66

My dear Emily, to please me you have only to be happy yourself," he answered with real affection.

Ah, that is just the one thing that I cannot do. My life is all wrong somehow, and I cannot make it right. I have been trying to square the circle, ever since my marriage-with such unspeakable care and trouble-and the circle is no nearer being square. The impracticable, unmeasurable curves still remain, and are not to be squared by my power of calculation."

"Ah, Emily, if you had only trusted in me, and waited!"

"Ah, Laurence, if you had only spoken a little sooner!"

"I would not speak till I had secured a certain income. I had been taught to believe that no woman in your position could exist without a certain expenditure."

"Ah, that is the false philosophy of your modern school. A man tells himself that with such or such a woman he could live happily all the days of his life, but his friends warn him that the lady has been educated in a certain style, and must therefore be extravagant-so he keeps aloof from her; and some day, necessity, family ambition, weariness, pique, anger, Heaven knows what incomprehensible feminine impulse, tempts her to the utterance of the most fatal lie a woman's lips can shape. She marries a man she can never love, and she has her equipage, and her servants, and her house in Mayfair, and all the splendours he has been told she cannot live without: and she does live-the life of the world, which is living death."

"For God's sake no more! You stab me to the heart."

He covered his face with his hands, and thought of what she had been saying to him. Yes, it was all true. His worldly wisdom had blighted that fair young life. Because he had been prudent; because he had taken counsel with his long-headed friends of the world, and had believed them when they said that the horrors of Pandemonium were less horrid than the dismal muddling torments of a pinched householdbecause of these things Emily Jerningham's mind had been embittered, and her fair name sullied. And he could not undo the past. No. Strike Harold Jerningham from the roll of the living to-morrow, and leave those two free to wed, the haughty woman and the world-worn man who should stand side by side before God's altar would have little more than their names in common with the lovers who walked arm-inarm ten years ago in the garden at Passy.

"Yes, Emily, my sin is heavier than yours," he said presently. "With both want of faith was the root of evil. If you had trusted in me, if I had trusted in Providence, all would have been different. But it is worse than useless to bewail those old mistakes. Let us make the best of what happiness remains to us. The pleasures of a real friendship, and one of those rarest of all alliances-a friendship between man and woman on terms of intellectual equality."

"There are wretched misogynists who say that kind of thing never

has answered," said Mrs. Jerningham; "but we will try to prove them miserable maligners. And you will never regret the loss of a wife, or feel the want of a home, eh, Laurence ?"

"Never, while you abstain from foolish jealousies," he answered boldly, and in all good faith.

Mrs. Jerningham drove into town next day, to see Dr. Leonards, in accordance with her promise to Laurence Desmond. She was accompanied by Mrs. Colton, who thought it rather absurd that anyone should take so much trouble about a Morland cough; but who was not ill pleased to spend an hour in the delightful diversion of shopping, and to visit one of the winter exhibitions of pictures, while the horses took their rest and refreshment.

Dr. Leonards said very little, except that Mrs. Jerningham's chest was rather weak, and her nerves somewhat too highly strung. He asked her a few questions, wrote her a prescription, enjoined great care, and requested her to come to him again in a fortnight, or, better still, allow him to come to her.

"For, now really, you ought not to be out to-day," he said, glancing at a thermometer. "There is the slightest appearance of fever; and, altogether, a drive from Hampton is about the worst possible thing for you. You ought to be sitting in a warm room at home."

"But look at my wraps," exclaimed Mrs. Jerningham.

"My dear lady, do you really imagine that your sables can protect you from the air you breathe? An equable temperature of about sixty degrees is what you require; and here you are on a bleak March day riding thirty miles in a draughty carriage. I must beg you to be more careful."

Mrs. Colton on this assured Dr. Leonards that the cough was only a family cough; but the physician repeated his injunction.

"Prevention is better than cure," he said. "I can say nothing wiser than the old adage. Thanks. Good-morning."

