PAGE My Enemy's Daughter. A Novel. By Justin M'Carthy, author "Shame to you, to fight with him!" Drawn by Louis Huard. Frontispiece BELGRAVIA NOVEMBER 1868 MY ENEMY'S DAUGHTER BY JUSTIN M'CARTHY, AUTHOR OF "PAUL MASSIE," "THE WATERDALE NEIGHBOURS," ETC. CHAPTER I. RETROSPECT; AND MIST. IT is a wet Sunday evening in the leaden heart of London. I am now in the Bloomsbury region; and perhaps I need hardly say that nothing on earth could be more dull, dingy, and unpicturesque in itself than the prospect from my windows. Yet just now, in the deepening gloom of a rainy dusk, I seem to look on something not unlike one of the most picturesque and romantic scenes whereon my eyes have ever rested. "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten ;" but the ridges of the houses opposite begin to show through the steaming mist fantastically like the outlines of the hills I used to see every day years ago, and the broad blank lying between me and over the way may easily enough seem filled by the stretch of bay I have watched when it lay wild and drear on the wet evenings of late autumn like this. The kindly, loving, artistic fog and rain, which now hide all but the faint and softened outlines of our street, have done this for me; and lo! in Bloomsbury I am looking upon sea and hill once more. city-life come to help out the illusion. below is a good deal more like the scream theatrical imitations are like the reality. and tolling for evening service are to me now the bell of the church to which I used to be conducted when a boy on Sundays, and with which so many of the associations of my after-life inevitably connect themselves. It used to be a dreadful ceremonial, that service, to us boys, on the fine Sundays of summer. It was bad enough in winter; but in summer it became unspeakably more torturing. There was a window in the church close to where we used to sit-poor little weary, yawning martyrs-and the branches of an elm flapped unceasingly on the panes. Tantalus-torture was it to watch the tender, lucent leaves, free in the VOL. VII. The very sounds of London B glorious air of May or June, as they flickered across the window, and seemed to whisper of the blue sky and the shingly strand and the waves of transparent emerald which they could see and we could not; while the organ pealed and the clergyman preached the long sermon to which we never listened. I do not know how it is, that when I thus sit alone of nights and do not feel inclined to read, or steadily to go to work at something, every object I see, flame, cloud, or even chimneypot, reminds me in an indescribable, irresistible way, of some object belonging to the dear dull little seaport town where I, Emanuel Temple Banks, was born some five-and-thirty years ago. I have now written my full name, but it is long since I have been known otherwise than as Emanuel Temple. I pruned my name down to its present brevity for reasons which shall be explained in due time. I was called "Emanuel Temple" because my mother had a proper womanly objection to commonplace or vulgar names, and since we could call ourselves nothing better than Banks, resolved that we should at least have euphonious and elegant Christian names. Therefore, instead of becoming, as was suggested, John Banks and Peter Banks, my brother and I became Emanuel Temple Banks and Theodore Eustace Banks respectively. I scarcely know by what process Theodore Eustace and myself were brought up. We were the only children-I the elder by a year-and my father died when I was six years old. He had owned fishing-boats, and was doing well, until, at the instigation of my mother, he unfortunately took to immature building speculations, and failed accordingly, fishing-boats and all going down in the land-wreck. Indeed, my poor father did not remain long after the ruin of his venture, and my mother had to live by making gloves and trying to let lodgings. She had been a genteel woman of her class at one time; and being engaged in one of the few pretentious millinery shops in our little town, was regarded by her friends as having made quite a sort of mésalliance when she married my father, who was then only a goodlooking young boat-builder, with a fine voice for singing. She was very sentimental then, was poor mother-so she has often told meand those were the days when the heart of sentimental womanhood was divided between the Corsair and the Lady of the Lake. My mother loved both, but leaned to the Corsair; and found a resemblance between that hero and my father. To her latest days she was fond of repeating whole strings of "My own Medora," and Ellen and James Fitzjamesand I doubt much whether Locksley Hall and Maud are often recited and raved about and glorified in the shops of provincial milliners just now. Poetry and romance seem to have taken a terrible grip of the female heart at that time, and to have released the squeeze in our days. Besides being romantic, my mother was likewise religious-a combination which also does not seem to flourish in our time. Heaven only knows how painfully she laboured and strove to give and get us some education in religion and poetry. She loved her sons dearly, weakly, and her most passionate prayer of nights was that they might never, never leave her. The dearest wish and ambition of her heart would have been that one of the two might become a gentle clergyman, and the other, whatever his ordinary pursuits, a churchwarden. If she had lived until now, O what a Ritualist she would have been! Her prayers for the future of her sons were not even half granted. One of the sons went, very young, to America, and became