust and parted amidst thieves. The crime
of Orestes seemed scarce more of parricide than Ins
crime.
Had not his oath held him, had not his word, pledged
to one who now lay in his fresh grave, bound his arm
powerless, in that hour he would have fallen, killed by
his own hand, beneath his father's statue, where the
moon touched with its brightest lustre the proud brow
of the marble that stood there as though to bear wit-
ness against the wreck and shame of his ruined race,
the desolation of his forsaken hearth.
The stillness of the after-midnight was unbroken;
once the distant belling of a deer echoed over the park
without: other sound there was none. He seemed
alone with the dead he had dishonored—with the great
dead whose memories he had shamed and whose treas-
ures he had sold into bondage.
He looked at those lifeless symbols as though they
were his judges and accusers; and amoarse shuddering
cry broke from him and moaned down the silence of
the porphyry hall.
"Oh, God 1 I saved our honor!"
He felt as though he pleaded before their judgment-
seat—as though he called on them to bear with him in
his agony, to be merciful to him in his misery. He had
not bartered all their birthright; he had not given up
his honor into slavery!
The hushed, grave-like calm that followed on the
echo of his words was like the calm of a lone cathe-
dral; it cast back upon his heart in terrible isolation
the sense of how utterly he, who had loved men so
well and been the caressed of so many voices, stood m
his poverty and his exile alone.
Slowly, very slowly, he looked once more at all that
he must leave forever, then turned to pass out from
the porphyry chamber. But the tension of his strength
gave way; weakened by littte food, and" worn out by
exhaustion, his limbs shook, his frame reeled; he
swayed aside like a tree under fhe blows of an axe, and
fell prone across the threshold—the moonlight bathing
him where he lay.                                             ' ..     ,
For hours he was stretched senseless there, the dog
—the one friend faithful-crouched down by him in a
sleepless guard. The night passed lingeringly; the
flicker of the gentle leaves, or the soft rush of an owl s
wing, the only noise that stirred in it without. Now
and then there was the sweeping beat of a flight of deer
trooping across the sward that echoed from afar; once
a nightingale sang her love-song with a music of pas-
sionate pain. There was no noise of life in the great
forests without; there was none here in the moonlit
banqueting-hall.                                               -
The wind freshened as the day drew near, blowing
through the vastness of the foi saken chambers down
the aisles of the porphyry columns; its cooler breath
breathed on him and revived him; he stirred with a
shuddering sigh. His limbs were stiff and paralyzed;
his blood seemed frozen; the warm air around felt
chill as a tomb. He rose with difficulty, and dragged
himself like a man crippled with age, across the thres-
hold that his steps should never repass. The faint
light of the young day was breaking, and shed a
colder grayer hue on all its splendor, from which the
white majesty of the sculpture rose, like a spectre
keeping silent witness over the abandoned solitude.
Thus, with his head bowed, and in his step the slow,
laborious, feeble effort of bodily prostration, he passed
onward-onward through all that never again could
his eyes look upon, save in such remembrance as
dreams lend to sleep, to mock the waking of despair-
onward through the mighty entrance-hall, in which the
silence as of death reigned, where the steel tramp ot
the soldiers of the king had once re-echoed to its
vaulted roof.                                         .    ,  .     .._,
He looked back, in longing as agonized, in thirst as
terrible, in yearning as speechless in its love as that
with which eyes look backward to the bier in which all
that made life worth its living to them lies sightless,
senseless, and forever lost. He looked back once—m
such a gaze as men upon the scaffold give to the fair-
ness of earth and the brilliance of sunlight that they
shall never gaze upon again. Then the doors closed
on him with a hollow, sullen sound; he was
the while was on the eve of bankruptcy!—society felt
morally indignant and unjustifiably treated. Nothing
so marvellous, nothing so incredible, had startled his
order for many a long year; in the clubs and in the
drawing-rooms, in the Rooms and the Lobby, in the
lounge of the Park and the téte-a-tête of the boudoirs,
there was but one theme—his disappearance and Ins
ruin. No loss eould have been so irreparable as the
the loss of their leader; no shock could ha.'e been so
intense as the fall of their idol; no episode could have
been so thrilling as their reception by him the very
night before his story was known. Gourmets were in
despair—there would be no such dinners elsewhere;
and club-wits were in paradise—there crdd be no
dearth of a topic. Ladies fainted with grief, and re-
vived to wonder if his Limoges-ware would be sold,
and wept their bright eyes dun, to clear them again
with sager speculation as to the fate of the Clarencieux
diamonds; divided interests reigned together m then
hearts; itwas agonizing, it was terrible; no one would
ever give them such fêtes, but it was possible—all
clouds have their silver lining—that the Chandos 3ewels
perhaps might come into the market!