This was the patient's dismissal; the two ladies returned to their carriage.

"I hope Mr. Desmond will be satisfied," said Mrs. Jerningham; "and now let us go to see the French pictures."

At the French picture-gallery the ladies found Mr. Desmond, absorbed in the contemplation of a Meissonier.

"How good of you to be here!" exclaimed Mrs. Jerningham, brightening as she recognised him; "and so, for once in a way, you really have a leisure morning."

"I never have a leisure morning; at this very moment I ought to be sitting upon' a sensational historian, who fancies himself something between Thucydides and Macaulay. But you told me you were coming here, and so I postpone my sensational historian's annihilation until next week, and come to hear what Dr. Leonards says of your cough."

"Dr. Leonards says very little. I am to take care of myself. That is all."

"What does he mean by care?"

"O, I suppose I am to go on wearing furs, and that kind of thing. And I am to see all the pictures of the year; and you are to find plenty of leisure mornings; and so on."

In this careless manner did the patient dismiss the subject; nor could Laurence extort any further information from her. He attacked Mrs. Colton next, but could obtain little intelligence from that lady; and beyond this point he was powerless to proceed. He, Laurence Desmond, could not interrogate Dr. Leonards upon the health of Harold Jerningham's wife. If she had been dangerously ill, interference was no privilege of his. And as her illness was of a very slight and unalarming character, he was fain to content himself with the fact that she had placed herself under the direction of an eminent physician.

That day was one of the few happy days that had been granted of late to Emily Jerningham. Mr. Desmond was even more devoted and anxious than he had shown himself for a long time. He accompanied the two ladies to picture-galleries, and silk-mercers, florists, and librarians, and did not leave them till he saw them safely bestowed in their carriage for the homeward journey, banked-in with parcels, and in an atmosphere stifling with exotics.

"What, in the name of the Sphinx, do women do with their parcels?" he asked himself, as he went back to his chambers. "Mrs. Jerningham comes to town at least once a fortnight, and she never goes back to Hampton without the same heterogeneous collection of paper packages. What can be the fate of that mysterious mass? How does she make away with that mountain of frivolity, packed in whiteybrown paper? I never see any trace of the contents of those inexplicable packets. They never seem to develop into anything beyond their primeval form. To this day I know not what butterflies emerge from those paper chrysalids. And if she had been my wife, I must have found money to pay for all those parcels. I must have battered my weary brains, and worked myself into a premature grave, to supply that perennial stream of parcels."

CHAPTER XXXI.

LUCY'S FAREWELL TO THE STAGE.

FOR Lucy Alford life's outlook seemed very dreary after that chill day in February, when her father's bones were laid in their last restingplace. He had not been a good father-if measured by the ordinary standard of parental duty-but he had been a kind and gentle one, and his daughter lamented him with profound regret. He had allowed

her to grow up very much as she pleased, taking no pains to educate her, but suffering her to pick-up such stray crumbs of learning as fell from the table of the professional crammer; but by reason of this very neglect Tristram Alford had seemed to his child the very centre of love and indulgence. And, beyond this, he had believed in her, and admired her, and sustained her fainting spirit, when the theatrical horizon was darkest-when managers were unkind, and sister-actresses malevolent-by such prophetic visions of future triumphs, and such glowing anticipations of coming happiness, as the man of sanguine temperament can always evolve from his inner consciousness and a gin-bottle. The poor child had found comfort and hope in those shadowy dreams, happily unconscious that her father's fancies were steeped in alcohol; and now that he was gone, the hopes and dreams seemed to have perished with him.

Thus it was that Lucy shrank from the idea of recommencing her theatrical labours as from a hopeless and a dreary prospect. Nor were her feelings on this subject uninfluenced by the sentiments of those two persons who were now her sole earthly friends. Laurence Desmond's shuddering horror of the Cat's-meat-man, his furtive glance at the little red-satin boots in which she was to have danced the famous comic dance so much affected of late years, had been keenly noted, and remembered with cruel pain.