a Rationalist. The other came up to London and turned opera-singer. As soon as I could write a decent hand, some good-natured person got me a situation in the office of an attorney and land-agent. I began as the youngest and lowest of clerks-a sort of cross between a messenger and a scrivener's apprentice-never, of course, intended to develop into that pretentious grub the articled clerk, who in his time develops into the attorney. I had five shillings a-week to begin with, and I think the head clerk had a hundred and fifty pounds a-year. Perhaps, but for subsequent events, I might have worked up to hold that position, and receive that emolument, in my turn. Indeed, I mounted very steadily up to thirty shillings a-week, but there I stopped and got off the ladder. Before I had attained that eminence, however, my brother, who had tried one or two situations unsuccessfully, and was always alarming my mother with his longing and projects for going to sea, compromised matters by resolving to seek his fortune in America. My mother had to consent at last-indeed, hard times allowed her no choice and some poor outfit was scraped together. It was arranged that I must stay at home and work for mother until her sons should become wealthy men, when we were to live in one country and one home, and she was to keep house for both. We had much crying and feeble keeping-up of each other's spirits, and we parted full of grief, but not without hope. Theodore Eustace took with him the latch-key of our door, with which he used to let himself in of nights, promising himself and us that he would return before long, laden, doubtless, with wealth, arrive unexpectedly, and opening the door softly, steal in upon my mother and me as we sate some evening by the fire and talked of him. He wrote to us when he got a situation in a dry-goods store, Broadway, New York, and very soon after, when he lost it; when he went out next and became successively a hawker, a railway-clerk, a photographer, an electro-biologist, a newspaper correspondent, and a farmer. In each successive calling he was most positively to succeed, and to make up for all the time-never very much, that was one comfort— which he had lost in the vocation just abandoned. He never remitted anything except a sketch of a forest clearing, and a dried musquito as a specimen of the animal life of the New World. I think my mother placed the musquito's corpse tenderly in her bosom. He has sown all his wild oats long since. He was lately married for the third time, and I believe got money, or property of some sort, with each of the wives. He was just the sort of bright, exuberant, reckless, blundering, soft-hearted fellow whom a certain kind of women, and all dogs, and all animals of tender natures indeed, instinctively take to. He has many children, and is well-to-do now and steady. He still writes, although at long intervals. He says he has the latch-key still, which I doubt Theodore Eustace was seldom very literal in his statements. But even if he has, it will never open the door for which he meant to use it. Were he to return to our old street, so sunny and pleasant in summer, with its glimpse of the sea through every lane, he would find no creature there whom once he knew; and the place itself would know him no more. The little row of houses in which we lived has been pulled down long since to make way for more pretentious habitations-marine residences, semi-detached villas, sea-side boardinghouses, and the like. In my own season of success I often contemplated a tour through America as a star." I thought of setting New York wild with admiration, filling my brother's heart with ecstasy, and cramming his house with presents. Something, however, always intervened to postpone the journey, and before I had finally made up my mind, the best of my voice had gone, and my reputation was pulled down, like our old house, to make way for a new erection upon a more secure basis. 66 From my father I had inherited a good voice, et præterea nil. There are families through which a good voice appears to move in order of primogeniture; and I have observed that a fine tenor, thus bequeathed, rarely seems an inheritance which brings much worldly providence or prosperity. My father was always under the impression that he only wanted a lucky chance to have made him another Incledon, who was of course his hero, and whose rolling, quavering, florid style, unknown to this generation, he did his best to imitate. I cannot help thinking the fishing-boats and the building speculations would have fared a good deal better if my father had had no more voice than a grasshopper, and had therefore found no admiring idlers to persuade him that he was another Incledon. However, it is quite certain that at an early age my voice became remarkable; and some of my father's whilom admiring idlers did generously take me in hand and provide me with not very inadequate training. My mother's dread of my developing power was turned into confidence and pride when I began to sing in the choir of our church on Sundays. I paused not in my progress until I had actually been promoted to the post of primo tenore there, at a remuneration of twenty pounds a-year. This seemed to us what sea-coast people call "the third wave” of promise, on which we were to be safely lifted into prosperity. But it came a little too late. My mother's life had long been on the wane. Grief, anxiety, poverty, late long sewing, had been doing for years their combined best with her, and at last she utterly broke down. I was nineteen years old when I found myself watching, in the gray of a |