The Countess de la Vivaisol set her delicate teeth as
she heard of it, and felt her cheek grow white, rusée,
dazzling young diplomatist as she was.
"I hate him; I have my vengeance. I ought to re-
joice," she thought; "and yet-----" And yet m soli-
tude her tears fell. "Il est si beau!" she sighed to
herself.                                           ......^ ,,     ..
" He is ruined? Well, I have helped to do it, said
Flora de l'Orme, with gay self-accusation.
"What a pity!" lamented Claire Rahel. "The art
of opera-suppers will perish with him."
"There is an overruling Providence, ' sighed the
worldly-holies; "his books are not fit to be read.
Genius?—yes, no doubt; but what is genius without
principle?"                                           ;
"Died game," said a Guardsman. "By George, one
saw nothing last night."                                           , ,X
"Always eccentric," hinted a club-louuger. A lit-
tle mad, /think; and, on my word, it's the most char-
itable thing to suppose."
" Deceived us shamefully; acted most dishonorably,'
wept Lady Chesterton, to her allies. "My sisters
peace is ruined forever; indeed, I fear for her very
life. But we may be thankful perhaps for even this
terrible blow: it may have saved more. What happi-
ness could she have looked for with a gambler, a
libertine, a free-thinker, however brilliant his career?"
Two or three women—notably one beautiful Roman
princess, with the, splendor of Rome in her eyes—suf-
fered passionately in their solicitude, passively though
they had listened to the world on the subject, and
thought, wearily pushing off the weighty hair from
their brows, " / would have gone with him to his beg-
S£For the rest, the world talked itself out of breath
over its lost leader's fall, and picked the story of his
calamity as a carrion picks the bones of the dead
camel It flavored their white soups, was the choicest
olives to their wines, spared them silent moments, let
rhe dull seem witty if he brought a piquant addition
to it and gave a lulling morphine to the pangs of
jealous vanity. The world was perfectly certain, of
course, that the assertion of ignorance was merely a
blind, and that they had been wittingly duped many
years. A man run through a flue fortune without,
knowing it?—ridiculous 1 And the world began also,
as Trevenna prophesied, to find out that " Lucrèce
was very immoral.                  ¦                             ¦     ...
Thus the babble busied itself over the wreck of a life,
denying it even that sanctity of solitude which even
barbarians have conceded to calamity, and exposing it
far and wide in those pillories where no adversity can
veil no misery can hallow, no dignity beneath misfor-
tune can avail to shield those once given over to the
mercy of insatiate tongues.
They were shocked, grieved, horrified, most com-
passionately sympathetic, of course; but they were
quite of opinion that the idol they had followed had
been utterly worthless, and began to discuss with
unanimous vivacity the chances of who would be most
likely to secure the prize of that inimitable genius
Dubosc. It was perhaps, regarded as almost the
cruellest stroke of the wWe fearful affair when the
fact oozed out that the celebrated chef .alleged his
spirit to be broken, and announced Wsjntentionol
to exile, and his place would know him no more,
CHAPTER VIII.
With the day after his last entertainment the rum,
so sudden and so vast, had been rumored on the town.
Convulsed with amaze, aghast with indignation, indig-
nant in incredulity, the world at first refused to believe
it; persuaded of its truth, it went as nearly mad with
excitement as so languid and polite a world could.