"How can he be so prejudiced against the profession?" she asked herself. And then she thought of Shakespeare, and of the Greek dramatists, whose every syllable and every comma had been so laboriously studied in the cramming season at Henley, and was slow to perceive that the more a man loves his Shakespeare and his Sophocles, the less indulgence is he likely to show to the Cat's-meat-man.

Mrs. Jerningham contemplated the dramatic profession from the stand-point of a woman who had known poverty, but had never found herself in the streets of London without an escort, or her brougham, and who had spent her life in a circle where every woman's movements are regulated by severe and immutable laws.

"How will you pursue your professional career, now that your poor papa is gone, my dear?" she asked kindly, when she came to discuss Miss Alford's future. "You cannot possibly travel about the country without a chaperone-some nice elderly person who could take great care of you, and whose respectability would be a kind of guarantee for your safety. It is quite out of the question that you should go from town to town without some such person."

Lucy blushed as she thought of the many damsels who did go from town to town unattended by this ideal representative of the proprieties; of Miss Gloucester, the walking-lady, who had walked in that ladylike capacity for the last fifteen years, and knew every town in the United Kingdom, and every fit-up or temporary temple of the drama in the British Islands, and who had supported her bedridden old mother in

a comfortable lodging at Walworth, and had dressed herself with exquisite neatness and cleanliness, and preserved a reputation without spot or blemish, during the whole period, on a salary averaging twentyfive shillings per week. She thought, with a deeper blush, of the two dancers, Mademoiselle Pasdebasque and Miss May Zourka, who wandered over the face of the earth together, loud and reckless and riotous as a couple of medical students, and who were dimly suspected of having given suppers-suppers of oysters and pork-pies and bottledbeer-to the officers of different garrisons, in the course of their wanderings. Of these, and of many other unprotected strollers, -some bright pure gentle girls, of good lineage and careful education; many honest hard-working and self-sacrificing bread-winners; others painted and disreputable wanderers, who made their profession a means to their vile ends,-did Lucy think, as Mrs. Jerningham laid down the law about the respectable elderly chaperone.

"Do you know anyone of unblemished respectability with whom you could travel?" Mrs. Jerningham asked after a pause.

Miss Alford's mental gaze surveyed the ranks of her acquaintance, and the image of Mrs. M'Grudder arose before her, grim and terrible. Unblemished respectability was the M'Grudder's strong point. The fact that she was not an immoral person was a boast which she was apt to reiterate at all times and seasons, appropriate or inappropriate; and her blameless fame had furnished her with many a Parthian shaft wherewith to wound helpless evil-doers of the Pasdebasque and May Zourka class, in that Eleusinian temple of theatrical life, the ladies' dressing-room. Abroad, guilty Pasdebasque has the best of it. She attends race-meetings in her carriage, and flaunts her silks and velvets before the awe-stricken eyes of the little country town. The garrison provides her with bouquets, and applauds her entrées with big noisy hands and a bass roar of welcome; while her Benefits are favoured with a patronage seldom accorded to the benefits of innocence. But the Nemesis awaits her in the dressing-room. There the dread Furies avenge the wrongs of their weaker sisterhood, and retribution takes the awful voice of M'Grudder.

Ruthlessly does that lady perform her appointed duty. Loud are her expressions of wonder at the triumphs of some people; her bewilderment on perceiving the superb attire which some people can procure out of a pittance of two guineas per week; her regret that on the occasion of her benefit the 17th Prancers had held themselves disdainfully aloof from the theatre, though her Lady Douglas had been compared to the performance of the same character by the great Siddons, and by judges quite as competent as the Prancers; and anon, in the next breath, her inconsistent avowal of thankfulness to Providence that her dress-circle had been empty, rather than filled as was the dress-circle of Mademoiselle Pasdebasque.

Lucy thought of Mrs. M'Grudder, who had at divers times taken