Well as he had entertained the world, he had nevei,
on the whole, so richly banqueted it as now when it
could surfeit itself upon a calamity so astounding, ft
was grateful to all, which no good news could everclaim
to be-the story was so utterly undreamt of, so perfectly
complete, without a flaw to make it less terrible, a loop-
hole to make it less dark. It was a boon beyond prrçe
in the hot languid days of a waning season; it only
needed a suspicion of crime to be as refreshing as the
sudden sweep of a tramontane! through the sultry dull
ness of a Neapolitan noon. Just a thread of some-
thing wicked " woven with it would have made it the
caufe célèbre of fashionable drawing-rooms. As it was,
it was convulsingly amazing enough to be on the lips
of every creature in the town; and inimitably coined
rumors turned out with an exquisite promptness and
ingenuity from the mint of slander, soon supplied that
sole deficiency of the scandalous element with an in-
¦étiringfortherest'of his days to a villa at Auteuil
, : there to devote his mind primarily in uninterrupted
driven out | study to the effects that might ^. Produced!by certato
n^a              elements  unrevealed on the red mullet—a problem
moonugnt   streamed   in, clear  anu wiuwj  »uu ™.u,   j»/.c """—?"->' -,!„-"- i,.„™j „n nraise    "In the mis
througn the unclosed windows;.the wholeofthe great | ggjrya^ <^ff?fdf(h°efe f Ky's some relish
limitless vista of chamber opening on chamber stretch-
ed on and on in the spectral silver light; the hush of the
grave rested on the mighty halls wliere white-crossed
Crusaders had defiled, and houseless monarchs been
sheltered,'and revellers feasted in the king's name
through many a night of wassail, and his own life of
careless, cloudless pleasure spent with so lavish a hand
its golden moments. The quivering, ashy gleam of the
star-rays poured down the porphyry chamber, leaving
' deep breadths of gloom between the aisles of its col-
'^BPS' touching with a mournful light the drooping
«Pandards and the lost coronet of the last marquis,
shed full across Philip Chandos' statue, and leaving in
its darkest shadow the motionless form of the exiled
and beggared man by whose madsess the honor had
departed from their house.
says the Fronde philosopher; and when this adveis.U
piques the palate, amuses the ennui, and soothes the
vanity, the wretchedness of a friend and brother may
become very singularly acceptable.
It burst upon fie town like the bursting of a shell.
In its first rumor it was utterly discredited. Absurd
Had they not been at his ball last night? Had not
every one seen him at the new opera? Ruined f-pre-
pSterous! He could never be rained. They knew
npftpr "
Then when the truth became indisputable, gossip-
mongers quarrelled for it as a flock of street-sparrows
SSrrelfor a crumb of bread; and the town felt virtu-
ous and outraged. To have been led into offering such
clouds onneelse, year after year, to a man who all
elements  unrevealed on ...
which had long pursued him-and to indite a work
which should annihilate Brillat-Savann and become the
eternal Libra d'Oro of gastronomists.
The world, altogether, was harshly treated. There
was no scandal or crime in the story of ruin-which
omission rendered it curry without ^ Cayenne; and
th. great coveted master-Dubosc-was lost to it. It
coufl have lived without its late.idol well enough but
it could not be reconciled to living without his cook
So it said one Dc Profundis over the virtually dead
manlandturaedtohi= sales, much as it-would7 have
turned from his tomb to his catalogues No om asked
where he had gone; what did it matter? Take what
raute he would! he would be sure to.goto! Avernus
Men there were, it is true, who took it strong.} to
heart to their own'silent Quietist fashion wh- .smoked
we cigars over it in gloomy silence, who could not
forlet t?v as they would, the voice that had always
sDofen them a gay welcome, the hand that had been
aTways stretehel out to aid them the eyes.that had
never looked harshly on any living *m?- Ttoie were
men many men of h s own order, who loved l.im.y,no
couId not think of him without feeling like fools, as
thevtihrasedit; and there were others not of his set,
voungmetof talent and ambition, who had found an
^^alf^SS^^itwatfri»
sSSnTrf coureet bul meanwhile the virtuosi fteft
Prions about the Querela terra-cottas and the Frago-
uard medaCi s; Turf-men could not but congratulât,
each otherthat the famous Clarencieux strains would
Income public property ; dilettanti thought of the superb
Titians and'exquisite Petits Maitres they had envied so
long   Pall Mall loungers rumored on his cabinets ot